Howl You Like Me Now (Shifter Mates of Hollow Oak #8)

Rafe

He'd run this stretch of water more times than he could count.

He knew the slow bend east of the gorge, the widening current that announced the valley, the first glint of Moonmirror Lake through the tree line like a coin dropped at the bottom of a green glass.

In late spring it was usually easy water.

Swollen from snowmelt but predictable, manageable, the kind of current that let a man's mind wander if he let it.

His mind wasn't wandering, though. His wolf wouldn't let it.

"Cap." Dex came up from the hold, wiping grease from his hands onto a rag that had long since given up on being clean. Short, wiry, with a river-rat's permanent squint and a fox shifter's inconvenient knack for smelling trouble early. "You seeing what I'm seeing?"

"I'm seeing it."

"Because that doesn't look like spring weather."

"No."

Dex tucked the rag into his back pocket and leaned on the rail beside him, studying the sky with the particular expression he wore when he was deciding whether something was worth worrying about. He'd been with Rafe seven years. He knew when to push and when to shut up.

He shut up.

The Ashvane was a fifty-foot working boat made of river-hardened timber and iron-reinforced hull, built for cargo and built to last, with a shallow enough draft to navigate the channels feeding into Moonmirror Lake.

She wasn't fast, but she was steady, and Rafe had learned to trust her the way he trusted few things: absolutely, and based on evidence.

Right now she was pulling slightly to port for no reason he could see, the wheel resisting his hand with a subtle, strange pressure.

He let the wheel go for three seconds. She drifted left.

"The current's shifted," he said.

Dex peered over the rail at the water. "Upriver from a dock town that's been getting squalls. Probably runoff from the higher elevations."

"The current doesn't shift left in this channel. It never has."

The fox had no answer for that.

The lake came fully into view around the next bend, spread wide and dark between its wooded banks, and Rafe felt the hair on his arms stand up.

The water had gone a color he had never seen in a lake.

Not the deep green-blue of a healthy spring source but something closer to pewter, flat and matte and lightless, like the surface had stopped reflecting anything above it.

The mist that usually hung at the far edges had pulled inward, condensing over the center of the lake in a column that shifted and breathed.

Rafe's wolf rose to the surface of his skin the way it did before a fight. Pay attention.

"Get Pell and Orick up here," Rafe said. "And break out the storm lines. All of them."

Dex was already moving.

Rafe had made this run over four times since Hollow Oak opened trade with his network.

It was a straightforward stop. Radio ahead, come in on the eastern dock, unload Maren's wool order and two pallets of dry goods for the Mercantile, spend a night at the dockside tavern if the weather allowed, and push back out by morning.

Simple. He did not linger in Hollow Oak.

It was a town that had a way of pulling people in and keeping them, and Rafe had routes to run and contracts to honor and no interest in being kept anywhere.

That had been the plan when he left port three days ago. The plan he had the moment the water called to him.

Pell came up from the stern looking foul-tempered about it. He was a big man, half-troll on his mother's side, with hands like harbor cleats and a dislike of weather changes that he traced back to a childhood near the sea. "We stopping here or pushing through to the north landing?"

"Eastern dock. Same as always."

"Storm's coming in fast."

"I know."

"I'm just saying, if we pushed another two hours upriver we'd clear the worst of it."

Rafe looked at him and Pell stopped talking.

Hollow Oak's eastern dock came into view through the tree line, the small cluster of buildings beyond it showing lamplight through the thickening air.

The dockside tavern sat closest to the water, warm and low-slung, smoke rising from its chimney in a straight line that the wind hadn't touched yet.

The harbourmaster's office was further up the bank.

Rafe had radioed ahead two hours ago. He expected a dock hand waiting on the pier.

Nobody was there.

"That's unusual," Dex said, coming back up with Orick behind him, both of them loaded down with coiled storm line.

"Get those tied off. Port side first." Rafe eased back on the throttle and began working the Ashvane toward the approach, his eyes moving between the dock and the sky.

The clouds had come faster than he'd tracked them.

They were overhead now, the late-afternoon light gone strange under them, greenish and flat.

Then, the lake surface went glassy.

That was the thing about wind on water. It never fully stopped.

Even on still days there was movement, a surface texture, the lake breathing.

This was different. The water had gone smooth as hammered tin, and in that total stillness the reflection of the storm clouds above looked less like a reflection and more like a second sky opening beneath the first.

Rafe's grip tightened on the wheel.

The temperature dropped sharply. He could see his own breath.

"Orick." His voice came out flat and even. "Get below and check the cargo lashings."

Dex was quiet beside him, which Rafe appreciated.

There was nothing useful to say and they both knew it.

The approach to the dock was sixty yards, then forty, the Ashvane moving slow and deliberate through water that had gone so still the hull seemed to cut it like cloth.

The only sound was the engine and the low, steady creak of the rigging.

They were almost there when the lightning hit.

Not from the clouds. From the water, a column of white-silver that erupted from the lake and drove straight upward, and for three full seconds it held there, rigid and burning, before it fractured along the surface in six lines spaced so evenly they could have been measured.

The thunder came right behind it and rolled across the water and up through the hull into the soles of Rafe's boots.

Dex swore. Pell shouted something from the stern but Rafe didn't move.

He was already reading the lightning, the pattern of it, how it had originated from a single point and spread outward in a configuration no natural storm produced. Whoever was driving this weather, they were close. Whatever they were feeling, it was big.

The second column went up, same location, same duration. Suddenly, the wind whipped out ahead of the storm like a warning and Rafe caught the scent.

Cool. Clean. The particular sharpness of a mountain storm distilled down to something almost unbearably precise, wild rain stripped of everything ordinary until what remained was pure silver, and underneath that was something warm, alive, and unmistakably female.

Fae. Powerfully, undeniably fae.

His wolf went absolutely still.

Shit.

The storm hit, rain coming in sideways across the deck, and Rafe turned the wheel into it and held on.