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When Briar was young, that had meant chores and, later, acting as a seamstress for Norine and Patrice. Whenever she felt like Cinderella, Briar had simply imagined the handsome prince who would one day take her away. 

“I’m sorry,” Briar said, feeling only a twinge of pain. “I know how much you did for me. But I’m paying my way now, right?”

Patrice shook her head. “That doesn’t mean you can be disrespectful.”

Briar’s temper flared hot. Why was it that respect only seemed to go one way in this house? “Well, then, respectfully, I’m going out.”

“Don’t you walk away from me. Norine just came through here, and she was very upset.”

“I just told her the truth!” Briar drove her hands into her masses of blond hair. “Why doesn’t anyone believe me?”

“Oh, gee, let me think,” Patrice said sarcastically. “Maybe it’s because of the time you told everyone you were in an episode of
I Love Lucy
. Or the time you said Arthur took you on a helicopter ride from Denver to Los Angeles, but you couldn’t name any of the states in between.”

Briar’s face burned. It was true; she had lied about those things. Those things, and many more. “I don’t expect you to forgive me for those times. But it would be nice if I could get just a little credit for changing.”

“How do I know you’ve changed?” Patrice asked, arching her brow. “You could be lying about that too.”

Briar threw up her hands. “I’m not going to the town meeting. I’m going to take my car, which I paid for, and go for a drive. I need to be alone.”

“Fine. But if your attitude doesn’t improve, you’ll be spending a lot more time alone. Because you won’t be living here.”

Briar wanted to lash out, but her aunt was telling the truth. Patrice could kick her out at any time. And she couldn’t afford to move. Though it was hard to scrape together enough money to give Patrice rent every month, it would be even harder to survive on her own. She took a deep breath and prepared herself for the pain.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked back.”

“That’s better,” Patrice said. 

Briar’s eyes watered at the lightning bolt of pain that seared across her brain. But it was worth it, if she had a bed to come back to tonight. Not trusting herself to speak again, Briar turned and ran out the door.

CHAPTER TWO

Charlie

Charlie Huston pulled his battered truck off to the side of the thinly-traveled dirt road that crept into the mountains near the south end of town. His Uncle Rick’s farm lay below him in the valley, but he had taken pains to avoid any roads that would bring him close to Rick’s. He didn’t want anyone to know how he was spending his afternoon. 

How long had it been since he had been up to this particular patch of land? Three years? Four? The last time he remembered being up here was a hunting trip with his father and Uncle Rick the summer before Charlie’s senior year. They’d taken down a buck that year, large enough to keep his family in venison for months. What a struggle it had been, getting that big bastard out of the high meadow and through the rocky terrain to the truck. He and his dad and Rick had sweat and cursed and laughed until their sides ached. They’d sworn that, the next summer, they’d make their kill closer to where they’d parked their trucks. 

But there hadn’t been a next year. 

Charlie carefully removed the special pole he used to work the clutch in his truck. Danny Egan had rigged it for him, and as much as Charlie hated using it, he appreciated that Danny had done a good job. The pole fit neatly into a slot on the pedal, and Charlie had grown quite adept at using his left hand to balance the clutch while he changed gears with his right. The only problem was that he had to move it every time he got in and out of the truck. It was annoying, but a little annoyance was a small price to pay for mobility. For freedom.

Once he had the pole out of the way, he lifted his left thigh and shifted sideways in his seat until both feet were dangling out of the car door. He carefully settled his good right foot on the ground before standing. A glint of sunlight bounced off his cane where it sat in the passenger seat. 

Using the truck for balance, he shucked his clothes and tossed them on top of the cane. He loved leaving it behind. 

The light breeze, smelling of wildflowers and fir trees, raised goose bumps on his naked flesh. He made sure his car door wasn’t locked and carefully stashed his keys under the front wheel for good measure. Then he turned and took a few halting, painful steps.

He barely made it to the tree, grabbing at the branch before his weak leg could collapse under him. 

Sunlight streamed through the trees. Charlie hobbled carefully down the path, using branches and rocks to take the weight off his mangled left leg. This wasn’t his first time. He knew not to get too anxious, or he wouldn’t turn. He had to leave it all behind--his family, his friends, the accident, Independence Falls itself. It helped to focus on his surroundings. He took a deep breath, tasting the sweet air of a clear summer day. 

He could hear the gentle rustle of leaves and the chirrup of hidden crickets. The narrow footpath wended through the trees, beckoning him to come deeper into the wilderness. 

He knew it was starting because the light seemed to grow brighter. His nose prickled, filling with the scent of the small, warm-blooded things that scrabbled in the dirt. Charlie pushed off of a tree and didn’t reach for another, striding forward as if his left leg wasn’t shrieking in pain. 

His skin quivered and tickled, and he swore he could feel every follicle as his body hair thickened and lengthened. He could detect more and more as his hearing improved. His truck’s engine pinged softly as it cooled, and below that he could hear the rustling of insects in the underbrush and the far-off Breakneck River, its customary roar reduced to a tinkle by distance. 

He fell forward onto his hands as his hips shifted. This was the most painful part, as his bones and muscles crunched into a new alignment. He allowed himself a grunt of agony, which quickly became a feral yelp as his vocal cords changed. His nails and teeth sharpened as a tension arced through his lower back. 

For a quarter-second, while his lungs and heart reshaped, he wondered if this would be the time that the transformation killed him. Then his lungs re-inflated, his heart stuttered back to life, and it was over. He flexed his heavy paws, licked his sinuous tongue over sharp teeth. He stretched from the top of his head to the tip of his tail. 

Damn, it felt good to be a mountain lion. 

He crouched low, nearly purring with pleasure. Then he sprang onto a rock, barely taking the time to land before he launched himself at the branch of a tree. His claws sank into the living wood as he ventured out on the limb, adjusting his balance with the aid of his long, thick tail. Pine needles brushed against his snout. He took a moment to enjoy the sharpness of his senses, so far beyond anything he could hope to experience as a man. But that wasn’t his favorite part of this new, amazing ability. He flung himself off the branch, landing on all four paws, and then ran flat out up the mountain path. His left leg worked in perfect unison with the rest of his body, as strong and powerful as it had been before the accident. Charlie yowled at the joy of it. 

There was nothing to compare to this, nothing. His bleak life as a man paled in comparison to the freedom and power that he felt as a cat. Even his highest highs—hitting game-winning home runs, being scouted by famous coaches, traveling around the country to play ball with the best of the best—didn’t come close to the magic of leaping down a mountain path under a clear sky. When he was home, his twisted leg felt shameful and burdensome. But out here alone, reveling in the glory of his own working body, he felt more alive than he had in years.

The path faded and split, but Charlie didn’t need it. He knew where he was going. On that same hunting trip before his senior year, there had been a rocky moraine that his uncle swore was a shortcut to the higher elevations. It turned out that crossing the unstable rocks had taken them twice as long as it would have to go around. 

Charlie often thought back to that treacherous passage in the early days after his accident, when negotiating the path from his bed to the bathroom had seemed as perilous as maneuvering his way through those sharp, slick rocks. He wanted to try it again, this time as a cat. Especially since, as a man, he could never attempt to repeat the crossing. 

It didn’t take long to find the moraine. An impeccable sense of direction was another benefit of the transformation. Summer-thick trees gave way to scrubby grasses, then a dark ribbon of rocks cutting down the side of the mountain. 

It was deceptively narrow, but Charlie knew the mounds of slate hid deep channels full of shifting pebbles. Here and there, hardy flowers poked through the gravel, their small blossoms huddled together close to the ground. Charlie lowered his nose to the rocks and thought he could smell the deep cold of the glacier that had once cracked this stone and carried it down the mountain. 

Charlie moved out onto the rocks. When he had walked through here years ago, it had been a constant battle to keep his hiking boots steady on the shifting ground. Now, negotiating the unstable rocks was easy. The pads of his wide paws adjusted to each small displacement of the pebbles. Having his weight distributed over four legs, not two, helped him stay balanced when his feet braced at odd angles. Big stones that had once hindered his progress became springboards for increasingly impressive leaps from boulder to boulder. 

Before long, Charlie was having no trouble negotiating the moraine. He followed it into the high elevations, picking his way up a perilous course that only a mountain lion could traverse. It felt glorious to be leaping so freely through terrain that had challenged him in his peak physical condition. Now, it would be impossible for him. 

Thinking of what he used to be capable of made his heart ache. 

Charlie heard a faint sound—the scrabble of tiny claws on stone—and gave in to the urge to hunt. His telescopic ears zeroed in on the sound a half-second before his nose caught the scent. It was a pika—a small, round-eared rodent that made a home in the crags. When he heard her instinctive distress call, he knew the pika had sensed him too. 

She was skittering away from him at top speed, and Charlie launched himself after. She was clever and agile, leading him on a merry chase through the rambling rocks. Just when Charlie thought he had her, the pika veered off through some tiny tunnel known only to her. 

Off-balance, Charlie’s feet tangled underneath him and he tumbled down a short slope, a small avalanche of pebbles following in his wake. Before his mind even realized he was falling, his body reacted, scrambling forward to avoid the worst of the rock fall and turning one foot’s worth of grip into 160 pounds of feline propulsion. 

He was back on the pika, gasping for breath, his excitement and desire increasing with each thump of his pounding heart. The pika’s scent filled his nose thick as perfume, desperation and terror blending into a heady mix that drove Charlie faster, ever faster, on its tail. Finally, Charlie pounced. 

It was the perfect launch, he could tell from the outset, and when he fell on the pika it felt predestined, as if it was not him and this pika but all mountain lions and all pikas, since the Rocky Mountains first thrust out of the earth. Under his paws, he could feel the thrum of the pika’s heartbeat through the sensitive pads on the bottom of his feet. She thrashed briefly under Charlie’s weight in one last frenzied attempt to escape, then collapsed in submission. 

Charlie inhaled deeply, drinking in his triumph and power. 

Then he lifted his paws. 

Sitting back on his haunches, he lifted one paw to his face and began to clean the dirt from between his claws. 

It took a few moments for the pika to realize her luck. Whiskers twitching, eyes darting, she trembled in a prone position against the hard stones. It was instinct, not intellect, that caused her to scramble up and away. Charlie watched her disappear into the warren of rocks. He hoped that she was clever enough to find her way back to her food stores. 

Despite the instinct that drove him to hunt and pounce, he retained a man’s distaste for eating raw meat. He’d tried a few times, simply because the instinct seemed so natural, but he couldn’t get used to the taste and texture. It was stringy and chewy, like blood-flavored licorice. Besides, he got plenty of food as a human: His mother seemed to view it as her personal mission to fatten him up. 

He didn’t need to hunt as a mountain lion, but sometimes he did it anyway. It was fun. 

Charlie methodically continued to clean his paws. It felt good to tend to each pad, clearing any minuscule flecks of rock that might impede the maximum performance of his feet. He was tired, but pleasantly so. It was good to feel enervated after some triumphant physical activity, rather than the pathetic exhaustion that often drove him to his bed after a walk of any distance. 

He could tell from the angle of the sun that it was getting late. His parents tried to be respectful of his privacy, but they would still worry if he didn’t come home for dinner. It felt strange to be living at home at the age of twenty-four, but what choice did he have? With his leg, he would probably be living with them forever. 

As much as he loved being a mountain lion, he still craved the creature comforts of a warm bed and a hot breakfast. The sun would set soon; there were already rays of gold and pink shooting through the darkening sky. He could gallivant through the moraine once more, he decided, then head home. 

The wind shifted. As a man, he might not have noticed, but as a cat it was as if the whole ridge above him had just revealed itself. He could smell moss and fresh water and cold stone and … what was that last smell? Was that roses? He knew wild roses could grow in the Rockies, but only the hardiest plants survived the forbidding terrain around the moraine. The scent teased his nostrils, sweet and earthy. Almost without realizing it, he tracked up the ridge.