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And then, of course, I probably would have Tasered him and run like hell.
That was beside the point.
Tasers aside, how had he expected me to respond? Was I just supposed to accept this dishonesty from someone who was supposed to love me? Was I supposed to pat him on the head and tell him I understood?
I bought a cheap, reliable truck with new snow tires at a cash-only used-car lot. Traveling with Caleb had given me a confidence I’d lacked on my first trip to the valley. I could take care of myself. I had taken care of myself. And I was careful to keep my baton in Caleb’s special coat pocket, its heavy weight giving me a bit of swagger when I stopped to gas up the truck or grab a bite to eat.
It took four days of driving in pretty questionable weather for me to reach Grundy. I beat a respectable snowstorm by a matter of hours and had to stay at the Evergreen Motel overnight to wait for the weather to pass. I prayed in earnest that it was the last motel I had to avail myself of for quite some time.
The road to the valley had been temporarily blocked by a rockslide on the highway pass. I had to promise Leonard Tremblay discreet, no-questions-asked treatment of certain social maladies in return for a snowmobile ride there. Cooper offered to take me, but Mo was suffering from some insanely intense morning sickness, and I couldn’t, in good conscience, ask him to leave his mate’s side. Nor did I have the heart to tell him that in all of the werewolf pregnancies I’d seen, that level of nausea indicated more than one baby. Possibly three.
After examining Mo and prescribing some ginger tea and extra-strength iron supplements, I hopped onto the back of Leonard’s souped-up, blue-and-purple-flame-emblazoned snowmobile and promised fealty to whatever deity I could think of if I didn’t slide off the back. The valley was a winding two-hour ride away. I spent most of it clinging to Leonard like a koala and desperately pinning my scarf against my face to block the freezing wind. Even with temperatures hovering just above zero degrees, this weather was mild compared with what we could expect in the coming months.
Still, it was a great ride. With the snow nipping at our faces and the scenery flying by, I couldn’t help but grin like a little kid.
We approached the upper ridge of the valley, where we found Maggie’s mate, Nick Thatcher, sitting in a little burrow he’d dug out at the base of a large pine and scribbling into a notebook. Blond, bespectacled Nick could see the entire village from his vantage point, including Maggie’s office at the community center. An avid climber, Nick, I knew, would have preferred to do his scribbling from a tree limb overhead, but Maggie had made her stance on snow-covered-tree climbing pretty clear when he had fallen out of that very tree the previous winter and broken his collarbone. As I’d set the delicate winglike bone, Maggie had bounced between fussing and fretting over his pain and threatening to break several of his other appendages “to match.”
Nick’s cap-covered head snapped up at the sound of the snowmobile’s engine. Residents of the valley were protective of its borders, and the nonwolf residents knew to alert the pack about any unexpected visitors. But when he recognized Leonard’s blue-and-purple flame motif, his even white teeth showed through the golden-blond stubble on his face.
“Len!” he called as Leonard killed the engine. “What’s the news in Grundy? Have you seen Mo lately? How’s she feeling?”
“Got a special delivery for you, Doc,” Leonard shot back.
I snorted. Nick’s PhD was a bit of a stumper for the locals, as they thought they were getting a new MD when he showed up at the Blue Glacier two years before. Even now, I’m not sure our neighbors fully understood the difference between Nick’s various anthropology and folk-studies degrees and my time in medical school.>At least I looked good while I stalled.
Every morning, I would wake up, pack my bags, and practically sprint to the lobby.
I would hitch my bag over my shoulder, prepared to make a blind run to the post office to pick up Red-burn’s package. I could feel the cold fingers of outside air tracing the lines of my cheeks. And instead of walking out into the cold, somehow, my feet changed direction, and I was standing at the bank of elevators, ready to go back upstairs. And every morning, the staff would look at me with increasingly alarmed expressions.
I was angry with Caleb. There was no question about it. But I’d lied to him, pretending to know he wasn’t lying to me, while he lied to me, pretending he didn’t know I was lying to him. Neither of us was the picture of healthy communication.
In my minibar-buffeted den, I mulled my options over and over. Run back to the valley, or start another new life, or go back to Tennessee and straighten out the mess I’d made of my old one. The last was more of a not-even-the-least-bit-likely palate cleanser.
A tiny, twisted part of my brain kept telling me I was damaged, messed up in the head. I couldn’t even cross a parking lot without having a panic attack. Werewolves needed fierce mates who could stand up to the strange, violent pressures of their world. I would fold under the first test. I knew that pack mating rules seemed unquestionable. But maybe whatever magic governed them would make an exception, since Caleb hadn’t gotten me pregnant. Maybe he could go on to have babies with some nice girl from another pack, a girl who didn’t have night terrors and trust issues. And yet the very idea made my blood boil.
I didn’t want him marrying some other woman. I didn’t want her touching him, helping him with cases. Caleb was mine.
Now I just had to figure out how to go about talking to him again without Tasering him.
On the sixth day of my self-imposed Howard Hughes retreat, Red-burn resolved my quandary with a phone call.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“What do you think about your new ID? My connection worked really hard to make sure your picture came out nice. And I picked your name myself. I always thought you sounded like a Bethel.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your new ID. Haven’t you picked it up yet? Honey, I sent it a week ago, three-day guaranteed delivery. I thought you hadn’t called because you were on the move. Or because you were pissed because your new first name is Bethel. But that doesn’t matter, because right now, there’s an animal clinic in Ottawa waiting for you to take over a vet-tech position.”
Sadly, given the amount of time I’d spent working with both wolf and human anatomy, I was probably qualified for this position. “I haven’t had a chance to pick it up.”
“What’s going on with you?” she asked. “You hassled me for weeks for that ID, and all of a sudden, you don’t have time to pick it up? You sound all weird and distracted . . . wait, is there a man in this picture?”
“Sort of.”
Red-burn snorted. “Honey, either he is or he isn’t.”
