We hiked longer than I’d ever chosen to walk in my entire life. We finally reached a small clearing, flanked by even more trees. The ground was hard-packed and smooth. There was a small stone circle in the middle filled with the black remains of burnt branches.
“This campsite seems pretty well used for being so ‘out of the way.’ Do you bring all of your girlfriends here?” I narrowed my eyes in mock suspicion as I shrugged out of the backpack.
“Only the ones who know about the werewolf thing,” he said as he stacked firewood into the stone circle. “Which would be you and you only.”
I dropped the bag. “You’ve never told any of your girlfriends about the wolf thing?”
He blinked a few times, as if I’d just posed an incredibly stupid question. “I haven’t really had that many girlfriends, and none I’ve stayed with long enough to tell about the wolf thing.”
“That’s sort of huge. How has this not come up before?”
“You never asked.”
I thought back to all of the conversations we’d had. “Oh, my . . . you’re right. As a girlfriend, I suck.”
“Well, you get bonus points for prying a bear trap off my leg. That can’t be discounted.”
“Ah, thank God, a retroactive points system. It’s really the only way I’ll win.”
It took surprisingly little time to set up camp. Apparently, experiences with my parents, which included hours spent searching outdoor concert venues for campsites that had good feng shui, had colored my perception of camping. With the thick double sleeping bag, a tent wasn’t necessary. As I unfurled it a safe distance from the fire, Cooper set out the rapidly disintegrating toilet paper and a little spade without comment. I chose not to think about that until it was absolutely necessary.
“What now?” I asked, with the fire blazing comfortably near my bare feet.
“Now I’m going to hunt,” he said.
My jaw dropped, but I felt immediately stupid for not realizing that Cooper would have to run down our dinner. What else were we going to eat? He grinned and rooted around in his backpack, producing packages of hot dogs and buns.
“Funny,” I grunted, slapping at his shoulder. Even though I knew something was brewing, it was sort of nice to have glimpses of the old Cooper back. It was as if he struggled with the decision to have this big “talk” more than the dread of my reaction. Now that he’d made his decision, he could relax.
“Keep up that attitude, and there will be no s’mores for you,” he said as I wandered to the edge of the clearing to find some long, thin sticks fit for roasting. I wiped them down as best I could and held my hand out imperiously for a hot dog. “I can do the cooking,” Cooper said, somewhat indignant now.
“Men always think they should be in charge of outdoor cooking.” I took the hot-dog package from him and skewered a few. “But the Y chromosome has been programmed with the ‘the blacker my food is, the more manly I am’ gene. I like my processed meats to be somewhere in the unnatural-nitrate-red range. Ergo I will handle the cooking, thank you.”
Cooper was quiet for a long moment.
“You’re trying to come up with some sort of ‘processed meats’ double entendre, aren’t you?” I accused him as I held the sticks over the fire.
“Yeah, you didn’t leave me a lot to work with,” he grumbled.
We ate an indecent number of hot dogs and s’mores, careful to hang our leftovers and trash in a tree several yards away from our sleeping bag. As the temperatures dropped into the cool range, I changed into thermals and thick wool socks, something Cooper didn’t have to bother with.
“So, what do you think?” Cooper asked, pulling me against his knees and kissing my neck.
“Camping is just like being at home, only much, much more work.”
He grumped, “Well, it’s not easy for me, either, you know. I’m used to sitting around a campfire with a bunch of overdressed, out-of-shape outsiders, swilling imported beer and pretending to laugh at their jokes.”
“The adjustment must be so difficult for you,” I said, wiping pretend tears of pity from my cheeks. Cooper got quiet, playing with my hands, lacing our fingers together. “You wanted to talk. Let’s talk.”
Cooper cleared his throat and dropped my hands. I obstinately grabbed his and lifted his chin so he had to look me in the eye. He took a deep breath and said, “About a year after I became alpha, this other pack showed up one night. They dragged Maggie out of our house, and their alpha threatened to snap Maggie’s neck in front of me if I didn’t relinquish control of the valley to them. The pack had come up from outside Vancouver. They’d bled their own packlands dry. Their alpha, Jonas, had no choice but to move on to better hunting grounds. He heard that the valley was a pretty good range. They’d done a pretty good job of scouting us out, because they knew about the vulnerabilities of the packlands, the layout of the village, how many able fighters were in the pack, and that I wasn’t all that strong of an alpha.”
He sighed, plucking at my sleeves with nervous fingers. “I’m standing there in the woods surrounded by my whole family. All I could think to do was offer them a place in the valley. To share it with them. He declined. This fucker has my baby sister by the neck, shaking her so hard I can still hear her teeth rattle, and everybody’s looking at me like I’m supposed to know what to do. And the worst part was Maggie—she wasn’t even scared. Because she knew her big brother was going to fix it. I was scared out of my fucking mind, and Maggie was sort of smirking at me, like, ‘Come on, Cooper, just kick this guy’s ass, already.’”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I just froze. And the look on Maggie’s face when she realized that I had no clue what to do . . . I still have nightmares about that look.” He shuddered. “You want to know how we got out of it? My baby sister sank her teeth into Jonas’s arm, kicked all six foot four inches of him in the balls, and called him a jerkoff.”
“Wow. That sounds nothing like her.”
He gave a little smile. “She always was tougher than me. But I was faster. And when Jonas went for her throat, I was able to change before Maggie. I held him off, but both packs phased, and nothing could prevent blood from being shed. Maggie just wouldn’t stay away from Jonas. She kept lunging at him, no matter what I did to keep her away. I got distracted when another male jumped on my back. Jonas got Maggie down on the ground. His teeth were at her neck, and I just lost it. It’s one of those rare clear memories I have as a wolf, killing that male without a second thought, knocking Jonas off Maggie, holding him to the ground, and ripping his throat out.”
Cooper looked a little green just remembering it. I squeezed his hands, trying to bring him back to the present. “What about the rest of their pack?”
“Maggie took down one. But I killed the rest, one by one. Some of my own pack members tried to help me, and I snapped at them. There were twelve wolves in the other pack, and when I phased back to human, they were all dead.” Cooper buried his face in his hands, as if he couldn’t look up to see my face.
I was at a loss to understand why. I shook his shoulder. “But isn’t that a good thing?”
“No, it’s not a good thing!” he yelled.
“You saved your sister. You defended your home and your pack. I’m failing to see the bad here.”
“I killed people, Mo! Yeah, they had fangs and fur at the time, but they were people, just like every member of my own pack is a person. Men and women alike. I killed them all. Something in me was able to do that. I couldn’t stomach what I’d done. Everybody tried to tell me how proud my father would have been, how I’d shown myself to be a great leader. And every night, I woke up screaming from the nightmares. Nothing helped. I couldn’t be around my family anymore. I couldn’t trust myself with them. I didn’t deserve them.”
Cooper stared into the fire, his lips barely moving as he spoke. “Maggie could forgive my hesitation. She could forget that I’d killed people in front of her. But when I couldn’t just go back to being her goofy big brother, she started to hate me. She hated me for not being able to accept a position that she was obviously more suited for, for betraying the pack. When I left, it was like she was relieved, because she had a reason.”
I crawled into his lap, part of me expecting him to shy away from me, to shove me away. “What do you want me to do? Yell at you? Hit you? Scream ‘Get away from me, you monster’? Because if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re going to be disappointed.”
Cooper sighed deeply, the tension easing out of his body. He nuzzled his face into my neck. “You’re not angry with me?”
“I haven’t processed it all yet. Mostly, I’m really irritated that you didn’t think I would understand. You hurt someone to help me,” I said. “Do you think I hold that against you? That I love you any less for it? How could I judge you for doing the same for your family?”
I tilted his head up and gave him my best stern expression. He sighed, pressed his ear to my chest, and
