Chapter 30
G et up.
Buck awoke with a start. “Honey?”
She murmured something, nestling closer against his side. Her eyelids fluttered, then stilled.
Buck rubbed a hand over his face, trying to figure out what had woken him. From the faint light visible through the curtains, it was coming up to dawn. He must have slept through most of the night.
And in my own body too. Huh.
He looked down at Honey. No real need to wake her up, he supposed—unless you counted his own. He imagined sliding back under the covers, running his tongue all the way down her curves until he tasted the sweetness between her thighs…
It was a tempting thought, but he shook it off. Something was nagging at him, pulling on the edge of his mind. Not a voice, or the familiar bite of pain in his scar. Just a feeling, an urge to…
Get up.
Anyone who spent any time working on a wildfire crew learned to pay attention to those nagging little warnings.
He automatically sniffed the air, but there was no hint of smoke.
Still, a feeling of wrongness plucked at his senses.
And he hadn’t lived to retirement by second-guessing his subconscious.
Honey stirred as he got out of bed. She mumbled a sleepy, indistinct, “Buck?”
“It’s probably nothing.” He bent over to kiss her cheek. “Go back to sleep.”
He dressed quickly, pulling on his boots.
Dragging the desk away from the door would have made too much noise, so he went out the window instead.
The sky was just starting to shade to pale mauve at the horizon, but to his eyes, it might as well be mid-day.
He frowned, scanning the sleeping camp for any sign of trouble.
That way.
He couldn’t have said what made him turn toward the woods. His assessing gaze swept the forest—and snagged on a faint break in the undergrowth.
Honey’s trail , he realized. She’d told him how she’d taken a roundabout route through the woods to reach his cabin, avoiding the paths. Had she managed to shake Ignatius off her tail?
Maybe that was what was bothering him. Buck set off into the woods, following the faint traces of her passage.
He’d always been a pretty good tracker, even before he'd been bitten.
Now, to his unnatural senses, each bent twig and scuff in the leaf litter might as well have been outlined in glowing neon.
“Damn it,” he said under his breath. If he could follow her trail this easily, no doubt most shifters would as well. He did his best to obscure it, obliterating the faint imprints of her bare toes under his own heavy tread.
Still, she seemed to have been successful at losing Ignatius. He got all the way back to the actual trail before picking up any sign of a second person—a smaller footprint, ridged by the sole of a sneaker.
Feeling faintly ridiculous, he squatted, inspecting the footprint.
He hadn’t the foggiest idea what kind of shoes any of the campers wore—apart from Archie, because he’d lost count of the number of times he’d had to find the damn things after the kid got too excited and furred up without getting undressed first. Still, something told him that the footprint had been left by Ignatius.
He sniffed again and scowled. Right. That’s how he could tell.
Since there was no way in hell he was going to crawl around with his face in the dirt like a damn dog, he stood up.
He strode down the path, scanning the ground.
It was harder to spot signs on the hard-packed earth than the virgin forest floor, but after a while he was rewarded with another faint sneaker-print. It pointed uphill, away from the camp.
Good. That meant that when Honey had diverged from the path and circled back through the woods, Ignatius had carried on. He must have eventually figured out that she’d given him the slip. In all probability, he’d assumed that it was because she’d shifted into her wolf form. Her secret was safe…
… so why did he still have that nagging feeling of unease?
He stared at Ignatius’s trail. That telltale footprint, heading up the mountain…
And no footprints heading back.
“ Damn it!” He lifted his voice. “ Ignatius!”
His bellow bounced back at him from the tree trunks. Apart from that, there was no other response. Buck swore under his breath, breaking into a run.
“Ignatius!” he called again. “For the love of baby bunnies, kid, don’t tell me you’ve finally found your dragon and flown away… Ignatius! ”
He didn’t dare sprint flat-out, in case he missed a clue. He stuck to a lope only slightly faster than a normal human could run, searching the surroundings for any sign of the kid.
Even with all his senses on high alert, he almost went straight past it—a faint deer trail, just worn enough that in the dark a kid might mistake it for the continuation of the hiking route. There wasn’t so much as a bent twig, yet some instinct told him Ignatius had gone that way.
Buck was beginning to harbor some unpleasant suspicions about the real source of that instinct, but there was no time to think about that now. With a growl of irritation, he let that not-so-mysterious sixth sense guide his feet. The kid couldn’t have gotten that far, could he?
Apparently he could. Either Ignatius had been determined to spy on Honey, or—more likely—he had gotten thoroughly lost. His trail wandered through the forest, heading vaguely up the mountain, getting further and further away from any form of civilization.
He was well beyond the borders of the camp now. Buck drew up short as he realized exactly how far beyond. He knew most of Thunder Mountain like the back of his hand, but there were places even he didn’t go.
At least, not without invitation.
“Shit,” he muttered.
He was tempted to keep following Ignatius’s trail anyway, but that was asking for trouble. Relations between the camp and its nearest neighbor had been strained in recent years. Bad enough that Ignatius had trampled across that invisible boundary without compounding the offense.
Buck stuck two fingers in his mouth. He whistled sharply, and waited.
Just as he was beginning to fear there was no one at home, his sensitive ears picked up incoming hoofbeats. A glimmer appeared through the trees, like a lost star. Lit by that shimmering light, a tall gray form stepped onto the path, barring Buck’s way.
Wonderful . Just when I thought this morning couldn’t get any worse. Him.
“Hello, Alder-in-Winter,” Buck said without enthusiasm.
His least favorite unicorn regarded him with equal displeasure. *Male Deer.*
Buck grimaced—more at the unpleasant sensation of someone else speaking in his head than at the over-literal mangling of his given name. The unicorn’s telepathy always felt like dry leaves brushing the inside of his skull.
“Need to ask you a favor,” he said. “One of our campers slipped out last night. I think he might have accidentally wandered into your neck of the woods.”
Alder’s ears flattened. *Slight Breeze gave me his word that no humans would approach our boundaries.*
Not for the first time, Buck wondered why Alder’s magic—which let the unicorn speak to anything from people to pillbugs—consistently fell down where it came to names. In his less charitable moments, he suspected the motherlover did it on purpose.
“First of all, Zephyr doesn’t know a damn thing about any of this, so don’t try to pin the blame on him,” he said. “And second, there’s no need to clutch your pearly horn in horror. The kid’s a shifter. You know damn well that humans aren’t allowed at the camp.”
Alder snorted, black-rimmed nostrils flaring. *A human is a human, whether they walk on two legs or not. Being able to change form does not change one’s nature.*
“Look, I didn’t come here to have a philosophical discussion,” Buck snapped. “I know how you feel about outsiders tramping through your land, but I need to find the kid. Are you going to give me permission to cross your border, or are we going to have a problem?”
Alder’s gray eyes narrowed. He was damn big for a wild unicorn. They mainly tended to be dainty things, but Alder would have outweighed the average elk. A lot of muscle lay behind his pointy end.
Try it, motherlover. A long, silent growl rumbled through his head. For once, Buck didn’t try to push the beast back. He matched the unicorn’s hostile stare, not backing down. Bet that fancy horn would make a real good lightning rod.
Alder must have had much the same thought. The unicorn dipped his muzzle in a grudging nod.
*I will allow you to retrieve your errant youngster.* Alder turned, long black tail flicking in irritation. *But I will accompany you at all times. Quickly, now. The rest of the herd will be awakening soon, and I will not have a stray human alarming our foals.*
Privately, Buck thought the foals were likely to be considerably less alarmed than Alder himself. The younger members of the unicorn herd had always shown considerably more curiosity toward their two-legged neighbors than the more conservative herd elders.
But he couldn’t really blame Alder for being wary of humans, or even shifters.
The unicorn herd hadn’t always lived on Thunder Mountain.
Their old territory had been destroyed a decade ago, and it was only thanks to the efforts of the Thunder Mountain Hotshots—Buck’s old wildland firefighter crew—that the herd had survived at all.
Alder was old enough to remember the bad times, and how close his people had come to extinction.
It was no wonder that he wanted to keep their new home completely isolated from the outside world.
Unlike shifters, unicorns couldn’t pass unnoticed in general society.
Their magic let them conceal themselves somewhat, but a whole herd of pure white ‘deer’ was still odd enough to raise awkward questions, if any human caught a glimpse of them.