Born To Be Wild Read online

  Josie spoke softly to Bill as she led him through the back of the clinic to a small room with cabinets on one wall, sophisticated-looking equipment on another, and a third lined with assorted sizes of clean metal cages. Eli could see that most of them were empty, but in the bottom row, the largest of all the cages was nearly hidden by a monitor and IV stands. A twin-size air mattress complete with pillow and rumpled blanket lay a little to the side. Behind the wire door, the still form of the injured Lupine lay on a thick fleece blanket, her eyes closed but her side rising and falling steadily with her breathing.

  “Oh, Goddess, no. Not my Rosie,” Bill groaned, throwing himself to his knees beside the cage. He made distressing little whimpers as his hands fumbled for the latch. “Rosie, baby, come on. Look at me. It’s Billy. Rosie! Rosie, can you hear me, sweetheart?”

  Josie bent down beside him and gently brushed his hands away so she could open the cage herself. “She had a minor bullet wound on her flank, Bill, but we stitched that up with no problem. The more serious issue was some internal bleeding. I had to operate to see where it was coming from and to get it stopped. I had to take out her spleen, but she should do just fine without that.” She opened the door and laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “She’s probably still sore, so you’ll need to be gentle with her.”

  Bill nodded frantically, but his eyes stayed locked on Rosemary. As soon as the barrier between them shifted, he lay down next to her, half in and half out of the cage. One elbow propped up his torso beside her, while he reached for her with the other, his shaking fingers tenderly ruffling the fur just behind her jaw.

  “Aw, Rosie, baby. Look what you’ve done to yourself. My poor girl.”

  Josie looked over her shoulder at Eli and grimaced, a sentiment he wholeheartedly shared. It was almost painful to watch the Lupine’s obvious grief and concern. But as touching as Bill’s reunion with his wife might be, they really needed him to answer some questions. Like, who might have wanted to shoot at Rosemary? Why were her injuries not healing? Why was she still unconscious? What kind of infection could a Lupine have contracted without showing any of the usual signs of illness?

  Eli cleared his throat.

  “Bill, we’re so sorry that Rosemary was hurt,” Josie said before he had a chance to speak, “but we are taking very good care of her—”

  “Then why is she in a cage?” Bill demanded, glaring up at her through watery, red-rimmed eyes. “She’s not an animal! Why are you treating her like an animal?”

  Eli saw the look of hurt that flashed across Josie’s face and felt a snarl of irritation tickle the back of his throat. He wanted to smack the Lupine for talking to her that way, but sheriffs weren’t allowed to go around assaulting people. Even the ones who showed disrespect to their mates.

  “Dr. Barrett isn’t treating your wife like an animal, Evans,” he bit out, his voice low and perhaps a bit snarly. “She’s treating her like a patient. In case you haven’t noticed, her clinic isn’t exactly fitted with beds and TVs.”

  Josie shot him a glare, then softened her expression for the Lupine. “Mr. Evans, I feel just as bad about where I’ve had to put Rosemary, I assure you. I would love to see her in a real bed at the clinic, but unfortunately, Dr. Shad has been out of town this weekend, so he hasn’t been able to take over her care. I’ve done the best I could, but she does need to be kept quiet and still while her body heals.”

  “She should be healed already. What did you do to her?”

  That time, Eli did step forward. “I’m going to suggest you watch your tone, Bill. Dr. Barrett hasn’t done anything to Rosemary that didn’t need doing. She has taken excellent care of your wife, and I’m sure she will continue to do so. Neither of us has been able to explain why Rosemary hasn’t healed, or why she hasn’t shifted. In fact, I think the doctor was kind of hoping you’d be able to help us figure that out.”

  Bill deflated at those words and shook his head. “I—I don’t know. I can’t think why not. I mean, it’s instinct. If you get hurt, the first thing you do is shift. It usually feels like hell, but it also takes care of most of the problem. That’s kid stuff. She should have done it as soon as she was hit.”

  Josie frowned. “Was Rosemary sick at all in the last week or so, Mr. Evans? Did she have a cold or the flu? Anything like that?”

  “Lupines don’t catch colds, Dr. Barrett. We’re immune to them. We’re immune to almost everything that makes humans sick. And I haven’t seen Rosie sick a day since I’ve known her. That’s been twelve years now.”

  “Because if she was already sick, if her immune system were somehow compromised, that could explain the slow healing,” Josie insisted. “It might even explain the lack of shifting, if she just felt too weak to go through that.”

  “I’m telling you, she wasn’t sick. Not ever. She’s as healthy as I am.”

  Eli took hold of Josie’s arm and pulled her back from the cage. “All right, Bill. We had to ask. Would you like to spend a few minutes with Rosemary?”

  “I’d like to stay with her. Stay the night. She might wake up. She might need me. I don’t want her waking up all alone in a cage. It’s just not right.”

  “I understand how you feel, Mr. Evans,” Josie began, “but I just don’t have any place to put you. I slept on the air mattress last night, but believe me when I tell you I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. I’d be happy to call you—”

  The Lupine’s expression turned mulish. “No, I have to stay with her.”

  “Mr. Evans, I honestly—”

  “I can crawl into that cage with her,” Bill interrupted. “I won’t mind. It’s big enough for the two of us in wolf form. And I promise I’ll be careful of her tubes and stuff. We don’t get stupid just because we change shape. I can be careful.”

  “I’m sure you can, but—”

  Eli nudged her with a knee. “C’mon, Doc. Let him stay. He can keep an eye on her so you won’t have to sleep on the floor again, and maybe his presence will help bring her around. You never know.”

  “It’s totally unorthodox—”

  “Please.”

  Josie gave in with a sigh. “All right, but you’re going to have to promise not to touch her monitor or her IV. She’s on an antibiotic in case there is some kind of infection, and until I know for sure that there isn’t, I don’t want the treatment interrupted. The last thing she needs is to develop an unknown resistance to an unknown bug.”

  “Sure.”

  “And you have to be up, out of the cage, and dressed by six o’clock. I don’t want my staff finding you still here in the morning and freaking out.”

  “I promise!”

  The vow barely made it through his teeth before Bill scrambled to his haunches, bowed his head, and shifted, shaking off layers of cloth to reveal thick fur. It happened so fast that Josie looked dizzy from the change. She made a strangled sound of protest when Bill the scraggly, buff-colored wolf climbed carefully into the cage with his mate and curled up against her back. He nuzzled her ear and gave a tender lick to the neat line of stitches on her flank before laying his muzzle gently over her shoulder with a heartfelt groan. Even the veterinarian in Josie didn’t try to stop him, though, and Eli thought that was the important part.

  He tugged at her sleeve and nodded toward the door. “Come on. Let’s give them some privacy.”

  He could see her medical training and her emotions warring inside her, their battle plans broadcast in those chocolate-dark eyes of hers, but in the end she sighed and followed him back through the swinging door to the triage area.

  “Well, at least we know who she is now,” Josie said, sounding as if she lacked a certain amount of the excitement she thought appropriate.

  “There is that,” Eli agreed, but his mind was already flipping through a million questions that Bill hadn’t been able to answer.

  He wanted to talk to Rick some more, so that was a third call he’d have to make, and tomorrow morning, when he was ostensibly off duty, he could final
ly head back out to the scene of the shooting to see if there was anything worth seeing. His deputy hadn’t turned anything up, but if Eli got lucky, maybe his sharper Feline senses would help him find some tracks that belonged to the shooter, or even a bullet casing. Josie could deal with the medical mystery and puzzle out the reason for Rosemary’s delayed recovery, but Eli wanted to know why the Lupine had been shot in the first place.

  Josie cleared her throat, tugging his attention back to her, and shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Well, um, thanks again. For dinner, I mean.”

  The look on her face matched the hesitation in her speech, all uncertain and female and vulnerable. It made Eli’s mouth twitch and his chest swell.

  His chest, and other things.

  “We’ll do it again,” he told her, reaching up to tuck back a strand of silky dark hair that had slipped free from her ponytail. Then he couldn’t resist rubbing the pad of his thumb over the full center of her bottom lip. He’d never felt anything so soft, not in his life.

  “We will?”

  “Soon.”

  He bent his head and took her mouth before she could stop him. Judging from the way she melted against him, though, stopping him didn’t number among her top priorities. He knew it was a fierce kiss, not the kind he’d planned on. Not right away. He’d meant it to be a good-night kiss, soft and sweet and a little bit seductive, but instead his beast had seized control, and it wanted to gobble her up like a Christmas cookie.

  It took a serious expenditure of willpower to pull away, and even more to step back from her. When she looked at him like that, with her lips pink and swollen, her lids heavy, her eyes all soft and unfocused, it was all he could do not to carry her down to the nearest horizontal surface and show her exactly how she affected him. But this wasn’t the time.

  It wasn’t the time.

  He ended up repeating that to himself all the way home. It was the only thing that kept his feet headed in the right direction.

  Exp. 10-1017.03

  Log 03-00128

  Technicians report three doses successfully administered, however one subject appears to have suffered a reaction and must be removed from the experiment. Have instructed techs to leave the remains. Will use them as unplanned aside to study if current product has any native mutation abilities that could be passed on through consumption of contaminated material.

  Tomorrow will have technicians dose a replacement subject along with three new subjects for Stage 3C. New product will be ready by morning. Optimism remains high.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  He couldn’t help wishing his time in the woods had a different purpose, but at least he got to actually spend time in them. As he made his way back to the area where he’d picked up Rosemary, Eli remembered how much he’d been looking forward to the end of his shift on Saturday for that very reason.

  He’d worked a lot of doubles and a lot of overtime in the last few weeks while half of his staff—the human half—dropped like flies from this year’s merciless strain of flu. Saturday, he’d finally had enough coverage to give himself the night off, and he’d intended to spend it furry. In lion form, ghosting through the forests and hillsides on the outskirts of town. Unfortunately, he’d barely managed to shift before he’d caught the scent of blood and ended up following his nose right to Rosemary.

  Eli stopped three feet from the base of the tree where he’d found her. To the naked eye, there was little indication that anything unusual had happened here. There was no huge pool of blood, no chalk outline, but he didn’t need those to know he’d found the right spot. He could smell it. He could smell the blood that had soaked into the soil beneath the litter of pine needles, twigs, and fallen leaves. He could smell Rosemary’s scent, now that he recognized it, and he could smell the lingering odor of something else. Faint and fading, it barely registered as a whisper among the aromas of the forest, but Eli could smell the last think traces of it. It smelled almost . . . human.

  Eyes narrowing, he dropped into a crouch and ran a sharp gaze over the spot where Rosemary had lain. The disturbance in the forest carpet showed him precisely where it had been. Only a very talented and highly trained tracker could pick out those kind of signs, but Eli was both. And he was Other. Tracks had a damn hard time hiding from him.

  He scanned the area to the north, and within a few seconds he saw the first of Rosemary’s tracks. Or rather the last of them, the last staggering steps she’d taken before she’d fallen and lain still beneath the massive fir.

  She had run to this spot, then. The shooting had happened elsewhere. Eli would find out exactly where.

  He stood, but kept his eyes on the ground. Moving silently more out of habit than intent, he began to follow the trail of paw prints leading away to the north. It was slow going. There hadn’t been rain since early last week, so while moist, the soil hadn’t formed the kind of mud that captured prints as perfectly as photographs. The tracks Eli followed had more to do with broken sticks, a drop of blood on the fronds of a fern, or small spots where a fast-moving paw had kicked away the loose debris and left a bare patch of dirt exposed to the world.

  He walked for several yards, making note of the way the Lupine’s gait had grown gradually slower and more uneven. She’d started out running, he could see, but she’d been getting weaker toward the end. Her strides looked to be longer the farther he went from the site where she’d fallen.

  Moving deeper into the woods, he could feel the temperature dropping. The cover grew denser here, and less light penetrated all the way to the ground. On the plus side, less breeze penetrated, too, so when Eli lost sight of the Lupine’s trail, he could turn to his nose to keep him pointed in the right direction. He could still smell Rosemary fairly clearly, but the faint whiffs of the other person he’d caught before still came and went, maddeningly elusive.

  A few more feet and he halted, head jerking up. The smell of blood was stronger here, and with it Eli detected a sharp bite of fear. He’d bet money that this was where the bullet had struck. Picturing Rosemary in his mind, he estimated the height of her flank and trained his gaze on that level before he began carefully examining the surrounding fauna. Finally, after five tense minutes, he turned to face northwest and he saw what he was looking for—a rough-barked hemlock tree, thick around with age, with faint, dark speckles along the eastern face.

  He hunkered down beside the broad trunk and inhaled deeply. The scent of the wood and the leaves nearly overwhelmed the trace of copper, but Eli caught it anyway. The tiny spots on the coarse lumpy bark were blood. Rosemary’s blood.

  Bracing his forearms across his thighs, he crouched down near the height of the Lupine’s back and looked back in the direction he’d come. He could see which way Rosemary had been heading, and he’d found the spatter that marked the place where she’d been standing when the bullet hit her. Since the shot had only grazed her, that meant the bullet should still be out here somewhere. The question was whether Eli could find it.

  He spent a frustrating forty minutes searching. He pawed through mulch, shifted leaves, and ran his fingers over more bark than a troop full of Boy Scouts, all to no avail. If that bullet was out here, it was hiding from him very effectively. If he really wanted to get his hands on it, he’d just have to come back with a metal detector.

  A quick brush of his hands dislodged the remains of the last hole he’d scraped in the forest carpet. Since he hadn’t found the bullet, his next step would be to look for a casing, which meant calculating the most likely spot where the shooter had stood when he’d aimed his rifle at a lone Lupine and pulled the trigger.

  Growing up Feline in the middle of the Rocky Mountains had taught Eli a thing or two about rifles, bullets, and trajectories, but more than that, it had taught him about hunters. While he might have preferred to take down game the old-fashioned way—with teeth and claws and a breathless, adrenaline-surging chase through the trees—most of the human hunters he’d met had liked what Eli privately referred to as the La-Z-Boy Sc
hool of Depredation.

  Adherents of the La-Z-Boy method went out into the woods days in advance of their planned hunting trip, toting with them heavy tool kits, camouflage paints, and thermoses of coffee laced with alcohol. They then spent the better part of several days scouting out the perfect location to build a hunter’s blind. Sometimes on the ground, sometimes partway up a tree, LZBs picked their spot and them commenced complicated construction projects wherein they harvested saplings and fallen branches and wove or nailed the suckers together to erect “natural” screens that they could use for cover on the day when they eventually started “hunting.”

  Even Eli had to admit that some of the things ended up as works or art. In the same way that abstract smears of paint thrown randomly onto a blank canvas counted as art. The blinds themselves occasionally involved paint, as the LZB would dab on a touch of black here, some olive there, a bit of dark green on the other, all so that on hunting day he could park his ass behind it and wait for the animal of his choosing to wander unsuspectingly into the sights of his .50-caliber rifle.

  Call him old-fashioned, but Eli just didn’t think that kind of thing was very sporting. But then, neither was shooting at a single gray wolf at least sixty miles from the nearest sheep herd, and more than that from the closest dairy farm. In a state where the animals had never made their way off the endangered species list. Could the shot have been a mistake? Eli would like to think so—that the hunter had been after deer, or even elk, although the season for them was still a couple of weeks off. He’d certainly rather deal with an overeager elk hunter with bad aim than someone who’d come out specifically to bag a wolf.

  With that in mind, Eli began scanning the tree line looking for the telltale signs of a blind.

  He had to admit, this hunter had done a better-than-average job. It took almost an hour before Eli spotted it, set off from the path Rosemary had taken by nearly a hundred feet and set back amid a tangle of thorn and mountain ash. It owed less to construction than most of the structures he’d seen and more to rearrangement and strategic accentuation. The hunter had used the profusion of the nearby bushes and supplemented their concealment with dozens of thin branches from other plants in the area, some of which still bore foliage for additional concealment. Nothing looked like it had been trucked in from outside the forest, and no canvas or paint had been added to create one of the little huts that occasionally sprang up. This blind appeared to be entirely utilitarian, constructed solely for the purpose of concealing a shooter without standing out from the environment in any way. To a passerby—or an unsuspecting deer—it looked like just a particularly overgrown thicket in a forest full of them. No wonder it had taken Eli so long to find it.