C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

“Were transformative.” Morrison’s eyes sparkled, noticing how I’d managed to use his first name, but neither of us said anything, like it was an elephant in the room. “It’s all right, Walker. I got over being upset right around the same time you said I love you.”

It was my turn to blush. I bet we could stand here for a week taking turns at it. “Does that mean you’re going to let me turn you into a wolf again?”

He groaned, turned to the vista, and pushed his hand through his hair. “Do I have any choice?”

“Sure. I could try turning you into a puma or a horse or something, except a horse couldn’t get through the underbrush well and I bet anybody who saw us might take a shot at a puma with your coloring. Ghost puma. Anyway, I think the wolf was your choice, which suggests you’ve got an affinity, so it’s a better idea to try it.” A grin started working its way forward. “Is that your mental image of yourself, Morrison? A lone wolf, standing against the tide of evildoers? That’s very teenage epic fantasy of you.”

He gave me such a flat look I laughed again. “It could be worse.”

“Really. How?”

“ siing againsYou could think of yourself that way and not be a hero.” I kissed him while he looked flummoxed, then got my drum out and beamed at him. “Take your clothes off.”

“What?”

“Take your clothes off. They don’t transform with you. You can carry them once you’re shifted.”

For a while his expression remained steady and patient, like if he waited long enough there would be an explanation as to how he had ended up on the back end of American history about to strip naked and run through the woods as a wolf. When it became clear no explanation was forthcoming—because really, he already knew the answers—he took his clothes off while I fought between watching unabashedly and trying to find somewhere else to look.

Watching won. He folded his shirt into his coat, toed his shoes off and stripped to his skivvies. He had an awfully nice body. Not overdeveloped, but not soft, either. Just right, like Goldilocks’s third bear. He said, “I’m not sure I’ve ever taken all my clothes off outside in broad daylight,” at the same time I said, “You know, I used to think you were kind of soft around the middle, but damn, Morrison.”

Apparently we were both trying to distract ourselves from him taking his underwear off. It worked, anyway, and he sat down on the bundle of folded clothes, saying, “I knocked off ten or fifteen pounds last spring, after I realized the woman I was increasingly interested in was eleven years younger than me. I didn’t want to have a heart attack while she was still hale and hearty, if things worked out there. Your turn.”

“My turn what?”

“To take your clothes off.” He smiled at me. “If I’m going to sit here naked while you bang that drum, so are you.”

I really wanted to find a viable argument, and really couldn’t. Morrison got a self-satisfied smirk as I pulled my shirt off, so I threw it at him. He caught it and folded it along with his own clothes. I muttered, “I don’t think I’ve ever taken all my clothes off outside in broad daylight before, either. Is this one of those things that’s supposed to bring couples closer together?”

Morrison’s voice dropped somewhere below the belt. “That sounds like a better idea than shapeshifting.” Then, in a much more ordinary and amused voice, he added, “I didn’t know it was possible to blush that far down. You’re too thin, Walker.”

I looked down and blushed even farther down. My navel was in danger of turning pink. “I didn’t, either. And I know. I keep eating, but all the shapeshifting really took it out of me.”

“The shapeshifting?”

“In Ireland.” There was a lot I hadn’t told him yet, and naked on a mountainside didn’t seem like quite the right time or place to do it. I started anyway, getting as far as “I,” and then ran into “Oh, hell.” I hadn’t drawn a power circle, and now I was naked. By the time I was done building one, I had moved beyond embarrassment into a comfortable Zen attitude, and clung to it with all my slightly Puritan little heart. Morrison tied our clothes and weapons into bundles, but otherwise watched the whole process with a grin that made him look about fourteen.

The positive upshot of all that was there was a great deal of energy crashing around inside the power circle. Most of it was sexual and anticipatory, but it wasn’t difficult to channel it into shapeshifting magic. I called for Rattler, who awakened with a sense of approval. I wasn’t in the habit of doing things properly, like building power circingiffles and working up energy to help ease a transition from one form to another, but this time I’d done it right and he liked it. That helped, too, and so did Morrison having gone through the transformation process once before. He knew right down to his bones that I could do it, and so his bones were surprisingly willing to adapt to the new shape I poured them into.

There was no drawn-out painful half-man, half-wolf aspect to the change. Shamanic shifting didn’t work that way, and from what I’d glimpsed with Tia Carley, neither did werewolf transformations. It was one, then the other, with little more than a shimmer of magic between the two to mark the transition. My power washed over Morrison in a gunmetal bath and left a huge silver-white wolf in his place. He took a very manlike sharp breath, but otherwise held himself still, becoming accustomed to the new form.

That was much better than the first time, when he’d understandably panicked, given in to the animal brain, and run like hell. Delighted, I put my drum into the bundle of clothes and weapons, then turned my magic inward, slipping into—

Not a wolf shape. Wolves were not my thing. Coyotes were. That hit Morrison like a blow, even in wolf form, and I felt him withdraw emotionally.

Frustration bubbled up inside me. That was twice already Coyote had come between us, even though there was absolutely nothing with Coyote to come between us. And I couldn’t address the problem now, because as far as I knew, even humans shapeshifted into animals couldn’t speak like humans while in the animal form. To make it worse, Morrison gave a cranky snort, picked up his gear and trotted away with it in his mouth, clearly saying, “Let’s get on with it, Walker.”

I was going to bite him as soon as my own mouth was free. Thus resolved, I picked up my gear, too, and we ran into the forests.

My ill temper couldn’t hold a candle to the joy of running headlong through wilderness. We were both enormously large canines, weighing the same as we did in our human forms. The clothes were mildly inconvenient, and my jaw got tired, so the first time we stopped for a brief rest I shifted back to human form. It took a while to repackage everything, but then I slung Morrison’s gun holster on him with his clothes and weapons stuffed into it. He squirmed a bit, but looked more satisfied with the results, so I hung mine on a branch so I could walk into it once transformed. Morrison managed, after some trial and error, to latch the shotgun’s holster around my ribs, and we were off again.

We didn’t change back to human form for two days, instead hunting, drinking and sleeping as canines. Very little disturbed us, and our supremely sensitive senses of smell allowed us to avoid anything that might have chosen to. I had no idea how much distance we covered. My thoughts simplified: we were hunting. When we reached the quarry, the hunt would intensify. Until then, nothing mattered but reaching it.

On the third day, the scent of blood came into the air. Morrison and I both slowed, tasting it, judging it and naming it: human. It was still far off, but we were reaching our destination. Morrison cocked an ear and I shook my head. It was too soon to change back to humans. Too far to go, still. But we would have to be ever-more careful. Our size would make us seem dangerous, and Morrison’s brilliant white pelt would be a prize by itself.