Текст книги "River Marked"

THE COLUMBIA GORGE IS A CANYON THAT RUNS nearly eighty miles through the Cascade Mountains, with the Columbia River cutting through the bottom. It is part of the border between Washington and Oregon. Most of the travel is on the main, divided highway on the Oregon side, but there is a highway on the Washington side that runs most of the length of the gorge. Though the western part of the gorge is a temperate rain forest, the eastern section is dry steppe country with cheatgrass, sagebrush, and breathtaking basalt cliffs that sometimes form columnar joints.

Adam turned off the highway at Biggs and took the bridge back over the Columbia to the Washington side. That bridge is one of my all-time favorites. The river is wide, a mile or nearly so, and the bridge arches gracefully up and over the water to the town of Maryhill.

It was founded by financier Sam Hill (as in“where in Sam Hill?”) in the early twentieth century. He’d envisioned a Quaker paradisaical farm community and named the town after his wife, Mary Hill. She might have thought it was cooler, I suspect, if it weren’t out in the middle of the desert with about two inches of soil. There isn’t much left of the town—a few small orchards, a couple of nearby vineyards, and a state-run campground—none of which made Maryhill special.

But Sam Hill hadn’t stopped with the town. He built the very first WWI memorial, a full-sized replica of Stonehenge visible from the highway on the Oregon side of the river.

We turned west once we were over the bridge, though, away from Stonehenge and Maryhill. After ten or fifteen minutes of driving down a narrow highway that cut its way along the desert-steppe country of the Columbia Gorge, we came to a campground. Though it was groomed to within an inch of its life, there was no one inside. Adam pulled in the driveway, took a card off the map holder on his sunshade, and swiped it though the control box next to the gate. A green light flashed, and the gate slid open.

“We have it to ourselves,” he said. “I did some of the security here, and they told me we could stay even though it doesn’t officially open until next spring. I’m sure the shower in the trailer works, but the ones in the restrooms over there are a lot bigger.”

I looked around the campground, where tall oaks and maples gave shade to the graveled RV spaces. The big trees weren’t natural for this part of the state, any more than the green, green grass—someone had spent a lot of time tending them.

Adam pulled into a spot halfway between the gray stone restroom and the river. I found myself frowning at one of the trees. It must have been sixty feet tall, its roots buried deep in the earth where it wouldn’t disturb the groomed campground.

“Ten days,” I said.

He knew how my mind worked.“Zee has the shop,” he said. “Darryl and his mate are watching Jesse, who told me before we left that she didn’t need a babysitter.”

“To which you answered that they were bodyguards, not babysitters,” I said. “But she argued that bodyguards usually didn’t get to tell the people they are guarding what time they have to be home.”

“And you weren’t even there for the argument,” marveled Adam. “Darryl broke in, and said, ‘Family does.’ And that was the end of that. So what else are you worried about?”

“Stefan,” I said. “I asked Warren to look in on him, but …”

“I had a talk with Stefan,” said Adam. “Unlike you, my conscience didn’t prevent me from telling him he needed to fill out his menagerie. One of his problems is that he doesn’t want to hunt in his backyard, and he can’t leave his menagerie alone. Ben offered to watch his people, and Warren should leave for Portland tomorrow with Stefan. Anything else?”

“Ten days,” I said, giving him a broad smile. “Ten days of vacation with you. No interruptions.”

Adam leaned over and kissed me—and that was the last time I worried about anything for some time.

3

WE SWAM IN THE RIVER—OR RATHER I SWAM AND ADAM waded in chest high because werewolves can’t swim. Their muscle mass is too dense to be buoyant, so they sink to the bottom like anchors.

The campground was built around a fair-sized backwater that was fast enough not to be stagnant but slow enough to be really good swimming. Strategic growths of Russian Olive and a selection of shrub-sized plant life I couldn’t name, as well as a ten-or fifteen-foot drop just before the river, gave the swimming area a feeling of privacy. The temperature had risen to somewhere around a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, so the water felt really good.

We splashed and dunked each other like a pair of kids, and I laughed until I had to go out and sit on the shore to catch my breath.

“Coward,” Adam said from the river, his hands just below the surface where he could gather ammunition to splash me.

“Not a coward,” I vowed, panting as the sun tried to bake the water out of my hair, skin, and swimming suit all at once.

“Then what are you doing up there?” he asked.

I opened my eyes wide and batted them at him.“Watching the wildlife.” I lowered my gaze to his midsection, where all sorts of lovely muscles were displaying themselves. Werewolves are seldom out of shape, but Adam was a little more ripped even than the average werewolf. “Some nice scenery around here,” I purred.

He made a soft sound, and when I raised my gaze, his eyes were hot.“I have to agree,” he said, stalking out of the water with purpose.

I squealed and came to my feet, laughing—and something out in the water beyond him caught my eye. He spun around to see what I’d noticed, but it was gone. A log maybe, I thought, floating a little below the surface. Hard to judge the size at this distance, but it had been too big for a fish.

Before the dams went in, some of the sturgeon got pretty darn big, upward of twelve feet if I believed Zee. Whatever I’d seen had been bigger than that. But it was gone now, and I’d distracted Adam from his hunt.

He was looking behind him. I took advantage of his momentary distraction and bolted toward the trailer.

Werewolves are quick. Not cheetah fast, maybe, but faster than timber wolves or dogs. I, too, am very fast. Faster than most werewolves I know—so maybe I wasn’t running as hard as I could. Or maybe sex inspires the male of any species to greater lengths. Either way, Adam caught me before I was halfway to the trailer. Without slowing down, he tossed me over his shoulder and ran all the way back while I laughed like a ninny and tried really hard to breathe. He pressed me against the side of the trailer and made sure I didn’t mind my capture at all.

Somewhere along the way, we made it into the trailer and up on the soft queen bed that was made with clean, new sheets—in fact, the whole trailer smelled brand-new. Trailers like this were expensive. Who did he know who would loan him a brand-new trailer?

That thought left me, too, and when we were finished, I was as hot and sweaty as I’d been before I first jumped into the river, the trailer smelled like us, and Adam was asleep.

Mating is a lot more permanent than marriage. Partly, I think, it’s that usually if you find your mate, he’s not going to be someone you need to divorce. Abuse is almost not possible when two people are connected by a mating bond, and it gives you insight into your mate that allows you to avoid the nastier fights that snowball into cold distance. And partly it is that magic is somewhat harder to deal with than legal paperwork, and the mating bond is pack magic.

Given that, I hadn’t really expected for the actual wedding to matter so much to me.

“I like having you wear my ring,” said Adam, his eyes yellow and gleaming out from under half-opened lids. Sometimes the mate bond gives more insight to one or the other of us. He seemed to be responding to the gist of what I’d been thinking, while I was being kept in the dark. “I like thatpeople can just look at you and know that you are taken, that you are mine.” He closed his eyes and laughed. “And yes, I know that sentiment is at the top of the Women’s Liberation Movement’s list of things not to say to a modern woman.”

Something was bothering him, I thought. The last sentence or two had been just a little too tight.

“Uhm,” I said, rolling over so I could lick a bead of sweat off his chest. He tasted like Adam. Who needed champagne? “You better not take off your ring without a really good reason,” I told him, letting my inner coyote out where he could see her. Maybe he needed to know his possessiveness was returned, in spades. “And if your ex-wife or any moderately attractive woman from thirteen to seventy is in the area, you should be aware that thereis no reason good enough for you to take off your ring.”

He laughed, and I rolled again, until I was all the way on top of him.

I hadn’t gotten it right yet, hadn’t worked out what was bothering him. Our bond might be talking to him, but it wasn’t letting me know anything that was going on behind his eyes—which had gone dark again. That’s the problem with magic. You start counting on it, and it disappears out from underyour feet and leaves you floundering worse than if you’d never had it in the first place. So all I could go on was what most other women had to use to interpret their mates’ moods.

I had known Adam for more than ten years—I’d known his ex-wife, Christy, too. Maybe his problem was rooted in his first marriage. She’d been big on personal freedom—as long as it was her freedom. She’d been jealous of the pack; jealous, also, I thought, of Jesse, their daughter. She didn’t love him, but she had wanted to be the center of his world and would tolerate nothing else.

Maybe he felt that he was trying to do that to me. Maybe we both needed to lighten up the atmosphere a bit, give ourselves time to deal with all the changes.

I nipped his ear lightly.“If it were socially acceptable to tattoo my name across your forehead, I’d do it.”

“I only see my forehead when I look in a mirror,” he said. “I see my hand a lot more often.”

“It wouldn’t be for you,” I told him. “You know who you belong to. It’s for all the other women. Only fair to warn them when the wrong word might get them hurt. This coyote has fangs.”

His chest vibrated under me, the laugh not making it all the way out yet. He relaxed subtly.

“I thought that if you’re feeling primitive about this, it is only fair to let you know that I’m feeling pretty primitive, too,” I informed him lightly.

Then I rolled off him and over the edge of the bed to drop down on the floor. I kicked my swimming suit, now cold and clammy, aside.“However, you ought to know thatI can’t work at the shop with my rings on unless I want to be known as Nine-Fingered Mercy. And”—I put my fingers on the pawprint just beneath my navel—“having gotten all the tattoos I ever intend to, I won’t tattoo your name on my forehead or anything like that.”

He jumped out of bed and strode to his suitcase. He unzipped the outer pocket and pulled out a flat box, which he handed to me.

I opened it to find a thick gold chain with a battered military dog tag on it. Hauptman, it read, Adam Alexander. The last time I’d seen it, it had been one of a pair on the same steel chain lying on Adam’s chest of drawers.

“That’s to put your rings on when you’re at work,” he said, taking the chain from me and putting it around my neck. As he fastened the chain, he kissed the back of my neck. He stayed there for a moment, his fingers tight on the necklace.

He’d given me one of his dog tags. I was never a soldier, but I’m a historian. I know why they started using a pair of dog tags. When a man died, and his buddies couldn’t get the body out, they’d leave one tag with the body so anyone who found it could identify him. The other would be used toreport his death.

That dog tag meant more to him than the ring did—and so it meant more to me, too. I noticed that the chain looked to be tough enough that I could wear it when running as a coyote, too.

“I need to go for a run,” he told me, taking a full step back and slapping me lightly on my naked rump. His fingers lingered a little, testing the faint buckshot scars left from when I’d gotten a bit too close to a gun-happy rancher. “You want to come with?”

“Long run or short run?” I asked warily. Wolves love to run, but even most of them don’t love to run the way Adam does.

He pulled on underwear and running shorts, socks and shoes as he considered my question.“Long run,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “I’m a little wound up about something …” He let his voice trail off and gave me a small, almost shy, grin. “Wolf instincts are good, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what’s touching them off. Running helps connect the frontallobe with the hindbrain.”

“That helps?” I asked with sudden eagerness. It really irked me when I knew something and had no idea where it came from.

He laughed.“Sometimes. Sometimes I just get tired enough not to care. You staying here?”

“I am feeling extremely mellow,” I told him. He’d run things off better if I wasn’t with him. “I’ll stay here. But you better put a shirt on, or your gorgeous self will cause an accident if you go running by the road, and someone sees you.” He smiled at that; I think he thought I was joking. “I’ll take a shower and read until you get back. By then we might think about food, making some or hunting some down.”

He hesitated.

“Adam,” I said, “we are out in the middle of nowhere. No one who hates me knows where we are unless you borrowed this rig from Marsilia. Go run. I’ll be here for you when you get back—that’s a promise.”

He gave me one of his assessing looks, then left, closing the trailer door gently behind him. *