Chapter 5
LUKE
Luke couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this bad. His head throbbed, his mouth felt parched and salt-caked, and his entire body ached as if he’d been beaten.
He couldn’t remember much, period. As he stumbled along the rocky beach after his beautiful rescuer, trying not to slip and cut his bare feet on the rocks, he was dimly aware of the past like a confused, churning mass that he was dragging along behind him.
All his recent memories were a mixed-up sludge he couldn’t fully grasp.
Catching fish? Eating them raw? He kept feeling off balance on two legs and having to catch himself on the nearest available thing, which was usually Rogue’s back or a nearby rock.
The fact that Rogue was here and real made the last few—weeks, months?
years? seem more real to him too. Otherwise he might have thought he’d dreamed it all, that endless time on the ice floe with the black dog.
But Rogue was real, and Inga had responded to him; she saw him too.
So Luke’s memories, however confused, must be real too, even if they included being a bear for most of that time.
He had another moment of unreality when Inga stopped to pick up a pack resting on a rock, producing an explosion of gray feathers that seemed to hurtle off in all directions. Luke jumped, and Rogue let out a few gruff barks.
“Settle down,” Luke told the dog. He rested his hand on Rogue’s back, once again steadying himself on the thick knot of muscle and bone that was the dog’s shoulders.
Seagulls mobbing Inga’s pack, maybe? But they hadn’t really looked like it, and now she was picking up fluffy things off the ground and setting them on the pack.
When she picked up up, there was a fuzzy, seething mass of gray fluff on top of it.
“Don’t ask,” Inga said in a weary voice. “But since you’re here, could you hold this so I can get my arms into the straps? I usually knock off at least one or two and have to pick them back up.”
One or two ... what? Baffled, Luke held the pack for her. This put him on eye level with the fuzzy things, all of which stared at him with big eyes. At first, dazedly, he thought they were stuffies, like teenagers sometimes attached to their bags. Baby owls, maybe? But they had paws ...
One of them tried to bite his nose with its beak.
“Ack,” he said.
Inga took the weight of the pack off his hands, and as she leaned forward, one of the—things tumbled off. Luke lunged forward and caught it, then nearly had his ear taken off by a shrieking banshee that swooped by his head. Rogue barked loudly and jumped in the air as if to catch it.
“It’s fine!” Inga said, to whom, Luke wasn’t sure. All of them, possibly. “Just put it back—there you go.”
The thing he had caught was very much alive.
He could feel its tiny heartbeat racing against his fingers and its little claws pressing into his palm.
It was soft, fluffy, and wriggly, about the size of a softball.
Inga bent her knees so he could easily reach the top of the pack, and he put it with the others, all of which seemed to be clinging on.
There was some chirping and shuffling as they rearranged themselves.
“Incoming!” Inga said. Luke had no idea what that meant, but he ducked anyway, and something winged and fast-moving dive-bombed through where he had just been. “Uh, maybe you better walk apart from me a little bit, until they get used to you.”
“What the heck are they?” He fell back a few steps, so she was walking ahead. The flying things whirled in the air above her, moving too fast for Luke to really get a good look in his present dazed state.
“I’ll explain later. Let’s get up top before we lose the light completely down here, because this is going to be dangerous to navigate at night.”
It was growing dark, and his feet stung from new cuts and bruises as they scrambled up the narrow ravine that Inga said she had used to get down to the beach.
There was a small stream flowing down the middle of it.
Luke crouched to drink from it, rinsing his mouth and wincing again at the sting of small cuts and sores.
Just below him, almost invisible in the near-dark, Rogue lapped noisily from the water.
Luke felt a little better after he’d drunk his fill.
He was pretty sure most of his problem was just that he was exhausted and had been fighting the waves for what felt like days.
He had only the dimmest memory of how he and Rogue had come to be in the water, but he remembered having tranq darts shot at him. There was a helicopter ...
“Luke?” Inga’s voice said from above him. “Come on, we need to get higher while there’s still a little light. I’m getting worried about finding the cabin in the dark.”
Out of the ravine, in the open country on top of the headland, it was still light although the sun was down. The western sky was piled with vivid pink and red clouds. To the east, stars had begun to emerge in a deep purple sky. Inga looked around thoughtfully, getting her bearings.
Luke had yet to get a really good look at her, but he liked what he had seen so far—he liked it a lot. She was tall and strong, with sun-tanned skin and tangled blonde hair half pulled out of its braid.
“AWK!”
Luke ducked.
“I really wish they’d stop doing that,” Inga said, in the way of someone complaining halfheartedly about a minor everyday annoyance.
“Okay, so we’re looking for a one-story plank building along the shore.
It’s on the hillside above a little cove with an old dock.
I’m pretty sure it’s over this next hill, or maybe the one after that, but I’m used to getting there by sea.
If we don’t find it soon, I might try going back to see if I missed it by not cutting over to the shore soon enough. ”
They started walking again. Luke was having to pick his way on his cut-up, half-numb feet. It was easier here than on the rocky shoreline, but he still hated that Inga was very evidently having to slow down for him, and he made an effort to ignore what his feet were doing and keep up with her.
“Are you camping out?” he asked. “I guess I hadn’t even wondered what you’re doing here.”
“No, I, uh.” She didn’t look at him. “I lost my boat.”
She almost mumbled it.
“What happened?”
“I stupidly didn’t tie it up well enough in the storm. Total amateur mistake, I still can’t believe I did that. If the boat washes up back in Westerly Cove, that’s where I’m from, and my dad shows up with a whole fleet of his fishing buddies convinced that I’m dead, I’m going to feel so dumb.”
A laugh escaped Luke, startling him. He could only blame it on his current physical state. Exhausted and aching, he felt as if he was floating, a little bit disconnected from his body. “But think about it, you could go to your own funeral. Haven’t you always wanted to do that?”
“No!” Inga said. But she was laughing, too. “Everyone would be so sad! Stop, it’s not funny.”
“Isn’t it a little funny?”
“No!”
“You’re laughing too!”
“I know!” she moaned. Then she stopped, reaching out a hand. Luke stepped closer, seemingly outside his conscious control, so she touched his arm. “That’s it down there, I think.”
He wasn’t sure how she could see in the dark.
Or—was it dark? With the sun down, darkness had settled over the land, but it still seemed as if he could see in a kind of eerie, monochrome way.
Whenever he focused too closely on any specific thing, the darkness washed back in and he was almost blind, but if he kept his eyes moving, he could make out shapes with more clarity than seemed physically possible.
And when he looked down the hill, he saw that she was right. There was some kind of fisherman’s shack down there, cast in shades of gray—not so much like a monochrome photograph as a badly over-corrected image on a computer, sharpened until detail started to be lost.
Luke hissed in pain as he stumbled on a rock, causing the finer notes of his oddly clear night vision to be suddenly lost. He was in total dark for a few staggering steps before that weird clarity reasserted itself and he could sort of see again.
Inga caught his arm. “Luke? Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he murmured. He felt Rogue against his leg, and put a hand down to rest it on the dog’s back. “Ready to sit down, I think.”
“We’re almost there.”
Luke gave up on trying to understand it, because every time he overthought it, it was as if his brain remembered that it was dark and he stopped being able to see.
As long as he just let it happen, he was able to pick out enough of the detail in front of him to avoid tripping and falling face-first down the hill.
Getting to the cabin was less a walk down a trail than it was a scramble on a nearly vertical hillside.
The cabin clearly wasn’t meant to be approached by land.
When they reached a semi-level strip of land halfway down the hill, Luke could see—for certain values of ‘see’—that it was tucked against the hillside so closely that it seemed to grow out of the rocks.
A steep, short path led down to the shore, where the ocean was a mirror of reflective starlight, hissing softly with the rise and fall of waves.
“Now let’s just hope nothing else has moved in while we were gone,” Inga said. There was a blink of light and abruptly he could see in a more conventional way, as she was holding a small flashlight and working on a complicated wood-and-iron latch holding the door shut.
“If you have a flashlight, why didn’t you use that earlier?”
She gave him a quick look, brow furrowed. “Can’t you see? I thought all shifters can see at night.”
“Sort of.”
“Oh!” Her lips rounded. “Your feet. I’m sorry, I didn’t think.” Under her straining fingers, the latch abruptly sprang open. “Aha. Dad didn’t want wild animals to be able to get in, but he didn’t have to make it quite this stiff.”