BrightBlueMoon Read Free Page B

hike back together, both human. “Let’s go.”
    She let him take her hand, though her fingers felt tense, curling in on themselves instead of twining with his.  
    He held on as they walked in silence, the journey back longer – or so it seemed – than their original hike. By the time they reached the edge of the woods and approached Jack and Mandy’s cabin, she still hadn’t said a word.
    No one else was back yet – Mandy met them at the door, alone. With a twinge of guilt, Michael remembered Jack’s instructions to howl if necessary.  
    “Well?” Mandy’s eyes – blue, just like Michael’s – were wide as she held the door open, letting them in.
    He’d notify the rest of the pack after he got in touch with the authorities.
    Kimberly pulled her hand from his, drifting across the kitchen area, taking a glass from a cabinet and filling it at the tap.
    “We found the hiker,” he said as matter-of-factly as possible. “Fell over an overhang – broken neck maybe… He’s gone. Sorry.” Why was he apologizing? The word didn’t cut through the tension that hung in the air like fog, didn’t make it any easier to watch Kimberly drink her glass of water, staring straight ahead at the wall instead of at him or Mandy.
    “I’ve got Ronnie’s number,” Mandy said, picking her phone up from a nearby counter. “He wanted to know if we found anything. Here.” She dialed, then handed the phone to him.
    Michael took it and explained what they’d found, right down to the bite marks that had been left on the man’s arms and shoulder. Saying it all out loud felt callous, somehow. When the conversation was over, he surrendered Mandy’s phone and went outdoors, stripping and shifting, calling to the others with a howl.
    The animal sound felt right in a way words hadn’t since he and Kimberly had discovered the body.
    “Would you like something to eat?” Mandy appeared on the porch, holding the front door open as Michael lingered near the cabin porch, dressed and bracing himself for the coming conversation. “I have some cookies in the oven, and there’s other stuff in the fridge.”
    He turned toward his daughter, a glimmer of brightness skittering over the surface of his mind as he laid eyes on her. “I’ll have one of those cookies, since you went through the trouble of making them.”
    He didn’t have much of an appetite; a sense of foreboding gnawed at him in a way hunger didn’t. It wasn’t just the hiker, though his death was regrettable – he’d seen plenty of dead bodies throughout his life, human and shifter alike. The war between his extinct pack and the Gruen clan of shifter hunters had seen to that.
      It was Kimberly.
    Seeing the body had shaken her, even if she didn’t say so out loud. He could see the subtle signs of her distress, could smell it on her when he was in his wolf form.
    He shouldn’t have taken her along for the search, shouldn’t have let her see the body. But what else could he have done? The gap between them was still too wide for him to tell her what was best, and he wouldn’t have tried to control her like that anyway. She might not be a wolf, but she was his mate – his equal – as far as he was concerned.
    Had she ever seen a corpse before, outside of funeral services? He didn’t know, didn’t dare to broach the subject in front of Mandy. But later…
    “Michael.” Kimberly appeared on the porch, arms crossed beneath her breasts. “Why don’t you come inside? Mandy’s taking the cookies out of the oven. They’re your favorite – chocolate chip.”
    Her voice and the mention of the past drew him in like a moth to flame despite the fact that he’d intended to wait outside for the others.
    Nearly thirty years had passed and she still remembered his favorite type of cookie. Their time together had been brief, but steeped in the sort of passion that made memories last, hardwiring them into the mind. He remembered so many things about her and what she liked