canines. If you come across a wolf on the trail and use it, the wolf will either run off or be too distracted to chase you when you run away.”
“He’ll make a fortune,” I muttered, slapping it back into his hand.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you. I was just trying to break up the fight—” Realization suddenly dawned on Nick’s face. “Oh, hey, wait a minute, so that means that whole scenario with the nudity and the kissing and the rubbing in your truck—that really happened!”
I blushed. Blushed! I never blushed, and here it felt as if my cheeks were going to burst into flames. “No, it didn’t!”
He grinned winsomely. “Trust me, I keep very careful mental records of the beautiful women I’ve seen naked. And you are a very memorable entry in my—”
“If you say ‘spank bank,’ I will literally knock teeth out of your head.”
“I was going to say—” He stopped in mid-sentence, suddenly aghast. “Where does a nice girl even learn a term like ‘spank bank’?”
“I’m not a nice girl. And I spend a lot of time with barely postadolescent men,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Look, can we have this conversation somewhere a little less secluded and open to attack? What are you even doing out here?”
“I heard Alan make some crack about this being a high-traffic area for the wolf sightings. I came out here to investigate. I saw the wolf . . .”
“And you assumed it was a werewolf and not, say, an actual timber wolf that could rip your throat out and leave your bones scattered all over this clearing?”
“I thought it was Cooper,” he said, paling. “Oh, shit, was that a real wolf?”
“No, that was a werewolf,” I said, shaking my head and eyeing the tree line.
“So, why are you so upset?”
“Because I didn’t know him.”
WE ENDED UP stumbling our way back to Nick’s, although Cooper and Mo’s place was closer. I didn’t want to have to explain to my brother that I’d phased in front of Nick again or endure Mo’s superior little smirks.
I called Samson to tell him I would be away for the night and to watch the borders of the valley for strangers. He was confused, but I was using my “don’t question me” tone, so he agreed. I turned back to Nick.
I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling oddly naked. Well, I was naked. But I felt more naked than usual. How was I going to do this? I wondered. What would this mean for my family? How much of this was I telling him because I wanted him to understand the pack, and how much of it was I telling him because I wanted him to understand me?
We basically stood in his front hall and stared at each other. I turned on my heel and walked into his kitchen. On the wall, he had a map marked with red pins at the attack sites. He had tried to mark the estimated hunting range, with a list of average wolfhunting ranges posted on the wall next to mileage estimates from each attack site to Mo’s house. He had our accident scene marked with a blue pin. He had two huge lists written on two sheets of legal paper. One was marked “Proven” and was completely blank. The other was titled “Total Bullshit—Probably” and included “full-moon phasing,” “bipeds,” “bitten vs. born,” and, finally, “silver bullets” with a question mark next to it. And there was a stack of little notebooks, each one filled with scribbles.
“Technically, silver bullets will kill us,” I told him. “And so will real bullets. Bullets kill pretty much everybody.”
He nodded and pulled out a Sharpie to make a note on his chart. “Good to know.”
“You don’t have any other little James Bond gadgets I should know about, do you?” I asked, eyeing the air horn, which he’d tossed onto the counter. “A gun that’ll launch a net over me? Cufflinks that shoot bear mace?”
“Nope. That would be pretty cool, though.” His lips twitched a little when I glared at him. “But obviously not appropriate.”
Snickering, he tossed me a pair of old basketball shorts and a Reidland High School Greyhounds T-shirt. I turned my back to slip into it.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, suddenly very close behind me, running his fingertips along three slashing scars down my back.
“Angry bear. I was on a run with my brothers at Eagle Pass,” I murmured. “I was young. I thought I was the biggest, baddest thing on the mountain. The bear reminded me otherwise, when I got too close to her cubs.”
“But you heal so quickly; I seem to remember something about that,” he said.
“Sure, we heal, but we still scar. It’s not like we’re vampires.” Nick’s face lit up with delight and a million questions, so I had to add, “As far as I know, vampires are not real.”
“Damn it,” he grumbled as I pulled the shirt over my head and slid into the shorts. Nick lifted my leg and examined the waffle pattern of tiny dents along my thigh. He quirked an eyebrow.
“Never piss off a porcupine, no matter how jolly he may seem,” I explained gravely. “Cartoons are very misleading.”
He pointed to another long white streak on my shin.
“Softball game, sliding into second. Samson wouldn’t get out of the damn baseline.”
He laughed, then traced his fingers along the faint trio of short lines just over my throat. “I’ll get to that one,” I told him. His brows furrowed. “Ask me anything,” I offered. “I’ll tell you all about us, and then I’ll tell you why you shouldn’t share what I tell you with other people.”
His face lit up as if I’d just offered him the Holy Grail, a Babe Ruth rookie card and Megan Fox’s phone number.
Just to take the look off his face, I added, “That reason includes the words ‘because I’ll kill you and make sure no one ever finds your body.’ “
“I can live with that.” He nodded, making little “hurry up” motions with his hands.
“No, no,” I told him. “I don’t start the explanations until you have your little notebook and a number two pencil and all that crap. I don’t like interruptions.”
Patting his pockets frantically, he ran for his notebook, and it was clear that he had pages of carefully scripted questions. His eyes scrambled over the pages for a few moments before he finally looked up at me, pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, and said, “How?”
“How do we change?” I asked. He nodded. “It’s just genetics. Some people have good balance or are really good at making egg salad. We can change into abnormally large wolves.”
I explained to Nick that there were packs all over the world. Our pack happened to be descended from people who lived in the valley. An outsider crossed the frozen oceans, made his way over the mountains, and married a valley woman. He must have come from Russia or northeastern Asia, where there were a lot of packs. Either way, something about the mixing of their bloodlines produced the first wolf-sons, two huge, burly, probably pretty hairy fellas. There was a terrible winter, and the hunters couldn’t get enough food for their families. People were starving. The Northern Man’s elder son wished for the strength of the wolf, so that he could provide for his family and neighbors, and he wished so strongly that he was able to phase. And then his brother, seeing what the elder could do, joined in. They were able to hunt up enough food for the whole village and store some away, which was almost being a millionaire in the those days. The other villages kept asking how they did it, but my ancestors were smart enough not to tell. Instead, they shared what they had and prevented jealousy, which was pretty damned ingenious. I like to think my family invented public relations.
“Phasing just became a way of life,” I told Nick. “They had a lot of kids, all of whom could transform. So could their kids, and their kids, et cetera, et cetera. And here we are.”
He was silent, his eyes all shiny and bright like a kid’s on Christmas morning.
“I’m starved,” I said, motioning at his cabinets. “Do you mind?”
He shook his head. I took a carton of eggs out of his fridge and heated a pan. I opened his spice drawer and was shocked to find garlic salt that was at least five years old and what might, at one point, have been nutmeg.
“Mo would be appalled by this,” I told him, clucking my tongue.
“I’ll subscribe to the Spice of the Month Club if you keep talking,” he promised solemnly.
“Well, don’t do that online; you’ll be shocked by your search results.” I cracked eggs, beating them lightly. I poured them into the pan and took a hunk of cheddar cheese from the fridge. I sniffed to make sure it was mold-
