Fox Mate (Madison Wolves) (33 page)

The water was cold, so very, very cold, but I shifted to human and swam down to where the beavers hide the entrance to their house, and then I shifted to fox and crept into the beaver hut. Luckily, the beaver was long gone. He had made a fine meal for me one day.

There were chinks in the walls, and I dug at them to make more. I shivered there in the beaver home,
chilled to the bone, and it took a long time to warm up and even longer to dry out, but I watched.

They woke up, of course, and fled from the burning shack. But I had burned everything they had, they didn't get any of
it out, and they were very mad.

I knew this was a setback for them, that's all. They could stay in fur, like I had, and live
there indefinitely. They hunted for me, they hunted for a long time, but not once did they ever swim, so not once did they notice the beaver hut.

They left the next day, climbing into the airplane I had spent an hour trying to break. I watched it travel across the water. I watched it lift into the air. And then it disappeared, so I didn't see what happened, but I heard it crash.

They were numbers 26, 27, 28 and 29.

I sobbed. Lara held me while I sobbed. And Angel and Scarlett sobbed with me, and maybe the others, I didn't look.

I calmed down eventually.

"Since then, until today, I forgot how to heal when I shift. I had convinced myself so well that I couldn't, and after the plane crashed, I didn't remember anything for a long time. Whatever happened for the next six months is a blur. But I couldn't heal when I shifted, not until today, when I remembered."

"But today, I remembered everything, well, almost everything, including that I could heal. Healing fast is like shifting fast. Lara, could you always shift so fast?"

"No," she said. "It always used to take me several minutes, no faster than Elisabeth."

"When did that change?"

"After I saw you shift. I saw you shift so fast, and-"

"You got stubborn. If the fox could do it, so could you?" I asked.

She nodded, laughing lightly. "Yes."

"I bet you can learn to heal like I do, too. I bet all of you can. I bet all of you can shift like I can, too, now that you know it's possible."

"I don't know," Elisabeth said. "I am just as stubborn as Lara, and I haven't made any headway."

"It was just all of a sudden," Lara said. "Something clicked. It wasn't gradual. Suddenly I just knew how."

I got up from the sofa and walked to the window, staring out. Elisabeth rose behind me, stepping up to me and putting her arm around me. I leaned against her. Neither of us spoke.

I turned around. "I'll have that beer now. Have you all heard enough?"

"Is there more?" Vivian asked.

"Yes, but maybe only one more story that needs telling." I looked down. "I am very ashamed of this story, but Lara needs to hear it, she needs to know what kind of person I really am."

"I know what kind of person you are!" she said in her alpha voice.

Angel returned from the kitchen, handing out cold beers, keeping one for herself and another for Scarlett.

I opened my beer, drinking some of it. It was cold. That's all I could say about it. I wandered around the room aimlessly. I stared at a bookcase and started crying quietly, not wanting them to hear. I had cried enough in front of them.

Vivian came over eventually. She stood next to me and let me cry, then handed me the tissues she always seemed to have ready for me. I cleaned up, then wandered into the bathroom to clean up further. No one followed me, so maybe I wasn't on suicide watch anymore.

Then I stepped back out of the bathroom, and Lara was right there. All right, maybe I still was.

"Are you all right?"

"It was a long time ago," I said.

"But you only just remembered."

I nodded. I pushed my head into her chest, leaning against her, then returned to my place on the sofa, nursing my beer.

"Have you had enough?" I asked quietly.

"We're not going anywhere," Scarlett said.

"Vivian? Questions?"

She shook her head. "No. But Michaela, you know, you are going to be visiting me for a very long time."

"I know."
I stared into my beer, then thrust it into Lara's hands. She set it on the coffee table.

"Do you want something else?" Angel asked quietly.

"Coke."

She got it for me, setting extras on the table for anyone who wanted one. I fumbled to open it, and Lara took it from me and opened it. I took a big swig.

"I became a hunter," I said quietly.

"You're a fox," Angel said. "Weren't you always a hunter."

I didn't answer her. Elisabeth did for me. "She became a wolf hunter, Angel."

"Oh." She thought about it. "I don't blame you."

"I hunted only the ones who tried to hunt me. I became very, very good at killing them. I would set myself up, carefully, showing myself to only one or two wolves, and if they chased me, I led them deep into my territory, and I found ways to kill them."

I drank more of my Coke, not looking at any of them.

"At first, it was in Quebec and Ontario. But then I moved southwest, and I crossed back into the United States. I worked my way home. There were wolves where I used to live; the entire region was overrun. I set a new base, planted my weapons near at hand, made my traps, and I lured wolves to me."

"How many?" Elisabeth asked.

"I don't know. A lot."

"Hundreds?"

"No, I don't think so. Seventy? Or so, I guess. I didn't count."

"I roamed through northern New England," I said. "I couldn't get home. I couldn't go that deep into their territory. I picked at the edges, luring the hunters out, and killing them. I couldn't kill everyone who hunted me; many escaped. Many times there were too many, and I was forced to escape. Not every wolf is a sadistic asshole. Not every wolf wanted to hunt me. If they didn't hunt me, I moved past them, but I couldn't leave them at my back, either."

"What happened, Michaela?" Vivian asked.

"There was an isolated cabin.
"

I stared into space
, remembering. Then I lowered my eyes, and all the silvered knives were still where we had left them on the tabletop. I stared at them.

Lara saw where I was staring. "Elisabeth, get those out of here. Now."

"Angel," she said. "Call Rory."

I stared at the knives as Elisabeth picked them up, collecting them all together, sticking them into their sheaths, not washing the blades. I didn't care. I had more.

"I wasn't going to use them," I said. "But thank you. I wanted them gone. In case."

"I know," Lara said. "I understand what your look meant."

"Thank you."

Elisabeth met Rory at the door, shoving the knives into his hands.

"Jesus!" he said. "How many of these does she have?"

"More where those came from," I yelled.

"Folks want to know what's going on," Rory said from the door. "Michaela, are you all right? Everyone is worried."

"I don't know, Rory. I'll know more in a half hour."

Elisabeth closed the front door and locked it, then returned to her seat, squeezing my shoulder as she passed behind the sofa.

I took a big breath of air. "An isolated cabin, in northern Maine, I believe, I'm not sure. I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Lara said.

"It was a man and wife. Well, wolf and wolf. You know what I mean. We were so isolated, and I was turning sadistic. Wolves kept hunting me, and I was becoming sadistic in how I dealt with it. I taunted this one. I walked right across his steps in the middle of the night and I pissed on his door."

"Oh shit," said Scarlett. "I bet that got a rise out of him."

"Yeah. Fox piss on his door. I hid a mile away and I heard him screaming the next day. This guy was a real winner. He screamed at his wife all the time, and I thought he beat her, too. I listened to him hunt a deer, and he was cruel. He could have killed the deer easily, but he kept letting it back up, letting it run, then taking it down. You don't play with your food like that. You kill it cleanly."

They looked disgusted along with me.

"So I pissed on his door, a clear challenge. And he took it up, both he and his wife. She was just as angry and just as bitter
, and she was just as happy to hunt me as he was. They laughed about it together, and joked about what they were going to do to me before they killed me."

No one spoke. I paused to see what they would say. No one was looking at me except Vivian. She caught my eye. "Is this a story you are sure you are going to be able to tell?"

"This part, yes. Oh, they didn't stand a chance. They were big and stupid. Stupid. So amazingly stupid."

Vivian nodded. "And the part after this?"

"That might go badly, but it's the last part to tell."

"All right," she said. "Lara, don't be lulled."

"I'm watching her," she said.

I leaned against Lara for a moment.

"I lured them out. I gave them a trail to follow, and they followed it. I led them to a dead end, and they didn't have a clue what to do. I had just disappeared, of course, flown away. They thought maybe I had scaled a shear cliff wall. Idiots. They couldn't even find my correct trail. They went home.

"So every night for a week, I did something to taunt them. I pissed on their door. I pissed on their car. On the third night, they tried to stay awake, waiting for me outside, so I listened, waiting for their breathing to even out. They both fell asleep in their fur, hiding in their barn. I took a dump on their front door step.
"

Angel smirked at that.

"I disabled their car, poking a hole in some of the pipes underneath, the coolant thing."

Elisabeth chuckled. "The radiator hose?"

"Yeah, whatever. I didn't need to bother. In the morning, they tracked me. I led them away from their cabin, and I led them into the first trap. It wasn't designed to kill, just hurt. I led them across a small field that I had laced with children's jacks, you know those little things the kids pick up while bouncing a ball."

"I used to play that," Angel said.

"But the ones I had were silver, of course. I led them into the middle of the field by a clear path, but I had doubled back, and once they were well into the field, I snuck out behind them, hiding in the high grass, and threw more of them out into the field, all over the only path out. There were hundreds and hundreds of them in that field, and they found a goodly share of them with their paws."

I smiled, remembering. "Remember, I had become a sadist, but these two deserved it, or so I thought. I set a path away from the field, and they could follow me or not, but then I
shifted to human and taunted them, then back to fox and ran away. They ran over the jacks, and some got embedded, and I heard them howling their pain. They eventually got the jacks out of their paws, and they stupidly followed me."

"They didn't clean the silver out?" Scarlett asked.

"No. I told you: idiots. They were now silver poisoned, and they were running after me, pumping the silver into their system.

"I led them
deep into an area I had heavily trapped, and then I led them over a deadfall with silvered spikes. They both fell in."

I looked around. "Does anyone blame me yet?"

"No," said Lara. Everyone appeared to agree with her.

"Well, that will change soon.
The male, he got it the worst, he went down first, and the female fell on top of him. He got both lungs punctured."

"By silver," Scarlett said.

"Yeah. I don't think you come back from that without immediate access to medical facilities that know how to flush silver from a were."

"Even then," Vivian said. "It would be rough."

I nodded. "And he wasn't going to get medical help. The female, she wasn't so bad. Oh, she had taken the tips of several spikes, but not that deeply. She was still moving. But she knew her only chance to live was to get to her car and to get help."

"You disabled her car," Elisabeth said.

"Yes, but it wouldn't have mattered. You see, they had a child."

"Stop," Vivian said. "You aren't ready to tell this."

"Too late, Vivian," I said.

"Oh honey," Lara said.

"I got back to the house before she did. What kind of mother leaves a child alone like that, for hours?" I sighed. "The child was a girl, she was Kaylee's size."

I stared at the floor, and I couldn't talk for a while. The tears started to crawl down my cheeks. No one said anything. No one rushed me.

"I caught the girl. There was an overhang over the door with two posts holding the roof up, outside the cabin, and I tied the girl to one of them, I tied her real good. She was crying, crying for her mommy, but I didn't care. I thought about Flora and Fauna. I thought about Jean and Tyler and Mom and Dad. And I thought about what all wolves grow up to be. They all grow up to become killers."

"Not all," Angel said softly.

"I know that now. The female dragged herself home, and she was in bad shape, the silver poison pretty bad. And then she saw me, human now, standing next to her daughter. I had one of my daggers in my hand. The female stopped. And stared. She lay down in the grass, right where she was, and shifted slowly, the pain evident. When she could talk, she said, 'Why?' So I told her why. As she lay in the dirt, twenty yards away, I told her about all the deaths, about all the wolves who had hurt me. And I told her how I had listened to her talking to her male, and she was no different than the rest.

"I told her, 'I was nothing but prey to you, a game, someone to hunt and kill for your amusement, and if you had found my kits, what would you have done?' She looked at me and nodded her understanding, admitting what she would have done. But then she spoke. 'My daughter never hurt you. My daughter never hurt anyone. She's a sweet girl. Please let her go.'"

"I asked her, 'Why should I? You wolves didn't spare my babies when you could.' And she coughed then said, 'If you promise not to kill my daughter, I will tell you where you will be safe.' Well, of course, I thought she was lying, but I agreed, and that's when she told me about your father, Lara. That female, lying in the dirt, told me to go to Wisconsin, that the wolves here were different, that they wouldn't hunt me. I was sure she was lying, but I looked at her daughter, tied to the pole, and I looked at her in the dirt, and I walked away."