Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Miranda
The wolf in front of me has Grayson’s eyes.
The gold isn’t amber, but the eyes are his.
The fur is gunmetal gray at the ruff, lighter along the muzzle, dark at the tips of the ears, and he’s the size of a small horse, bigger than a dog has any business being, standing in front of my chair with steam rising off his coat in the cold air.
My grandmother’s voice surfaces inside my head, sudden and complete.
The beasts who wore human skin. I haven’t thought of the stories she used to tell me in years.
But right now, facing an impossibly large wolf, I do.
I recall her soft voice, the secrets in her eyes, the mischievous laughter in her voice as she used to whisper tales of wolves who weren’t wolves.
The memories I had only faintly recalled up till now are roaring back so vividly.
She used to sit on the end of my bed with one hand smoothing my blanket, telling me about men who could shed themselves like coats, who walked on four legs when they wished, who could love a human woman so hard the world rearranged itself to fit them. To me, it was always a fairy tale.
Pushing up onto my knees, my injured arm cradled against my ribs, I feel the porch boards cold through my jeans. The wolf doesn’t move. He waits, head lowered to my level, low huffs of breath fogging between us.
“You’re really in there,” I whisper. His ear flicks.
Lifting my hand, I watch his gold eyes track its approach. My fingers are almost touching the side of his jaw when his head tilts and his tongue swipes hot and wet up the entire side of my face.
I let out a startled cry. He does it again, on the other cheek this time, then drops his front paws onto my thighs and pins me back against the chair.
“Stop it!” I swat at his enormous head with my one good hand while he licks me with enthusiasm.
My hair is going to need professional intervention after this is over.
“Stop it, Grayson!” I complain, trying to turn my head away. “You’re slobbering all over me!”
He doesn’t stop, having decided this is his moment.
Somewhere behind the shock and the slobber, there’s another thing happening, something quieter.
A small, warm thing wakes up low in my chest and stretches—not fear, not surprise, more a recognition with no words attached, a current running underneath my skin.
Some sleeping part of me has cracked an eye open and gone oh, it’s you.
“You’re not a dog,” I gasp, shoving at his shoulder. “Stop acting like one.”
He huffs against my throat, which I’m pretty sure is wolf for make me, then mercifully steps back, padding in a slow circle before dropping to the boards beside me with his chin on his paws. I sit there breathing hard.
The bottle has rolled to the edge of the porch. My braid is half-undone and wet on one side, my arm aches where the stitches pull, and I’m sitting on a wooden porch at ten at night beside a wolf bigger than the kitchen door. The world hasn’t ended.
I reach over to touch him. His fur is denser than I expected, coarse on top, soft underneath, and a low, pleased rumble moves through him when I run my fingers along the ridge of his shoulder.
“You’re very pretty,” I murmur.
His head snaps up. The look he gives me is so deeply offended I burst out laughing. His gold eyes narrow, and his ears pin back, the picture of a man who has just been called the wrong thing. He huffs once, sharply, and stands up.
“What’s wrong with that?” I’m still laughing. “You really are pretty.”
The air around him distorts, the space he occupies folding in on itself for half a second, fur receding, bone resetting, and then Grayson is standing in front of me on the porch with no clothes on whatsoever. I yelp and slap a hand over my eyes.
“I’m not pretty,” he announces.
“Oh my God.”
“Pretty is for the bouquets you arrange. I’m not pretty.”
“Can you put some clothes on, please, right now.”
“I’m handsome at minimum, striking on a good day.”
“Grayson.”
I hear him chuckle and the rustle of fabric.
Through the gap between my fingers, I catch the line of his hip as he steps into his pants, the muscle moving along his stomach as he reaches for the button.
My face is so hot I could fry an egg on it.
I press my palm flatter against my eyes and breathe in through my nose, willing my blood pressure down.
“You can look now.”
I peek. He has his pants on, but his chest is still bare, and his hand is held out to me. I take it. Grayson pulls me to my feet, careful of my arm, the warmth of his skin hitting me sharper now that I know what’s underneath.
His face looks the same. Same jaw, same mouth, same scar at the corner of his eyebrow he won’t tell me how he got. The same man who hands me coffee in the mornings and complains when I steal his pillow.
“My grandmother used to tell me stories about people like you.”
His head tilts. “When you were little?”
I rub my good arm absently. “I always thought she made it up.”
Something behind his eyes sharpens. “Your grandmother must have been involved with a pack,” he says slowly. “Humans don’t tell those stories. They don’t know enough to.”
“She disappeared when I was twelve.”
He goes still.
“My mother said she was gone, and we weren’t to look for her.” I shrug with one shoulder because the other pulls at the stitches. “I was a kid, so I assumed she’d died. My mother wouldn’t talk about it.”
Grayson is quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks again, his voice has gone gentle.
“Humans who get involved with our kind sometimes get pulled into the territory of the pack they’re attached to.
If she was loved by one of us, that pack would have taken care of her with or without your family’s knowledge.
From the outside, it would have looked like a disappearance. ”
The breath leaves me in a slow exhale. For twenty years, I’ve imagined my grandmother walking out of her house in a coat and never coming back, pictured her in some city alive and choosing not to find us, pictured her dead in a ditch.
What I never pictured was a place under trees somewhere with people standing around her who knew how to say goodbye properly.
“Oh,” I say.
I sit down on the chair heavily, and Grayson lowers himself into the chair beside mine, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. The porch is quiet around us. Down by the tree line, something rustles and goes still.
“So what are you really, wolf or human?”
“The honest answer is complicated.”
“You can try me.”
His mouth pulls. “There’s a creation story we tell. A human and a wolf spirit fell in love, and out of that union came the first of us.”
I narrow my eyes. “No, they didn’t.”
“You’re right, they didn’t.” He’s grinning at me now. “I just wanted to see if you’d buy it.”
I shove his good shoulder with mine.
“My kind was around before humans were. We weren’t wolves who learned to walk. Something else came first, and we took on this form because the world started filling up with you, and looking like you was useful.”
“You’re terrible at storytelling.”
“I’m a hockey player. Storytelling wasn’t in the contract.”
I laugh into the cold air. He’s watching me. I can feel it.
“What’s that look for?”
“You’re taking this better than I thought.”
I turn the bottle between my palms. It’s empty. “I’m just relieved to know the truth.”
“Yet I would expect some reaction.” He studies me.
I open my mouth and don’t know what to tell him because I don’t understand it myself. When I saw him in his wolf form, something in me resonated, and it all felt so right. Fear didn’t have room in my head or heart.
“Maybe I’m strange,” I finally offer.
He reaches over and tucks a piece of damp hair behind my ear, his thumb lingering at my jaw a second longer than the motion needs. “You’re plenty strange, but I like you that way.”
“So what does it mean for your biology?”
He blinks. “What are you asking about?”
“I mean your biology. You said your blood is different. What does that mean for how you heal, your senses, all of it?”
A laugh shakes out of him. “Only you would ask that.”
“I’m a nurse, Grayson.”
“Right.” He scrubs a hand over his jaw. “We have the same blood as a human at a glance with a few small differences only a lab would catch. We heal four or five times faster than you do, depending on the wound. There’s natural strength, though not as much as the movies would have you think.
Our senses run further too, mostly hearing and smell. ”
“And the eye thing is what, exactly?”
“That’s emotion, when the wolf surfaces. Usually it’s anger, but not only anger.”
I nod, turning it over in my head. “What’s a pack, exactly?”
“There are several in the region. Mine is Silverpeak. All the private property in the forest belongs to us.” He gestures vaguely. “Coach is our alpha.”
“Which pack does Vanessa belong to?”
He stiffens at the question. “She’s Crimson Rock now, after leaving Silverpeak when she married Brent. Different territory, different rules.”
“Oh.” I pull my knees up to my chest as carefully as I can with the stitches. The flannel rides up over my ankles, and he watches me arrange myself without comment. “So we really are from two different worlds.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
The picture stays in my head a moment. “Can Ethan also shift?”
“He can’t yet, but he will eventually.”
A smile climbs onto my face before I can stop it. “I bet he’ll be cute as a wolf.”
“He’d better be.” Grayson’s mouth tilts. “First shift should make him roughly the size of a full-grown golden retriever, maybe a little smaller. Pups always come out underestimating themselves.”
“That’s why you’re so strict with him on the boundaries thing.”