Carrie Vaughn - Kitty in the Underworld

“Is it just one person or a group? Did they seem lost? Are they looking for something?”

Tom said, “It wasn’t enough to make a trail, not anything I could track. It was almost like they circled around for a while. Maybe they were looking for something.”

“And it was fresh?”

“Couldn’t be more than a day old,” he said. “It was pretty strong—I wouldn’t have called if it was just a trace.”

I blew out a breath. This could be nothing—someone passing through, getting lost. Or it could be someone with bad intentions. A scouting mission for an attack at some later date?

Either way, I couldn’t ignore it. If things went well, we might have a new friend to talk to. If not … I had a territory to defend. I started cleaning up in preparation for leaving. I wanted to go there to take a look.

“Just out of curiosity,” I said. “What were you doing out that way?”

He paused a moment, then said, nervous, “Um … just going for a hike…”

“You shifted, didn’t you? Went out for a run?” “Going for a run” was a euphemism among werewolves. Tom grumbled a perfunctory, unenthusiastic denial. “Why exactly did you do this? Full moon’s not for a week.” Six days, actually. I kept count. We all did.

“I’m not hurting anything,” he said, and I could almost see him pouting. “I didn’t get in any kind of trouble.”

We had to shape-shift on the night of a full moon, but we had the ability to shift anytime we wanted. Or we shifted when we were stressed, angry, frightened, in danger … yeah. Part of why we formed packs was so we could watch out for each other. We could gather on nights of the full moon, shape-shift together, make sure we stayed safe—and didn’t do anything that might get us in trouble, like hunting people. We could take care of each other, so we didn’t shift uncontrollably at other times. Solo shifting kind of defeated the purpose.

“Tom. You know better than that.”

“Seriously, I’m not hurting anything. I can handle it.”

If I sounded like an irate parent, he sounded like a teenager. I trusted Tom; he was smart enough to go to a remote spot if he was going to do recreational shape-shifting. Of everyone in the pack, he was probably the one who most enjoyed being a werewolf—who reveled in the power and exhilaration of running on four legs, feeling the wind in your fur, hunting for the taste of fresh meat …

Most of us tried to ignore how good being wolf made us feel.

“Why don’t you just tell me that you had a suspicion something was wrong and went out to patrol under your own initiative?”

“Okay, then. I went out to patrol because I thought something might be wrong.”

“Fine. Okay. Good work, then. I want to check it out. I can be out there in about an hour. Can you wait for me and show me what you found?”

“I’ll be here.”

We hung up and I looked around at my paper-strewn, chaotic office. This could wait another day. Going to see what Tom had found was more important.

I CALLED Ben. His phone went straight to voice mail, which I expected. He was probably in a meeting. I left a message explaining what was happening and that Tom was with me, because Ben would worry if I was on my own. He’d worry anyway, but he’d be reassured that I wasn’t running off alone. Then I drove into the mountains to meet Tom.

Denver lay near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains—the Front Range, which rose from the Great Plains like a wall of sandstone and granite. I turned the car onto I-70. The freeway climbed, curving around hills, until I was in the mountains proper. Within half an hour, pine-covered slopes surrounded me. In the dead of winter, I rolled down the window so I could smell the sharp, icy air, laden with the scent of snow and forest. The wind whipped strands of my blond hair out of my ponytail and into my face. South-facing slopes and hillsides were bare of snow, green with conifers rising tall. North-facing slopes had a carpet of white. I’d managed to miss ski traffic heading to the resorts farther west.

Soon enough, I reached the Georgetown exit and pulled off onto the frontage road, and from there to the road that wound into the mountains. Then came a couple of narrow drives, then dirt roads. I felt like I was traveling through time, from the height of civilization to some nineteenth-century village, to wilderness. I ran into patches of ice and snow, but my little car with its snow tires handled the road okay.

On full-moon nights, we rotated between half a dozen semiremote spots in national forest land in the Rockies, or out east on the plains. They had to be close enough to Denver that we could drive there in an hour or two, but far enough away from people that we weren’t likely to draw attention or cause trouble. A set of USGS topographic maps marking service roads helped us pick our spots. The best ones had sheltered areas where we could bed down for the rest of the night, open spaces where we could run, and plenty of prey. Deer and rabbit, usually. That was the true purpose of shape-shifting and running on full-moon nights: blood. The need to let our wolf sides loose; the desire to kill that we could only restrain for so long. This one night, we had to send our howling songs to the moon, and let our claws and teeth tear into the weak.

I found Tom’s car, a compact SUV parked on the side of the road by a pine tree. I pulled my hatchback in behind his car, then followed his scent through the trees, around a rise, and into a clearing. Tom stood on a slope patched with half-melted drifts of snow, leaning on a tree and looking out into the next valley. He wore jeans and no shirt, and went shoeless. He must have called me as soon as he’d woken up after his time as a wolf and dressed just enough to appear decent. In his thirties, he was as fit and rugged a man as a red-blooded girl like me could hope to gaze upon.

“Hey,” I said, coming to stand beside him. I touched his shoulder, a confirmation of contact, a wolfish gesture of comfort and identity. Relaxing, he dropped his shoulders and pressed his lips into a smile. He turned his gaze away, a sign of submission to the alpha of his pack.

“Do you smell it?” he asked.

Stepping away from him, I tipped my face up, found a faint, vagrant breeze, and turned my nose into it. The smells here were thick, layer upon layer of vivid life and wild. I had to filter them out, ignoring the omnipresent smell of trees, forest decay and detritus; the myriad trails of deer and skunk and fox and squirrel and grouse and sparrow, no matter how they piqued my appetite; and more distant scents of mountain snow, an icebound creek.

And there it was, acrid and alien, standing out because it so obviously didn’t belong. Wolf and human, bound together, fur under the skin—and something else. There were two distinct scents. I recognized the second one, but I understood why Tom hadn’t. This scent also gave me the tangled mix of fur and skin that indicated lycanthrope, but with a feline edge to it, both tangy and musky, making me think of golden eyes and a smug demeanor. This one was female. The wolf was male.

“That other one’s a were-lion,” I said. “They’ve been through here, but they didn’t stick around.”

“Were-lion,” Tom said, furrowing a brow. “Really? And they’re together?”

“Dogs and cats—sign of the apocalypse. They didn’t mark or anything, did they? Just walked on through, like they’re scouting without being threatening. You think?”

“No clue,” he said. “But it’s making me nervous.”

“That’ll teach you to go off Changing and running by yourself.”

“Give me a break,” he muttered, but his body language was all apology: shoulders slouched, making him look small and sheepish. If he’d had a tail it would have been tucked between his legs.