Wolf Song (Wolf Song Trilogy #1)(4)

“Thank you,” he’d said, his voice deep, but soft as a weeping willow bud.

She hadn’t known what to do. But her playful nature took over. She pelted him with a black walnut.

His mouth cracked, his lips quirking upward. He had a lovely smile, like sunlight suddenly bursting through dark, forbidding storm clouds. One that sent hot tingles rippling through her in places she’d never been warmed.

He’d grinned up at her. Or at least in her direction. Her heart clenched.

He’d touched her soul. She recognized a kindred being. She could no more stop watching him now, stop coming to his glade, than she could cease to soar in the bright wind, against the wide blue heaven in her favorite guise. The raven gave her the freedom she craved. Escape from the suffocating hold of her ever more greedy family.

When he finished building his shelves during those first weeks, he once again positioned the small baubles she had dropped. Again, in precise rows, no trinket misaligned…as if he needed tangible proof he could bring order to some part of his world. He built shelves for the interior of the cabin, too.

Gee seemed pleased the next time he visited.

“Progress,” he’d said. “You’re making a home.”

“I can live here,” the youth said. “I don’t hear voices. Just beautiful songs.”

“One day you’ll need pack. As they will need you. You will have to return.”

Ah, so he was wolf.

“Maybe.” He’d shrugged. “But not now.”

The older shifter nodded. “Get strong. Let the spirits of these woods speak to you. They have much to impart. Learn from them.”

Gee showed him a martial arts technique called t’ai chi ch’uan, part stillness, part meditation, all physicality.

“Focus. Become one with what you hear, what you see, what you sense. Use it. Control it.”

The three hundred-pound bear had lumbered through the lithe holds and movements comically, but Brick took to them easily. He practiced for hours in the quiet after dawn or the gray, gloaming time at dusk, barefoot on the dewy grass, bare-chested, dressed only in loose black drawstring trousers, holding his poses for lengthening periods, his body striated and rippling with muscles.

Gee visited less and less. The youth spent long afternoons hiking and exploring the hills and woods, then returning to the cabin to whittle animals and figurines on his porch. Sometimes whole woodland scenes, no bigger than a large man’s fist. She admired his artistry.

Eventually, he gathered up his handiwork, carefully placed the objects in a tin box, and then ventured away from the cabin. He started going into a town. Not Los Lobos, though, where she suspected he came from, where the Black Hills Wolves pack held sway. But into Shady Heart, on the other side of the mountain, where her cat shifter family ran the county, sprawling outward from the somewhat seedy business district like an oil slick on the ocean.

When he’d come home after that first foray, he no longer had his carved pieces. The next day he gathered fallen branches of green wood and began anew.

After one trip to town, he’d returned with a battered old truck. She wondered if one of her relatives had sold the rattling junker to him. Cheated him, maybe. Another time, he came back drunk, followed by a hard-looking woman who tumbled from her car, wobbly on her feet. One of the easy floozies from her Uncle Cal’s place, she was sure. Males from miles around, both human and shifter, knew they could pay for pleasure—or anything else they craved—at the Graymarket Trading Company Saloon and Casino, Cal’s palatial den of decadence and iniquity in Shady Heart—which was not shady in the leafy meaning of the word, and had very little heart to speak of.

Black eye makeup had streaked the female’s cheeks, circling her eyes like a raccoon. Too much blush, too much lipstick, too little dress. Definitely one of Cal’s flock. Human, probably. Too graceless to belong to Clan Goldspark, their mountain lion clan. And Summer hadn’t recognized her.

How much had Brick paid for her?

The woman stumbled toward him, grabbing onto his arm.

Summer had swooped down with a brittle cry and flapped around the painted female, until the woman shrieked in terror and threw her arms up to shield her face. Then she left a sticky deposit in the whore’s teased hair and soared away. The soiled dove scrambled back into her car and sped down the mountain. Brick never brought another woman home.

The following day, when he emerged from the cabin, rubbing his temples as if his head hurt, she’d peppered him with black walnuts. He held up his hands in surrender.

“You can’t be jealous, Annabel Lee.”

So he’d given her a name, had he? She liked that. She’d rained another batch of walnuts down on him, but more playfully. He caught some. Juggled. Standing in his clearing, looking up at the sky, tossing walnuts in the air and laughing. He had a deep, rich laugh. His laugh grew even deeper, richer over time. He fed the teasing, carefree, whimsical aspects of her nature. She looked forward to playing with him, to their game with the walnuts.

But not as much as she now looked forward to him removing his shirt.

One day, years earlier, he’d sat on his porch rocker whittling, whistling a little off-key, pausing to glance up occasionally, as if he knew he were being watched. A mischievous smile quirked his lips upward. When he finished, he placed a beautifully carved figure of a wolf on the railing.

She hopped down to take a closer look. His best work yet. The detail stunned her, the knife strokes on the body making each whorl of hair of the creature’s furry coat distinct. The expression around the eyes, the mouth, one of wonder and bemusement, and just the right amount of devilry. Like Brick’s own. Hinting at the shaggy scruffiness of the carver in human form. She coveted the tiny sculpture. Wanted to grasp it and soar away, to hide it in her tree house for her and her alone. He’d winked, as if he knew.