Page 2 of Redemption Road

Riding a bike like this might be as close to that as you could get in human form.

He grinned. Back on that first trip out with Ryder, he’d experimented with letting his wolf surge to the surface and take control — shared control, really. His wolf had better motor skills, but no regard for things like speed limits or rules of the road. Remember? He asked his wolf. His wolf grinned back at him. Remember, it’s shared, Benny warned the wolf. I do the speed limits, you run the bike. His wolf agreed and surged closer to the surface.

Benny laughed as his wolf steered the bike, and Benny kept an eye on the speedometer and on the others on the road. They experimented with shifting levels of control — playing really, almost a form of tag. They ceded control back and forth, both of them laughing at each other.

This was exactly what he needed. Benny let go of all of his worries —except for speed limits and cops —and sank into the pleasures of the ride.

They ate at a bar in Abbottsford —one of Ryder’s regular stops. A good home-style hamburger with lots of meat, hand-cut fries, and good beer. There was a lot of banter among the men until the food was served. They seemed to ignore Jessie, and she was quiet, staying close to Ryder, as she’d been instructed. Benny approved. She was playing this right. He would have liked to have checked in with her — ask her how she was doing. But she was staking her position as Ryder’s girl — did she know that? —and he wasn’t going to interfere with that message just because he was snoopy.

He grinned as he got back on his bike. He was always snoopy, he admitted cheerfully. It had made him a renowned intelligencer back in the day, and it served him well as psychologist. And having an Alpha who was as curious as he was, was a joy. She had a tidier mind, he admitted. Her questions went onto lists, and often had bullet points. His were more of a jumble, like he tossed them into toy bins to be taken out and played with later.

His wolf sent him an image of a kid’s room with brightly colored bins, overflowing with toys, and a question mark. Exactly like that, he told his wolf. His wolf laughed. Benny grinned. The ride up I-5 had been good for both of them. A shared balance of power. Was that the way forward?

Something to consider. He envisioned tossing this idea into one of those bins, and it made him laugh. Well, they said that those who could laugh at themselves would never lack for amusement.

They slowly went through town, and then merged onto Highway 3. Benny could feel the ride already in unused muscles, especially in his abs used unconsciously for stability on the bike. He didn’t know what Ryder had planned for the night. He hoped it included a hot shower.

Ryder was taking the southernmost route, Highway 3, which had fewer towns, among other things, but it was slower. It was a winding highway that often had deep canyons to one side, and a steep mountain to the other. Taking the curves was a pleasure —Benny let his wolf do some stretches, but the wolf’s confidence in his reflexes made some of those curves a hair-raising experience. They traded off.

This was high desert like the Okanogan, with sagebrush and scrub pines, and the brown remnants of bunch grass, amid outcroppings of rock. But there was also the towering peaks and the canyons with dark forests and at the top, snow. Magnificent country. You could go for miles and see no evidence of human habitation besides the road itself. This land hadn’t changed since the gold miners had first worked their way north. Not since the fur trappers had come from the east centuries before that.

Except for this road, the tribes who had roamed this land from time memorial would find it familiar. And Benny figured it would stay like this for generations to come. Some things youcouldcount on.

This land was gray, too. Unlike the misty grays of the Puget Sound that played over the ubiquitous greens of the rhododendrons, this gray was dustier, and the browns of rocks and dirt substituted for those evergreen shrubs. He knew Yui could probably tell him a half-dozen different species that he was lumping into rhododendrons, and he was glad of it. Her knowledge, along with Okami’s, made Hat Island a garden masterpiece. But for his purposes, they were rhodies. And here? There was sagebrush instead —which probably was also more than one species, now that he thought about it.

The high desert was colder and drier than the Puget Sound. Benny could feel it on his jaw left exposed by his helmet, and one strip of flesh left bare above his right glove. He grimaced. Rookie mistake. He’d do better tomorrow. He had a balaclava in his pack. He’d need it.

There was wind too. Not enough to make riding difficult, but the cold reached him even through his leather jacket and wool sweater beneath.

It took nearly four hours to reach Penticton. Penticton was a town of loggers and farmers, overlaid with a booming tourism economy. The town sat on a lake that provided year-around attractions, and there was skiing in the winter. It used to be a party town, although Benny had heard it had cleaned things up for an older, more affluent crowd.

Pity. Benny had been up here many times when he’d been in high school. Later he’d been up here for the infamous MC Hammer concert where the street party after the concert got so out of control the local cops had called in the Mounties for help, and they’d eventually had to use tear gas. Benny grinned. Good times.

So while the fancy hotels and trendy restaurants faced the lake, there were plenty of seedier bars along the highway. Benny doubted they’d even bother to go look at the lake, although it was gorgeous. Some of the clearest, deep blue waters he’d seen. No, these men would be looking for a beer. And bonus if the bar had a big-screen TV to watch the game. He was sure there must be a game of some kind —there always was.

This was Canada — maybe it would be hockey. He grinned again.

Ryder pulled into the parking lot of a rather run-down, two-story motel, built in the ‘60s, with doors that faced the parking lot. While Ryder went into the motel office, everyone else stretched and undid their helmets and gloves. Benny stationed himself near Jessie. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust these men to behave themselves with her. They would, especially since Ryder had basically staked his claim. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be intimidating; they were rough, hard men.

Jessie didn’t seem intimidated, Benny conceded. Well, she’d been through hell. These men probably didn’t even score in the top 10 of her nightmares.

And he was going to see to it that it stayed that way. He liked the men — Trip and Kev, Mucho and all the rest of them. He’d drank with them, fought alongside them, and even fought them. Sometimes a good brawl cleared the head. But he was clear-eyed about Ryder’s Wolves too. They weren’t a bunch of townies out for Sunday rides. They were all men who had a violent past, who couldn’t quite fit in with the norms of society, who had found Ryder and the Wolves to be a way of life they could live with. Much as a different generation of men had found his father in the Okanogan, Benny realized. For all practical purposes Ryder was their Alpha, although Ryder himself looked to their father as Alpha.

And Ryder ruled them with a kind of tough dominance Benny had seen demonstrated just yesterday. He could pound all of them into the ground and had when needed. Some of them more than once. And they were comforted knowing that he was in control of them even if they lost control. Running these men was a brutal way of life.

Benny looked at Jessie, considering her. Watching her and Ryder face off this morning had been revealing. He tried to estimate her dominance, to compare it with Ryder’s. But estimating a woman’s dominance was hard, he’d found. A man? He could size up where they stood with each other in minutes. And he was the most dominant shifter here. He chose to submit to Ryder’s leadership, to place himself under him, but hewasthe more dominant. And both of them knew it. The others probably didn’t —Benny had always been able to hide his dominance behind a shield of the ‘good-natured playboy.’ It was what had made him an effective intelligencer for the Council back in the day. It was a shield that was hard to set down, even still.

He sighed and shook off the memories. He raised his eyebrows at Jessie. “Doing OK?”

She laughed. “I love it,” she said, surprising him. “That was great!”

The men around them grinned at that. She couldn’t have said a better line to win them over, Benny thought with amusement, especially because it was truly said, and the men could see it.

“Have to get you your own bike,” he said, teasing her.

She grinned. “I might like that.”

Ryder came out with a bunch of keys — real keys with large plastic fobs attached. He handed them out to the men. Two to a room, except for Benny who got his own room. And Jessie who didn’t get a key at all. She didn’t look surprised or upset, so Benny assumed she and Ryder had already discussed this when they laid out the plan for the trip.

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