Queen Bitch of the Callowwood Pack (Siren Publishing Classic) (16 page)

After their meal, they napped for a short time in the shade of the trees, though Julianna never fully slept. Her ears kept telling her there were too many other creatures around to completely relax. She rested a little, and when Sebrina rose to her feet, she didn’t protest.

The rest of the afternoon was spent leaping, literally, in and out of her two forms. Sebrina made her dive into bushes and undergrowth, changing into a wolf as she went. She was supposed to land on all four feet, balanced and in control. The best she managed was a wobbly landing that filled her coat and ears with prickly spines from the shrubbery. Her nose filled with dust, and she ended up sneezing more, which ruined her balance.

Then Julianna had to jump over rocks, shift mid-leap, and roll to her feet as a human. Her body looked like it had been on the losing end of a fight with two cats. Scratches scored her thighs and arms, and her hair was full of twigs. She lost the boundary between herself and her Sister. She could smell Sebrina’s amusement and hear the industrious woodpecker while she dragged herself to her human feet once more.

Exhausted and bruised by the time Sebrina took her home, Julianna stood stupidly at her door for a few moments, trying to remember what she was supposed to do.

Door, there’s a door. What happens next? Oh, yes,
unlock
the door
.
Right.

Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew her keys and her cell phone clunked to the wooden deck. It beeped indignantly, and she mumbled a curse as she bent to retrieve it. Every muscle screamed in protest, and she groaned, glad Sebrina had gone home. Leaning her forehead against the door, she used both hands to open the cell phone and saw her mother’s text message.

Have a great day, dear one.

Snorting with painful humor, she yanked her body upright, ignoring the pain zipping through her tired muscles and let herself inside. She made herself choke down some cheese and crackers before she dragged herself to bed. She didn’t even bother to undress as she fell into bed.

Morning came with aches and pains in muscles she didn’t even know she had. She dragged her body into some clothes just in time for Sebrina to show up to take her “hunting”. She looked askance at the older woman, but soon she knew what she meant.

Julianna found herself in her Sister form belly-down in a thicket of scrub oak, watching a pair of cottontails nervously grazing on the summer scrub growing through the tough soil. She crept closer, freezing as the heads of both rabbits came up, only their noses moving. Her hindquarters bunched beneath her as she prepared to pounce, but some scrub jays exploded out of a nearby pinion pine, screaming bloody murder, and the rabbits bolted. She dropped her butt to the dirt with a frustrated grunt.

She made her next attempt on a wily jackrabbit who’d found a comfortable spot in the shade. Sebrina had told her she needed the element of surprise to catch one of the fast leporids, so Julianna angled her approach to cut across the most logical path of escape. She slithered forward on her belly, pausing only when the rabbit’s ears twitched in her direction.

She gathered herself, took a deep breath, and shot out of the brush. The jackrabbit burst out of its apparent slumber in a cloud of dead leaves and dust. Julianna knew the creatures were fast, but she’d never had to chase one for dinner. The thrill of the chase lent her speed and strength, but the leporid zigged and zagged so fast, she could barely keep up.

She almost had it in her teeth when the rabbit found open ground and began to pull away from her. She pushed herself just a little faster and lunged. Her teeth snapped together on nothing but shed fur and dust. The leporid bolted in ground-eating bounds, and she flopped down in the dirt, gasping for breath.

Soft laughter filled her ears, and she angled her head so she could see Sebrina sitting beside her, her tongue lolling out in an amused grin.

“I told you surprise is needed to catch leporids,”
she remarked.

Julianna
wuffed
a sigh.
“I
had
the element of surprise, just not enough.”
She panted for a few moments.
“Damn, those things are fast!”

“Then you must be faster. Get up and try again!”

Julianna groaned but heaved herself to her feet as Sebrina led her off to the next hunting opportunity.

Despite her fumbling, she still managed to catch a ground squirrel and was surprised to feel disappointment in letting her prey go. Her Sister wanted to eat it once she’d worked so hard to catch it, and Julianna agreed, but Sebrina firmly reminded her to release it. They broke for lunch, and she got to eat a cottontail. It tasted so good she swore it was better than some of the fancy meals she’d had in Fresno’s high-end restaurants. She even licked the rock clean of the blood and viscera left from her kill.

After lunch, Sebrina insisted Julianna start tracking by learning the sights, sounds, and scents of the other creatures. Sebrina taught her how to see the signs that something, large or small, had passed by through the undergrowth, and how recently. She also learned the warning scents of skunk before she got sprayed, and when a porcupine hid close by. Julianna trained how to track and disguise herself from the cougars and bobcats prowling the hills. She watched coyotes that thought themselves too smart for her to detect and tracked the sneaky critters straight to their dens. Despite their attempts to take her “kills” for themselves, she liked them and knew she could learn from their adaptive ways.

Julianna spent her entire day as a wolf and enjoyed every moment. It was exhilarating to share her Sister’s instincts and abilities. She’d certainly scared the crap out of several cottontails and rock squirrels. Again, she came home that night conscious enough to text her mother and swallow something before she collapsed in a heap of exhaustion.

Two solid weeks of training and getting to know her Sister form continued from dawn until dusk. Her mother looked at her strangely the few times they saw each other and asked where she’d been during the days. Julianna replied she was taking some time for herself, to work out, to deal with her grief, and to get her head on straight. They seemed like the right things to say because her mother stopped asking.

Julianna never saw Jeff, but she couldn’t be sure he hadn’t visited her home while she trained with Sebrina. If he had, he never left a note and he didn’t have her cell number. She admitted to herself she probably would’ve been too tired to see him anyway. Her body became stronger, and her stamina increased. Muscles she’d never before seen in her arms and legs suddenly appeared in the mirror when she stopped to look.

Julianna felt like she’d become a hermit, the pack and the competition for Luna all but forgotten during that time. Even her frustration with Jeff’s behavior at the end of the candidacy party dwindled, though it flared at odd moments, especially as the full Moon approached. She worried her Sister would completely take over again, but Sebrina assured her it wouldn’t happen. Julianna had come a long way in healing the rift between her human and lupine selves, and her Sister knew it.

With all the time spent training, she grew familiar with Sebrina and her moods. There was something in the older female’s eyes each time she looked at Julianna. Julianna thought it was simple pride at first, but it expanded into more than that, a kind of proprietary joy, as if Julianna’s improvements in the world of the wolf reflected well on Sebrina. Julianna wanted to know why the woman remained so patient with her obvious lack of skill, but she never had time to ask, and at the end of the day, she was too exhausted to care.

One morning, Sebrina looked Julianna over critically when she arrived, and said, “Today we’ll go for tea. Please dress for town.”

“Town?”

“Yes. We’ve done enough physical training. Now we must strengthen your knowledge of pack policies.”

“You mean politics,” Juliana remarked flatly.

Sebrina just shrugged with a half-smile and sat down on one of the chairs on the front balcony to wait.

Julianna turned around and marched back to her bedroom to change. She wasn’t certain this was such a good idea. Would she run into anyone she shouldn’t, like Jeff or the other Luna candidates? What if she wigged out? She could feel the full moon approaching like a siren’s song, and her Sister stalked very close to the surface. She swore she had PMS, Pre-Moonal Syndrome, and her temper had grown short.

Just keep your cool, Sister. We don’t need any more weirdness this close to shifting, okay?

Humph!

Julianna pulled her token over her head and held it in her hand, studying it intently. Each time she looked at it, her heart danced. The token resembled the wolf’s head pendant she’d seen hanging around Jeff’s neck, carved with a Celtic knot around the outer edge. It was the size of a fifty-cent piece, the silver tarnished along the ridges. Chips of aquamarine filled the wolf’s eyes and glittered in the sunlight from the window as she tilted her hand.

Excitement fluttered through her. The token meant she could have Jeff.

You
will
have Jeff. He’s your Mate.

If I pass the tests.

You will.

Julianna slipped the token around her wrist like a charm bracelet and gathered her hair into a ponytail. She glanced at herself in the mirror before she sailed out into the front room and grabbed her keys and phone. At least she looked presentable. She suspected that was one of the unspoken tests of the Luna. Even the first lady of the United States had to dress carefully when she ran to the grocery store. Shoving her feet into sandals, she paused long enough to grab her purse and lock her door. Sebrina waited outside.

“Are you hungry?” Julianna asked as she closed the door behind her. “We could have breakfast with our tea.”

“What a good idea,” Sebrina said with an ingenuous smile.

Julianna laughed, and they strolled together in companionable silence until they reached “downtown” Callowwood. They passed the post office with the pale pink granite entry steps beside the old Callowwood Hotel and Saloon where it was rumored Jesse James had once stayed. The Rebel gas station next to the Hotel pulled the town back into the twenty-first century with its shiny pumps with digital readouts.

Milner’s Grass and Feed still had the hand-painted wooden flower cutouts decorating the front, and the old, dusty pickup trucks mingling with the fancier Hondas and minivans of the Wells Fargo Banking crowd next door. A Smith’s grocery store with slot machines just inside the sliding glass doors sat across the street from the Rebel.

The Wolf’s Den took up the block between Cindy’s Café and the old Sears that still advertised free roto-tiller rentals with the purchase of a 100 pound bag of fertilizer. The Mobil service station with the red Pegasus on top of the white pole shared a parking lot with Landry’s Five and Dime—now more like Ten and a Quarter – where Julianna had once found a five-dollar bill caught in a crack in the pavement. The Ranch Drive-in Movie’s yard with the huge white outdoor screen edged the empty desert across from a Sonic Burger that seemed to have lost its way from the interstate. She remembered sharing her first kiss with a human boy behind the big white screen after Jeff had ignored her once again.

Julianna sighed at the quaintness, and her memories, but she still liked her little hometown. Reno had been bright and exciting, but she’d missed the familiarity of knowing where all the roads went and who lived on them.

Julianna and Sebrina entered Cindy’s Café, run by Cindy Howington and her four sons, Mickey, Ronald, Buckner “Bucky” III, and Quinn. Though Julianna had been away, her mother had filled her in on the town’s gossip when she’d first come home. Beth had said each son had his job, and Cindy kept them hopping.

Mickey maintained the books of the Café and kept the records straight. He’d gone to the Great Basin College in Elko for accounting and had become a CPA. He kept the books of almost all the business owners in town. Ronald was a mechanic at the Mobil service station and also kept all the mechanical things in the café running like clockwork.

Bucky had attended a fancy chef’s school somewhere in L.A. and came home swearing he’d never make “useless shit” like that ever again. Apparently, he’d worked in some fancy restaurants and prepared dishes so small and dainty “it was like eating a doily, with the same nutritional value.” Bucky happily cooked great eggs, bacon, cheese sandwiches, BLTs, and burgers. Cindy’s youngest son, Quinn, had graduated high school after Julianna left Callowwood and seemed content to just wait tables with his mom, clearing them away again after the diners finished.

Cindy was a heavily built woman who looked as if she could bench press a Mack truck if necessary. Mousy brown hair, held tight to the back of her head in a bun, pulled at her sharp pale blue eyes, making her squint a little. She was stocky and short, but her shoulders were almost as broad as Jeff’s and she had large hands that could palm a basketball. Julianna always expected Cindy to have a voice like a bullhorn, but she spoke melodiously, the tones more suited to a singer of ballads than a greasy spoon owner.

“Sebrina, Miss Morris, good to see you,” Cindy called out to them as they stepped across her threshold. “Damn, it’s been a long time since you were home! How you been, girl? Your mama keeping you busy over in that house?”

“I’m hanging in there, thanks, Cindy,” Julianna replied as the other woman handed them menus. She caught the scent of winter nights under the full moon and realized the café owner was a Moon Singer like herself. “I’ve been trying to get myself together and it’s taking longer than I thought. It’s hard to live in that place without Dad.”