Authors: Kate Spofford
“Guess we need to patch that hole in the
ceiling, huh?”
I spin around from where I was scrubbing the
walls of the shower–which are actually white, not tan–and glare at
Remy. I fight to keep the scowl on my face despite Remy’s casually
unbuttoned shirt. God, he has six-pack abs. Of course he does.
“How do you sneak up on us like that?” I
demand.
He smiles mysteriously. “You really want to
learn?”
“Yeah.” I shrug. “I mean, you’re supposed to
be on our side, right? Helping us?”
“And what will you offer me in return?” he
asks, a twinkle in his eye.
“Not sex,” my mouth blurts out with seemingly
zero input from my brain. It is all I can do not to slap my hands
over my mouth and turn beet red. Somehow I manage to keep my cool
and my eye contact with him. Daring him to look disappointed.
He laughs heartily. “Not that I would refuse
if you offered, but I was thinking more in terms of something you
might teach me in exchange.”
“Like what?” Immediately I think of
dreamwalking, but I don’t want to offer it. It’s my secret weapon,
and how would I teach it, anyway?
“Don’t you have any skills? You know… any
secret ninja skills you’ve been hiding from everyone all these
years?”
I do my best to keep my poker face on and
play dumb. “I can ruin pretty much any recipe, even if I follow
it.”
He laughs again. Oh God, he thinks I’m
flirting with him. “Well, maybe we’ll discover something along the
way.”
“So you really will teach me how to sneak up
on people? And werewolves?”
“Sure.” When he sees me move to take off my
gloves, he adds, “We can start after lunch. This bathroom needs a
lot more work.” A smirk crosses his face as he walks away.
I yank the glove back on.
Here’s the thing about hard work: you don’t
want to do it, because it seems so hard, but when you finish and
can actually see what a huge difference your work made, it’s all
worth it.
Hole in the ceiling notwithstanding, the
shower actually might clean someone instead of make them dirtier,
and the toilet seat no longer teems with germs. You could walk on
the floor tiles with bare feet with no worries about cutting
yourself on broken beer bottles or contracting foot fungus. The
mirror’s cracked but the shards that remain show a clear
reflection; the paint is cracked but mold doesn’t grow out of the
corners anymore.
The rest of the house has undergone a similar
transformation. Trash, branches, leaves, and other debris gone,
walls and floors scrubbed, decaying curtains removed and windows
washed, and our sparse bits of camping equipment arranged like
furniture: camping chairs surround a cooler coffee table with a
lantern as a the only light source. Even the bedroom looks better
now that the bed has some sheets and blankets on it, although I
think I’ll stick to the floor.
It’s nearly two o’clock when I finish and
wander in to the kitchen to see what Aunt Jenny is making for
lunch. She’s cutting up sandwich fixings on a cutting board and
adding them to four open sub rolls.
“Need any help?” I ask.
“I’m nearly done. You hungry?”
“Starving. All I had for breakfast was an
apple.”
“Remy’s working to get the stove working.
It’s gas, though, so we might have to just buy a grill.”
I move toward the sink. “How’s the
water?”
“Brown. There’s bottled water in the cooler.”
She nods toward the makeshift coffee table.
I gulp down half a bottle. My stomach still
rumbles. When I feel that familiar jab of pain in my abdomen,
Daniel pops into my mind. He’s still out there, still hurt. Maybe
this hunger belongs to him and not me. But really, an apple isn’t
enough to tide anyone over after all the work I’ve done this
morning.
“K.K., go tell your mom and Remy that lunch
is ready. They’re out back.”
I head out and stop in the doorway when I see
what they are doing out there. Clearly my mother was hauling out a
trash bag when she came upon Remy bending over the generator
attached to the back of the house. He’s talking to her and
laughing, and she’s leaning against the house and trying not to be
obvious about checking out his ass. I narrow my eyes. Must be a
dream come true for a single werewolf guy, to find three single
females. His own little harem.
“Lunch is ready,” I say loudly, startling
them both.
Mom laughs like a preteen and I just want to
kick her. “Oh, honey, you sure snuck up on me! I’ll be there in a
minute.” She heads off to deposit the trash beside the Jeep like
she’d just stopped by for a minute to see what Remy was doing. Remy
wipes his hands on his jeans and heads in.
As he passes me in the doorway, I murmur,
“Looks like maybe I don’t need those lessons after all.”
I know he heard me, but he strides in and
grabs a sandwich, joking with Aunt Jenny like I hadn’t said a
word.
We eat like a pack of wolves. The sandwiches
are gone in minutes, along with an entire bag of chips. Only Aunt
Jenny is still picking at her meal by the time we’re all
finished.
“What’s the plan for this afternoon?” Mom
asks.
Hopefully not standing around ogling
Remy?
I think, and when Mom gives me a sharp look I realize I
sent that thought out. Lock down. Must lock down. I glance at Remy,
glad he can’t hear.
“Well, I had promised to show Kayla
something,” Remy says. He looks at me. “If you’re still
interested?”
I smile with my eyes wide, allowing only a
hint of sarcasm in my voice. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Mom looks from Remy to me and back again.
“Oh. Good. Okay, then. Well, what are the chances of a hot
shower?”
“Slim to none,” Remy says. “I haven’t got the
water situation quite fixed yet. You could boil some water and take
a bath, though.”
“How medieval.” She rises from her seat.
“I’ll light some candles and make it a bubble bath, then.”
I follow Remy outside. He leads me into the
forest along a narrow but well-worn path. Once we are out of view
of the house, Remy turns to me.
“Close your eyes and count to one
hundred.”
I narrow my eyes. “What, are we playing hide
and seek?”
“Kinda.” He smiles crookedly. “When you get
to 100, try to sneak up on me while I sneak up on you.”
I consider protesting that this is unfair. He
can sneak away and keep me in his sights while I look for him. But
something makes me keep my mouth shut.
As soon as I close my eyes, I put all my
other senses on alert. Hearing, smell, touch. A rustle of leaves
could be Remy’s footsteps. That small breeze at my neck could be
him back there, sniffing me. But overwhelmingly I hear the voice of
the forest: the groaning of mighty tree trunks as they sway in the
slight breeze, branches rattling together, a sharp crack–could be
Remy, could be just another casualty of winter.
Scent. It should be helping me. I smell cold,
I smell a squirrel hibernating in a tree several feet to my left. I
smell the smoke of the fire from last night. Amazingly, I begin to
hear Mom and Aunt Jenny bickering about food back at the cabin, and
I can smell some kind of meat roasting, and gasoline–once that
scent gets in my nose, there’s no room to sniff out Remy’s clean
smell. What does Remy smell like, anyway?
I’ve been forgetting to count, so I wait
until I think it’s been 100 before crouching low to the ground and
inhaling deeply. Then some shallower sniffs. I’ve never really had
to search for a scent in human form before. As a wolf my senses are
much sharper. And when I was actually using my sense of smell for
tracking, the prey wasn’t exactly hard to find. Daniel’s unwashed
body odor clung to the ground like oil when there wasn’t a trail of
coppery blood scent to follow. And when I hunted for food… animals
were easy to ferret out, as were discarded leftovers from fast food
restaurants.
Now, however, I couldn’t pick Remy’s scent
from the mud and snow and leaves at my feet.
My skin shivers. I want so badly to turn
wolf, to give myself that advantage. But I hold back.
I could stay here, crouched and ready, until
I find some trace of him. But I decide instead to find a place to
hide where I can attempt to track him. I search the ground, and
take a step, avoiding any twigs or dead leaves that might snap and
make sound. Still the snow crunches beneath my boots and I freeze,
the sound excruciatingly loud in my ears. I take another step, this
time lowering my foot slowly to the ground.
A few more steps and I realize that I am
making far too much noise. What am I forgetting? I crouch down, try
to ferret out his scent again.
The door of the cabin slams, a sharp rifle
crack that startles me. Through the soles of my boots, I feel a
vibration. Yes! I’ve been forgetting about my sense of touch. I
press my bare hand to the cold ground, close my eyes, and feel.
Amazing, what I can sense through the ground.
Deep vibrations of either Mom or Aunt Jenny stomping around outside
the cabin. The staccato rapping of a woodpecker miles off, barely
audible but I can feel them in my hands. The roots of the trees
holding fast in the dirt as the wind pushes them around. Water
dripping from icicles on the cabin roof.
If Remy can walk so silently I can’t hear
him, I won’t be able to feel his vibrations in the earth,
either.
Disappointed, I nearly give up, then stretch
my sense of feelings from the tangible earth vibrations to the air.
That feeling you get when you know someone is behind you even when
you haven’t seen or heard them–I seek out that feeling now, the
feeling of another’s consciousness.
And I can feel something–something that is
not Mom or Aunt Jenny or a squirrel or a bird–I move in that
direction, my eyes still half-closed to keep that sense prominent.
I move quickly, not taking care to mask my own movements. I snake
through the trees and lope toward that presence.
“Tag.”
His voice comes from behind me only seconds
before I realize the presence I felt had gone. I turn and glare at
his smug face.
He taps my shoulder.
“Yeah, I get it. I lose.”
“Oh, don’t pout. You weren’t too bad, for
your first time.”
Oh, all the things I want to scream at him.
It isn’t like this is my first time ever tracking anyone. I want to
punch that smug grin off his face. Instead I let my eyes do the
angry ranting.
“You were somehow able to find me, which is
pretty amazing. But you need to learn how to make yourself silent.
If you hadn’t been so obvious I couldn’t have surprised you like I
did.”
“Okay, then teach me how to move silently. I
don’t know how to do it. And how do you hide your scent?”
“That’s pack magic,” Remy says. “I’m... not
sure I can teach you that part.”
Pack magic, huh? Who, exactly, is part of
Remy’s pack?
For over an hour Remy instructs me in how to
step carefully and lightly and quickly. It’s amazing to watch him:
if I weren’t seeing him with my eyes I wouldn’t know he was there.
He glides over the snowy, rocky, littered ground like a ghost. Not
a sound.
If I couldn’t sense his presence.
Now that I’ve figured out how to do this, his
being pulls at me. If I close my eyes, I know where he is.
I have to say it’s pretty distracting.
By the time it starts getting dark I’m
feeling more confident in my learning. I can’t glide along quite
like Remy can, but we’ve played our version of Hide and Seek twice
more, and it’s taken longer and longer for him to surprise me.
“You learn fast,” he says to me as we walk
back to the cabin.
“Thanks.” I don’t meet his eyes. Instead I
admire the muscled arm inside the sleeve of his flannel shirt.
“I’m serious.”
I look up. Those eyes. God, could they be any
paler?
“I’ve been living out in the woods for years.
I mean that it’s taken me years to be as silent as I am. What you
learned this afternoon took me months and months.”
“Thanks.” Then, to avoid sounding repetitive,
“You’re a good teacher.”
His fingers brush up against mine. Whether
it’s an accident or not, I don’t know, because we emerge at the
cabin then, and Aunt Jenny is outside beating a rug. She looks up
at us and I move away from Remy toward her.
Once darkness falls, I flop into one of the
armchairs around the fireplace. Aunt Jenny had beat the dust out of
the cushion, Febreezed it, and covered it with a quilt, and
honestly, I’m too tired to care about the faint smell of moldy dust
and the lumps. My body is exhausted from the hard work, my stomach
is full, and when Remy lights a fire in the fireplace, my eyes slip
to half-mast in the lovely warmth. I gaze into the flames, sensing
that everyone else is doing the same on their choice of
furniture.
My body here feels warm and safe, but Daniel
is still out there. Rubbing my ribcage, I search for the hurt I’d
felt there so sharply a couple of days ago. A faint sliver of pain,
no more than a paper cut, or the ache of a scar. He isn’t in pain
anymore, or not enough to send it across the miles through our
bond.
The bonding with Daniel clearly worked. I’d
learned easily to tune out Mom and Aunt Jenny’s thoughts after the
first time I turned. They were a quiet babble, and it was just as
easy to figure out how to keep them out of my head. But Daniel–wow.
His thoughts blasted into my head. Both his and his wolf’s, because
they were so separate when I caught up to him. I didn’t remember
that from childhood, but I wouldn’t, because I hadn’t turned yet.
So I can’t be sure that we didn’t always have this bond...
I imagine this bond would be wonderful
between two people who loved and respected each other, when one
didn’t overpower the other. To know undoubtedly that your partner
wasn’t cheating on you, and loved you? That would solve half the
world’s problems. To be able to send that kind of love through the
bond… it would make a relationship amazing. Far better than any
human relationship could ever hope for.