Chapter Twenty-four

Isabelle tracked the remaining Were for hours. He blundered, inept and frightened, around the shale slopes and scrubby flatlands. Just before dawn, he crouched behind some scraggly bushes. He grunted and moaned as she waited and wondered what he was up to. Finally, he emerged as a naked man and ran the last hundred yards before scrambling down a gully onto a deserted side road. She watched him hurriedly drag out a stash of clothes from his truck and pull them on any old way. He glanced about nervously, stinking of stale sweat and shaking with fright.

He knew she?d been following him; he just didn?t know how close she?d got. She was right behind him, standing by a tumble of sandstone, deliberately so, because she blended beautifully with the colors in the murky dawn light. It was testimony to his incompetence that he didn?t see her. He wasn?t using his wolf side. Instead, he was letting his blunt human senses ride him.

She flew at him from out of the shrub and stones with the sudden burst of speed she had come to love, and slammed him against the side of his truck. He screamed, and she heard a satisfying crunch as she crushed several vertebrae. He slid to the dirt in a heap, shock and hopelessness draining the color from his face. She crouched over him, watching his dismay as his body instantly began sending messages to his brain?feet won?t work, no legs, can?t move, arms gone? She had broken his back. He could lift his head, barely. His chest rose and fell in panicked heaves; his mouth kept moving, but he had no words, no screams, just pathetic little grunts of effort as he defied his limbs to unfreeze and save him.

Now she was concerned. What if he couldn?t speak? She hadn?t meant to inflict this much damage. She must remember this. Human bodies took less punishment. She hunkered down beside him. His head had fallen back in the watery mud, and it swam up, filling his ears. She wanted information from him but was unsure how to get it. She supposed she should change into human form as he had done, and interrogate him before?doing what? Calling an ambulance? The police would come, and she didn?t want that. What did you do after attacking a human? Was he even human anymore? She shook the thought from her head; she simply didn?t know these sort of details. It was all a mystery to her.

She looked at him again. His chest still rose and fell too quickly. He was staring wide-eyed back at her. She could see right into his soul. His vulnerability, terror, and remorse were on display, all mushed up in one big ugly ball. If he could read her eyes, would he see doubt and perhaps a little remorse, too? She blinked and looked away. Her immediate problem was not remorsefulness; her problem was changing back to human form and questioning him?about something? What? What had she been hunting him for? He?d tried to harm her, him and his buddies. They were dead now, and so would he be, soon enough. But what did she need from him before he died? Perhaps if she were human she would remember better. Her human brain worked differently. In her wolfskin, human thoughts and recollections were nothing more than an irritating buzz in the back of her mind. A list of chores and boring details her wolven side wanted to ignore. All her wolfside wanted to do was sniff exciting things, and run, and hunt, and enjoy the world for what it really was.

She idly scratched her rump, then plucked at her damp ear hairs. How did she turn back to human form? She had no idea. He burbled something at her. She leaned in to him and paid attention. He was saying something about help please. No. None of that. She pulled away.

Then he said something about her friend. Isabelle bared her teeth. This was good talk. The buzz in her head increased significantly, so she leaned in closer and concentrated on his words. He said there was a shack to the northeast, near Lost Creek, in Wallowa County. He said Patrick had her friend there. Patrick! Her nostrils flared. Yes, she wanted Patrick. The hunt continued, and her heart swelled with joy. She knew there had to be more to it than these three sad specimens, these easy kills. He was talking again, trying to make a deal, trying to get her to help.

Disinterested now, Isabelle heaved onto her feet and padded away into the dawn.

A grim, dull light crept over the hills and Isabelle became tired of moving onward. Though she was stronger than ever, her massive musculature demanded more fuel. Her earlier hunt had used up a lot of her reserves and she had not eaten since raiding Hope?s fridge?Hope! Her tongue lolled and she tasted the crisp morning air with happiness. Hope was a friend. Hope was her target, not Patrick. She would kill Patrick because he had stolen Hope and hurt the little dog. The dog was a friend, too. They were den, yet not den? Her real den was far away, in the north, and she was parted from it.

The realization winded her. She squatted on the dirt and raised her muzzle to the gray skies and howled out her sadness and discontent. The mournful cry startled a nearby baby rabbit and it scuttled for home. Isabelle pounced, but its small frame slid through her claws. She snapped her jaws, and by pure luck, caught its hind leg, tossing it into the air. It landed stunned and she was on it in a second, ripping its head off with her teeth and sucking down fur and bone and blood and fuel. A warm kill, the sweetest of nectars, and an ensurance of survival.

Licking her muzzle, she rolled onto her back among the wet wiregrass and stared up at the slowly vanishing stars. The sky was cloudless and brightening by the minute, and the temperature dropping quickly. It would be a cold day. She could smell more rain on the wind. Her fur would keep her warm and waterproof, even though her breath puffed in the morning air. Her stomach felt happy. She could eat a dozen more baby rabbits. Perhaps if she found the warren hole she could dig it out and eat them all?

Satisfied, she curled onto her side and wriggled down into the grass, making a little nest. She would rest for a few hours. Then, before the sun burned too bright, she would head northeast in great galloping strides, eating up the countryside between here and her enemy, Patrick. No, she wanted Hope, not Patrick. Her friend Hope. She?d eat up the countryside between here and her friend Hope. Then she?d eat up Patrick.

Her dreams were as thick and fuzzy as wool, but as comforting, too. Aunt Mary fussed about her living room. She wanted to lock up the house for winter, though the sunshine still shone through the opened windows. Shafts of light cut across the plump, chintz furnishings. Dust motes rose up in the air from their frantic cleaning. It was a fine day. Perhaps the last good day before the snows came for real.

Isabelle wore white. A white dress and a flowery apron. She had a yellow duster in her hand, and she was happy and laughing. Everything felt good.

The door rattled with a hard, jaunty rap, and Aunt Mary bustled toward it, excited. She had been waiting for this visitor. She adored this visitor. She opened the door, and the brightest of sunrays haloed Ren standing handsome and impressive on the doorstep. Her smile was radiant; her eyes gleamed as black and as wicked as Lucifer?s heart, and fixed on Isabelle and nothing else.

Isabelle smiled nervously back. All the comfort of her dream world fell away. Her stomach turned stone cold under that stare.

?Why, hello, Luc,? Aunt Mary said.

Isabelle awoke shivering. She was drenched in dew and stiff with the cold seeping through into her bones. She sat on a scrubby slope, in a patch of itchy wiregrass, buck-naked. Her stomach roiled with nausea, her mouth tasted foul?so revolting, in fact, she had to fight down biliousness. She crawled up onto her feet and fell right back down again on her backside on the prickly grass. Was this weakness the aftermath of her transition back to human form? She felt miserable, hung-over, and self-loathing. She was aching and wretched, through and through.

Isabelle rolled onto her back and groaned at the sky. What had she become? She shrank from any thoughts on what she might have done, though images clamored at the edges of her mind, bloody and sickening.

?I change when I sleep?? She picked out the most pertinent piece of all the information ricocheting around her aching head. With shame she accepted the memory of the men she had attacked and killed. And the one she had left alive and paralyzed in the gully?

Isabelle lurched to her feet and this time managed to stay upright. With a shaking, swaying gait, she retraced her steps, her own wolven tracks quite obvious to her. She had to find the guy. She had to save him. It was a selfish action. By saving him she was really trying to save part of herself.

She found him beside the truck where she?d left him. Approaching from the far side, she saw his feet first. One booted, the other bare. She hadn?t given him time to dress before charging him down. Was he still alive? She came around the truck cautiously, afraid to face her carnage.

Remember, he?s another werewolf from an enemy pack. They all were. They were hunting you down. They were going to hurt you. They?ve already hurt those you care for. It was a hunt, and you were the better hunter. She attempted to quantify her guilt. There was an instinct in her that told her she had to justify her wolven actions and rationalize them with her human side if she was to stay sane.

He was sprawled in the dirt, legs twisted, arms flailed to the sides where he had fallen. His head was still part buried in the mud, his horrified face staring bug-eyed at a slate gray sky. His chest had been stove in. Crushed flat. His unbuttoned shirt fluttered over an enormous, bruised hollow in his chest where before she had seen his lungs inflate with gulping breaths as he bargained for mercy.

Instead, she had abandoned him. She moved closer. She had not abandoned him like this, though. The ground around his body was churned with huge wolven footprints that were not her own. A clear trail showed their approach and retreat. And there, in the center of his caved-in chest, was one more muddy footprint. The beast had stood on his sternum and slowly crushed him to death.

Isabelle stood drinking in the callousness of the kill. This beast had not even bared a claw. There was nothing quick or merciful about this death. It was calculated for maximum cruelty with the least effort.

She sneezed. It brought her back to her own plight. She was naked and shivering and becoming ill because of it. She was in vulnerable human form at the scene of a vicious killing and didn?t know how to mutate back to wolven at will. An enemy was out there. It had killed this man, and she sensed its ill will for her, too. She was not safe here.

The truck cab door still hung open and more clothes were piled on the bench seat. They must have belonged to his dead buddies. She jumbled through the mishmash for the best fit and threw on jeans, a shirt, and some boots. At least she had a sleeve to wipe her runny nose on.

Isabelle stared at the body beside the truck. She took a calculating look at the surrounding landscape and at the state of the track they were parked on. How often was it used? The truck keys were dangling from the ignition. Decision made, she pulled herself into the cab. She backed along the twisting gully track, away from the body, leaving the remains uncovered. Let it be a gift of ensured survival for the coyotes, wolves, and foxes, and anything else that might find him. He could feed his brothers.

The road she reversed onto was underused at that time of year. She headed northeast for Wallowa and somewhere called Lost Creek, following the man?s directions from last night. With the cab heater on she soon warmed up and her body began to relax. Only then did she allow the remnants of her dream to resurface. She was careful with it. She did not trust the feelings it aroused.

Luc. Why had she disliked her so much? Luc?s face swam out from the dream and also the photograph stored in her camera. Ren and Luc. They both sat on a log by the forest stream, smiling over at her. Isabelle knew instinctively she had never liked Luc.

When she thought of Ren, her heart ached like a sentimental song. She wanted to be with her. She thought she understood now?well, at least understood more than she had two days ago. Ren had been trying to protect her from the ferocious beast clawing at her from the inside out. Ren had wanted to help. She knew what awaited Isabelle. She knew there would come a moment when Isabelle would erupt in a spew of gore and blood, and run amok. Thank God her targets had been her wolven pursuers and not cattle, or tourists, or preschool picnickers.

?Get a grip,? Isabelle scolded herself. She wasn?t sure how it worked, but she knew it didn?t work like that. Driving through the outskirts of a town, she felt panic well up in her chest and sweat prickle her scalp. She was shy around humans, cautious and careful not to draw attention. It was a good lesson. She would run a million miles away from a preschool picnic, and that was nice to know.

Ren. She sighed heavily. She wanted Ren, as much as she ever did back in the valley. Could she go home? She called it home now, and even thought of it as den. When had that shift happened?

And this Luc? What did she represent in her dream? She had to be related to Ren to look so alike. Sisters for sure, maybe even twins? Isabelle braked and pulled over, ignoring an angry honk from a passing car. She sat trembling at the wheel.

Her journal. Her burned journal was talking about Luc. Luc and Ren. The yin and yang of it came sharply into focus. She could not recall everything. She still was bleary about actually meeting Ren for the first time, possibly because the discomfort of meeting Luc had overclouded her memories. But Luc had frightened her. Luc had to be the scary woman in the journal, and Ren was her rescuer. Isabelle knew that as a fact. Ren must have tried to save the journal as some sort of evidence, an insurance against Isabelle?s amnesia. An evil twin was such a cliché! No wonder she had been so upset when Patrick burned it.

Isabelle shook her head. It was a ridiculous assumption and only went to show how far she would go to make Ren the hero and lover she wanted her to be. Luc had not locked her up in a cabin, burned her car, or hidden her documents. Ren had. Just because someone glared at you in a photograph and scared you in dreams did not mean you could place the woes of your world on their shoulders. Isabelle had run away from Ren, not the mysterious Luc.

Her logic was gooed up with nonsensical wishes. Heartfelt longing was such a viscous thing. It clogged the arteries like cholesterol, starving the brain of oxygen-rich good, plain common sense.

Isabelle stared at her hands on the steering wheel. She was a stupid, shallow woman. Clogged to the gills with neediness and romantic twaddle. She read so much cheap romance she was swimming in it. She was even studying it in Classic form, for God?s sake! Ren?s face swam before her, darkened by thought, and then lit by laughter as she playfully tickled Mouse.

?I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.? She quoted from Jane Austen to underscore her point. ?See how ridiculous you are??

Isabelle shook herself out of her reverie and reached for the gearshift. She had a friend to save, and an enemy to greet, at a shack near Lost Creek. She could not afford to wallow in what might-have-beens. Hope needed her, Patrick was out there hurting her friends, and something vicious was stomping on paralyzed people.

And Ren? Ren was nine hundred miles away, and even in the midst of all this chaos Isabelle was stupid enough to wonder if she was thinking of her, too.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 62