“I thought he’d gotten over that.”
“Who got over what?”
“I’d have told you if he’d eaten a wise woman in the past two centuries.” Neil’s eyes met Julian’s. “I swear.”
“Who—” Julian began, then he knew.
He shoved Neil out of the way and raced barefoot and bare-chested across the snow.
Alex chased Cade through the moonlight. She wasn’t enjoying this run at all. She’d thought when werewolves shared the moon, they bonded. That it was the
equivalent of coffee with the girls, poker with the boys, maybe a couples’ potluck.
Instead, she kept getting ice and snow kicked in her face as she followed his light brown tail on and on. No gamboling, no rolling and wrestling, no playing. No fun.
They weren’t too far away from town at least. She didn’t feel sick. But she did miss Julian. She wished she’d stayed home and run with him.
First she and Cade had loped around and around Barlowsville in larger and larger circles. Alex was a new wolf. She didn’t know the procedure. It had seemed a little foolish to her, but Cade appeared to enjoy it. Every time she glanced at him, he was grinning.
Eventually they’d headed away from town, and the terrain had become rougher if that were possible. Even on wolf feet, Alex had stumbled, fallen, then slid all the way down a hill and into a hollow of water so cold she couldn’t understand how it wasn’t frozen.
Once she’d extricated herself, she looked around for Cade and huffed a surprised bit of air through her nose to discover that he’d disappeared into a fairly large grove of trees. She plunged in, too, managing to keep sight of his tail, even though the thickness of the branches nearly obscured the moon.
Eventually she popped out of the cover and into a clearing where a house stood, surrounded on all sides by trees and tall piles of snow—an oasis in a desert of ice.
Unlit, the building was but a shadow, not a wisp of smoke from the fireplace, no hint of a generator. Cade trotted past the huge monster truck parked to the side. How had that gotten there? She didn’t see a road anywhere.
Alex made an anxious sound as Cade approached the door. What was he doing?
That became apparent an instant later when Cade straightened to his full height, naked skin gleaming silver. Then he reached out and opened the door.
Alex cocked her head, afraid she’d hear screams, shots, but there was nothing. Perhaps this was a place Cade kept apart from the lab where he could relax away from his weird science. She wouldn’t blame him.
The thought of going inside, finding warmth, a towel, even clothes, appealed more and more as the water on her fur turned to ice, then began to crackle and break and rain around her paws like sleet.
The natural reticence of a wolf for a human abode made her hang back, paw the snow, pace. She wasn’t going to be able to go in until she—
Alex closed her eyes and reached for human form. The shift took longer than Cade’s had. Of course Cade was nearly as old, and therefore as powerful, as Julian.
Once she had two legs instead of four, Alex hurried inside.
“Close the door.”
Cade’s voice came from somewhere to her right. With the door closed and human eyes, she couldn’t see much. The windows were covered. The moon could not spill in.
“This is yours?” she asked.
“It is now.”
A light flared, so brilliant she was left blinking against the glare. When the black spots went away, she saw that Cade had set a portable lantern on the mantel. The room was so small and the lantern so bright, everything was illuminated.
The blood splotches on the floor, the basket of toys in the corner, and the hundreds of pictures of Alana Barlow that had been tacked over every inch of the walls.
Alex slowly tugged her gaze from the pictures to Cade, but before she even saw his face, she knew she was in trouble.
Julian managed to slow down long enough to avoid crashing through the door of the lab; he managed to calm down enough to keep from shouting his brother’s name. Until he discovered the place was empty. Then he shouted a lot.
However when he found Alex’s clothes, he couldn’t speak at all.