Uncaging Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 4) (6 page)

This is ridiculous
, he thought.
You first saw her two hours ago.

She was just some horny girl out looking for a little fun.

Chase rubbed his hands over his eyes.

“What did we do wrong?” he asked.

Gavin shook his head, staring at the floor.

“She seemed to be having a pretty good time,” he said. “She was the one who brought condoms, too.”

Chase took a deep breath, and forced himself to calm down. Getting upset wouldn’t help anything, and getting angry definitely wouldn’t make her come back.

“Let’s just go home,” he said softly. “It’s the middle of the night. Maybe there was some misunderstanding, and everything will be fine in the morning.”

Gavin looked up at him, then nodded.

An hour later, next to Gavin in their huge bed, in their house in the hills outside Rustvale, Chase couldn’t sleep. Gavin didn’t sound asleep, either, but he didn’t say anything. What was left to say that hadn’t been said already? Nothing was going to make the almost-physical pain go away, especially not at three-thirty in the morning.

Get some sleep
, he told himself.
When has getting some sleep not helped?

He forced himself to close his eyes and relax.

Years ago, Chase had discovered the best relaxation trick of all-time. He had to remember the job he’d had for six years, from ages sixteen to twenty-two. When his job was to cross-country hike from the commune where he’d grown up to the marijuana farm they kept, hidden deep inside Klamath National forest.
 

He started from the back of the barn and walked toward Humpback Ridge, always keeping the rocky bumps well in sight. The trees changed, just slightly, and Chase always knew that he was going the right way. Then he hit the tree line and had to scramble a bit, up and over the saddle, down through the west side of the mountain. Across a series of freezing, glacier-fed streams, over a few rock-strewn canyons. Every time he made the trek, a few new trees had been hit by lightning, until at last, after hours of walking through the woods, he’d walk through the last couple of trees and come up on the neat rows of marijuana plants.
 

He still knew the route by heart, even though the farm was long gone. After the commune’s building had been seized, someone had turned it into a bed and breakfast.

Chase knew it was probably ironic that his family had grown so much pot on land owned by the Federal government, but the Klamath National Forest spanned thousands of square miles with no roads, no trails, not a single human. There was no better place.

Chase forced his breathing to slow, imagining himself sliding down the quick slope that had led to the glacier-fed stream just past the tree that had been struck by lightning one year. The forest had always been quiet and cool, an inviting respite from the rest of his life back then.

He crossed the stream, then stood on the opposite bank, his frame pack on his back, and listened to it gurgle. Chase imagined that he stood there for a long time, just listening, the smell of the cold, fresh water rising into his nose.
 

Next to him, in their bed, Gavin’s breathing finally slowed and evened out.

We’ll find her,
he thought.
We will.

At last, Chase fell asleep.

Chapter Six

Scarlet

Scarlet felt better when she woke up. The sun was already shining into her bedroom, and from the angle, she thought it might be a little late. She took a deep breath and looked around, cataloging all the things that she’d missed.

I’m alone in a room,
she thought.
The door locks from the inside. I can turn the lights all the way off. The window doesn’t have bars, the sheets don’t scratch, and I can stay in here as long as I want.

She stretched and rolled onto her side, looking around her childhood room. It didn’t look quite how she’d left it — someone had cleaned it significantly, for starters — but she could still see the room it had been through the changes.

It all still felt too good to be true, Scarlet thought as she sat up, letting her feet hit the brightly colored rug that still covered the wooden floor. She looked around the room, remembering everything that was in there: books on a small bookshelf, a jewelry stand for jewelry she never wore, a chest of drawers.

If it’s so good,
she thought,
why do I feel empty?

She thought quickly about the two men last night. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before — she’d had sex, yeah, and sex with mated pairs, but her itch had never felt so
scratched
.

What if I fucked up by leaving?
she thought, but shook her head, forcing herself to stop thinking about it.

Her wolf growled. Four years in prison with nothing but a half-hour a week to shift and run around a fenced-in prison yard hadn’t been good for the wild animal inside Scarlet, and it was yet another reason why she shouldn’t be forming relationships right now.

What she needed was a slow, steady, predictable life. One that wouldn’t send her back to jail, especially since the first few weeks were the worst. Those were the Mutathol weeks, before the guards trusted new shifters not to shift. Sometimes she still had dreams about it, and she woke up dripping with sweat, trying to tear her own skin off.
Anything
to stop the feeling of the drug crawling through her veins.

A bird landed on the windowsill. She’d kept the curtains open just because she could, and now she watched the bird look at her suspiciously, cocking its head to one side.

“I live here now,” Scarlet told the bird, though she wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince of that: herself, or her feathered friend.

The bird hopped a couple of times to the corner of the window, and Scarlet noticed the nest there for the first time. She leaned over, earning an angry squawk from the bird, but saw three perfect, tiny, speckled eggs inside it.

Suddenly, she could feel the tears rising to her eyes, her throat closing off, and she covered her mouth with both hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the now-angry bird, her voice barely a whisper.

Why the fuck am I crying?
she thought.
It’s a bird’s nest. With eggs.
 

Chill the fuck out, Scarlet.

Something deep inside her stirred. She had no idea why, but she found the nest, the eggs, and the tiny bird’s fearless show of rage incredibly moving.

Scarlet backed away and took a deep breath, then another, and another, until she finally felt like she might not cry.

Then she left her room, the bird still on the windowsill, and went down to breakfast.

Eating Trevor’s blueberry pancakes, she had the odd feeling that maybe nothing had
really
changed. Sure, both her parents were in prison and Trevor was married to a bear and a human now, but besides that, what was different?

Lizzie, who now insisted on going by Liz, was complaining about her pre-calculus class. Tim was stabbing blueberries with his fork, drawing on a well of angst that only a thirteen-year-old could, glaring at his orange juice.

“I just don’t see why I have to learn this stuff,” Lizzie — no,
Liz
— was saying. “Who needs to know the area under a curve for
anything
?”

“Engineers,” Trevor said calmly, flipping a pancake.

“Anyone in the sciences,” added Sloane.
 

Lizzie sighed, and the screen door shut. Austin’s footsteps sounded through the hall, and then he appeared in the kitchen entryway, mail in hand.

“Have
you
ever had to find the root of a polynomial in real life?” Liz demanded.

Austin stopped short and looked at her, then flicked his gaze to Trevor and Sloane.

“No, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn it,” he said.

Scarlet didn’t say a thing. As far as she was concerned, they were speaking a foreign language. In high school, she’d been too busy skipping class and sneaking off to smoke and hang out with her friends to even get as far as pre-calculus. It was a minor miracle that she’d graduated at all, honestly.

And now I’m out of jail on parole at twenty-six
, she thought.

“Your mom was good at math,” Scarlet said suddenly.

Now, every set of eyes in the kitchen turned her way, and Scarlet felt like there was a spotlight on her.

“She helped me with my algebra homework a couple of times,” Scarlet went on. “I still failed, but not for her lack of trying. I remember being
amazed
that she could just read the textbook and figure out what to do.”

It had been a long time since Scarlet had thought of their older brother, David. Mostly because his death had been their family’s real trigger, when their dad has started sliding to the deep end and their mother had started drinking more and more. Papa had already been dead for years, so there was no one to stop them.

Sometimes, Scarlet was amazed that they were as normal as they were, everything considered.

Trevor flipped two pancakes in silence, then spoke up.

“She helped me with physics once,” he said. “I don’t even remember what with, but when she was finished, it all suddenly made sense.”

Liz was looking at the three-quarters eaten pancake on her plate. She’d only been four or five when they died, and Tim had been even younger.

“See,” said Scarlet. “It’s not all armed militias and ranch work.”

“Anything good in the mail?” Trevor asked, tilting his head toward Austin.

“Junk, mostly,” Austin said, leaning against the counter and going through the pile of envelopes in his hand. “Property tax bill, credit card offer. Coupons. The housecat sanctuary in Canyon City is having another fundraiser.”

“Isn’t Pierce a billionaire or something?” interjected Sloane. “Why does he need to fundraise?”

Austin just shrugged.

“A billion dollars doesn’t buy enough cat litter?” he guessed, putting that envelope on the bottom of the stack.

“Ooh,” he went on. “Here’s one just addressed to ‘Ursid Bastard,’ care of Red Sky Ranch. No return address.”

“That’s you,” said Trevor. He put pancakes on a plate and handed them to Sloane. “At least it’s not from prison. They have to use a return address.”

“Ursid isn’t even a word,” Sloane said. “Did they mean ‘Ursine’?”

“Probably,” said Austin.

“It’s a meteor shower,” Scarlet piped up. “I think.”

“Ursid?” asked Austin.

Scarlet nodded.

“Meteor showers are usually named for the constellations they originate in,” Scarlet said. “Or, where it looks like they originate from when you’re standing on Earth, at least. So the Leonids look like they’re coming from the constellation Leo, the Perseids look like they’re coming from Perseus, and so on. I think there’s an Ursid shower. From one of the Ursa constellations.”

Everyone else in the room stared at her. Sloane’s mouth was partly open, and even Tim looked surprised.

“There weren’t very many books in the prison library,” Scarlet said. She could feel the heat rising to her face.

Stop looking at me
, she thought.

“So I ended up reading one about astronomy, because it seemed sort of interesting,” she finished.

Do they have to look so surprised that I read a book?

“Cool,” said Austin at last. “I’m a meteoric bastard, then.”

“They probably did mean ‘ursine,’” Scarlet said.

“You haven’t gotten a nasty letter in a while,” said Trevor. “You do something lately?”

Austin just shrugged.

“Every so often the Ponderosa pack remnants remember that I exist, and they get worked up enough to write down their thoughts,” he said, ripping it open and scanning it. “Yeah, this is just the usual.”

Trevor poured out more pancake batter, and Scarlet could see his jaw working, his back rigid. Then he tugged on his earlobe, something he’d done when he was mad since he was a kid.

“It’s not a big deal,” Austin said, his voice softer now.

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Trevor said.

“The people who write those are almost too stupid to breathe properly,” Sloane said, her eyes flashing. “Just give them time, and they’ll take care of themselves.”

Scarlet looked down at her pancakes.

That used to be me
, she thought. She’d never written a nasty letter like that, but she had a feeling that she knew exactly what was in it. How many awful things had she said about bears and lions and humans, without knowing the first thing about any of them?

What if I’m still like that?
she wondered.

What if knowing about constellations and meteors is just a cover, and deep down, I’ll always be the hateful bitch I used to be? What if I couldn’t actually change?

Scarlet ate the rest of her breakfast in silence, trying to keep her eyes away from her three-moon tattoo.

After breakfast, she volunteered for the dishes, and she could tell that Trevor was pleased, even if he didn’t say anything.

“Austin’s gonna do some ranch stuff,” he said, leaning against the counter next to her. “But I cleared my schedule. I thought you might need some wolf time. I know you didn’t get much on the inside.”

Scarlet would barely consider the time she got to shift in the prison wolf time at all: half an hour a week in a twenty-by-twenty yard, surrounded on all sides by cinderblock walls topped with razor wire. Above it had sat a guard tower, a human guard with a high-caliber rifle inside it.

Human guards were
notoriously
trigger happy around shifter prisoners. Scarlet had seen them shoot another woman, a lion who’d nearly managed to scale a fence and escape.
 

“Yes,” Scarlet said quickly. She looked at her brother and grinned, her wolf hopping with joy. “I definitely need some wolf time.”

“Ready now?” Trevor asked, as she put the last plate in the draining rack.

Scarlet just nodded. She was so excited that her wolf felt more like a puppy with a squeak toy than a full-grown wild animal.

“Come on,” he said, and led her out the back door.

As they walked through the back yard, he pointed.