Chapter Five
Which Takes Care of Itself
Several emotions raced through Mitch’s body. Shock, dismay, then resignation took their turns before he remembered to school his face into the gruff mask he used to hide his thoughts.
The lovely phoenix-colored girl from the harvest dance was here in the woods.
Looking a little worse for wear, with twigs and leaves sprouting from her person and numerous tiny scratches on her arms and face.
Her current state was less important than her current location, though.
Mitch didn’t stick around in one place for long to avoid this exact situation.
The rumors about wolfmen on the continent stemmed from him, after all. Stupid curse.
The girl—Tasia, he thought—wrinkled her nose.
He knew how this would go down. For as awful as the men could be when they uncovered his secret, the women were worse.
If they didn’t scream and faint outright, which didn’t bother him since he could get away, they invariably turned to blackmail.
Granted, his sample size was low, but Mitch had been disillusioned long ago.
He decided to mitigate the damages by speaking first.
He stalked toward her, noting the way she swallowed hard at his approach. She held her ground, even when he stopped within arm’s reach on the other side of the pathetic weed pretending to be a bush and crossed his arms.
“If I play escort for your trips to ‘Granny,’ will you keep this between us?”
The beauty scratched at a thin scab forming on her temple. “Grandmother,” she corrected absently.
Mitch wasn’t sure if the woman lacked wits or if he needed to wait a moment for her to register his offer. He suspected it was the latter when she perked up and looked him in the eye.
“That would be acceptable.” She nodded in what she probably thought was a regal manner but looked a little silly given her dishevelment.
He breathed heavily through his nose. His gaze dropped to the basket at her feet. “You’re going there now?”
“Yes.” She looked at the stream and winced. “I know I was supposed to cross the stream on a log, but I missed that part somehow. So I thought following it would help, but . . .” She trailed off.
He loosed a longer, slower breath through his nose as he counted to ten. His mother had taught him to do so whenever he felt out of control of a situation. It never seemed to work, but he stubbornly kept trying, if only to honor her memory.
“The most straightforward path from the village crosses the stream twice. You may not have noticed the second crossing, it’s mostly underground. You seem to have bypassed that whole loop.” Mitch shook his head, unsure how she had missed the path so thoroughly.
“Ah. That would do it.” The young woman lifted her hand in a tentative wave. “I don’t know if you remember, but my name is Tasia.” She offered a gracious smile.
“I remember.” Convinced that nothing was going to make him feel better about this turn of events, Mitch turned on his heel and began moving across the glade. “Come on.”
He could hear her stumbling after him. A quick glance over his shoulder let him know that she had grabbed the basket.
Good. He wasn’t going to waste any more of his day backtracking for the wretched thing.
His resentment was already sky-high thanks to being forced into his wolf shape by the full moon last night.
Transforming into the beast had its advantages: heightened senses, a warm fur coat, increased stamina and speed.
And since he maintained his human mind and reason throughout, Mitch often shifted just for fun.
Away from people, that is. Sun-drenched naps were particularly lovely.
Even enduring poor weather outside wasn’t too bad when he could curl up comfortably in a cave.
The real issue was that the full moon took away his choice. Living with this curse since early childhood had left him with particularly negative feelings for the person who had granted it to him. Actually, his feelings about the one who had tried to ameliorate the curse were nearly as complicated.
As they traveled through the woods, he could hear Tasia flinching and startling at every little noise.
That was going to get old really fast. At least he knew where to find Grandmother’s house.
He had reasons to suspect the older woman of unsavory things, but none of that concerned him.
All he needed to do was get the girl there and back safely.
And only until he found new work that would let him escape this region.
He’d been in the area for too long as it was.
Some time later, Tasia’s voice startled him out of his thoughts. “Ooh, what a pretty butterfly.”
He turned to look back. She was still walking behind him, but now she swung the basket as she walked and gazed at their surroundings with a sense of quiet joy. He wasn’t sure when she had stopped jumping at shadows.
She caught him looking and grinned. “Did you see it?”
Mitch grunted and faced forward again. This was why you didn’t take other people into the woods: They desecrated the sacred silence. A raucous bird call immediately contradicted his word choice. Whatever. Being alone in nature was still peaceful.
Tasia seemed to take his grunt as an invitation.
She began asking him questions. When he blatantly ignored the polite personal questions, she switched to asking about the various plants and bugs she observed along the path.
He kept his own counsel for those, too. Eventually, she contented herself with making casual remarks about what she saw.
One hundred years later (or very nearly), they reached the clearing that marked the edge of the old woman’s yard.
Mitch stepped to the side and gestured for the chatterbox to do her thing.
To her credit, Tasia didn’t ask him to accompany her to the front door.
He faded into the forest where he could watch her make the hand-off without being seen himself.
Tasia waited outside the door for quite a bit after knocking.
When the hag did condescend to open the door, she snagged the basket and disappeared again for several minutes.
During the wait, Tasia seemed to notice the various bits of forest she was wearing.
Her employer’s dawdling allowed Tasia to remove all the debris, then finger-comb and re-braid her radiant hair.
The crone eventually returned with the presumably empty basket.
Tasia made her farewell. It looked cute and bouncy, even from a distance.
Mitch probably imagined it, but good ol’ Granny seemed to have a malicious twinkle in her eye as she watched her delivery girl waltz back to the safe embrace of the trees.
It was highly improbable that he was visible, but Mitch held absolutely still until the door to the cottage was shut with the old woman on the inside.
“I remembered to get the empty basket this time,” Tasia chirped in triumph. She held the basket aloft as though he would understand her victory.
Disregarding her incomprehensible words, he turned to lead her back toward Boschivo. Not five steps onto the path, her stomach rumbled loudly.
“Now would be a good time to eat your lunch,” he felt prompted to say after a second growl. “I won’t think you’re being rude.”
Silence, then a third belly groan, were his only answer. He turned around to find Tasia holding her stomach with one hand while wearing a sheepish grin.
“I . . . sort of forgot to pack a lunch,” she admitted.
Mitch was flummoxed. “It’s at least a four-hour journey for you.”
She cleared her throat delicately. Everything about this woman was soft and vulnerable. How had she survived to adulthood?
“Last week, I was too concerned with memorizing my guide’s directions on the way there to worry about my stomach.” She flushed, then looked down to mutter, “And too creeped out by the other guy.”
A surge of protectiveness flared in Mitch. Unsure what to do with the foreign feeling, he dismissed it.
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Tasia asked. She displayed an alarming amount of trust by following him without hesitation.
“Town.”
“Boschivo?”
“No.”
Tasia seemed to accept that he had no more to say on the subject and held her tongue. He led them in a wide loop around Granny’s place. No sense letting her know their whereabouts. Which reminded him.
“Did you tell Grandmother that I’m with you?” Mitch looked her in the eye as he asked.
She shook her head with wide, solemn eyes. He gave a grunt of approval. Maybe she had a few instincts after all.
Their roundabout trek soon landed them at the outskirts of a town much bigger than Tasia’s village. Attached to a main caravan route, it saw plenty of strangers. Mitch instructed the naive woman to stay in the woods until he got back. She smiled when he promised that it wouldn’t take long.
Mitch hurried through his errand, unhappy with himself for worrying about the person who was blackmailing him. The band around his gut loosened when he found her exactly where he left her.
“Here.” He held out a packet of food.
Tasia took it and opened the wrapping. She looked up at him in surprise. “You don’t need to spend money on me. It was my own silly mistake.”
“If you pass out, I’m not carrying you.”
A tinkling laugh cascaded from her pretty lips. Mitch found it pleasant, then frowned because he was not going to let her imprint on him like a duckling.
“Thank you, Mitch.”
The sound of his name spoken kindly produced a contrary response. He grabbed the basket she was struggling to hold while eating and stomped back in the direction they needed to go. Mitch thought he heard a faint snicker, but without the benefit of his wolf hearing, he couldn’t be sure.