Chapter 9
The look of surprise and relief in her eyes made his heart hurt. How many people reacted poorly to her visions? He started taking off the layers. He had assumed they’d be heading for the snowplow, and he needed to be human, but he wasn’t going hunting in the back country without his nose.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not going to need a coat. Or rather, I come with a built-in one.”
He put the four discs he had made down on the floor and looked up at her. “You’re going to have to put these on me.”
“You made snowshoes for a wolf?”
“He’s probably going to be fine, but I am a common Appenine wolf, not an arctic wolf.”
“Okay?” she said, still staring at the snowshoes.
“Arctic wolf paws are very broad for the snow, but mine aren’t, and we need to move fast, so you just strap this over the paw, okay?” He held up the strap he’d made of the smallest branches.
She nodded, and he began taking off his clothes. She turned red and looked away, and he snickered. “Really? After last night?”
She turned back. “I was trying to be respectful. But fine, I will ogle you all I want.”
He regretted telling her to watch him when he realized what he had to do next. “He’s big.”
She grinned.
“I mean the wolf, Patchouli.”
“I know.”
He shook his head. “I hope you know he also would never hurt you.” That was meant to be reassuring, but her heart rate sped up.
“Is it genuinely not you? Like you can’t control its behavior?”
He laughed and then coughed, visions of endless negotiations and battles of will throughout his childhood coming to mind.
When she didn’t smile, all urge to laugh disappeared.
“I don’t know. He’s not just me in a different form; he has a mind of his own, but he’s not a free and whole wolf.
There are parts of us we share, and there are parts of us we definitely don’t.
I’m not a huge fan of raw squirrel…” He laughed again, and she still didn’t.
“No one knows what we are or what we were supposed to be or what we’ve become, but I will not lose control of him even if he wanted to hurt you, which he absolutely doesn’t. He’s actually weirdly invested.”
She crossed her arms and forced a smile. He realized he could tell now when she was faking it. “It’s weird to care about me, is it?”
“No! Not at all! It is the most natural thing in the world, and everyone should do it…” His wolf rose in anger.
“But I should do it the most! What I meant was that he mostly doesn’t care about humans.
They’re just not on his radar unless they’re a threat, and the fact that he does care about you even though we’ve known you for a day—that’s the weird part. ”
“So he normally doesn’t care, but now he cares, and definitely under no circumstances will he eat me?”
“Yep!” Mateo was normally persuasive. It wasn’t a natural skill, but launching his business forced him to speak with some of the most powerful people in the world and ask them to trust him to protect them.
He’d gotten good at this kind of convincing, but for some reason, all skill flowed out of his mind the moment he met her.
“Are we good?” he asked at last.
She nodded once and stuffed his clothes into her backpack.
He couldn’t put it off any longer, standing naked in the rapidly cooling cabin.
He let the wolf take him, and as his senses shifted and the overwhelming spices came back into his awareness, he struggled not to sneeze and also not to move, sending the strictest instructions he’d ever given his wolf in his life.
The beast felt offended that it would even need a reminder not to hurt her. It would never hurt her.
Mateo tried to breathe slowly as her heart rate sped up. It hurt that she feared him beyond the atavistic reaction to a predator. She had a deep antipathy toward everything that he was, and he never wanted her to feel like this. All he could do about it now was stay still.
Slowly, she took a step forward as her breath began to normalize, and she reached out a hand. He lowered his nose so that she was heading toward the top of his head and not his impressive teeth.
He suddenly recalled visions of Little Red Riding Hood. The whole fairytale had confused him as a child because no one would’ve mistaken him for a grandmother, but somehow, they were acting out the scene as if it was safe for her to pat his head.
It is. It has to be.
Her hand hovered an inch above his fur, and his wolf bopped his head on her palm, trying to be playful. As soon as their skin met, he got a bright flash of her doing this exact thing to a tiny wolf’s head with the same color fur as his.
She staggered away, and he blinked dazedly, feeling like he did in the moments after a shift, like his entire psyche wasn’t aligned right.
The wolf shook as if it was sopping wet as she curled her hands around the counter behind her, eyes wide.
What was that? Did he just have a vision? How?
She opened her mouth, and he held his breath, waiting for what she would have to say about that, but she snapped her jaw closed with a click of teeth and shook her head.
“We have to find those kids.”
This time, she didn’t hesitate as she gripped the fur on the top of his head a little too firmly, and he resisted the urge to pull away. He was rewarded when she gentled her touch and looked down.
“Could you, um, step over there? Not that I’m telling you what to do!”
The wolf briefly raised a metaphorical eyebrow at him, and he reassured it that the bizarre contraptions he’d made were going to help it.
The wolf had long experience watching endless and incomprehensible code flow over computer screens, not to mention all the other bizarre projects he’d concocted over the years.
It brought to mind a tiny robot for a club in school that played an extremely inefficient game of water polo.
The thing could float, propel itself forward, and it had one little arm that batted in one direction.
Ridiculous was his wolf’s general opinion on any of its human’s inventions, but it stepped willingly enough onto four twisted piles of branches and was shocked to find that they didn’t hurt its paws.
Of course, I wouldn’t do that to you. You don’t think I know what the ground feels like under your paws?
The beast didn’t answer but focused on the woman who shuffled more branches over his claws.
Pick up your paw, he said, and the beast did, fighting the urge to rip them off.
You’re going to like them, Mateo thought triumphantly as Cat pulled the door open, and they slipped out of the cabin that had saved their lives.
She swung the door almost shut and used a rope he’d rigged to the box behind it to pull it flush since the latch was still broken.
He braced for her to step off the porch, but she just looked out into the morning.
The light was still dim; the clouds were heavy, but the snow had stopped, and Mateo was aware of the profound silence.
Not even the wolf could hear anything stirring.
All other animals were intelligently staying where they’d burrowed for the blizzard.
She snapped on her own snowshoes, but instead of starting out, she closed her eyes.
“I think we can go that way,” she said as she pointed away from the cabin. “I wish it was sunny. It’s impossible to tell angles in my vision with the clouds, but there’s slightly more light on one side than the other.”
He just nodded and urged the wolf forward, but the beast stopped at the edge of the porch, eyeing the snow drifts.
Just try it, he thought firmly but confidently.
The beast sent him flashes of the struggle to get to the cabin, mostly in visions of thick snow.
Just do it! he said with a little more firmness.
He didn’t love playing the dictator, but the wolf was too strong to allow for anything else.
It took a tentative step forward and did not sink into the snow. It yanked its foot back and shuddered.
“It’s okay!” Cat said, noticing their trouble, like she was talking to a puppy with anxiety and not an alpha werewolf. “You can do it.”
The wolf was so offended that she would think it was incapable that it dashed right out into the snow, plowing into a bank in seconds.
Then it panicked that it was stuck and reared backwards, sending a shower of snow over her as she laughed.
“Gently,” she said as the wolf climbed back onto the porch like the boards were the deck of a lake.
The wolf sent him image after image of getting stuck, freezing, and dying.
You heard her, he said, content for her to be the carrot.
He was amused at the wolf’s fear. He hadn’t experienced it in years.
It was the master of every domain it entered and knew it, but they had graphic proof that one wrong move could kill them out here, and the wolf was not coping.
Maybe his dismissiveness wasn’t helping. He wasn’t used to having to coax.
Walk like your stalking game, he finally said, trying to offer advice and not just ultimatums. Keep your weight balanced and go gently. You’re still going to sink a little, but it won’t be a lot. You can still move.
“You can do it,” she said in that sweet voice, and he almost changed to tell her that was not helping; it just riled his wolf into proving itself.
Dolce, he said like Nonna used to, Softly.
Finally, the wolf got itself together enough to take the first few tentative steps out onto the snow.
It marveled at the fact that they would not be stuck in a ditch. Its paws sank a little, but with four feet instead of two, it actually worked better than snowshoes for people. The wolf crept forward like it was stalking.
You can just walk now, Mateo corrected, worried it was going to stalk its way to a silver mine.
She started after them, and Mateo immediately wanted to take her on his back, feeling tortured at the amount of effort she had to make to walk. But they would definitely sink if he added another hundred-plus pounds to his back, and besides, of the two of them, she was more likely to do this well.