His expression turned wry. “You might convince me to start liking this pack thing.”
“I told you, it’s all about having someone watch your back.”
He pulled off his T-shirt and tossed it to the porch. His body was sleek, molded with well-defined, powerful muscles under smooth, dark skin. The guy worked out, but more than that, his body rippled with power. His muscles were natural, hard-earned, and he knew how to use them. He rolled his shoulders, flexed for a moment, then set off, from stop to run.
I bounced, testing my feet against the gravel, feeling earth under me and air around me. Then I set off after him. We took the hiking trail that led from the lodge and to wilderness—thirty miles to the next bit of civilization.
chapter 12
The Wolf had strength, agility, and stamina that the human side didn’t. The Wolf could run all night when she Changed under a full moon. I wasn’t as strong as that right now, but I didn’t stumble when a normal human would have. My lungs didn’t sear with hard breathing, I didn’t fall over after a mile. I found a rhythm, and my muscles flowed. My strides were long, steady, smooth, and my breath came easily. Letting the animal side fill me, I could keep this up for hours.
I became as much Wolf as I could without shifting entirely. If someone had spoken to me then, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. I’d have had to pull myself back from that edge first.
Jerome was stronger and faster than I. He pulled ahead, but only by a few strides, then adjusted so that he could see me by looking over his shoulder. We kept to the edge of the trail; the ground was softer and trees offered some shade. We probably couldn’t continue this all day, but we could slow to a trot during the heat of the afternoon, pick up the pace again after resting, and still make good time. My vision collapsed, focused on the way ahead of me, while my other senses expanded. I tasted the air, which was filled with scents of pine sap, insects, heat; and sounds roared around me—wind in trees, birdsong, our steps padding on the road.
I was still in that zone when Jerome pulled up suddenly, backpedaling to get away from something ahead. I nearly collided with him, but stopped myself and knelt. He also ducked to a defensive crouch and stared ahead, as if making a challenge. I took a breath through flaring nostrils, and smelled something out of place, metallic.
Crossing the trail a few yards ahead of us, a shiny object. I focused on it as a human rather than a wolf.
“Is that what it looks like?” Jerome said.
It looked like three coils of razor wire strung on hastily planted steel T-bar fence posts. Like someone had tried to rope in a prison in a hurry. I crept closer for a better look. The stuff was so shiny it gleamed, even in the shaded forest.
I put my finger on a section of wire, well away from the protruding sharpened spikes. In a few seconds, my finger started itching. A few more seconds, the itching was painful enough I had to pull my hand away. An allergic rash reddened my fingertip.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. “Silver,” I said, glancing back at Jerome.
“Shit.”
Someone hadn’t just wanted to rope in a prison—they’d wanted to make a prison for lycanthropes. We couldn’t make our way over or through the fence without risking cuts and scrapes, and if the silver taint entered our bloodstream, we were dead. I looked one way and the other, trying to see how far the fence went. From here, I couldn’t see the end of it.
“It can’t go on that long,” Jerome said. “You know how expensive that would be, stringing this whole place up with silver wire? Someone’s just trying to keep us off the path.”
That mysterious someone again. When I got my claws on that someone…
“Which way?” I said. “Left or right?”
Jerome considered, then started walking to the right. Right was downhill, a little easier. I followed him. Even though we followed the silver fence line, we kept a respectable distance between it and us.
Vagrant breezes carry information to a wolf’s nose: what’s going, what’s coming, what passed this way before and how long ago. How to find food, water, friends; how to find your way home. A sudden, intrusive smell can cut across the normal tapestry like a razor, sharp and sudden. Destructive and wrong.
I stopped cold and turned into the slight breeze, trying to catch hold of what I’d sensed for only a second. I turned in place. My feet throbbed; my muscles ached at being wrenched out of their rhythm. I’d lost track of time, but the sun was high, probably well past noon. Several hours at least had passed. We’d run maybe half the distance.
Jerome stopped a few paces ahead of me and looked back. His body heaved with deep, steady breaths. He didn’t speak, just gave me a focused look, then turned his own nose to the air, looking for what I searched for.
Skin, sweat, clothing, rubber—human. Just a glimpse. Maybe hikers, maybe a mountain biker. I’d caught only a hint. It was gone now. Maybe moving away, maybe gone downwind.
I looked at Jerome. He shook his head.
A sound like a whip cracked past us; Jerome twisted, dropped to one knee, and clapped a hand over his shoulder, where a rod, maybe ten inches, protruded. Blood dripped in a thin line from the puncture wound.
Breath left me in a gasp. I knelt beside him and touched his arm. At the same time I looked out, toward the direction the arrow had come from. Where I’d sensed a trace of human hunter. When would the next one strike?
Jerome’s breaths heaved, and his face twisted with pain.
“Jerome?”
“Get it out, get it out—Jesus, get it out!” He bared his teeth, and his skin prickled under my hand, rippling with newly sprouting fur. His face was changing, stretching. Pain was pushing him over the edge, making him shift.