Chapter 2
BAZ
The turnoff to the abandoned town was more overgrown than the last time Baz had seen it. In fact, even with the phone GPS, he would have overshot it if his uncle hadn’t been driving the first truck in their little convoy.
Baz slammed on his brakes, nearly getting rear-ended by the next vehicle in their convoy, a van driven by his twin cousins Declan and Maida.
“Jeez! Warn a girl!” exclaimed his cousin Lexie from the seat next to him, catching herself on the dash. She looked down at her phone. “Man, the road line isn’t anywhere near here. I told you that you should’ve let me drive.”
“I know where we are,” Baz retorted. He took the turn, the truck’s tires jolting on a rutted road.
The old red-painted boulder was still there, but with grass and flowers grown up around it, he hadn’t recognized it at first. “The map is wrong. I guess it’s a good thing your dad knows where he’s going. ”
“I know where we’re going,” Lexie said loftily.
Baz rolled his eyes. Lexie was only about a year apart from him in age, and the two had grown up together, so she often acted more like a pesky little sister than a cousin. “You want to change drivers, then?”
“Are you offering?”
“No,” Baz said.
Lexie looked like she was gearing up for an actual argument, but then he had to slow to avoid a tree hanging low over the road, which had swiped his uncle’s truck as it passed in and out of the patches of sun and shade ahead of them, and she was distracted by the scenery.
“Wow, look how overgrown it is. I can’t believe it’s been so long since we used to come out here as kids. Everything’s grown up so much over the years—the trees, I mean. But also us.”
Baz felt an aching wistfulness for those simpler times. Things used to be so easy, running wild with his cousins on the ranch and the surrounding woods. He and Lexie had been so close. They all had been.
Now they were all grown up, and things were—different. Difficult. It felt as if they were all strangers to each other.
Maybe this would be a fresh start for all of them.
Baz jolted over a rut, and the phone slipped out of Lexie’s hands, bouncing between her feet.
“Careful!” Lexie checked her phone reflexively, then frowned at the screen. “Dang. Service has been cutting in and out, but I just lost it completely.”
“Just now? I thought you lost it years ago.”
She swiped at him with a fist. Baz grinned, ducked, and nearly steered them into a tree.
He wrenched the steering wheel and the truck jolted back into the ruts.
There was an audible clatter from everything lashed down in the truck bed.
The van behind them had to slam on its brakes to avoid running into their tailgate.
“Watch it, boy,” Lexie said, twisting around to see out the back window. “My baby is back there.”
Baz waved apologetically out the window at his cousins, and saw Maida give him the finger out the van’s window. “I think it’s impossible for my driving to damage your bouncing baby motorcycle any worse than you already have with your driving.”
“Cute, very cute.” Lexie checked her phone again. “Nope, still nothing. The mountain must be blocking the cell towers.”
“We wanted to get out on our own,” Baz pointed out.
“This is maybe a little more ‘on our own’ than I was planning on.”
Abruptly the dense forest opened up around them.
The trees had been blocking the light, casting deep green shade across the road.
Now they emerged into sunshine. Baz drove under the old WINDROCK CITY sign, noticing that it looked a lot more weatherbeaten than the last time he saw it, and pulled into the main street.
The old clapboard and log buildings also looked shabbier, although he wasn’t sure whether that was the effects of twenty years of changes, or the difference that came from seeing them through adult eyes.
Lexie leaned forward, excited. “Oh wow, it’s so cool seeing it after all these years! Look, the windmill is still there. I thought for sure it would have fallen down.”
The lead truck in their convoy—driven by Baz’s uncle and Lexie’s dad, Axl Tanner—slowed and flashed its brake lights before coming to a stop in front of the largest building on Main Street.
A faded and weatherbeaten sign read WINDROCK GENERAL STORE.
Baz parked behind him and killed the truck’s engine as the twins drew up behind him in the van.
Lexie opened her door. “C’mon, let’s have a look and see how much of this we remember.”
They climbed out of the truck. It was so quiet that the ping of the cooling engines seemed loud. The only other sound was the twins, Declan and Maida, arguing as they got out of the van.
“You just about scraped off the oil pan on that last rut,” Maida was saying. “Mom is gonna murder us if we wreck the van.”
“It’s already a wreck,” Declan shot back. Both of the twins were dark-haired and dark-eyed, a brooding contrast to the sunnier coloring of the other adult Pinerock Clan kids. “The only reason we needed to borrow it at all is because my car doesn’t have a backseat.”
“No, the problem is you didn’t want to risk that ridiculous muscle car of yours on these roads.”
Uncle Axl leaned against the side of his truck, grinning. Long experience at shepherding the group of rowdy Pinerock cousins through an endless parade of family barbecues, birthday parties, and summer outings had given him a sky-high tolerance for bickering that paired well with his natural calm.
From the passenger side of Axl’s truck, Fern Lennox jumped down in a swish of long skirts and a swirl of red-blonde curls. She ignored the bickering and trotted over to peer curiously through the dirty windows of the general store.
Lexie and Baz stood looking up and down the street. The old buildings drowsed in the sun, as if they were waiting for someone to come wake them up.
“Honestly,” Lexie said, planting her hands on her hips, “I was expecting it to be in much worse shape than this.”
“Yeah, same.” Baz surveyed the town, his gaze distant, picturing not just what was in front of him (decaying buildings surrounded with wildflowers) but what it might be: a busy, bustling small town, with storefronts and parked cars and people browsing at shop windows.
Ever since any of them could remember, the old gold rush town had been owned by a company that was theoretically planning to fix it up and use it as a tourist attraction.
And ever since they could remember, that hadn’t happened.
They used to come out here now and then, like many of the other local kids.
But now, as an adult, Baz was struck by how little damage and graffiti there was for the old town having been the haunt of the local teens for decades.
He remembered how, as kids, they’d always had a sense that they should treat the town respectfully.
The town never had a bad feeling to it, but there was definitely an awareness that they ought to tread lightly in this space.
And now it was their space.
He still couldn’t get over the fact that they actually owned a town.
Well, technically Lexie’s mom and Fern’s mom had put it in a trust for them; both of their families had money.
Now that Baz, the oldest of the kids, was past his twenty-fifth birthday—well past, in fact—the whole place was theirs: lock, stock, and a few old wooden barrels too.
It was going to take some getting used to.
One part of him didn’t need any encouragement. He could already feel the bear inside him straining eagerly. It was fascinated with the wild world full of scents and smells, urging him to shift and look around.
“If you’re not too busy woolgathering, let’s get started,” Lexie declared, jumping up in the back of Baz’s truck, where her dirt bike was strapped in with a bunch of other gear. “Help me get Baby unloaded.”
“I think it’s time to get all of this unloaded,” Axl remarked in a lazy drawl. “Don’t forget, I’m just here as a beast of burden. You all are going to be on your own soon.”
Maida and Declan had wandered up the street, taking their argument with them, but now they came back. “Is there someone else staying here, Uncle Axl?” Maida asked.
“The neighbor comes over and checks on it now and then,” Axl replied. “She keeps the weeds down by grazing her goats around here. You’ll probably meet her sooner or later. Anyone want to take the other end of this generator?”
Declan grasped the opposite handle of the metal case with easy shifter strength. “It looks like the grass along some of the buildings has been trampled.”
“Could be visitors, hikers, deer. Any number of things.” As Baz and Declan took over the generator, Axl handed down a flowered suitcase. “This belongs to someone.”
“Mine!” Fern cried, darting back to grab it.
Soon their gear was stacked in a large pile beside the trucks and the van.
They had brought camping supplies, tools, the generator and fuel for it, cases of packaged food and perishable food in coolers, and jugs of drinking water.
Baz could hear rushing water somewhere out of sight, probably Silver Creek, the waterway that the town and its long-abandoned silver mine had been built around.
But there was no guarantee it would be clean enough to drink in their human forms.
“It really feels like we’re going to be roughing it,” Lexie remarked, propping her dirt bike up against the corner of the general store.
“That’s because you are,” Maida said pointedly.
“Come on, Maidie-May, stay with us,” Fern begged.
“Not a chance. I know the rest of you enjoy having bugs in your teeth and dirt under your fingernails, but I’m fond of running water and refrigeration.”
“Don’t forget cell service,” Lexie pointed out. “We don’t have phone capabilities here, so if we want to get in touch with anyone, we’re going to have to walk or drive down to the highway.”
“And you all want to stay here?” Maida said in disbelief. “Anyway, someone’s got to get the van back to Mom.”