“Nope. Just a wolf.” She let out a sigh as she rustled through the cabinets and pulled out a can of powdered coffee.
“I’ll get the stove going so we can make breakfast,” he said, jarred out of his reverie.
“I know all this sounds crazy. I’m just trying to figure out where I am exactly. Am I still back in the car, dying? If so, it’s sure taking a long time. Am I in limbo? Is this actually heaven?”
“Good question. What about the possibility that you have a head injury and you just imagined that part, and everything else is real?” He watched her carefully. She just shrugged and shook her head as she walked to the kitchen, with the blanket draped over her body.
No dice.
She smiled wistfully at him. “I know it’s weird to talk about this with one of the inhabitants of my dream universe, but it’s just that…I don’t know. I feel as if I can tell you anything.”
He felt overflowing warmth and affection when she said that, mingled with deep sorrow. He wished he could be the same with her, and pour out all his hopes and dreams and feelings, but he never could.
“Of course you can.”
“Well, right now I’m thinking that since I’m dead or dying, I am happy that I’ll get to see my parents again – uh, of course I would want to get dressed first – but I wish I’d had more time here on Earth. I never got to have children.” She looked sad. “I’ll miss my friend Katherine, and my other friends in Lonesome Pine. I mean, I know I wasn’t the belle of the ball or anything, but I did have friends.”
Steele felt regret burning through him. There was no point in correcting her; she might as well think she was hallucinating. If she realized that she was trapped in a cabin with a wolf shifter, she might very well panic, and he didn’t want that.
Someday, she probably would have children…with someone else. The thought stabbed through him, and made him feel ill. Fur rippled on the backs of his hands at the thought of another man being with his woman, and he stifled a growl.
No. Not his woman. She could never be his woman.
He forced the fur back down, stifling his wolf. He glanced out the window.
“The snow has stopped,” he said. “I’m going to call my friends and check in with them.”
“Sure thing,” she said.
He called up the headquarters of the nearest pack, the Silver Forest shifters, and told them his location. He knew where all the packs lived; this pack was only about half an hour from the cabin.
“I’ve got a new friend here with me, someone I met in my travels,” he said. That was universal shifter code meaning he was with a human. “Hey, by the way, I’m parched. Can you bring me a soda?” That was universal code among shifters for an incident of a human spotting a shifter, which was a level one emergency among their kind.
“Sure thing. Everything going okay?” Joel, the wolf shifter who’d answered the phone, asked. The casual tone on the other end belied the seriousness of the situation.
“Everything’s fine, no emergency. We’re just hanging out and enjoying the solitude.”
“We’ll see you soon,”
The Silver Forest Pack would send the pack’s Shaman, and he would erase her memory. That was one of the most important functions of a Shaman. They could reach into human minds and do what they called a mind-wipe, leaving a blank spot in their memories or even implanting new ones that would explain away the brief period of time during which the human had witnessed a shifter.
In Roxanne’s case, it would be easy enough to have her believe that the bump on her head had caused her to have temporary amnesia surrounding the time of the car accident and the day after.
She’d wake up next to her car, with the human police arriving – he’d make sure of that – and she’d think she’d forgotten an entire day of her life.
It would be as if he’d never existed. As if he’d never loved her.
Chapter Four
February 2014, Lonesome Pine, Montana
Katherine Bertelsen crouched behind the thick underbrush, peering through her binoculars. Every breath sent puffs of white vapor into the air, and even through her thick wool gloves, her fingers felt numb. She wore winter camo from head to toe; it wouldn’t do to be seen.
The sun overhead bathed the forest in a cold white light, but did little to warm the frigid winter air.
The object of her scrutiny, Police Chief Jerrod Fennel, was standing in a small clearing among the towering Ponderosa pine trees, talking to four men in military uniform. She reached down and patted her 9 mm pistol for reassurance. She knew it wouldn’t help her if they spotted her. They were armed with M4 carbines with grenade launchers. Still, it made her feel better having some kind of weapon.
“See anything interesting?” A low, masculine voice sounded directly behind her, and she whirled around, pointing her gun. She and her father had spent many a day at the range practicing her quick draw technique. She was also a pretty good shot.
The masculine voice belonged to Edvin Gund. He was a couple of years older than her, a member of a large, reclusive clan who lived up in the hills. There were several families in the clan, all descended from families who’d come to mine for gold in the 1800s. They homeschooled their children and only rarely came into town. Her grandmother had told her strange stories about them – that some of them could turn into wolves. Supposedly it was the result of some Native American curse from when they’d first settled the area.
“Are you fricking crazy, sneaking up on me like that?” she hissed. “I could have shot you! And there’s a bunch of soldiers out in the woods here, and they do not look friendly!”
Edvin was wearing camo, just like her. He was a tall, rangy young man, somewhere in his early twenties, with thick wavy hair the color of wheat.
“I know.” He spoke in a low voice. “You shouldn’t be out here, Katherine. It’s not safe. Why did you come?”
He knew her name? Katherine felt an odd fluttering inside her at that. She quickly pushed it aside.
“I’m keeping an eye on Chief Fennell. I don’t trust him,” she said.
“You shouldn’t.” He looked at her curiously. “But why don’t you?”
“Because my friend Roxanne disappeared a few days ago, on her way to the doctor, and he’s working really hard to make sure that nobody does anything about it. I think he’s behind it somehow, so I’m trying to figure out what he’s up to.”
He settled down next to her.
“He’s talking to four soldiers. Do you want to see? You can borrow my binoculars,” Katherine said.
He shook his head. “I don’t need them.” Now what the heck did he mean by that?
“Oh yeah?” she challenged. “How many men is Chief Fennell talking to?”
“Four.” Had he sniffed the air a little bit before he said that? She seriously must be losing her mind.
“Why don’t you trust him?” she asked.
He glanced in the direction of the men. “He did the same thing when my cousin Axel disappeared two years ago.”
“Axel disappeared? I never knew that.” Katherine was shocked.
He nodded. “That’s because he took the report and buried it. We know someone in the police department; we found out that Chief Fennell never gave it to anyone to be investigated, and when some officers tried to look into it, he shut them down right away. What happened with your friend?”
“She was on her way to a doctor’s appointment, but she never arrived. I went to her house that evening because she hadn’t answered any of my calls. My dad owns the house, and I have a key. The suitcase was missing from her closet, along with some clothes, and there was a typewritten letter lying out on the kitchen table, saying she was leaving town and wanted to make a fresh start. It wasn’t signed. She left behind a bunch of stuff that I know that she would have taken with her if she left. Sentimental stuff, like jewelry her parents had given her, pictures of them, that kind of thing.”
She checked through her binoculars again. One of the men was handing the chief an envelope.
“I think they’re giving Chief Fennell an envelope full of cash,” she said. “There’s no insignia on their uniforms. I can’t figure out where they’re from.”
She scowled, shaking her head. “When I went to the police station to report that she’d never arrived at the doctor’s office, he made a big deal about how she was an adult and he couldn’t go looking for her until she’d been missing for 48 hours. He also asked me if she’d left any kind of note – when I hadn’t even mentioned that I’d been in her house. It was like he knew that I’d been there, and he knew about the note. So I looked him in the eye and told him no. I’d actually taken the note from the house, because I knew that she hadn’t written it. She would never just up and run off like that; I’ve known her my whole life.”
She checked again. Now the soldiers were heading back into the woods, and the chief was walking towards the four wheeler he’d driven out there.
“They’re leaving,” she said.
He nodded. “I know.”
Ok, not weird at all, she thought.
“So anyway, I told my father, because I thought maybe she could have gotten in a car accident somewhere, and he organized a bunch of people to go looking for her. We were driving around town, checking all the roads. The police chief heard about it, and he got really angry and yelled at my father about wasting everyone’s time and getting them all worked up about nothing. The thing is, he’s a pretty new chief, and of course my family’s been here for generations, and most people sided with my father. Then that evening, I got an email that was supposedly from Roxanne, saying please don’t look for her, and she wouldn’t be coming back. In the email she said that she’d left behind a note explaining everything, but she wanted to make sure that I had gotten the message. It was like someone knew that we were looking for her, and wanted to make sure that we stopped. Then the next day the chief called me up and asked if I’d heard from Roxanne. Like he knew.”