“There’s a cap on the chimney to keep birds and weather out,” Inga said. “I’m going to climb up there and take it off.” She pointed to what he had taken for a wall. “That’s a window with a board over it. You should find a hammer on the windowsill. Can you work on that while I do this?”
“Do you need help?” Luke asked.
“No, I’ve got it. It’ll only take a minute.” She gestured to a bucket beside the door. “I’ll get some water while I’m out. There’s a spring nearby; it’s one of the reasons my parents chosethis spot. You’ll also find some clothes and bedding in a sealed tote under the bunks, if you want to—you know. Get dressed.”
She opened the door. There was some squawking from knee level and Inga’s sharp exclamation of “No, you can’t come in!” and then the door closed on the ongoing clamor.
Luke found the hammer and discovered that the board was held on with a couple of loose nails. While he peeled it off, he heard scuffling on the roof, and then Inga called down, “It’s all good! You can make a fire whenever you’re ready. I’ll be back with the water in a minute.”
Although it had been some time since he had laid out a fire, it came back to him easily. He placed some smaller sticks on top of the magazine pages, and was surprised and pleased when it caught almost immediately. Then he was less pleased when smoke billowed out. After fiddling with the different moving parts of the stove, he found a chimney damper that was closed, also evidently rusted or stuck, but it let go and opened up when he banged on it with his fist a couple of times.
After feeding it a few more pieces of wood, he closed the small iron door in the front of the stove and limped over to drag out the tote from under the bed. Totes, actually; there were two of them. One held bedding, and the other, as she had said, contained clothing—plain workman’s clothes, sized for a big guy. Most of it would fit Luke easily. He shed the slicker and changed into loose work pants and a man’s cable-knit sweater.
His feet ached and stung, but when he cautiously investigated, he was slightly unnerved to find that cuts which he was positive he had received only this evening had already sealed and stopped bleeding. He ran his thumb lightly over a bruise that had faded to brown even though he was pretty sure it had happened a couple of hours ago.
I’m a monster.
But no—Inga wasn’t. Though he only had her word that she was like him. Except—not like him. He had been forced into his present circumstances, while Inga seemed to come by hers naturally.
Maybe that was what made all the difference.
INGA
In full dark,Inga found her way to the spring using the stark, sharp-edged clarity of shifter night vision, disregarding one of the trash griffins (the raccoon one) that followed her.
It was a relief to make her escape, for a short time, from Luke’s all too compelling male presence and the equally compelling questions that he raised. She had never met anyone quite like him. He clearly was a shifter, yet didn’t really act like a shifter. She had noticed him stumbling in the dark, but didn’t think too much of it—the path was rough, his feet were bare—until realizing that he appeared to lack the keen night vision she and her family had always possessed.
Could there be differences like that among shifters? The only other shifters she had spent a lot of time around, or talked to about it much, were her brothers and other friends in Westerly Cove, primarily Wyona and Nita, the seal shifter sisters. Now that she thought back on it, she hadn’t noticed Luke inhaling the night air as she did habitually, sifting through those scents which she was able to distinguish in human form.
It shouldn’t be surprising that there were some shifters who might be night-blind, or nose-blind. Perhaps some of them were less completely adapted to their shift form. Could he be an urbanshifter, perhaps? Inga had heard there were differences between them and the rural shifters who were able to live more closely with their animal side.
A familiar hint of woodsmoke reached her. She turned to look at the light streaming from the cabin’s single glazed window. At least he didn’t seem to be put off by the crude accommodations. Whatever else Luke might be, he was stoic and brave and evidently not one to simply lie down and give up.
And she was wildly curious how he came to be on a deserted stretch of rocky beach with a dog.
The spring was just as she remembered it, clear and clean, framed in a rocky casing that she remembered helping build with her brothers back when all three of them were young enough that this kind of work was play rather than feeling like yet another chore. Even though she suspected, in hindsight, that their dad had set them working on it to give them something to do and stop the complaints about being bored.
The old tin camp cup still hung on its hook above the spring. Inga dipped a cupful and drank deeply of the icy cold water, then filled her bucket.
The raccoon griffin at her feet got tired of watching her and apparently decided she wasn’t going to drop any candy bars or fast food wrappers. It clattered its beak and waddled back toward the old seagull nest into which she had deposited the griffin family to settle in for the night.
“I guess I’m going to have to name you all if you stay, aren’t I?” Inga said aloud. She had no idea how to tell the sex of the adult griffins, or even if they were a mated pair at all; for all she knew, scavenger griffins raised their young in groups and these were two unrelated members of the flock who had been swept up in her boat trip. She suspected from their behavior that they were the parents, however.
She looked down at the cove, glossy in the starlight. Memories of those trips surged in her with painful-sweet nostalgia. Their dad’s fishing boat, theCodfather, would be moored down there. He usually slept on board, sometimes with one of the youngest children, while the others slept in the cabin that was also where the group prepared meals and hung out to play cards or read when it was too inclement to be outside.
In her earliest memories, there were faint hints of the warm, elusive figure known as Mom. The fishing shack was still informally known among the Nilsson kids as “Mom’s cabin,” and her dad called it Anna’s Place. Her grandparents on Mom’s side had built it, and her parents used to come out together all the time when they were first married. She knew from her dad that Mom had loved it out here.
But an icy road and a crash while driving to St. John’s had claimed her mom on a winter day long ago. It was an old grief, worn soft and smooth by time. She missed her mom, but she had never really known her. As long as Inga could remember, except for a few scattered recollections from her earliest childhood, it had been just her brothers and her dad on those long-ago summers in the cove.
They had all reveled in the freedom of being somewhere remote enough to shift with impunity. Even in Westerly Cove, they had to be careful of tourists and neighbors who weren’t in on the shifter secret. At the cabin, they never had to worry about it. She remembered scampering after big brother Tor on her stubby legs as a tiny, toddling cub. When they were all a bit older, with the leggy energy of teenage polar bears, they would swim and wrestle in the cove, hunting for fish and cheerfully dunking each other.
Right now, though, far from experiencing the easy peace she normally felt in this place, she had the strangest feeling she was being watched. Unable to explain the crawling sensation on theback of her neck, Inga looked first to the griffins, but they had settled down in their nest. The door of the cabin hadn’t opened, so it wasn’t Luke or the dog.
She had learned not to discount that kind of feeling, which was frequently the instinctive surroundings awareness of her inner bear. As she slowly scanned around her, Inga looked up.
There was a polar bear looking down at her from the top of the hill.
She only glimpsed it for a moment, and when she sucked in her breath, it vanished so suddenly that it seemed to simply ghost away into thin air—though she knew it must have merely disappeared below the edge of the hill.
