4. Chapter 4
Family Dinner Crasher
Dasher
Ilearned her name the next morning. Meredith.
Meredith was home. When I woke with the light streaming over my face on the couch, I answered all the questions she peppered me with the same way as I had the day before.
With a slight chuckle, and muttering to herself about ‘dumb move for a potential serial killer,’ she allowed me to stay.
Two days later was a day she called Sunday, and by then, I decided her house was mine.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, more the way an animal decides a den is theirs.
I didn’t have a claim to her house, or to her - yet - but being near her settled me.
My body relaxed around her. The farther I went from her, the more tense I became. Home. Meredith was home.
The clothes helped. She dug them out of a closet, told me they belonged to one of her brothers, and I pulled on a flannel shirt that smelled of cedar and someone else’s cologne that masked the underlying scent.
For the first time since I arrived here, I felt like something closer to the man I had been, instead of a wound with a pulse.
Yet, underneath my skin, an unnatural energy pulsed.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Meredith said from the kitchen doorway. Her arms crossed over her ample chest, which I refused to stare at. She watched me pace her living room for what must have been the tenth lap.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you walk my house like you’re casing it for a heist.” She snorted. “If you are, there’s nothing of any value to steal.”
“I’m not casing anything,” I protested. She didn’t need to know I had learned every inch of the room by then.
The floorboards near the window gave a bit with my full weight on them.
On my way to the bathroom, the second stair creaked.
Her scent permeated into the couch cushions where I’d slept every night since my arrival.
My shoulder had knitted closed faster than it should have, faster than any wound I remembered healing back home, and something about that wrong-fast mending sat heavy in my gut.
I still didn’t have an explanation for it. “I’m restless. That’s not a crime.”
“No, but it's annoying, so maybe sit down before you wear a groove into my floor.”
I didn’t sit. I tried sitting on the first full day with Meredith.
Sitting left too much room for the thoughts in my head to circle back to my fields, the sled, the fat man in red with his fist closing on my coat.
None of that circling ever landed anywhere but a wall.
Moving my body was easier. Moving I understood.
“Someone’s coming tonight,” she said, glancing at the clock over her stove. Something in her voice tightened. Possessiveness jolted through me at her tone. Her words were brisk, clipped, instead of easy, as if she were bracing for a fight.
“Who? A mate?”
“No. My brothers. They come for Sunday dinner. It’s a whole tradition, they show up, I feed them, they act like I can’t hold a knife without supervision, we all pretend it’s not exhausting.
” Her words were light, but the tension in her shoulders didn’t match the lightness. “You should probably stay upstairs.”
“Why?”
“They’ll think I’m crazy for having a strange man who swears his name is Dasher in my house.” She tightened her arms. “Which, by the way, is one of Santa’s reindeer.”
“What?” I stopped in my tracks. “The fat man has reindeer?”
She nodded and turned into the kitchen. “He does. Now, don’t wear a hole in my floor, and before they get here, please head upstairs to the guest room.”
“Why haven’t I slept there?” I pointed to the couch. “Why have you restricted me to the sofa if there is a comfortable bed upstairs?”
A pained look crossed Meredith’s face. “I… I think you’d be too close to me, and… well, you’re still kind of a stranger. I don’t need you that close to my room.”
My nostrils flared. She lied. I smelled her arousal. She didn’t trust herself not to come to my bed. Interesting.
“If you think it’s for the best.” My instincts recoiled.
“I do.” Her words might be neutral, but with her scent heavy in my nostrils, I knew she would be mine.
I should have fought back. I knew I should take the stairs and stay out of sight until her brothers had come and gone.
I did not go upstairs.
I leaned against her kitchen counter, my arms crossed this time, and told myself I was keeping her company while she cooked.
Engrossed in conversation about food preparation, I never heard the tell-tale noise of an engine pull up to her house, or turn off.
The front door opened without a knock and two men, both of similar size to me, walked into the house as if they owned a piece of it too.
The scent hit me before either of them said a word.
It came in on the draft off the open door, cold and sharp in my nostrils.
My fingers dug into the counter as I remembered the smell of gunpowder and pine.
My body recognized it on a cellular level…
the same scent that had been in the air the second before the hot metal tore through my shoulder and set my whole world on fire.
Everything in me stilled, and tension coiled in my body.
“Smells good in here, Mer,” the bigger one said, shrugging out of his coat.
I watched his face, memorizing it without meaning to.
It matched nothing and no one I’d seen before.
Yet in that moment, I relived everything; the crack of the shot, the punch of heat in my shoulder, the blood running hot down my leg while I ran for my life through unfamiliar trees.
“Mer, you didn't tell us you had company.”
“I… shit.” Meredith’s eyes cut to me, wide, a warning I registered half a second too late to use.
“Hey, that’s my shirt,” the smaller one said, squinting at me. The puzzle pieces clicked behind his eyes, having nothing to do with recognizing his own flannel and everything to do with reading a room he’d realized was wrong.
I don’t remember deciding to move or moving.
I remember their scents filling up every space in my skull where reasoning lived.
My body crossed Meredith’s kitchen in a few long, powerful strides, before either of the males recognized me as a threat instead of a docile stranger wearing borrowed clothes.
“Whoa,” the bigger one got out, his hands coming up, but I wasn’t going for him. I went for the smaller one; the one whose scent sat closer to the note that had been on the wind the second the shot went off. My fist connected with his jaw before he’d finished the word.
“Cole! Jake! What the fuck! Dash!” Meredith shut off the flames from her stove.
Jake went down hard against the table. Glass shattered.
Meredith shouted my name, or a word close enough to it, and the bigger one, Cole, wrapped his arms around my chest from behind, dragging me back.
I threw him off the way I’d throw off a coat.
He went flying into the wall. The animal running through my blood had one priority: Meredith.
It wasn’t the food, or the men, or the room. Only Meredith mattered.
I heard her voice calling my name and turned from the wreck of the kitchen, from the man groaning on the floor and the bigger one climbing back to his feet with murder in his expression.
Meredith stood pressed against the counter, her eyes wide.
In that instant, the animal in me made a decision that had nothing to do with sense and everything to do with the one clear thought it still possessed: Out. Away. Now. Her, with me.
I had her by the wrist before I’d finished the thought. She yelped, more startled than hurt, and I hustled out of the kitchen, dragging her toward the door, past the bigger brother reaching for me. He shouted out in fury, and my fist connected with his chest.
“Dash. Dash, what are you…”
I didn’t have words left to answer her. My throat burned, and I felt my head swim; my vision changing as my face elongated.
The shift had been building since her brother’s scent first hit me, some pressure behind my ribs that had nowhere left to go but out, and my spine bowed.
My knees were next, buckling wrong. My bones slid and reformed under skin that tore itself into something else.
My ears stood on end, fur lining the outside, and I heard Meredith scream.
Instead of a long wail, it was short and sharp.
Before my arms turned into legs, I threw her in the air, and she screamed again.
The ground came up fast and four legs met it where two had been a half second before.
I didn’t stop to explain it. There wasn’t a version of me, in this body, capable of explaining anything.
I ran.
She was on my back somehow, I don’t know how, whether I’d thrown her up there in the last second of having hands or she’d scrambled up out of pure panic to match my own.
Her fingers twisted hard into fur at my neck, her whole body pressed low along my spine and she shouted something I couldn’t parse into words anymore.
Behind us I heard her brothers shouting too, heard a door bang open, heard a voice that cracked with something raw enough it might have been fear for her.
None of it slowed me. The scent of the men who’d shot me was behind us, fading with every stride, and ahead of us was nothing but snow and dark. My only thoughts focused on getting her somewhere that their smell couldn’t follow.
Her hands fisted tighter in my fur. Her breath came ragged against the back of my neck.
“You are going to explain this," she got out, teeth chattering, voice thin with cold and fear both, “you are going to explain every single part of this, Dash, I swear to God.”
I ran faster. I would, whenever I could.
Whatever answer I owed her, I didn't have it yet. I only had the certainty driving every stride, thoughtless and total, that as long as she was on my back and moving with me, nothing behind us could touch her.