Of Wings and Wolves (8 page)

“Nothing, never mind.” She shook her head to clear it—and to force herself to stop staring at his lips. “Let’s leave. It’s crowded in here.”

He offered a hand to help her stand up. She was already craving the touch of his skin again, so Summer decided to ignore it and get up on her own.

Nash put his sunglasses back on, and they walked outside together.

“Tell me about this internship,” she said as they strolled along the damp sidewalk. He walked so close beside her that their elbows brushed on every other step. “Do you really want a programmer?”

“Yes. Building a new archaeological studies wasn’t mere philanthropy. I obtained parts of computers at a dig a few years ago, and I need someone who can reassemble them and read the data.” He tipped the sunglasses down and peered at her over the edge. “Someone I can trust.”

“Wait, you got computers at an archaeological site? Personal computers?”

“Indeed.”

“But they’ve only been around for three hundred years,” Summer said. “There isn’t any archaic computer your IT department can’t read. I mean, we still learn original machine code in class.”

“Three hundred years old. Are you certain?”

“Uh, yeah,” she said. “It’s kind of my major.”

“If it’s so easy, then you’ll get through the project and take your money home in no time, I’m sure,” Nash said.

Summer rolled her eyes. “Look, you don’t have to make up reasons for me to get to ‘work’ for you. You can tell me the truth.”

“And what’s that?”

“You’re lonely, and you need me,” she said, swirling her finger around the rim of the cup so that she wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. “It’s okay to need people.”

Nash stopped walking. Summer knew that she must have struck a nerve, but his expression remained unchanged.

“You don’t know anything,” he growled.

Her response was interrupted by a sudden flare of gray light. It only lasted for an instant, but it illuminated the entire sky, and Nash’s skin glowed with it.

“Impossible,” he hissed.

A drop of rain plonked on Summer’s shoulder. She lifted a hand to feel for more precipitation. “Relax. It was just lightning. This storm’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

“Go back into the coffee shop and stay there until I come back for you,” Nash said, grabbing her shoulders. When she opened her mouth to protest, his hands tightened. “Trust me.”

And then he was walking away at a fast clip, almost on the verge of a run.

“That guy must really dislike lightning,” she muttered, peering up at the hazy sky. That flash had been unusually bright. It must have been close. Yet the air didn’t have that scorched ozone smell that always followed lightning. She only smelled rain—and Abram.

The growing wind brought a cocktail of scents to Summer’s nose. She lowered the coffee so that it wouldn’t distract her.

She picked something up off of the gusts that came from the forest—something that made the hair lift on the back of her neck and all of her senses go on high alert.

It was definitely her brother, Abram. But his familiar smell was all tangled up with the iron tang of blood, and something frighteningly foreign. It reminded her of Nash, if he were to drench himself in kerosene and ignite his inner flame. A wildfire that was going to devour the world.

“Abram,” she whispered.

He should have been in the art department, elbow-deep in oil paint and turpentine. So why was his smell coming from the forest?

He’s in danger
. She could feel it in her gut.

Her pace quickened. The coffee cup slipped from her hands and the ceramic shattered against cement. Summer’s feet slapped against the ground, clumsy in her shoes, and she kicked them off as soon as she reached the border of grass between the campus and forest.

Another gust of wind blasted her hair out of her face. This time, it didn’t just carry Abram’s smell to her. It brought a cry, too.

He was in pain.

Summer ripped off her shirt and flung it to the grass. The leggings would be too complicated to remove. She could only hope that the hems were weak enough to tear.

She didn’t step into her second skin this time—she leaped.

With a roar, the form of her beast ripped free of her chest, consuming her flesh in an explosion of blood and musky pheromones. Shreds of cotton tangled between her hind legs, but she kicked them aside, and all four paws connected with the ground. Her spine and skull continued to shift as she ran.

Throwing her head back, she loosed a howl into the forest that she knew her brother would hear.

I’m coming, Abram. I’m coming
.

His scream responded to her wolfish wail.

The smell of blood and smoke grew thick until it felt like she had to swim through sludge to keep moving. Summer huffed to clear her sinuses of the damp leaves and sap, then breathed deep again. Abram wasn’t far.

His voice whip-cracked through the forest. “Summer!”

She yipped at him and plunged deeper into the trees.

This part of the forest was as familiar to Summer as her bedroom. She darted between a pair of boulders and circled around the hill as Abram cried out again.

Summer found him in the grassy clearing on the other side of the ridge. She couldn’t see any reason for him to be screaming. His back was pressed against the trunk of a tree, but there was nothing physical to hold him in place.

Yet his shoulders twisted and feet kicked as if struggling against a captor.

“Summer!” he shouted.

She sniffed the air. That smell of a raging fire was much stronger in the clearing. Her instincts said that there was an assailant nearby—maybe even two of them. But she couldn’t see anything amiss.

As she watched, a fresh cut sliced open on his cheek, as if the point of a dagger had been drawn from his nose to his ear. Abram thrashed, but jerking his head away didn’t stop the cut.

What the fuck is going on?

Pain flared in Summer’s ribs. She whirled, searching for the source of the attack.

Nothing.

Blood spilled from her fur, and the fever of rapid healing made her flesh crawl and shake. Her nose was filled with the scent of an enemy. But where was it? She snarled and snapped at empty air.

“To your right!” Abram called.

Summer jumped a moment too late. The next hit smacked her into the ground. Weight crushed her ribs, as if someone was sitting on her.

She bit at the air near her side. Her teeth sank into something soft, a foul taste filled her mouth, and shrieks shattered her eardrums.

The pressure vanished.

As Summer climbed to her feet, the trees whirled around her. Ground and sky inverted. There were clouds under her paws and a halo of rain-soaked earth.

When everything reoriented itself, Summer and Abram were no longer alone in the forest.

There were three young children with them, each no more than six years old. They had button noses, plump lips, and eyes framed by thick eyelashes. But there was no mistaking them for normal kids when shriveled wings hung from their backs and blood stained their claws. One of them even had an injured leg—an injury that looked a lot like a wolf bite. The other two held Abram to the tree.

Summer felt dizzy. What she was looking at should have been impossible.

Denying their existence didn’t make them vanish again.

“Can you see them now?” Abram asked.

She couldn’t respond without a human mouth, so she lunged at the nearest child and slammed her head into its midsection. It alighted, flapping its stubby wings, and didn’t fall. She snapped halfheartedly at its ascending feet.

Summer couldn’t bite a child. Even a child that looked like an unholy mix of raven and human.

The creatures weren’t nearly as hesitant to attack. A tiny fist struck the back of Abram’s skull, and he sagged, instantly unconscious. He fell when they released him.

He didn’t move when he landed.

The bottom of Summer’s stomach dropped out.

Please, just be unconscious
.

That left all three of the creatures to focus on her. They buzzed through the air and swarmed around her with flashing silver claws. She wasn’t ready for it. All the play-fighting with Abram could have never prepared her for such an assault.

One of the creatures pinned her to the ground, knocking the breath out of her lungs. It was too strong to buck, even for a shapeshifter. The others crouched by her head.

Claws descended toward her throat.

A low explosion rocked the forest. Summer thought that lightning must have struck nearby until she saw the dark shape hurtling through the clouds.

A man dropped from the sky and slammed into the dirt between the creatures. Rotting leaves and moss showered over them, the drooping branches shook, and the entire world trembled under his feet.

He straightened and swept his wings wide. Each was longer than he was tall and shone with internal light. Summer’s eyes watered from the intensity. She couldn’t make out his features, but she thought that he almost looked like Nash Adamson.

He slammed one of the creatures into a tree, then tossed another across the clearing as easily as though it were a sack of flour. The third raked claws down his bare, muscular chest, but there was no blood. He seized the creature’s throat and lifted it above him. “Balam,” he spat. The word was unfamiliar to her, but it fell from his lips like a curse. “You don’t belong here.”

It responded in a high, trilling voice that made Summer’s skull ache. That wasn’t a human language.

“If you hurt her again, I will shatter your bones,” the man said, and he hurled in against the ground.

The three creatures took to the air instantly, shrieking in a shrill chorus, and whirled away in an explosion of glossy black feathers. The wildfire stench faded instantly. It was replaced by a much more familiar smell—more like the comfort of a fireplace in a cold winter.

Summer tried to stand, but her legs weren’t working right. She was still bleeding.

How was she going to drag Abram to safety if she couldn’t even get her paws under her?

Her savior folded his wings against his back as he approached, dimming his radiant feathers. Her eyes adjusted quickly.

It
was
Nash. He was as shirtless as the night that she had seen him on the balcony, but the wings affixed to his back were new. She must have been confused from the blood loss. Or she had snapped and started to hallucinate. Or maybe both.

But Nash’s dry chuckle was definitely no illusion. “I thought I told you to go to the coffee shop.”

Summer lost control of her second skin. Fingers emerged from her paws, fur fell away, her nose shortened. It was a lot colder without the protection of dense fur, and her lacerated skin burned.

As soon as she had a mouth, she said, “I thought you said that you’re a human.” She groaned when Nash scooped her off the ground and stood.

“I never said any such thing.”

“What
are
you?” she whispered, struggling to focus on him as her vision darkened at the edges.

The last thing she heard before passing out was a single word: “Angel.”

Then she was gone.

seven

Memories flitted through Summer’s dreams.
Memories of bears, caves, and broken bones. Dragging Abram out of the ravine had been a two person job after he broke his ankle, and Gran and Uncle Scott prioritized getting him to the truck. That left Summer healing in the cave with no company but a dead bear.

It couldn’t have been longer than ten minutes before Summer was healed enough to follow them, but to a nine year old, it felt like months. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the bear’s unseeing gaze as the healing fever wracked her body.

She had never experienced anything like the pain of falling under a bear’s claws, yet she still felt sadness at seeing it dead. A force of nature had been destroyed. Gran had proved herself the real apex predator.

Once Uncle Scott returned with a spare sweater, Summer changed back, dressed, and followed him to the cottage.

Gran had already driven Abram home. She didn’t look angry when she emerged from his room a couple of hours later. “He’s okay,” she said, sitting next to Summer on the couch. “And stop looking like you swallowed a rotten egg, because you’re not in trouble. I reckon your experience was lesson enough.”

But that wasn’t why Summer had been struggling to hold back tears. She leaned her head on Gran’s shoulder. “Are you sorry that you killed the bear?”

“No,” Gran said, stroking a hand over her curls. “But I’m sorry that you put me in a place where I had to.” She still didn’t look mad, but Summer felt as though she had been slapped across the face.

“We’re not normal, are we?” Summer asked, hot tears sliding down her cheeks.

“No,” Gran said. “You’re special. Both you and your brother.” She then kissed Summer’s forehead. “Your life’s a gift, pumpkin. Show a little appreciation for it.”

Summer had healed her wounds
from fighting a bear in minutes, but when she woke up in the passenger’s seat of Nash’s sports car, she still hadn’t healed all of the scratches inflicted by the winged children. Nash’s jacket draped over her wasn’t doing much to protect the upholstery. Blood and fur was everywhere.

He ignored her protests as he pulled her out of the car and carried her up the front steps to his house. Summer curled against his chest, head tucked under his chin and fingers gripping the collar of his damp shirt.

Margaret met them at the door. “Another dress, please,” Nash said, and the maid disappeared to follow his instructions.

“I can walk,” she said as he mounted the stairs.

“And you would surely walk straight out my door. No, I don’t think so. I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”

“But my brother—”

Nash turned his blazing stare on her. “Your brother is fully capable of taking care of himself. The claws of a balam aren’t poisonous to humans. He’ll be fine. You, on the other hand…”

Summer gave a shaky laugh. “You say that like I’m not human.” She felt his throat humming next to her ear and realized that he was laughing.