Moon Dancer Page 3

  After an eternity, the contraction let up sufficiently for the cave girl to collapse back against the animal skin beneath her. The fur was soft and white—from a sheep, I guessed, but not the domesticated sort.

  Because, unlike my dream, this wasn’t a vision from the present. I recognized the cave girl, which placed us thousands of years before cell phones. And as our eyes wandered up along the vast expanse of rock protecting our den from the elements, I knew exactly where we were.

  Despite the name, Mummy Cave was really a rock shelter rather than a water-dug cavern. Just past the eastern boundary of Yellowstone National Park, this dry indentation at the base of a vast cliff had boasted human habitation for over nine thousand years. The fact my cave girl had stumbled across it as she fled west away from her abusive pack mates wasn’t all that surprising given the proximity of a well-traveled trail that might well have dated back further than originally supposed....

  My puzzle-piecing was interrupted by another contraction, this one so intense the cave girl emitted a wolf-like howl. She struggled to her knees then her feet, squatting and reaching beneath herself even as a head crowned between her thighs.

  Well, okay, it was a head, but not the type I’d been expecting. Instead, a snout came out first, blood wetting the fur on either side of flat black nostrils.

  We were giving birth to a puppy. A baby wolf that slid out as easily as if a doctor had been in attendance. A stone knife flashed in our fingers, severing the umbilical cord. Then the cave girl lifted the puppy to her mouth to lick at its face.

  The effect was gruesome...and also so sweetly maternal it lodged a sliver of yearning beneath my breastbone. This cave girl had left her entire world behind for the sake of the wolf pup that now nuzzled in search of a nipple. She’d survived birth without attendants. And now she was no longer alone.

  Still packless, my wolf murmured. She’d been silent up until now, as caught up in the drama as I was. But the concept of raising a child alone in the wilderness bit deeply into her shifter gut.

  They’re safer by themselves, I argued.

  Or they were until the puppy paused in its nursing. It whined, turning its head side to side fitfully. Then it clawed at the cave girl’s flesh with needle-sharp claws.

  Blink. One moment, we saw through the mother’s eyes. Blink. The next moment we were behind the closed lids of the child.

  The pup couldn’t see the cave and the sheepskin, but her world wasn’t dark and featureless. Instead, a thin streak of glowing light twisted away from her plump little belly. A pack bond in search of a terminus? The thread twined like an octopus’s questing tentacle, testing the mother, finding her wolfless....

  The pup cocked its head, considering. “No, we’re enough,” the cave girl admonished, understanding faster than I did even though humanity prevented her from seeing the incipient bond.

  Unfortunately, the mother’s efforts weren’t enough to prevent the pup from achieving its purpose. The newborn’s tether slid around the mother then arrowed east in the direction from which the cave girl had originated. The thread stretched so thin it was barely visible...then it thickened and strengthened as it attached to something on the other end.

  Together, the cave girl and I gasped. Somewhere not as distant as we might have hoped, I imagined a shifter howling out his excitement. This cave girl had excised her wolf in order to shed an abusive partner, but now her baby had provided the abuser with a neon light leading to her door.

  I expected the mother to panic. But she merely rose, wrapping a soft fur around the newborn then rolling her sparse gear up into the sheep’s fleece.

  “We’ll find the sacred place,” she promised, moving quickly but not frantically. “We’ll find the sacred place, then we’ll finish the shaman’s work.”

  THE SACRED PLACE. Was that the same cave in which my dream had happened? Was it the key to divorcing my inner beast?

  The wolf in question growled. A thunder of knocks erupted from a door in the near distance.

  Deciphering this puzzle would have to wait.

  Blearily, I forced my eyes open. I was still in the kitchen, but the curtains were red instead of gray now. I glanced down at my human fingernails. How had they become so thoroughly embedded with dirt?

  “Who is it?”

  The muffled answer didn’t come in Claw’s deep rumble as I’d expected. Instead, Patricia was the one who called back. “I missed you after your lecture. I hope you don’t mind me stopping by....”

  Usually I wouldn’t have. But I was naked and filthy. “Um, just a minute.”

  I felt absurd, crouching on hands and knees so I could crawl beneath the uncurtained front window. In my bedroom, I yanked on a sweatshirt and sweatpants, not bothering with underwear. Five seconds in the bathroom was enough to rinse the worse of the grime off my hands.

  “It’s good to see you.” I pulled open the door then took in my teaching assistant’s red nose and lack of winter coat. She’d grown cold waiting on my shadowed porch. “Come on in.”

  “You have something here....” Patricia gestured to her cheek and I glanced at the hall mirror. Flinched.

  I didn’t just have a speck of lawn on my face. There was a big streak of something brown and yucky extending from the side of my eye to the bottom of my chin.

  Suddenly, I remembered the way my wolf had demanded that we pause just long enough to sniff behind a dumpster on our flight away from campus. Lupine, she hadn’t worried about potential grossness. Too bad transforming from wolf to human didn’t wipe our body clean.

  “I was gardening,” I said vaguely, rubbing whatever it was away with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. In the process, my top rode up and revealed a hand’s width of bare belly. Frantically, I tried to come up with explanations that would keep Patricia from questioning my half-dressed state.

  “Gardening sounds like fun.”

  Thank goodness for the youthful oblivion. And for self-centeredness too. Because Patricia didn’t ask about the tomato-juice stagecraft of my lecture. Instead, she dove straight into the dramas of her own young life.

  Over the next ten minutes, I learned the obvious. Graduation day was approaching. The realities of job searches were looming. Patricia had countermanded her father’s orders with regards to her major, which meant he expected her to support herself in a few short months.

  “Do you have any leads?”

  “Not just a lead. I got hired.” For an instant, the young woman stood tall and proud. Then her shoulders slumped. “I just don’t think I can do it?”

  When declarative sentences turned into interrogatives, I knew my students needed hand-holding. My wolf reached out to take that impulse literally. With a flick of my wrist, I turned the gesture into an invitation for Patricia to take a seat.

  “Of course you can do it. What’s the job?”

  “I’d be taking care of some professors’ kids. It sounded perfect when I applied. I could write while the kids were at school, read books to them in the evening. Plus, their mom is an English prof. She said she’d help me smooth the rough edges out of my novel at the end.”

  “I’m lost. It sounds perfect.” I wasn’t lying. This really was the ideal situation for an aspiring author.

  “Yeah, for me. But what about for the kids? What if I lose them in the grocery store? Don’t notice when they get sick? They might get run over.”

  And in that moment, I remembered when I’d come to my father with a similar dilemma at a much younger age. A teacher at my school had offered me cash in exchange for tutoring classmates close to failing. I’d agreed...then realized that skipping multiple grades meant the kids I’d be tutoring were half a foot taller than me.

  I’d caught my father during a rare moment of quiet. For once, he’d listened to my entire recital. “Can I do it?” I ended.

  “Probably not,” he answered.

  The next day, I told the teacher I couldn’t tutor after all. I’d forgotten a previous engagement. I was busy after school.


  I didn’t want to be responsible for Patricia falling into a similar trap of self-imposed limitations. After all, this was the real reason I’d chosen teaching. To nurture the young in the way I’d missed out on as a child.

  My wolf hummed her approval when I leaned in closer. I gave in to her request this time. It was appropriate for human knees to touch.

  “You’re not going to lose them in the grocery store,” I reassured Patricia, telling her what I wished my father had told me. “You are entirely ready for this. Don’t overthink it. Take the job.”

  Chapter 6

  Patricia left my house with a bounce in her step just as my phone rang. I glanced at the screen and frowned. Think of the devil and he’ll call you—it was Dad.

  Pack, my wolf whispered.

  Not likely. Still, I tapped the accept button. “Dad?”

  “Olivia.”

  His voice was a growl. So...not a pleasure call.

  “Have I taught you nothing?” my father continued without wading through further greetings. “I hear you’re buddy-buddy with our nation’s president. That you visited him three days ago. I looked like an idiot on the golf course when an acquaintance knew more about your whereabouts than I did.”

  “I didn’t think...” That you’d want to come along and talk about werewolves, I almost finished. That was the honest truth. But there was no place for honesty in our relationship.

  “You never think.” Barely repressed fury seethed down the phone line. “You ungrateful...”

  His voice faded, allowing me to inhale for the first time in several seconds. My father was never physically abusive and I was no longer a child dependent upon his goodwill to function. Still, Dr. Hart’s anger was like a fist squeezing all of the air out of my lungs.

  I wanted to end the call...but I couldn’t. My wolf wouldn’t let me. Pack, she repeated. Her fingers—my fingers—stroked the cell phone.

  I’d starved her of contact with other werewolves, and now she was grasping at rotten straws. He isn’t worth it, I started. He....

  Then Justine’s voice emerged from the troublesome hunk of metal and plastic. “Darling. What your father meant to say was—would you like to join us for dinner?”

  “Dinner?” Before I could come up with further questions, my wolf grabbed the reins away from me. “Definitely. Yes.”

  “Good. Tonight. Six o’clock. Don’t be late.”

  My father’s girlfriend exuded more warmth in ten seconds than my father had during my entire childhood. No wonder my chest throbbed with the aftermath of his anger and my wolf’s neediness when Justine ended the call.

  I SETTLED MY BRAIN by spending a few hours grading papers. Then I drove west, clean clothes on my back and Adena in the passenger seat.

  My wolf was sound asleep in my belly, unenthused by our mission when we could have been ripping into the flesh of a deer in the forest. Which left only Adena to give me the evil eye as she rode shotgun.

  “Not you too.” I didn’t know what the bird had to complain about.

  “Caaw!”

  Ah, yes. The lack of fresh meat since we hadn’t managed to hunt today. We were already halfway to my father’s house, where the refrigerator was bound to be stocked with microwave-ready snacks courtesy of his well-paid housekeeper. But Adena’s grumbling had turned into ear-splitting cawing. So I took the next exit, pulling into the lot of a McDonald’s and rolling down the window in case Adena needed a bathroom break.

  “Don’t go far,” I warned as I opened my door, grabbing my phone and wallet. I glared at the raven once, not trusting the look in her beady eyes...then backed straight into the arms of a strange werewolf.

  I was too close to see his features. Just smelled fur and gasoline. Noted hunger tightening his thin, hairy lips.

  He pulled me upright, fingers biting into my waist and eyes full of a predator’s intensity. His hands were bands of iron pressing into my skin.

  “Well, hello there.” His teeth grew into points as I stared at them. His wolf frolicked with excitement behind his eyes.

  Maybe it hadn’t been so smart to take off on my own into what was, apparently, some unknown werewolf’s territory. Still, I was here now, so I might as well make the best of it.

  “You really don’t want to do this,” I told the stranger, trying to infuse my voice with alpha dominance. But his hands clenched as I berated him. To my disgust, my final word came out as a squeak.

  His laughter emerged deep and hungry. “This is my territory, sweetheart. You’re the one trespassing.”

  My nose came to his collarbone. He canted his crotch forward until it touched my belly, the intervening denim insufficient to block the signs of his arousal.

  Ew.

  I shot a frantic glance toward Adena, who was busy tearing apart my dashboard rather than paying the slightest attention to my predicament. I’d parked at the edge of the lot to snag some shade for the raven, so there were no people around to aid me in my distress.

  No people...but my wolf was wide awake and ready for action. For once she chose the verbal approach.

  Due to lupine dominance, our words were garbled and snarly. Still, they were clear enough for the stranger to get the message. “Mess with me at your peril. I’m Claw Scordato’s mate.”

  Fireworks exploded in my belly. Mate. The word packed a scary amount of power.

  Externally as well as internally. The stranger let go so fast I barked my shin against the bumper. And when I hopped into the car and floored it out of the parking lot, I caught sight of him pulling out his phone.

  ADRENALINE CARRIED me the rest of the way down the highway...then I ran out of steam. By the time I punched the code into my father’s automatic gate opener and pulled into his driveway, I was shaking so hard I could barely grasp the wheel.

  Call Claw, my wolf suggested. She was on high alert, ears pricked as she assisted my human hearing. Together, we rolled down the window and sniffed at the air. No sign of werewolves.

  “We’ll be fine,” I reassured both of us, eying the metal fence slats that were too close together for a human to squeeze through but that probably wouldn’t stop a determined shifter. “This is a private residence and nobody knows I’m coming,” I reassured both of us. “On the drive home, we simply won’t stop.”

  I refused to consider what this meant for my future. How could I travel to distant archaeological sites if I couldn’t even grab lunch without being accosted by a strange shifter? Was I really going to be penned within a one-mile radius of Claw until I could transfer my wolf to Val?

  Inside, my animal half growled something wordless and troublesome. Now wasn’t the time to discuss our upcoming separation. So I rolled down the passenger-side window for Adena—“I’ll bring you a snack in a few minutes,” I told her—then I walked up the flower-lined steps.

  There were cars in the driveway; Dr. Hart liked variety and kept a stable of SUVs, sedans, and sports cars at the ready. But my wolf and I smelled the emptiness the instant I unlocked the door.

  My father wasn’t home. So maybe I was early?

  This is good. Dad’s absence would give me a few blissful minutes to get my thoughts in order before I presented the proposal that had been germinated by my recent vision. My forehead was hot and at the same time clammy. I swiped one hand across my brow even as I took the stairs two at a time.

  Fear raced me to my childhood bedroom, but I won the contest. Inside, the space was just as lacking in personality as when I’d left it, but the air wasn’t as stale as I would have expected. Instead, a floral perfume spun around me, making me sneeze in protest. I couldn’t tell if the concoction really was vile or if my lupine senses were exaggerating the scent.

  Either way, I pulled the neck of my sweater up over my nose as I headed for my destination, which—thankfully—wasn’t the stinky bedroom itself. Instead, I smiled against the shielding fabric as I ran mental fingers over the artifacts waiting for me inside the walk-in closet on the far side of the room.

  My
archaeological itch had started young, so I’d collected things not worth collecting. A triangular rock I’d been certain was an arrowhead (but now knew wasn’t). A couple of bones I could pretend were from ancient kills rather than from a raccoon squished on the side of the road.

  Later, I’d added modern versions of prehistoric weapons. An atlatl used to throw spears (sticks) in the backyard when no one was looking. A sad-looking bow I’d crafted out of a sapling and string.

  This collection, more than anything else from my childhood, was the home I returned to when I needed a mental pick-me-up. I’d spent hours hiding in this closet and dreaming of my future. Even as an adult, the cool, dim space was bound to bring my racing heart back into line.

  I have a purpose. Students. Science. Archaeology.

  I opened the door, glad when the scent of perfume faded in the face of the dark recesses. Flicking the light switch on the wall outside the closet...I blinked as I took in row after row of women’s shoes.

  Chapter 7

  The shoe wearer arrived two hours later as I sat on the second-floor landing just like I’d done as a child. Wiping sandwich crumbs off my fingers, I gazed down through slats in the banister and considered my father’s tuxedo-clad form.

  Dr. Hart looked much the same as he had two decades earlier. “Dining with donors tonight,” he would have explained when he left me in the care of my nanny. Even at eight, I’d already understood he was meeting someone rich and willing to buy one of his finds.

  There’d never been a woman on his arm at the time, but Justine fit in the picture perfectly. Her gown matched Dr. Hart’s pocket square and her slim build showed off his wide shoulders to advantage.

  She was also the one who met my eyes the moment the pair came through the doorway. “Olivia! I forgot to call you. We got sidetracked.”

  Her self-deprecating laugh was a tinkle of water across stones. I unfolded myself, feeling like a newborn colt in contrast with her elegance.