Kitty Takes a Holiday

Chapter 16

I could run faster and for longer than someone who wasn't a lycanthrope. But I couldn't hope to keep up with a lycanthrope in wolf form. I could only track him, hope he knew I was following, and that maybe he would think about slowing down. Fortunately, his instincts led him true: away from town, into the open desert.

The night was clear, the air crisp, but the moon was absent. The world was dark. Let me go, let me come out, I can see better in the dark.

No.

I smelled prey here—jackrabbits, quail. Ben had smelled it, too, and it slowed him down. I spotted him ahead, trot­ting now, his head low, his mouth open, and his tongue hanging.

He must have been tired. Afraid. His movements weren't assured. A wolf's trot should have been graceful, swinging, able to cover miles without effort. His feet were dragging, his tail hung low. He wasn't used to this—lucky for me.

"Ben!"

He froze, lifted his head, his ears pricked forward. Then he turned and ran again.

I leaned on my knees, gathered my breath, and set off after him.

We must have gone on like that for half the night. He wasn't going toward anything. If I hadn't been chasing him, he might have stopped to try to hunt—I seriously doubted his ability to catch anything in his current state. But he was just running away, and I just followed. My face bled for a long time; I kept wiping the blood away and didn't think of it. I only noticed that I hadn't touched my face in a while when it started itching—scabs had formed and the healing had started. I could only concen­trate on my lungs working overtime.

I'd lost sight of him, but his scent—musk and fear—blazed a trail. As long as I kept breathing, I could find him.

He came into view again when he slowed to a walk. I stopped following him then. Instead, I cut over obliquely from his trail. Like I'd stopped paying attention. Like I was circling back. I made a wide loop, and watched him out of the corner of my eye.

As I'd hoped, my change in behavior caught his attention. Now, I just had to tell him I was a friend. I almost wish I'd Changed so I'd have the throat to vocalize it. But I did what I could. I moved slowly, relaxed as much as I could manage, my gaze down and limbs loose. Just out for a stroll.

He watched, ears forward, interested. I kept walking, not moving toward him, not doing anything threatening. He should have been able to smell me—I should have smelled familiar, safe. Come home, Ben. Please.

He started trotting, taking a path that was parallel to mine. I walked a few more steps, then crouched and watched him. He circled me, not looking at me, swinging along, pretending I wasn't there. But his circles grew smaller, and he came closer. I didn't move, not even to watch him over my back.

Then, he stopped. He was off to my right. We stared at each other. This wasn't a challenge. Both his head and his tail drooped. Our hackles were down. I made a conscious effort to keep my arms and shoulders relaxed. We were asking each other: Well? What's next?

He gave the smallest, tiniest whine. A lost and tired breath wheezing through his throat. I stepped forward, crawling on all fours, and I wished I had a tail to hold out to tell him it was okay, that I'd take care of him. "It's okay, Ben. It's going to be okay." I'd been telling him that for two weeks now. I didn't know why he should believe me now.

He reached forward, stretching his body low, and licked my chin. I let him, closing my eyes and touching his shoulder. His fur was hot, his ribs still heaving with the effort of his run. I pressed my face to his neck and breathed deep. He leaned into me, whining softly with each breath.

I just kept saying, It's okay.

The wolf lay down, curling up next to me right there in the dirt—I was going to have to teach him how to find a safe place to bed down. But I supposed he figured that settling in next to me was safe enough. He fell asleep quickly. He dreamed, his breaths whining, his legs kick­ing out a couple of times. Chasing rabbits. Still running.

I'd taken it upon myself to look after him. To take care of him. So I did, staying awake while billions of stars arced overhead, against a velvet-black sky. More black and more stars than I'd ever seen, with no city lights to wash them out. All the cliches you could think of about the humbling vastness of the universe, the awe-inspiring sweep of sky and stars, seemed true now. The two of us might have been alone in the world.

The night was freezing cold, but I had a warm bundle of fur lounging against me and didn't mind so much. I bur­ied my hands in his coat and watched the stars. Enjoyed the moment of peace, and hoped it would extend past this night.

I hummed to pass the time, something slow and classi­cal. Slowly, Ben shifted back to human. This was almost gentle compared to the shift in the other direction. There, the wolf tore out of its human skin. But this, the wolf seemed to slip away, fading, limbs growing, hair thinning until only skin showed. By then, dawn had come, the sky growing pale. A bird sang, a series of high, watery notes—an incongruous beauty in the middle of the cold desert-Even in this desolate place, something lived and thrived.

Ben's skin looked gray, stonelike in the early light. Sit­ting close to him, I kept my hand on his shoulder, shelter­ing him. I sensed the moment he awoke; his arm twitched. He snuggled, pillowing his head more comfortably into my lap, which made me smile. I played with a strand of his hair, brushing it back from his forehead. He was awfully cute like this.

He opened his eyes.

"Oh, God." He squeezed them tightly shut again.

"Morning, sunshine," I murmured.

He rubbed a hand over his face, shifted uncomfortably on the hard ground. "What happened?"

"What do you remember?"

He thought for a moment, his brow furrowing. "Getting up. I thought I was going to the bathroom—but I just kept going, didn't I?"

I smiled wryly, brushing damp hair out of his face. That he remembered so little surprised me. I could usu­ally track to the moment I shifted, even though I might forget everything after that. But he hadn't been in control at all.

"Yeah. At least you made it out of the parking lot before you shifted."

He groaned again, sitting up. He touched my sweat­pants and shirt, which were smeared with blood. So was my hair, which had gone all dried and crunchy. I didn't want to know how I looked.

He said, "You're bleeding. You're hurt."

"Not anymore. All healed up."

"Did I do it?" I nodded. "God, I'm sorry."

"You can make it up to me later. Take me out for a nice steak dinner."

He thought for a moment, pursing his lips. "We've never even been out on a real date, have we?"

I hadn't thought of it. We'd fallen together by chance. But I didn't believe that anymore, not really, because something pulled at me. Something that kept me from looking away. I couldn't turn away from him.

I shrugged. "No sense in being all traditional."

"Why did you even bother coming after me?" He tilted his head to look out at the horizon. "Why did you bother staying?"

I touched his face. I couldn't not touch him. I held him, made him look at me, made him see my smile. This was another one of those situations that as a human seemed too weird, too strange to even consider. Sitting in the mid­dle of the desert at dawn, me in pajamas, him naked. But it didn't feel strange. Sitting beside him, pulling him into my arms, felt right.

"You're afraid it's just the lycanthropy. That I wouldn't be here if we weren't both werewolves. You should know, I wouldn't have come after just anyone. I wouldn't have taken care of just any new werewolf that showed up on my doorstep. I wouldn't have sat out in the desert all night with just anyone."

He leaned his head against mine. "You're not just say­ing that to make me feel better?"

"I don't know, do you feel better?" He made an indecisive grumble. "Ben, you're naked. I can't lie to a naked man."

He took my hand, where it rested on his thigh. He studied it, rubbing the back of it with his thumb. "If you can't lie, this is when I should ask you anything. Anything I want to know, now's my chance."

This was the kind of conversation new couples had the morning after sex. I was sure I had no secrets from him—he was my lawyer, for crying out loud. But conversations like this were also tests. Uneasy, I said, "Sure."

"Did you and Cormac ever get together?" He gave a little shrug.

"No. Got close a couple of times. He kept running away."

He nodded, like this didn't surprise him. Like it was the story of Cormac's life. Then he asked, "If I hadn't come along, would you two have eventually gotten together?"

These were questions I was afraid to ask myself.

"I don't know. Ben, why do you need to know this?"

"I'm afraid I've messed things up for him. Again. But it's all 'what ifs' now, isn't it? No way to tell what might have happened."

No. No way at all to tell. Those "what ifs" followed us our whole lives, didn't they? What if I hadn't been at that hiking trail on a full moon night. What if I hadn't met Cormac. What if he hadn't brought Ben to me but shot him instead. What if I'd invited him back to my apartment that one night…

I had Ben here with me, not "what ifs." Had to move on.

"You didn't mess anything up. Cormac never had the guts to say anything about it to me."

"Ironic. He's always been the tough one."

Ben had his own kind of toughness. I smiled. "What about you? Are you with me because you want to be, or because you're a victim of circumstance?"

He kissed me gently, a press of warm lips. Took my face in his hands, holding me for a moment. And I felt safe with him.

I stood, rubbing the pins and needles out of my legs, and rugged on his hand. "Come on. We've got a long walk back, and you have no clothes."

He covered his eyes and groaned. "It's just one damn thing after another, isn't it?"

Slowly, he got to his feet, and we walked back, side by side, arms around each other.

We found his clothes on the way back to the motel, which was good. Then we discovered that we'd both left our keys in the room.

Just one damn thing after another.