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“Don’t most people use stars to keep track of where they are?” he asked, chuckling into my skin, tracing the outline of one with his tongue. I think he was somewhere near the Topeka star.
“Well, I was going to do push-pins, but they weren’t as pretty.”
“You don’t strike me as the tattoo kind of girl.”
“I wasn’t, but that was sort of the point. Don’t you have any?”
“I had a very strict mother,” he said, smiling into my skin.
“I think you would look awesome with a tattoo,” I told him, rolling over so I was facing him. “You could get a butterfly, right here.” I stroked the tramp-stamp area of his lower back. He chuckled again, jerking a little as my fingers stroked a particularly ticklish section of his back. “Or something tribal.” He snorted. “The Chinese symbols for love and strength . . . which inevitably will translate to ‘cliché tattoo.’ ”
“It’s a little alarming that you came up with those ideas so quickly.”
“Spent a lot of time thinking about it.”
“You are a very strange girl.”
I rolled over, balancing my chin on his chest. “Did you really have a strict mother?”
It seemed a little wrong, asking about his runaway human mom when I knew a little bit of the history. But I wanted to hear more about Caleb from his own mouth, his own version. The story I’d heard about cruel, thoughtless Lydia Graham, who had forgotten the promises involved in mating and left her husband and child to themselves, had been twisted in the telling by so many indignant werewolf housewives that I didn’t know if I could trust it.
He blanched a bit at the question. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, she didn’t stick around long enough for me to figure her out. She left when I was five. Dad met her when he was traveling in Washington State. He told her that he lived in the middle of nowhere, Alaska, but I don’t think she really got it until she moved there. And then she was stuck. Not stuck the way you were,” he clarified carefully. “I don’t remember them fighting or yelling or Dad being anything but good to her. It was seeing the same people every day, having the same conversations. Dad said he thought it drove her a little crazy. So she waited until I was in school one morning and ran for it.”
As a woman who had once run for it, I could sympathize with Lydia and the desperation she must have felt to have taken such a step. But at the same time, how could she leave her little boy behind? I was thankful, at least, that she’d left him with other werewolves so he wouldn’t go through his transformation without that support. And in some remote, gloomy corner of my mind, I couldn’t help but think that he was repeating his father’s cycle all over again, choosing a woman—however temporarily—who would inevitably leave him. Freud would have a field day with Caleb Graham.
“Did you ever hear from your mom?” I asked, running my fingers through his hair.
He leaned into the caress and shook his head. “Wasn’t interested. She made her choice.”
“And your dad?” I asked.
“He always missed her. He was a good dad. He loved me like crazy, did all of the things a dad was supposed to, but you could tell life was just a little bit less than it should have been for him.”
I gave him a little half smile and kissed him. “I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is. Yeah, it sucks, and my life could have been better. But there were people in my family who had it a lot worse. So I can’t really complain.” He rolled onto his side and slid his hand down my stomach, tracing each of my ribs with his fingertips.
“What was it like growing up in the valley?” I asked.
“It was the best kind of childhood for a little kid,” he said, sighing. “I spent a lot of time playing in the woods with Samson and Cooper. Maggie was the little sister I never really wanted. We were always chasing something, hunting, running around. Cooper and Samson lost their dads pretty early on, so my dad took them under his wing, so to speak. He taught us how to fix a car, clear a clogged sink, skin a deer with your bare teeth, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds idyllic, in a twisted Tom Sawyer kind of way.”
“We had to grow up fast. Cooper became the alpha when we were just teenagers. And then that other pack tried to take over the valley, and everything got so screwed up. It just seemed easier to pull away from all that confusion. I knew my dad was disappointed that I moved away, but it just didn’t feel right for me to be there anymore.”
“Was it Suds who got you into the whole werewolf-tracker-for-hire business?”
“No, and he doesn’t know what I am, by the way,” he replied. “I was the valley’s police force before I left. Usually, the alpha takes on the role along with mayoral duties. But we didn’t have an alpha when Cooper left, and I was able to fill in. I liked it. Mostly, it involved keeping the younger wolves in line and corralling my idiot uncles when they tied one on. But every once in a while, some unsavory character would wander into town, thinking it would be a nice place to set up a meth lab, and I would have to explain why this was not a good idea. In following up on the background information for these yahoos, I was amazed at what I managed to discover online. And in a lot of cases, these guys—and sometimes girls—had warrants or rewards for information leading to their arrests. With my extra senses, I could track them, even after they left the valley. I made quite a bit of money that way. And I made some good contacts as I traveled around. So when I left, it seemed a natural fit for me to do it full-time.”
“But doesn’t it kill you, being away from the packlands for this long?”
“It was hard, at first. I couldn’t stay away for long stretches at a time without really pushing myself. But it got easier with time.” He gave me a crooked little smile. “What I’m looking for isn’t in the packlands.”
“Well, that’s nice and cryptic, thank you.”
“So, your family?”
“What about them?”
