“Trowbridge,” I began, with remarkable civility considering he was sniffing my instep like it was an item on an exotic menu that he was as yet undecided about.
“Trowbridge!” I repeated.
This time, the gray wolf responded to his name with a piece of canine articulation that could have meant anything from “nice pedicure” to “I’ll pencil in a chat for sometime later next week.” Then, quite uncaring of my affronted glare, he resumed his ruthless examination of my body.
Snuffle, snuffle, snuffle.
I leaned to the right and then to the left in an effort to avoid it. But it didn’t matter how I squirmed or pushed at him, his big, inquisitive nose still nuzzled my hair, dampened my T-shirt, and found the pulse at the side of my throat.
He was, after all, an
“Enough!” I said, sharper than I meant to. “We need to talk. One paw means yes, two paws means no, okay?”
Blue eyes, rimmed with black, studied me.
As I gazed into them, doubt—like cold water on bare toes—washed over me. Those eyes were almost the same hue as those of the guy whom I’d shoved through the portal, but within their icy depths, there was no warming spark of recognition, no comet of light brightening that sea of azure. Whoever—whatever—lived behind those eyes was not precisely Trowbridge. And from the looks of it, that half-wild entity was as perplexed about me as I was of it.
Eight hours with a tail had changed the balance of who he was.
“Trowbridge? You in there?” I asked.“Can you understand me?”
Nothing. No paw lifted in greeting. No head tilt of inquiry.
I drew up my knees and clasped them to my chest while I considered this new spin on the Hedi Wheel of Disaster. The sun was shining and I had a wolf for a mate. His paw was larger than my hand. Dried blood had caked the fur on his muzzle and powerful chest. And he far outweighed me—not surprising when one took into account the fact that he was a solid wall of fur and muscle.
“It’s going to be a bitch to search your coat for ticks,” I muttered, feeling grim.
And that’s when the sleeping volcano inside me started spewing ash and fireballs.
As far as my inner-bitch was concerned, my off-the-cuff comment was tantamount to the squirrel perched on the fence; the cat sunning itself on her front steps; the Yorkie terrier taking a piss on her shrubbery.
She was
Too many months she’d sat in my gut, being jostled by my Fae, kept belly-low by my constraint checks and counterchecks. Too long she’d waited for the return of what had been promised her. Trowbridge’s wolf was hers—to claim, to protect, to fight for—and no one, including me, was going to stop her from trying to do so.
With a howl of pain that hurt my heart, she tore into me, attacking me from the inside in a flurry of frantic pawing.
I bowed over my belly, fighting to contain her.
Trowbridge placed a heavy paw on my thigh.
I looked up at him, my eyes flooding.
I hurt. She hurt. We hurt.
Then again, so briefly, I saw a flash of the big picture—all nicely assembled and coherent—slide by me. I’d struggled to grab on to it for months—no, not months, years—and there it was, shooting past me, the diagram to my life, the snapshot of my problems.
But it went by so quickly; I didn’t have time to grab it with both hands. All I got was the barest fragment of the whole truth. And I wished, oh, how I wished, I hadn’t. In a bitter moment of utter clarity, I saw the thing I didn’t want to see. The picture viewed from the other side—and from that viewpoint, the self-restraint that I’d so heroically forced on myself no longer looked like self-discipline; it looked like self-loathing.
A cruelty.
To her. To me.
Even my Fae recognized it. “Release her,” she said. “Else we will break apart.”
And so we did. Mortal-me and Fae-me stepped back, and we let the animal within us run free.
No side thoughts. No doubts. No pauses for logic tests.
Just him and her.
To touch. To smell. To taste.
Our arms looped around the neck of her beloved wolf, our face pressed itself deep inside his thick, dense pelt, and we knew a happiness that had been denied for too, too long.
Woods, and pine, and sex, and yes—a little bit of blood from the kill.
She knew him to be strong.
She knew him to be hers.
And all was simple and good.
I don’t know how long it went on—the stroking of his fur, the inarticulate murmurs of contentment coming from my throat, the rumbles from his, the sense of homecoming that I siphoned from my Were.
But here’s a sad fact: sweet things will always dissolve under a hot tongue. In this case, Lexi’s. I hadn’t noticed that the turmoil inside my silver home had stopped. Or that our wolves’ tender reunion was being watched and judged.
“That is a wolf, not your mate.” Lexi pushed back his bowler.
But I uncoiled my arm from the gray wolf’s neck. He gave me a chuff. Which meant more to Anu than me— she began stalking toward me, nape bristling, but Harry checked her with his knee. “No,” he said in English. And quite surprisingly, she stopped. Right there, between Biggs and Harry.
I dragged my fingers lightly through Trowbridge’s pelt.
“Will he stay like this?”
“No.” Lexi stroked his ferret pet. “He’ll change when he’s ready.”
“When will that be?”
My twin turned to gaze at the Trowbridge ridge. “He’ll wait till he’s home.”
The Trowbridge house was an old brick Victorian, every ninety-degree angle on the building embellished with a curlicue of wood. Six months isn’t long, but it’s long enough to make a house appear well and truly abandoned. Paint had begun peeling off its exterior, revealing the yellow brick beneath it, and the grass was mostly of the crab variety.
Something smelled bad.
Trowbridge’s four paws were planted on the porch, his impatience telegraphed in his stance. His wolf uttered a sharp, reproving bark at the door. I tried its handle. “It’s locked.” My stomach twisted at the rank smell seeping through the cracks in the door. “I don’t have the key. Does anyone have the—”
“I can send Biggs to the camper to fetch it,” Cordelia broke in.
