Shifter's Moon (Paranormal Shifter Romance) (2 page)

             
“Yeah,” he answered. “Anyway, listen Jordan, I was wondering if you could drop by the apartment maybe once a week.  I didn’t really think things through.  I just realized my plants are probably going to die if I’m not there.” He massaged his temple where a headache was beginning to throb.

             
“Sure thing, bud.  You just take as much time as you need,” Jordan replied.

             
“I owe you one, thanks,”

             
“You think getting off the grid will give you some inspiration?”

             
“I don’t know.  Maybe.  I just need to decompress, y’know?”

             
“Do I need to worry about you?”

             
Jake let the question hang in the air for a moment.  The trees suddenly cleared away and he could look down at the Oregon Coast.  A slow traffic of waves beat against the wide lip of a white sand beach.  He unconsciously pushed his foot down harder on the gas, felt the small car’s engine click irritably.

             
“I’m fine, really.  I just needed to get out, away from everything,”

             
“What should I say if she asks me about you?”

             
Jake grimaced.  “Nothing,” he said sullenly. 

His hands tightened reflexively on the steering wheel and he tried to close his mind to her.  It was a defense mechanism, and something he’d trained himself to do until it had become an art.  In the back of his mind he knew it wasn’t the healthiest way to deal with problems by bottling them up, turning off his emotions altogether. 
But there are less healthier choices too
. 

Alissa’s face flashed behind his eyes.  She had left a hole in him, and he had sewn it closed with rationalizations about how he was okay. 
Do I actually believe that,
he thought.  It’d been almost three months since their split, but it still weighed heavily on his mind.  There was a rarely a day where he hadn’t at some point encountered something that would trigger a memory of their lives together.  Part of him hated himself for having vested so much in another person, but another part of him knew that no matter what happened he’d loved her once, and that meant something.

             
“Listen, I’m losing the signal and my battery is about dead.  I’ll try to phone you tomorrow,” he said and pulled in at a cross-road by the rail-tracks.  His tires crunched under the gravel as he wound his way through a steep valley that was lined with ferns.

             
“Will do. Take it easy, bud,” Jordan said and the line went dead.

Jake fished in the breast pocket of his open shirt and pulled out a small scrap of paper with an address on it.  Up ahead he saw a white sign that read “Barrelgrove”.  He felt a little knot of panic creep into his stomach.  It had been nearly twenty years since he’d been back, and he was surprised at how familiar the old road seemed to him.  He reached down and took another sip at his coffee.

He barely had time to hit the brakes as he swerved around a slippery corner and saw a huge black dog standing in the center of the road. It was only reflex that saved him from plummeting into the swamp below.  He pulled hard on the steering wheel and the tires fish-tailed on the loose gravel, coughing up a huge cloud of pale dust. The car shrieked and bounded off the side of the bank, caving in the left side of the car.

“Shit,” Jake said, slumped over the steering wheel.  He opened the door and made several dizzy footsteps around the front of the automobile.  He rubbed his brow where a small goose-egg was already forming from where he’d hit the edge of the steering wheel. 

Serves me right for not wearing my seatbelt.

The headlights on the left side were crushed, but he was thankful that the rest of the car looked relatively unfazed.  He turned his head blurrily back down the road and saw the dust slowly settling around a large shape.  It wasn’t a dog at all, and his muscles tightened as he made eye contact with a large black wolf.  Her head was hung low and her eyes gleamed like fine slivers of topaz.

             
“Oh, Christ,” Jake gulped, and slowly moved toward the open door of his car.  The wolf cocked its head and seemed to regard him with a mixture of curiosity and tentative worry.  “Just making sure I’m not dead?” Jake shouted at the lupine figure.

The wolf lifted its head, and he saw at once how elegant and graceful she was.  The sunlight seemed to absorb into the smooth glossy fur of her head and her slender muzzle parted to reveal the sharp fangs of a predator.  Then, just as quickly as she’d appeared, she disappeared behind the bend in the road and was gone.  Jake reluctantly got back into his car, half-expecting to see the wolf come around the bend again, and started the engine.

Several kilometers down the road he pulled into the gas station that hedged the city limit of Barrelgrove and nodded at the whiskered owner who came out of the convenience store in a filthy jumpsuit, wiping at his hands with a handkerchief.

             
“You lost, son?” the mechanic chirped, the sparse white of his hair catching a slight gust of wind.  His knobby fingers cracked as he wiped fastidiously at the grease stains on his hands.

             
“Actually, no.  I’m heading up to the old Windsor place.  But I had a bit of a brush back on the road,” Jake said, getting out and buttoning up his shirt.  His tan muscles gleamed in the remaining sunlight which painted everything a vivid sort of orange.

             
“Windsor place, eh?” the mechanic said, rounding the car and looking at the damage to the headlight with a matter-of-fact candor.  “You a relative?”

             
“I’m his grandson,” Jake said.

             
“He was a good man.  Far as I know, the cabin’s just the way he left it.  I think Lia checks on it every so often, you know, keep the squatters out, tidy it up now and again.”

             
“I was kind of expecting it to be a dump, to be honest.  Who’s Lia?”

As if on cue Jake caught movement out of the corner of his eye and saw a young woman stroll out of the garage.  She was very thin and had on a similar pair of blue jumpers streaked with oil and grease.  Her black curly hair was tied back and flared out like a bunched cloud behind her. He could make out the definition in the muscles of her bare arms.  She gave a nod to the old mechanic who pointed absently at the busted headlight, and she strolled over, hardly acknowledging Jake.

             
“Where you been?  I don’t give you a whole hour for a lunch break,” the mechanic grumbled.

             
“This is the first customer all day, Larry,” she shot back, and kneeled down. “Looks like a pretty clean break. I can look and see if we have some extra parts.”

             
“This fella’s moving into the ol’ Windsor place,” Larry said. “Sorry I didn’t catch your name, son?”

             
“It’s Jake.”

He noticed the young woman stiffen at the mention of his grandfather’s cabin and she lifted her gaze toward him.  Her small round face dipped into the small teardrop of her chin and he was surprised at the darkness of her features.  Her caramel cheeks were high and sloped gently into the graceful arc of her full lips which remained firmly together.  Jake felt a lump grow in his throat as the woman stared him down, and the ferocity behind her eyes had an almost animal quality to it. 

             
“This is Lia,” Larry said, wiping his mouth, “Listen, how ‘bout you head up to the cabin.  Me and Lia’ll try and find a spare headlight in the meantime. I’m sure we have something lying around here, then we’ll come up there tomorrow some time.  Whaddya say?”

             
Jake nodded.  “That’s fine,” he said, but his attention was centered on Lia.  There was something both ominous and compelling about her.  She couldn’t have been much younger than he was, but she held herself with a poise that put him off-balance.

             
“Just out of curiosity, what’d you hit?” Larry inquired.

             
The image of the large black wolf flashed in Jake’s mind and he rubbed at his temple again.  He hadn’t realized how tired he was.  All he wanted was a stiff drink and the chance to put his feet up and try to forget the past three months.  “It was a wolf.  Can you believe that?”

Lia stood up, her thin frame catching the reflection of the setting sun.  “You should be more careful.  These roads aren’t like driving in the city, you can’t go speeding up and down them so recklessly,” she said, and there was a flat and uncompromising levelness to her tone.  He couldn’t get over the darkness of her large eyes.  Under her gaze he felt uncomfortably naked.

Jake frowned.  “I wasn’t speeding,” he replied defensively.  “Besides, a huge mother of a wolf is the last thing I expected to see out here.”

“You would be surprised,” Larry said, and put his hands in the pockets of his jumper. “You said you used to come here?  I’m surprised you don’t know about the wolves.”

“What do you mean?”

The old man scratched his beard.  The rusty sound of crickets coming awake in the grass began to punctuate the dying light.  He seemed to be trying to remember something, or else deciding whether or not Jake deserved to hear it.  Finally, he cleared this throat. “Just old legends, you know, every town has them.  Goes that there used to be a family that moved here, but they weren’t quite ordinary.  They were what the natives used to call shifters.”

Jake raised his eyebrow.  Lia’s gaze hadn’t drifted from his own.  “You mean werewolves?”

Larry continued, his words scratching from his throat.  “Well, that’s what Europeans tend to call ‘em.  But that’s a bunch of hokey.  These were just ordinary folk for the most part, just so happened that every once in a while they’d head into the woods and become… something else.  The legend goes that this family was being hunted.  No one knew who or what was hunting them, but they’d come here looking to live in peace.”

“So the legend goes,” Lia said.  There was a mocking cadence in her voice which irritated Jake. 

“Anyway, folks round here at the time were fine with it.  Considered wolves sort of a good luck charm.  So, that’s pretty much it.  Whenever you see a wolf round these parts, folks say it’s a spirit of that family, still watching over the town.”

             
“I’ve never heard that legend,” Jake said, and felt a warning chill run under his shirt.  The final twitch of sun peeked between the branches of a tall fir tree behind them.  “I suppose I should go and check the damage to the cabin before it gets any darker,” he joked, and Larry nodded at him with a dismissive wave.

             
“It’s not damaged,” Lia said softly and he turned ashamedly.

             
“I didn’t mean-… I just, I didn’t realize anyone had been taking care of it,” he said, “Larry told me that you’re sort of the unofficial grounds keeper.”

             
“Yeah, well, no one else is gonna do it,” she said. 
She really has a tough edge to her
, he thought.  There was a lingering suspicion in her expression.

             
“That was my off-hand terrible way of saying ‘thank you’,” he said, offering a smile.

Her expression shifted just slightly enough to let him know she was accepting the olive branch, but she kept the stiff upper lip and nodded at him the same way Larry had.  Jake grinned as she turned and strode back into the garage, her full hips swaying unconsciously with each step. 

Chapter Two

Larry hadn’t been exaggerating the condition of the cabin, and Lia had done her best to keep it just as Jake remembered it as a child.  His headlights plowed through the dark as he idled up the narrow driveway between the ghostly remains of an old fence-line.  Up ahead the cabin’s elegant timber frame seemed to rise against the backdrop of night sky like a singular black pillar.  To the east a small river emptied into a large pond, and as he climbed up the old weathered steps to the front door he could make out the haunting cry of a loon on its surface.

             
Inside the cabin smelled like smoke and dried fruit, and a wave of memories swept over Jake.  He had never been particularly close with his grandfather, and yet the memories he had of the old geezer were fond.  He’d been a bit rough around the edges, but Jake figured that was the old man’s way of trying to teach him independence.  He walked to the fireplace and found some logs and kindling already waiting for him.  Arranging the wood in a tent shape like his grandfather had taught him, he had a fire going in the old stone hearth in no time, and a solemn glow seemed to settle on the furniture.

             
“Guess I owe you one, gramps,” Jake said, stretching the knots in his back from the long drive up, and wandered into the kitchen.  When he saw the liquor cabinet tucked in against the far wall he selected a strong whiskey and poured himself a glass.  “Now I
really
owe you one
,
” he said, raising the glass and settling down in the big chair in the living room.