He opened the door to his truck and stepped in, putting it between us. “I can’t be around you right now.”
I skidded to a stop. “What?”
“You need to stay away from me,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “You know why. Susie Q, those hikers, Abner. I can’t be near you. I can’t take the chance that I could hurt you, too. I couldn’t stand it.”
My jaw fell slack, the indignant anger draining away. “You weren’t a wolf on the night Abner was attacked,” I whispered, well aware of the crowds gathering in shop windows to watch what promised to be the public lovers’ quarrel of the decade.
“We don’t know that!” He slammed his truck door, grabbed my elbow, and dragged me around the corner, behind the buildings of Main Street, until we’d reached the trees that surrounded Grundy. No one would hear us there. No one would see.
Cooper let go of my arm, and the momentum of my body carried me a half-dozen steps from where he stopped. “I can’t remember anything from that night, no dreams, not waking up to check on you, nothing,” he said. “I could have crawled out of the sleeping bag and phased without waking you up. How else could Abner get mauled by a wolf so close to our campsite?”
I protested, “You’ve never done that at home—”
“But I could have! How many wolves do you think were running in that area? When Abner saw me, he was terrified of me. Like he recognized me as the thing that hurt him.”
“You are not a thing, do you hear me?” I insisted. He gave me a long, piteous stare. “You don’t bully Oscar when you’re in wolf form. Every time I’ve been around you while you’re a wolf, your concern has been for my safety. You’ve never snapped at me, even when you were wounded. And you were nowhere near here when those boys went missing.”
Cooper looked at the ground and muttered, “Yeah, I was.”
“What?”
“I was worried about you. I couldn’t take being so far away from you so long, so I waited until the hunters went to sleep, changed, and ran home to check on you. I changed back, ran through the preserve, and got back to the camp before anybody woke up. Then I got back to town and heard that two kids went missing from the preserve, near your house, on the night I was running. I tried to ignore the signs, Mo, but it all keeps adding up.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“It doesn’t matter. As long as there are people being hurt, I can’t see you.” He turned on his heel and walked away. I managed to skirt around him and put my hand against his chest, stopping him—for the most part.
“So, you love me too much to leave me and too much to let me be anywhere near you? Well, pardon me, but that’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.”
“You can honestly tell me that it’s never even crossed your mind that I could be the one doing this?” he demanded. “There’s not some little voice in your head telling you that you need to get as far away from me as possible? You know what I can do, Mo. You know I’ve killed before. You’re not stupid.”
I looked down, and I felt the tears coursing down my cheeks before I realized I was crying. “Yes, OK? Yes. Every once in a while, I think it’s possible that you could do this without being aware of it. But then I look at you, and I have to believe that it’s not in you.”
He let out a bitter laugh. “Well, that’s one of us.”
“What do you want from me, Cooper, permission? My blessing to run off and leave me? Or do you want me to give up, to leave you because you might be hurting people? You want me to give you an out? Well, you’re not going to get it. Let’s just call this what it is. Instead of facing a problem, you’re running again. You talk this big talk about how hard it was to leave your pack, but the truth is that when things get difficult, that’s when you run. Running is easy.”
Cooper recoiled as if I’d punched him. And damned if I could find it in me to apologize for it. With one last look at me, Cooper took a few steps, his clothes landing with a subtle thwump as he shifted midair. After landing deftly on his paws, he disappeared into the woods, his long ululate howl echoing behind him as he ran away from me.
IN MY HEAD, I’D understood that Cooper wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with me. But somehow I expected to see him in town. I thought we would be carrying on the pretense of “parting as friends.” But he kept his promise to stay away. He told our neighbors stories about hunting trips, backpacking expeditions, fishing. Evie seemed to understand that something had happened, but she was too wise to ask me direct questions.
When I stormed back into town alone, our public spar became the topic of choice for gossiping saloon patrons, until Denny Greene sustained second-degree electrocution burns trying to rig up a TV/VCR on the lip of his bathtub and gave them something better to chew on.
Alan was the only one whose focus remained on me, even in the face of Denny’s oddly placed bandages. He took to squeezing my fingers in his while I took down his lunch order. He asked me to movies, to dinner at a new Chinese buffet that had opened in Burnee, to his place to play board games with Buzz and Evie. I appreciated it, but I just couldn’t muster the energy to be social after I left the saloon.
It was as if I’d scheduled my day in terms of “8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., generally pleasant person; 5:05 P.M. to 6:00 A.M., total basket case.”
I put on a brave face. I smiled, I served, I earned my living. I hurt. Either I couldn’t sleep, or I crashed and slept for fourteen hours. I couldn’t seem to eat anything, and the smells of the food I was cooking turned my stomach.
I was reminded of my parents’ more tragic friends, the ones who hadn’t quite gotten past the “if it feels good, smoke it” portion of the free-love era. They’d show up at the commune all jittery and stay long enough to get a decent meal and then amble away. When I looked into the mirror, I saw the same hollow-eyed stare, the unhappy twist to the mouth. Cooper had turned me into a strung-out love junkie.
Convinced I could still smell him in my bed, I bleached my sheets to bone white. I immediately regretted the loss, but it didn’t matter. Cooper’s scent was everywhere, in the mattress, the pillows, stubbornly resisting my efforts to drive it off.
I skipped over several stages of grief and got stuck at anger. In my more vindictive moments, I hoped Cooper was somehow worse off than I was, that he was somewhere curled up in a fetal position, twitching in misery, and I was just feeling an echo of it.
I don’t want him back, I told myself. I don’t need this shit. Even if he came crawling back on all fours, I wouldn’t take him. And an hour later, I knew that if he walked through the door, I’d fling myself at him and forgive him for everything. Back and forth I teetered until I worried that I’d finally cracked, that the depression Cooper’s presence had somehow delayed was flooding in. Maybe this was the life I would have had in Grundy if I’d never learned his secret, if I’d never loved him.
I know, even I wanted to slap myself a little bit.
Irony of ironies, my books on werewolf relationships arrived, having been delayed for weeks by some quirk of the postal system. I don’t know if it was morbid curiosity or a masochistic streak that had me thumbing through guides to successful relationships with were-creatures. But it proved to be a fascinating way to torture myself. For instance, I learned that the Grundy habit of offering a lady meat as a courting gesture was very much in line with werewolf sensibilities. Werewolves marked nearly every important gesture with food—dating, proposals, apologies. If Cooper came back and offered me a ham, I wasn’t sure I could keep from expressing my feelings with a cast-iron skillet against his head.
One night, while perusing Rituals and Love Customs of the Were, I found that most breeds of wolves mate for life. And if one wolf in a breeding pair dies, it can send the other into a depression. The mourning wolf wouldn’t hunt, wouldn’t do anything to take care of himself, until the pack had no choice but to let him die. This made no sense. I wasn’t a werewolf. And I certainly wasn’t part of a breeding pair.
Wait a minute. Breeding pair. Not eating, constant fatigue, nausea, mood swings . . . Mentally, I counted back to the last month.
Shit.
I was late, several weeks late, and I hadn’t even noticed. This didn’t make any sense. I was the contraception queen. To keep up with Cooper, I’d taken to storing condoms in every room of our house. Clearly, Cooper’s swimmers could not be contained by mere modern prophylactics.
Stupid werewolf ninja sperm.
“Oh . . .” My hand dropped to my stomach. I put my head in my hands and gave in to the urge to cry. What could I do? How could I be sure? I couldn’t run into town to buy a pregnancy test. The entire town would know before I checked out at Hannigan’s. Could I even go to the doctor? Would they be able to tell that the baby had a few extra furry DNA strands? Would I have a normal pregnancy? Could I have my baby in a hospital?
When exactly had it become “my baby”?
I wanted to call Evie. I wanted her to tell me that this was all a silly misunderstanding and I’d just skipped a period because of stress. Instead, I scoured the books for everything I could find on human women carrying werewolf babies. There were discouragingly few entries, most of them concerning shortened gestation periods and overwhelming food cravings. Apparently, wolves carry their babies for only three months, so women carrying werewolf babies split the difference at about six months. That sounded really fast. But it couldn’t be all that dangerous or rare, right? Cooper said the wolf magic was carrying on in fewer families because of mingling the bloodlines. Obviously, there were a lot of human women out there having werewolf babies. But somehow I didn’t see myself finding a chat room for them. There was no BearingWerewolfSpawn.com.
I checked.
Shaking, I went to the kitchen and forced myself to drink a glass of water. I hadn’t been taking care of myself for weeks. I couldn’t keep living like this. If things with Cooper didn’t change, I could end up raising this baby alone. Was I ready for that? Was I even remotely prepared? Given my parenting role models, I was going to guess not.
I had to make the conscious choice, right then, whether that would continue or whether I would keep this baby. Whether I would start eating or sleeping again, even if I didn’t feel like it.
I reached into my cabinet for my daily multivitamins, which I hadn’t touched in I couldn’t remember how long. They weren’t prenatal vitamins, but they’d have to do until I could pick some up. I shook one out into my palm and stared at the little yellow tablet. I put it into my mouth, wincing at the stale, mineral taste, and threw back some water to help me swallow it.
Suddenly exhausted, I leaned my forehead against the counter and sighed. “We’re not off to a great start, kiddo.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I drove to the Crescent Valley to visit Gracie and Samson. I thought it would help to see their faces. But the moment Gracie opened her front door, the idea of discussing this mess with someone who really knew what was happening pierced me with a misery so acute I stumbled back.
“I shouldn’t be here.” I stepped back off the porch. “I’m sorry. I should go.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, pulling me inside. “I’m making some herbal tea. It’s a little strong, but it will make you feel better.”
She pushed me into a kitchen chair and put a mug of dark, teak-colored brew in front of me. “It’s strong,” she cautioned again.
“I’m the child of hippies. Your tea doesn’t scare me,” I told her, taking a small sip. The bitter flavors flooded my mouth, puckering my lips. “Gah!” I blew out a breath. “What’s in this?”