Wolf's Song (2 page)

Calling upon every ounce of inner strength she could muster, she willed herself not to shift into human form and topple out of the pine to land like a graceless lump of naked flesh at his feet. She recalled the first time she’d shifted and fallen, as a young cougar kit just learning to climb trees. Half skinwalker, half cat born into a shifter clan of mountain lions, she’d never taken her feline form again, to the chagrin of her dwindling clan. They’d grown fewer in number but far stronger under her Uncle Cal’s leadership, grabbing acres of land in and around the shifter mecca known as Shady Heart. More and more, Cal pressed her to pick a mate from his coterie of lieutenants and other cats vying for her hand, as he pushed to consolidate his power and prepared to seize control of the county—including the area currently occupied by the lupine town of Los Lobos. But Summer remained detached from shifter politics.

And she only had eyes for her lone wolf.

Brick had first come to the mountain glade—in the no-man’s land between wolf and cat territory—ten years earlier; a skinny adolescent, pulpy and wounded, splinted, bandaged, unable to walk, barely able to lift that hard head of his, the crown swathed in gauze, his shell cracked like Humpty Dumpty’s. His face resembled raw meat that had been forced through a sausage grinder. His inner scarring, from what she could glean from a distance—and from Gee’s one-sided conversation—infinitely worse.

The old werebear had half-carried, half-dragged him in human form to the deserted cabin and left him there.

“You’ll heal faster if you shift.”

The sack of gauze greeted Gee’s advice with silence. And remained coiled on the floor in human form. As if he hated being a wolf. Hated being alive.

She’d flapped from tree to tree to investigate, drawing as near as she dared. During those first few weeks, he never came out of the cabin, not even on the occasions when the huge ursine creature visited to bring supplies. She’d hopped into a birch whose branches brushed the ground floor windows of the rustic cottage for a better view, fascinated by the wounded creature. A set of carved log stairs led to a loft she couldn’t see. But Gee bustled about below in the galley kitchen that opened into a small living room, stocking shelves, examining the young male’s dressings, cajoling and arguing with him.

After a few weeks, the giant pushed his charge, still in human form, out to the porch and dumped him there.

“Learn from this, boy. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get strong. I’m not going to mollycoddle you anymore. You need to snap out of it.”

But the youth had only lain where Gee had tossed him, not even bothering to drag himself to the rocker or porch swing. Had he been damaged so badly he couldn’t shift? Or…maybe he didn’t want to. As a skinwalker, able to assume different animal forms, she usually sensed the presence of another shifter in her environment. But if she hadn’t overheard Gee’s comments, she didn’t know if she’d have identified Brick as a were.

His listlessness and melancholy tore her heartstrings back then. Physical pain blossomed in her breast, raw and ragged, as if she’d been cut by the jagged edge of a tin can. She wanted to see a smile brighten the dark face, still swollen and discolored. But she dared not show herself.

Instead, she’d searched far and wide for the flotsam and jetsam dropped from pockets, from the wearer’s fingers or neck or tossed from moving vehicles. So much abandoned or discarded bounty. She pecked at half-buried gems and unearthed small pieces of shiny debris: rings, toy soldiers, colored glass, parts of plastic toys and gadgets, broken components off cars and electronics, sparkling gum wrappers. Taking them in her beak, wrapping talons around them, she winged back to the cabin. And then showered her tiny gifts of lost-and-found treasure onto the porch from great heights as she soared by.

Trinkets for her…well, she didn’t know in what esteem she’d held him then. Perhaps he was just a curiosity at first. A hurt and wounded creature in need of healing, in need of cheer. But now….

Now, he’d become something much more to her. Something vital. Something she dared not name. Dared not admit, even to herself.

Back then, he’d finally noticed the collection of silvery bits and other oddities accumulating on the deck of the porch after weeks of inertia—and only when she’d accidentally dropped a chipped and tarnished hood ornament on his chest.

Plunk
.

A ram’s head insignia. Shiny. Unlike the cracked blue-and-white BMW medallion already littering his doorstep. But she considered the ram a greater reward. He seemed much more of a truck kind of guy.

He’d sat up and snatched the chunk of metal off his rib cage, stared at it, blinked and then looked around, as if for the first time. Taking in his surroundings, the half-inch of detritus carpeting the planks on which he’d lain. She’d thought he’d sweep the mess away, relegate the whole mass of junk to a garbage can.

But he’d gathered everything together, painstakingly sorted through the lot and made groupings out of the motley hodgepodge, then arranged her offerings in precise lines and rows. Counted them. Began again. If a breeze happened to ripple through the assortment, juggling an item from its place, he’d quickly reformed his collection, aligning the trinkets once more, as if he couldn’t bear the slightest deviation from the rigid order he imposed on the jumble. He appeared obsessed. And his obsession had fascinated her. A male seeking to impose meaning out of meaningless chaos.

She’d started looking for more and more flashy bits of miscellany to add to his cache: crackly red cellophane, the dented pipe from an old wind chime. She could barely carry some things in her beak or talons. But she had to try. For him. Her heart swelled at the thought that he treasured the cast-off items she brought him.

After a few more deliveries, he’d gazed at the large carpenter’s box bristling with tools and stuck in a corner of the porch near the woodpile, eyes thoughtful. Selecting a large ax and a saw, he ventured down the short steps into his yard slowly, his limbs stiff as an old man’s. Cutting down his first tree, he sawed it into rough boards. Sanded the planks smooth. Then, to her amazement, he returned to the porch and started building shelves.

When he removed his shirt the first time, the discolored patchwork of bruises on his chest and back made her gasp. Sorrow and dismay softened her heart. Clearly, he’d been abused. She didn’t know what he’d done to warrant such a battering. But no one deserved to be treated that way.

She’d wanted, needed, to bring him joy. His elusive smile became for her a treasure rarer and dearer than any of the shiny bits she’d dropped on his porch.

So she’d sung for him. Not a raven’s raucous caw. But a clear, sweet melodic sound. Her special gift.

As if her song stunned him, he’d morphed into frozen marble, silent and still. Then, spitting the nails from between his teeth, he’d dropped the hammer and stepped off the porch again. He paced the yard in front of the cabin, scanning the skies, studying each of the trees. Had he found her? She couldn’t be sure.

“Thank you,” he’d said, his voice deep, but soft as a weeping willow bud.

She hadn’t known what to do. But her playful nature took over. She pelted him with a black walnut.

His mouth cracked, his lips quirking upward. He had a lovely smile, like sunlight suddenly bursting through dark, forbidding storm clouds. One that sent hot tingles rippling through her in places she’d never been warmed.

He’d grinned up at her. Or at least in her direction. Her heart clenched.

He’d touched her soul. She recognized a kindred being. She could no more stop watching him now, stop coming to his glade, than she could cease to soar in the bright wind, against the wide blue heaven in her favorite guise. The raven gave her the freedom she craved. Escape from the suffocating hold of her ever more greedy family.

When he finished building his shelves during those first weeks, he once again positioned the small baubles she had dropped. Again, in precise rows, no trinket misaligned…as if he needed tangible proof he could bring order to some part of his world. He built shelves for the interior of the cabin, too.

Gee seemed pleased the next time he visited.

“Progress,” he’d said. “You’re making a home.”

“I can live here,” the youth said. “I don’t hear voices. Just beautiful songs.”

“One day you’ll need pack. As they will need you. You will have to return.”

Ah, so he was wolf.

“Maybe.” He’d shrugged. “But not now.”

The older shifter nodded. “Get strong. Let the spirits of these woods speak to you. They have much to impart. Learn from them.”

Gee showed him a martial arts technique called
t’ai chi ch’uan
, part stillness, part meditation, all physicality.

“Focus. Become one with what you hear, what you see, what you sense. Use it. Control it.”

The three hundred-pound bear had lumbered through the lithe holds and movements comically, but Brick took to them easily. He practiced for hours in the quiet after dawn or the gray, gloaming time at dusk, barefoot on the dewy grass, bare-chested, dressed only in loose black drawstring trousers, holding his poses for lengthening periods, his body striated and rippling with muscles.

Gee visited less and less. The youth spent long afternoons hiking and exploring the hills and woods, then returning to the cabin to whittle animals and figurines on his porch. Sometimes whole woodland scenes, no bigger than a large man’s fist. She admired his artistry.

Eventually, he gathered up his handiwork, carefully placed the objects in a tin box, and then ventured away from the cabin. He started going into a town. Not Los Lobos, though, where she suspected he came from, where the Black Hills Wolves pack held sway. But into Shady Heart, on the other side of the mountain, where her cat shifter family ran the county, sprawling outward from the somewhat seedy business district like an oil slick on the ocean.

When he’d come home after that first foray, he no longer had his carved pieces. The next day he gathered fallen branches of green wood and began anew.

After one trip to town, he’d returned with a battered old truck. She wondered if one of her relatives had sold the rattling junker to him. Cheated him, maybe. Another time, he came back drunk, followed by a hard-looking woman who tumbled from her car, wobbly on her feet. One of the easy floozies from her Uncle Cal’s place, she was sure. Males from miles around, both human and shifter, knew they could pay for pleasure—or anything else they craved—at the Graymarket Trading Company Saloon and Casino, Cal’s palatial den of decadence and iniquity in Shady Heart—which was not shady in the leafy meaning of the word, and had very little heart to speak of.

Black eye makeup had streaked the female’s cheeks, circling her eyes like a raccoon. Too much blush, too much lipstick, too little dress. Definitely one of Cal’s flock. Human, probably. Too graceless to belong to Clan Goldspark, their mountain lion clan. And Summer hadn’t recognized her.

How much had Brick paid for her?

The woman stumbled toward him, grabbing onto his arm.

Summer had swooped down with a brittle cry and flapped around the painted female, until the woman shrieked in terror and threw her arms up to shield her face. Then she left a sticky deposit in the whore’s teased hair and soared away. The soiled dove scrambled back into her car and sped down the mountain. Brick never brought another woman home.

The following day, when he emerged from the cabin, rubbing his temples as if his head hurt, she’d peppered him with black walnuts. He held up his hands in surrender.

“You can’t be jealous, Annabel Lee.”

So he’d given her a name, had he? She liked that. She’d rained another batch of walnuts down on him, but more playfully. He caught some. Juggled. Standing in his clearing, looking up at the sky, tossing walnuts in the air and laughing. He had a deep, rich laugh. His laugh grew even deeper, richer over time. He fed the teasing, carefree, whimsical aspects of her nature. She looked forward to playing with him, to their game with the walnuts.

But not as much as she now looked forward to him removing his shirt.

One day, years earlier, he’d sat on his porch rocker whittling, whistling a little off-key, pausing to glance up occasionally, as if he knew he were being watched. A mischievous smile quirked his lips upward. When he finished, he placed a beautifully carved figure of a wolf on the railing.

She hopped down to take a closer look. His best work yet. The detail stunned her, the knife strokes on the body making each whorl of hair of the creature’s furry coat distinct. The expression around the eyes, the mouth, one of wonder and bemusement, and just the right amount of devilry. Like Brick’s own. Hinting at the shaggy scruffiness of the carver in human form. She coveted the tiny sculpture. Wanted to grasp it and soar away, to hide it in her tree house for her and her alone. He’d winked, as if he knew.

“Yours, sweetheart.”

Then he’d brushed the shavings away, slid his knife back into the sheath on his belt, gathered up his tin box with the other objects he’d carved that week and, leaving the wolf on the porch rail for her, got into the truck and rumbled down the mountain.

After he clattered away, she snatched up the little figurine, holding it carefully in her talons, and winged swiftly homeward. In her bedroom, she’d shifted to human form and held the small wolf to her heart, stroking the carved fur, warming the wood with her fingers, before tucking the figure beneath her pillow. She slept with one hand curled around the carving, and dreamed of him often.

He left the cabin on a monthly basis. She never followed him, but returned to her own house, built into a tree in the woods on the edge of the town. She did not know—did not want to know—what he did when he went into Shady Heart. She knew the town and suspected. But she blocked those unwanted thoughts from her mind.

Over the years, as the town’s animosity toward other shifters—particularly wolves, especially the wolves of the Black Hills Pack—grew, she feared for him also. But she told herself the cats would leave him alone as long as he minded his own business—something Brick excelled at—and spent his money in Shady Heart. And besides…he seemed to have no affiliation with Los Lobos or the Black Hills Pack anymore. He couldn’t pose any kind of threat to her Uncle Cal’s plans.