I straighten, toss the spade away, and dust my hands on my jeans.
If you can fit your head through, you can get your body through.
I don’t know where I read that, but it’s all I’ve got right now.
I squeeze up against the gap, feed my right arm through first, then my shoulder. The stone bites into my armpit, and I push past it. My ribs come next. Halfway through, a ridge of rock catches my left side and tears the skin.
“Shit.” I breathe everything out of my chest, flatten myself past what should be possible, and keep pushing.
My hips are the worst of it. I turn sideways, work one through, and drag the other after. I tumble out the other side in an ungainly heap. Then there’s cold air on my face and pine needles under my hands, and the whole mountain drops away below me in fir and loose stone.
I scramble to my feet and take off running.
The shift takes me faster than I can ever remember. Clothes rip away, and I’m on four legs before I’ve finished deciding to be, and the world goes sharp and close. For a fraction of a second, the wolf wants to look over her shoulder.
Serenity. She needs us.
I don’t look back. I keep moving.
I don’t know this country. I don’t know what’s loose in it. I know one direction—the one that puts him at my back—and Itake it at a dead run, fast and reckless, nothing left in my head butaway.
Chapter 15
Decker
The gradient up to the den runs forty minutes on a good day. This isn’t one.
Nothing’s wrong with my legs. The pack’s light: a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, four tins, a sack of coffee, bought for cash at the crossroads store out on the dry side of the range, where nobody knows my truck. I’ve resupplied a hundred hideouts this way and never thought twice about it.
What’s slowing me down is in my head.
She said she was hungry. That’s the whole reason I’m hauling groceries up a mountain like a man with a household. She said it, and before I’d finished hearing the words, the bear had his answer ready.
Feed her.
Flat and certain, the way he decides things before I get to them. So here I am. Eggs and bread for a woman I’ve got sealedbehind a boulder, because the bear wanted her fed and I didn’t argue.
I’ve been arguing less with him every hour since town.
The morning won’t leave me alone either. Her in that pool, washing, talking the whole time. Throwing questions at my back to see which one might crack me open. I kept my eyes on the passage and didn’t turn around, and she’ll have taken that for indifference.
It wasn’t. I made myself not look, and I counted every time I had to.
Because I wanted to.
I’ve gone my whole life untouched by this. Solitary. Nobody’s, and nobody mine, and I built the rest of me around liking it that way. Whatever’s in my blood now didn’t ask permission. It started on the drive north, and it hasn’t let up, and the heat under my skin climbs every time my mind goes back to that water. Water that touched her. Water that knows the texture of her skin.
I crest the last of the path. The cave mouth is a dark seam in the rock, boulder rolled across it, fir crowding the uphill side, the slope dropping away below into timber and loose stone. Cold up here, the thin, steady cold you only get this high. No fresh tracks on the path I just took but mine. Nobody comes up here.
I reach the cave entrance and stop.
Something’s wrong.
The angle of the boulder looks off.
I run an eye around the edge, and my stomach drops. That gap wasn’t there before.
I shove the boulder aside. The cave’s empty.
