SEVENTEEN

After an hour, I faced it: I wasn’t going to sleep. My body felt exhausted and restless, and my mind kept racing from one conundrum to another. Lying with my eyes closed, I had spent nearly forty minutes worrying about free-roaming manitous the way I used to worry about nuclear meltdowns at the Indian Point power plant. Trying to think about something else, I’d fretted about how close I’d come to being raped, and then agonized about how close I’d come to killing someone. From there it was a short jump to questioning whether I was in control of my hormones, which led me to pondering the state of my relationship with Red. At this point, I would have given anything to just go wolf and stop thinking, but whatever the good sheriff had given me had inhibited the change. It had also taken the edge off my desire, but it hadn’t taken it away completely. Which made me think that what I really needed was some mindless activity to soothe my nerves and quiet my brain.

If Red did walk through the door, I thought, I was going to rip his clothes off first, and ask questions later.

Throwing off the covers, I sighed and reached for my glasses. There were times when I really missed having a television set. You could live a fairly modern life without electricity—as Red pointed out, most people in Ireland and Wales and parts of England had been doing without it until long after World War II. But you couldn’t watch television, and at the moment, I wanted the distraction of talking heads.

I picked up the biography of Jane Goodall that I was currently reading, but couldn’t focus on the words. Throwing the thick hardcover onto the bed, I paced restlessly from one side of the cabin to the other, wondering where Red was, and what he was doing out on a cold Friday evening in January. Rocky the raccoon was missing, too, but of course, I’d been expecting that.

Knowing it was futile, I still checked all of Rocky’s hiding places—in between the sheets and blankets in the armoire, in the cupboard with the good plates, in the bed next to my pillow. But he was gone, and there was no recent scent of him. Maybe, I thought, he’d run into the woods that night and just never returned. Maybe he’d found an older raccoon to mentor him.

Or maybe Red had caught and killed him for a late-night snack. Which made me wonder, once again: Where the hell was he?

From her perch atop the armoire, Ladyhawke watched me with one golden eye. For the first time since she’d come home, she didn’t attempt to pull out my hair when I passed by, and when I glanced up at her, she cocked her head in a way that seemed almost endearing.

“Do you want me to pet you?” I’d seen Red do it, but hadn’t dared attempt it myself. Yet suddenly, I felt sure that all I had ever needed to do was approach the bird without fear or hesitation. And after my night of misadventures, I felt in need of a little creature comfort. Well, what I really needed was to be held and stroked until my nerves stopped jangling, but even a soft touch would be soothing. Reaching up to scratch the one-eyed raptor’s chest, I said, “You’re really quite a lovely bird,” just as her beak closed on my finger. We both screamed at each other, and there was a little explosion of feathers as I took a swing at her.

“That does it,” I snarled. “Out! Out!” I opened the front door, and a gust of wind blew in a dusting of snow. “Go on! Fly on out!” I held the door open, but Ladyhawke just gave an aggrieved shake of her feathers and then hunkered down into herself. I took a broom from the closet and tried to shoo her off her perch, but Ladyhawke just retreated, squawking furiously.

“Fine,” I said, glaring at the puffed up bird, who glared back at me just as fiercely. I closed the door on the swirling snow. “But you come near me, and I’ll twist your birdbrain head off.”

Ladyhawke squawked shrilly, causing me to think unkind thoughts about my absent lover. If he’d had to turn feral and kill one of our house animals, the least he could have done was go for the annoying one.

Still cursing the bird, I ran some cold water on my finger and wrapped it in a wet washcloth. Luckily, the skin hadn’t been broken.

Collapsing back onto the bed, I wondered what Lilliana had wound up doing. Heading back to the city, presumably, wishing she’d never gotten herself involved in my problems. I thought about calling her, but realized that my cell phone was still in my purse, which was still in the limo, along with my new clothes.

Oh, well. At least we wouldn’t lack for things to talk about when we got together again.

Reaching over, I looked through the other books on my bedside table. I always liked to have three books going at once, and in addition to the Jane Goodall I was reading Middlemarch and an erotic thriller that involved the Russian mafia and a lot of flimsily justified bondage. Opening up the thriller, I started to read a scene in which the anguished heroine is tied to a beam by the moody hero, who mistakenly believes she is working with the bad guys.

Impatient, I flipped back to a previous scene, burrowing under the covers as the hero dragged the heroine into a bedroom with a hidden camera. Slipping my hand under the waistband of my sweatpants, I tried to relieve some of my tension, with no success. I didn’t want to be touching myself, I wanted to be touched. I didn’t want the gentle knowledge of my own fingers, I wanted to surrender myself to somebody else’s hands.

Maybe if I just slipped off the sweatpants. Perspiring with the effort, I managed to get myself even more wound up, but release remained tantalizingly out of reach.

Closing my eyes, I found the right rhythm and was just closing my eyes when someone pounded on the front door. My first thought was that it was Red, and my heart began pounding in excitement and trepidation. And then, as I hastily pulled my sweatpants right side out and shoved my legs back inside, I realized that Red would have had a key.

“Who is it?” The reply was muffled by the wind, but my hearing was still more acute than usual, so I knew the answer.

It was Hunter. My almost ex-husband.

I pressed my hand against the wood of the door, torn with indecision. I hadn’t been alone with Hunter in over a year, and part of me wanted to speak to him again. We had dated in college, drifted apart, become friends and roommates and finally married, and nothing in our long, amicable history had prepared me for becoming adversaries. Sometimes, in my fantasies, I asked Hunter how we had come to this. In some versions, I imagined that we managed one last transformation and became friends again.

But the reality was that there was no explaining away Hunter’s betrayal, and no possible reconciliation. With Magda by his side, Hunter had broken into my mother’s home and hurt her. If I hadn’t prevented them from taking it further, I don’t believe they would have stopped themselves. Hunter might blame his behavior on the disease—it wasn’t me, honey, it was the beast talking—but I knew that he’d never liked my mother. Maybe you never really knew a man until you’d met his wolf.

From the other side of the door, I heard Hunter’s voice calling my name again. “Abra, I know you can hear me.”

“What do you want?”

There was no reply, and against all my better judgment, I opened the door a crack. “Hunter? What is it? Why did you come here?” Then I saw why he wasn’t responding.

His sharply handsome features bestial with the nearness of the change, Hunter gazed up at me with pain-dulled eyes. He was slumped awkwardly on the ground as white flakes of snow settled on his dark head. Despite the cold, I could smell blood, thick and fresh, the blood of something wounded but not yet dead.

Crap. Just what I needed on the night my hormones went into overdrive: my lying, cheating, seductive bastard of an almost ex-husband. “So,” Hunter said, “are you going to let me in, or watch me bleed to death out here?”

Red always says that when someone offers you two unpleasant choices, select a third. But the wind was whipping up the snow as it fell, obscuring the line of trees just twenty feet away, and I couldn’t come up with any other options. Not bothering to hide my irritation, I dragged my former husband over the threshold.