Page 49
“How long have you been back there?” I ask.
He blinks once.
“The whole time,” Mia says. She hasn’t turned around. Her shoulders are shaking slightly. “He was under my coat when I loaded the car. I felt him get in.”
“And you didn’t think that information was worth sharing?”
“I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice.”
I face forward. The fact that I didn’t notice is deeply unsettling. “I’m starting to wonder if the raccoon is more than he seems.”
“He does what he wants,” she says, laughing at whatever expression I’m wearing. “You get used to it.”
Echo finishes the protein bar and deposits the wrapper on the center console between us with the deliberate care of someone leaving a receipt. Or a calling card. Then he climbs forward onto the console itself, surveys the dash screen showing our coordinates, and makes a small sound I choose to interpret as approval of the route.
“He’s navigating now,” I say.
“Don’t give him ideas.”
The trailhead is a gravel pullout off a fire road twelve miles from the nearest paved surface. If Mia’s concerned about off-roading in her nice car, she doesn’t show it. Nor does she slow down nearly as much as I would have expected when we leave the asphalt behind. In a cloud of dust, we park, load our packs, and I check the coordinates against the scout report one final time while Mia stretches her arms over her head and looks at the tree line with an expression I’ve never seen on her before.
Yearning. Hungry.
And I realize with a pull low in my gut that I want her to look at me like that.
Echo drops from her shoulder to the ground, sniffs the air with great authority, and disappears into the undergrowth.
“He'll find camp,” she says.
“You trust a raccoon to navigate old-growth forest?”
“I trust Echo to do whatever he decides to do and for it to somehow work out.” She looks at me sideways. “We have about eight miles to cover. The light’s good for another few hours. Care to stretch your legs a bit before heading to our destination?”
“Lead the way.”
She holds my gaze for one moment. Something passes through her expression that I don’t quite catch before she turns to face the trees.
And strips.
She peels out of her leggings before I can fully check myself and look away. The sight of her curved ass is enough to make me instantly hard. I jerk my head to the right and concentrate on pulling my shirt off. Then my pants.
When I’m done, I stuff my clothes into my pack and zip it again. From the sounds of it, Mia’s already done the same.
I dare another glance at her just in time to watch her shift.
One moment, she’s standing at the trailhead with her pack at her feet, and the next, her wolf is there—deep red, almost auburn in the light, bigger than I expected, though that’s somehow not surprising at all. She shakes herself once, looks back at me over her shoulder with pale green eyes that are entirely her, grabs her pack in her teeth, and takes off at a run.
I shift, my wolf practically bursting out of me, and follow at her heels.
Eight miles through dense forest with Mia’s wolf is an experience I don’t have adequate language for.
She’s fast. Faster than me over the first mile, which costs her nothing and me a great deal of fucking pride. My wolf pushes harder to close the gap, and she feels it and pushes back, and for a long stretch, we’re just running full out; no mission, no strategy, nothing but speed and the mountain air and the forest floor under our paws.
Her wolf is extraordinary. Wild in a way her human self keeps carefully contained, joyful in a way I suspect she’d deny if she could. She takes a creek crossing in one leap that should have been impossible for anyone else.
But it’s not the speed or the joy that undoes me.
It's the moment, somewhere around mile four, when her wolf slows beside mine and simply runs beside me. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of her. Her wolf turns her head and looks at mine with an expression that isn’t strategy or careful management of what she’s willing to give.
