Cry Wolf (Alpha & Omega #1)(45)

Charles, who was ahead of her because he'd only stopped after she did, glanced out over the wilderness. "Not everywhere, " he said. "The scrublands have always looked like scrublands. This spring I'll take you out into the Missions, and we'll do a little technical climbing. If you're enjoying this, you'll love that." He'd been watching her, too, she thought, if he'd seen how much fun she was having.

"The Missions are even more spectacular than these- though they're pure hell if you are really trying to cross them. Straight up, straight down, and not much in between. Not that this is going to be easy, either. By the time they started setting aside wilderness areas, the only wild country left was pretty rugged."

He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a granola bar. "Eat this." And he watched until she pulled off a glove to rip the package open and gnaw on the carob-coated bar before starting on one for himself.

"You're a bit of a mother hen," she told him, not sure whether to be irritated or not.

He grunted. "If you were human, you'd be feeling this cold. It's only a little below freezing now, but don't underestimate the weather. You're burning a lot of fuel keeping warm, and you aren't up to fighting weight to start with. So you're stuck with me shoveling food down you as fast as I can for the duration of this trip-might as well get used to it."

Chapter EIGHT

"We started later than I thought we would," Charles told Anna. "But we've made pretty good time anyway. Baree Lake is still a mile or so away, but we'll make camp here before it gets dark. The wind's blown most of the last snow off the trees, and the branches will shelter us from any snowfall tonight."

Anna looked around doubtfully.

Her expression made him laugh. "Trust me. You'll be comfortable tonight. It's getting up in the morning that takes some fortitude."

She seemed to accept his assurance, which pleased him. "When will we go by the place Heather and Jack were attacked?"

"We won't," he told her. "I don't want our scent anywhere near there. I want us to look like prey, not any kind of official investigators."

"You think he cares one way or the other?"

Charles took off his backpack, set it on a rock that stuck out of the snow like a whale rising out of the ocean. "If he's really a rogue defending his territory, no. If he's here to cause trouble for my father, he won't attack people who look like they might carry word of his work out to the world."

She followed his lead and set her pack up out of the snow. He pulled a packet of raisins out of the pocket in his arm-the last packet he had handy, so he'd have to restock for the morning. She took it with a put-upon sigh, but opened it anyway and started munching.

With Anna occupied eating, he took a moment to examine his chosen campsite. There was a better one near the lake; he'd intended to reach it sometime in the early afternoon and give Anna the chance to rest up. It wouldn't be the first day of hiking that got to her-he had some experience taking other greenhorns out into the mountains. It would be the third or fourth.

But the first rule of playing in the woods was to be flexible. They could have made it to his first pick before dark, but he thought that giving her some time to rest after the first hike was more important.

He'd slept here before, and the rock hadn't changed since he was a boy. The last time...he thought about it for a minute, but he couldn't pin it down. The bushes on the side of the rock hadn't been there, and he could see the stump of the old Douglas fir that had sheltered him from the east the last time he'd been here. He put his toe against the rotten stump and watched the wood crumble. Maybe fifty years ago, or seventy.

Charles laid down a ground cloth but didn't bother setting up the backpacker's tent. As long as the weather held out, he had no intention of making them that vulnerable to attack. He seldom used tents if he didn't have to-and never if he was out hunting something that might hunt him back. The tent blocked his vision, muffled sounds, and got in the way. He'd brought it for Anna, but only if necessary.

The old fir was too wet to be good fuel, but there were other downed trees. A half hour of hunting gave him a generous armful of dry wood coaxed from the corpses of a couple of old forest monarchs.

Anna was perched up on the big rock next to his backpack when he returned, her snowshoes leaning against the base of the rock. He took off his own and set about building a small fire, conscious of her eyes on him.

"I thought Indians built fires with friction," she said when he took out a can of Sterno and a cigarette lighter.

"I can do that," he said. "But I'd like to eat sometime in the next day or so. Sterno and a Bic are much faster." They were all right again, he thought. It had started when she fell asleep in the car, but throughout the whole hike up here, she'd been relaxing more around him. Until, during the last few miles, she'd grabbed his coat several times to point out this and that-the tracks of a wolverine, a raven that watched them from a safe perch in the top of a lodge-pole pine, and a rabbit in its winter white.

"What would you like to eat?" he asked her after he'd arranged the fire to his liking and put a pot of snow on to boil.

"No more jerky," she said. "My jaw is tired of chewing."

"How about sweet-and-sour chicken?" he asked.