MisStaked (24 page)

In a single bound, his wolfen form cleared the forest. As stealthy as any cat, he crept across the matted pine straw and struggling saplings. The sound of his paws crunching the dry carpet of the forest floor brought the man's head up. The man turned and faced him.

Breathred the wolf drew up. His hackles rose at the impossibility of the sight that greeted him. It was him. Not the mate he had been chasing, but him, Breathred the man stood facing him. The horror of it drove him from his sleep.

A sudden pain jerked his head up. His neck was crooked in an impossible position and Breathred couldn't be sure, but he thought his face might be frozen to the window. Tugging his head slightly, Breathred's lip peeled away from his teeth, but that was as far as it went. Yep, he was frozen in place. A thin line of spittle ran from his mouth to his puckered chin. The drool must have freeze-dried his face to the window while he slept. Nothing short of a lip-ectomy would get him loose, now. Man, where was everybody? This was starting to hurt.

Breathred fumbled around with his left hand, hoping maybe Luna was still asleep beside him. A few seconds of useless grabbing told him she wasn't. He couldn't even hear Stud's nasally snores.

This was just great. He was all alone with his face glued to the window in the middle of the Canadian nowhere. All he needed now was for little green men to pop up at the window, and Breathred could be reliving his ninth grade Civics class.

He reached down to open the door. The handle clicked up but gave no sign of opening. Stud must have hit the child locks before he left. The stupid chimp always did that. Breathred felt like a Chihuahua trapped in a mid-sized sedan at a Wal-Mart parking lot. Since he was obviously stuck for the time being, he had better come up with something more constructive than sitting here like a goob.

Breathred strained to hear any sign that he hadn't been totally deserted. From the looks of things it wasn't a bad bet to take. It took him a couple of minutes, but he was able to hear voices off to the right. Breathred pricked an eye open—luckily the one that hadn't succumbed to the same fate as his lower jaw. Through the squinted lid, he could make out a crowd of people grouped around a bank of cabins.

So, they had made it to the Eh Ya Campgrounds. That was a relief. After the way Dr. Grayson had been driving, Breathred was beginning to think this was hell and he was paying for looking at Sally Mc Alistair's panties in kindergarten. He couldn't help himself. Sally threw her dress over his head in the sandbox. It was either look or plant his face in a freshly laid pile of cat poop. Thinking back, he should have taken the poop. To this day he still wasn't sure what he'd seen, or why the nuns had been so upset over it. He thought the Care Bears were cute.

Whoever was out there, Breathred had to get their attention. The last thing he needed was for some wandering bear with a working opposable thumb to come along and have Breathred under glass for morning brunch. The problem was how to get their attention without looking like a total dweeb. Somehow, he didn't think it was normal for a vampire slayer to be found frozen to his car window. It just didn't seem proper for someone in his profession.

Surely, one of his friends would have to come back and check on him. Luna wouldn't leave him out here. At least Breathred hoped she wouldn't. His grasp on the finer points of the female psychology were still rudimentary at best. For all Breathred knew this could be all a dream and he really was a female wolf sleeping in the woods. His life was strange enough he couldn't completely rule out the possibility.

Breathred jumped as he heard a roar come from the crowd. What was going on now? The sound of trampling feet swept past the van. Good, they were breaking up. Somebody was bound to find him now. He just hoped it wasn't Stud.

Luna stretched. She didn't remember nodding off, yet here she was dead on her feet. She must be more tired than she thought. Luna moved away from the rustic fence she'd been using as a makeshift bed. Snot-wallop, she couldn't even recall just when she fell asleep. She'd probably still be asleep if it wasn't for her weird dream. Luna couldn't remember all too much of it. All she could really see was a lot of sand and a freaking Care Bear. If that wasn't weird, she didn't know what was. She had been a Strawberry Shortcake girl.

Luna idly fingered the medicine bag hanging around her neck. The smooth leather felt warm to the touch, despite the chill air. She wondered if the dream could be a result of the spell Uncle Joan had worked upon the bag.

She was beginning to feel Breathred's emotions. Being inside his dreams wouldn't be too much of a stretch of the imagination. That couldn't be it, Luna decided. What would he be doing dreaming about a Care Bear? That wasn't true either. He was weird enough to be dreaming about the Care Bears. The only question that bothered her was why would he be dreaming about them?

Luna shook her head. All this was getting her nowhere, except confused as hell. Her feelings for Breathred shouldn't be making her so crazy. He was just a man. Oh yeah, just a man, right? Breathred was THE man. The man who completed her was nearer to the point.

Uncle Joan's spell had made the connection between them stronger than it otherwise might have been. Luna had known there would be side affects. She just hadn't figured she and Breathred would be sharing a brain because of it.

Well, Uncle Joan had warned her not to go into this lightly. Luna hadn't, either. Breathred was the One. Even he was beginning to realize it more and more each day. Maybe in hindsight, she had rushed into it a little bit, but it was for a good ‘cause. Otherwise she would have had to stay behind.

Even worse, she would have had to return home. The thought filled her with dread. Returning home meant Luna might never see Breathred again. Knowing that, she would have done anything. Anything! Even telling him the truth was preferable to never seeing him again.

Luna stepped away from her thoughts. They were getting her nowhere but lost inside herself—a place she had no intention of lingering. Besides, Breathred must be awake by now. She couldn't think of what was keeping him bottled up in that stinky van.

Taking one last look at the forest, she turned and almost fell over at the sight of Breathred's face squished against the window of the van. Was his lip glued to the window or what? Luna squinted a second time to make sure she wasn't seeing things. Yep, he was actually glued to the window.

Luna immediately looked around for Stud. This smacked of his devious mind. She was going to kill that primate. No, he was over talking to one of the Graduate Assistants. If this were one of his schemes, he'd be here to exploit it. For once, this one was all Breathred's faux pas.

Look at him. Wasn't that the cutest thing? He looked like a goldfish with his face all puckered like that. Luna fought the urge to make kissy faces at him. He wouldn't like it. She had better get over there and get him loose before Stud had a chance to see what was going on.

Luna meandered to the van nonchalantly. She poked her head over the top of the van. Having made sure the chimp was none the wiser, she bent down to talk to Breathred.

"Honey, are you okay?” Luna whispered into the glass.

"Meb lup dis froob,” he muttered in reply. His eyebrows rose dangerously on his forehead, making him look, like a frog through the frost-distorted glass.

"Give me a minute and I'll have you free,” Luna said, giving the glass a kiss where his lip was glued.

Luna rubbed the glass with her warm fingers until the frost was gone from the outside. Then, she cupped her hands over his lips and blew onto the glass. Within seconds it warmed enough for Breathred's lip to loosen from the window. It took relatively no time to slip free.

"Tank du,” he said. His lip was still numb and dry from the experience. He pointed toward the door handle. “Dud, tit de tilddoks."

"Sure thing, sugar,” Luna said, deciphering his new language. She popped the front door open and hit the button on the panel, opening his door for him.

"Me lib turts,” Breathred pouted, stretching his cramped limbs upon exiting the van. His fingers touched them tenderly to show where they hurt.

Luna couldn't help herself. She stood on tiptoe and kissed them, surprised to feel him return the lip embrace. She was more surprised to hear a low growl come from him. It was a low guttural sound, enough like a wolf's to send a shockwave down her spine.

Her eyes snapped open to find his staring into hers. They were his eyes but something else was behind them. They were wild, almost bestial. His sudden change frightened her, more so because it mirrored her own hidden thoughts than anything else. She seriously had to talk to her uncle when she got back to Seattle.

Luna was the first to back away. The gravel parking lot separated them by a few inches but it felt like miles, years—the time that existed between the kiss and the forever it promised. Luna sidled away, unsure of what had just happened. The sound of Stud yelling their names further pushed the distance between them. For the first time since they'd met, Luna was scared—scared of him, scared of the way she felt. Not saying a word, she turned and ran toward the yelling chimp.

Watching her go, a wave of shame washed over Breathred. Suddenly, he felt dirty all over. Breathred had never felt like that before, but he liked it. Liked the touch of her on him. The smell of her filling his nostrils was like the nectar from the gods, or the smell of freshly minted comic books. Breathred wasn't entirely sure, but he thought he might have just felt his testicles dropping.

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Beware of locals; they can be even weirder than the usual crowd of creatures of the night.

As the day wore on, Stud grew tired of watching the pair of lovesick fools. Breathred kept to himself for the remainder of the day. He avoided even the most basic of eye contact with Luna. She did her best to do the same. Stud had noticed their comedic attempts at melodrama but kept his opinions to himself. It was no skin off his nose how humans preformed their mating rituals. If they wanted to ignore each other for a while, that was alright with him. All that kissy-kissy stuff was quite frankly making him sick to his stomach.

Not to say, Stud wasn't worried about the whole thing. Being lifted from his real family at an early age had traumatized him so that no amount of therapy could hope to correct it. After so much misery, the chimp found himself loath to lose the new family he was in the process of raising.

Stud's past wasn't even the real reason for his worry. To tell the God's honest truth, he put a lot of effort into training Breathred up and would hate to see the big goob blow it. Hell, he knew whatever the problem was it sure as hell wasn't Luna's fault. The girl wasn't the type to screw things up. Breathred, on the other hand, excelled in such things. If things weren't set right soon, he'd just have to see to matters himself. It wouldn't be all that hard. He'd got them this far, hadn't he? Right now, Stud had important things to do. Well not important, but anything was better than being a party to their adolescent mooning.

Stud skirted the brooding pair on his way to the team meeting. The guide from the Canadian Archeological Cultural Agency had just arrived to brief them on the do's and don'ts of their excursion. As if he was in the mood for another lecture.

As an advanced form of primate, and not some lowly human, Stud couldn't see the sense in sitting down for a prolonged speech guaranteed to bore him into a coma. Besides, apes didn't settle things in committee. They threw shit and screamed at each other until it was all over but the crying. Anything not settled by then, you ran off, like a scared hyena. It was a sight more civilized than anything the so-called human race had come up with in three thousand years.

Seeing as how he had given his word to behave as long as they were trapped in this Canadian wilderness, Stud would be a good little boy. All bets were off if he had to listen to the word ‘eh’ more times than was necessary in the course of a normal conversation. It wasn't that he was a cultural bigot. Unnecessary pauses during a conversation led to the eventual breakdown of the esoteric balance of harmony in the universe. Aside from that, it made his ass itch.

Stud glanced back. The morose twosome fell in behind him. Good, if he couldn't irritate on a grand scale, he could at the very least agitate them enough to hopefully make them forget this funk they were drowning in. If that was what love did to people, Stud was damn glad he hadn't found someone to pick the fleas off his back.

The cabin was cramped with all sixteen team members bunched together. He wormed his diminutive body through the mass of bodies and took a seat in the back row. Stud wasn't enthused to find eight more people crowded around the side wall. They smelled of bear funk, which made his sinuses do belly flops. From the looks of them, he guessed they must be the yokels Dr. Grayson said would be joining them as laborers. Man, and he thought Breathred's relatives looked inbred.

"Everyone, find a seat. Mr. Brogan will be here in a moment to brief us on the regulations set down by the Canadian government, so get ready to listen.” Dr. Grayson's eye automatically aimed toward Stud. “And no goofing off in back."

On the general principle of the matter Stud stuck his tongue out. Let her stick that in her snap, crackle, and pop. He may have to behave but wasn't dead.

Stud chuckled when he noticed Dr. Grayson was ignoring him. True, he was just trying to get her goat, but he had given his word to behave. Stud would too, as long as he could manage it before gagging on the boredom. By his watch that gave him about five minutes and thirty-seven seconds before blowing his internal Tourette's fuse to hell and back. Which for him would be a personal record. Almost.

The room grew quiet. Stud raised up in his seat trying to see what was causing it. Apparently, so was everyone else, because all he could see was the back of some lard-butt's head. Stud toyed with the idea of a Vulcan nerve pinch, but let it go. The last time he tried it Breathred voided his bladder, but didn't go to sleep. Damn, Leonard Nimoy's lying ass.