Chapter Sixteen
T
he late afternoon sky had gathered a number of clouds, and a warm breeze stirred the alder leaves as Kenzie parked her truck. Thinking she’d like to be closer to her dig site, she’d spent the last hour planning out where to set up camp this time. And anticipating Anya’s delight when the child saw the toys and the pink sleeping bag that had been picked out for her. Kenzie tried to tell herself not to get too excited—after all, Anya would probably remain in her wolfen form. But then again, what if she didn’t?
With that happy picture in mind, Kenzie decided to leave most of the stuff in the truck for the moment and give Anya a couple of small presents first. She selected two brightly colored bags and wondered how the hell there had gotten to be so many.
It looks like Christm gias.
It’s Josh’s fault, she decided with a chuckle, knowing full well that she’d bought just as much, or more, than he had. She tucked a couple of folding camp chairs under her arm and headed for her site.
The grid around her dig was missing again.
Instantly she froze, her inner wolf on high alert. She could see that the entire area was disturbed, the grasses trampled down and limbs broken on the devil’s club and salmonberry bushes that surrounded the area. Had the bears returned?
“Anya? Where are you?” There was no answer. “Stanton!” The only sound was the throaty rattles and clicks of a raven high in a spruce tree. She called out to them in her mind but there was no response. Maybe Anya wouldn’t reply, but why didn’t Stanton? Kenzie tried to shake off her apprehension. After all, the little girl and her guardian could be doing any one of a dozen different things right now: hunting, swimming, fishing, or just plain napping in a cool spot. Still, she set the packages and the chairs down and paced carefully across the clearing, examining the ground as she went.
Her head spun when she found the first tire track. She quickly found another and another, crisscrossing each other and mixed with prints, both human and canine.
Large
canine. Even in her human form, she could easily tell the scent was dog, not wolf, and her heart skipped a beat.
Stop it, she told herself sternly. It was just some local hunters with their ATVs looking for deer or moose. Or maybe a few fishermen, heading out to catch those famous red salmon that Josh was talking about. Lots of people depended on fishing and hunting in this area, right? Stanton had probably taken Anya somewhere safer until the party moved on.
But her inner wolf growled long and low, and every instinct screamed at her that these were not ordinary hunters. She closed her eyes and focused again on
scent
. Suddenly, amid the odor of gasoline exhaust and human sweat, her senses caught a faint whiff of blood.
Changeling
blood.
“No, no,
no!
” Her hands fisted as she fell to her knees and an anguished howl was torn from her throat, a cry of pain and loss and rage. Memories slashed at her viciously as the ancient past erupted into horrifying life. Humans. Humans had attacked Changelings. And this time it was
her fault
, all her fault....
Guilt and blame pounded her like merciless fists. She should have stayed at camp, should have watched over the little wolf herself. What did she think she was doing anyway, playing around with a human? Taking a human’s word for it that Anya would be safe with a Changeling she didn’t even know? And just where the hell
was
Stanton? Was Josh involved in some way? Had the getaway to the city all been a plan to lure her away from camp, away from Anya? Sure, Josh was a great guy but
he wasn’t like her
. Maybe he hadn’t done it intentionally, maybe he’d just been careless in trusting the old Changeling?
She’d
been careless to trust either of them.
And where was the little girl now?
Her inner wolf raged, clawed to be released. Kenzie held it off, her hands shaking as she pulled out her cell and pressed Josh’s number, but it went straight to voicemail. She left him a message and vented her anger and frustration, then flung the phone aside as she Changed.
As a wolf, she cast back and forth over the ground, seeking information in the thick tangle of prints and tracks. Her senses were far sharper, keener, in her lupine form and it wasn’t long before she zeroed in on the blood she hhe n thead scented. Small droplets punctuated the clearing here and there, and all of them belonged to Stanton. What had happened here? And why wasn’t there any sign of Anya?
An hour later, Kenzie didn’t know anything more. She sat on her haunches and howled out her frustration. Her tracking skills had never been her strong point but she could follow a trail easily.
This
, however, was a goddamn mess. There were countless scents leading in and out of the forest, woven together in a knot so nasty that even her brother, James, the most skilled tracker she knew, would have problems with it.
She wished he was here. Hell, she wished
anybody
was here, but most of all she wished Josh was here. And raged at her mutinous heart for wanting a human. Disgusted with herself, she bent her nose to the ground and tried again. She had to find Anya. She had to.
The moose finally took her twin calves and left, grumbling as she went, and Josh breathed a sigh of relief. He hated to have to shoot animals because of human foolishness—in this case, they had offered the animals doughnuts. Tourists seldom took moose seriously, maybe because they looked ungainly and cartoonish, but the enormous creatures attacked people far more often than bears, and they could be every bit as deadly. Josh couldn’t help wishing he had a camera, though, as the fishermen made their way clumsily down the tree—they’d climbed it wearing hip-waders, a testament to just how terrifying a 900-pound moose could be.
Only one of the men complained as Josh took their names and issued fines for feeding moose—$110 in the State of Alaska. Josh didn’t miss a beat, simply cupped his hands around his mouth and produced a long, drawn out tone followed by several explosive grunts.
“What—what’re you doing?” asked the man, his eyes wide.
“Calling the moose back,” Josh said.
“That’s okay, it’s okay, I was only kidding,” he stammered. “I’ll take the ticket, no problem.” The man fell silent as Josh resumed writing and handed him his copy of the page. Luckily, the men were from California and didn’t know that it wasn’t breeding season and the cow moose was unlikely to respond to Josh’s call.
As the would-be fishermen drove away, the muffled beep of Josh’s cell reminded him that he’d thrown the phone on the seat of the loaner truck before mounting the rescue. It took a minute to locate the damn thing in the clutter—Frank really had to clean off his front seat one of these days—but when Josh pressed the voicemail button, he was almost sorry he’d found it. A furious Kenzie delivered a message that would have melted the ears off a lesser man. Somewhere between telling him she never wanted to set eyes on him again and that her trust in a
human
had been seriously misplaced, he heard the raw pain in her voice and gleaned what was really wrong.
Normally it took an hour to get to Chistochina but he covered the distance in record time, cursing the fact that Kenzie wasn’t answering her phone. He left message after message, asking, telling, ordering, and finally begging her to
wait for him
. Something wasn’t right, his gut said so. And his time in Afghanistan had taught him to pay attention to it.
As the truck bumped along the old logging road leading to Kenzie’s camp, Josh wondered about her words. She’d said
hunters
had taken Anya. But there shouldn’t be any hunters in the woods until August unless they were poaching.
Or unless they were deliberately targeting wolves.
Many Alaskans depended on game for suon wobsistence—and wolves were often seen as competition. Some hunters wouldn’t even flinch at shooting a wolf cub—or setting their dogs on it.
He rammed the truck into park and ran for the camp. There wasn’t much there except the interwoven tracks of several ATVs. Fresh human footprints and enormous canine paw prints formed part of the mix and Josh studied the ground as he headed for Kenzie’s dig site. Dogs, he decided at last. The size said
wolf
, but the structure subtly leaned toward
dog
. And the canines were definitely mingling with the humans, sometimes walking at their side. This couldn’t be a party of hunters, nobody hunted in such a large and noisy group. Could be kids, just having a little four-wheeling fun. Like he and his buddies had done growing up. No doubt got their hands on a little beer too—
He never saw it coming. One moment he was studying the ground, the next he was lying on it, looking into the long, sharp teeth of a seriously pissed-off wolf. Its storm gray pelt suited its snarling demeanor, but the size ... Jesus Christ, he’d never seen a wolf this big in his whole life and never from this vantage point. The enormous front paws pressed down on his chest, making it difficult to draw air, and its breath was hot on his face. His fingers inched toward his service revolver, flipped open the holster—and stopped as he got a good look at the creature’s unusual eyes.
“Kenzie?”
The teeth snapped together inches from his face with a sound that chilled his blood and the wolf sprang away. Turned and growled at him as he slowly got to his feet.
“What? What the hell’s wrong with you? Quit that.” He took a step toward the wolf but stopped as the growling got louder. Christ, it was like being in a horror movie—didn’t she recognize him? He hoped like hell she was in control of her animal side. Suddenly an icy breeze sliced through the summer heat and his skin prickled. Kenzie stood where the wolf had been. Tiny blue sparks winked out on the ground around her and he caught a whiff of ozone, as if lightning had struck nearby.
One look at her eyes, the color of thunderclouds threatening to spawn a tornado, let him know that her wolf was still present. He elected to treat her as a wolf and stood dead still, his body slightly sideways to appear nonthreatening. “Kenzie,” he said, more calmly than he felt. “Tell me what happened here.”
“What happened? Anya’s
gone
and I can’t find any sign of her that isn’t at least a day old.” Her voice was raspy, and he wondered if she’d been crying, or if it was a side-effect of shapeshifting. “She must be so scared. And I don’t think Stanton’s with her.”
His insides clenched at that. “I’m sure you’ve covered every inch of this place. What else did you find?”
“Too much.” Her face was pale and she rubbed the back of her neck as if she had a headache. “And not enough. I don’t know which way they went, I don’t know if Anya’s with them. I can’t even track them out of the damn clearing.”
“Let me help. I was reading a trail when I was six, maybe I can help sort it out.”
He walked toward her now, wanting to comfort her, but as he reached out she stepped back and the anger flashed in her eyes again. “Don’t. I don’t want you to touch me.”
Ouch.
“Okay. Is it you or your wolf talking?”
“This all went too fast, just too fast—you’re getting the wrong idea.”
He didn’t like where this was going. “Well, way too late for that lall . What the hell’s up with you?”
“Look, it was a memorable night, we had a lot of fun, and that’s all. That’s it.”
“That’s it?” He stared at her, unable to believe what he was hearing. “What, you want us to just shake hands and walk away or something?”
“Yeah, we should be smart and do exactly that. No harm, no foul.”
No harm? An invisible knife had just sliced through him, virtual guts were spilling out everywhere, and it was tough to draw a breath. “We’re both worried about Anya but we should be pulling together, not pulling apart. What the bloody hell are you afraid of, Kenzie?”
“Nothing, I just think it best that we don’t—”
“No, not
we
. You think it’s best that
you
don’t get involved with a human. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Last night was more than just simple fun, a helluva lot more
,
and you damn well know it. We made a connection and now you’re scared spitless. All because of something that happened to you a fucking
century
ago. And yeah, it was bad and it’s wrong that it happened to you, but you’ve judged most of the people on this planet by it ever since. Including me.”
“Don’t you say that to me. Not now, not with Anya missing.”
“I don’t think Anya has a thing to do with it. You’re using her disappearance as a goddamn excuse to blow me off. Because you’re scared.”
“I’m
not
scared!”
He paced, needing to channel his frustration before he grabbed her and shook her. “Not of some things, that’s for sure. You’ve got a lot of courage and a lot of strength. You have to, in order to spend years digging in the dust for any tiny clue that might protect your family and your people. For chrissakes, Kenzie, you’re preparing to stand the entire world on its ear with your work. Why can’t you find the courage to give us a chance?”