Rebel: The Blades of the Rose (14 page)

He followed, reaching out to stroke her hair, but she ducked from his hand and sidled away.

“We should go,” she said. “I don't know how far it might be to reach the Earth Spirits, and we need to cover more—”

He'd had enough. “What the hell are you doing?”

She stared at him, unblinking, removed. “I'm putting us back on track for our objective.”

Anger flared at her retreat. “Astrid. We just—”

“I know what we just did,” she said, her voice glacial. “I was there.”

“Me, too,” he growled. Her determined indifference dug at him. He wanted some kind of reaction from her, anything. Even anger. So he goaded. “Or maybe you were too busy throwing yourself onto my cock to notice.”

She winced slightly, his crudeness shaming him, but it was some kind of reaction rather than icy impassivity. “Don't confuse yourself,” she said. “What happened was only an expression of lust.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “More than that.”

“It wasn't.” She hardened her chin, almost surly. “I've not had sex in five years. It's only natural that, after being in such close contact with a man as we have been, and then surviving the rapids, I needed some release. You were convenient.”

The word was like a slap. He glowered as he stalked to her. “I've spent my life being dismissed, pushed aside because I'm an Indian, but I pushed back. And I'm damned well not going to allow it now.”

She looked offended. “This isn't because you are Native.”

“No,” he answered. “You're afraid.”

“Afraid?” she shot back, disbelieving. “I've faced fire demons while trapped inside a collapsed pyramid. Crossed the icy wastes of Siberia with nothing but a knife. I'm not afraid.”

“But you
are
frightened.”

She stiffened. “Getting bloody presumptuous just because I let you roger me.”

“It was better than a rogering.”

“Now you're being arrogant.” She tried to brush past him, but he gripped her arm. She glared up at him. “Lesperance—”

“No going back,” he said. “It's Nathan now.”

“What sodding difference does it make?” she snapped.

“It makes a hell of a difference,” he fired back. “It means we're more than strangers fucking each other.”

Hurt stained her cheeks. “We have just crossed the boundary of the Earth Spirits' territory. A tribe that is feared by all the Natives in these mountains, and likely with good cause. The Heirs of Albion are close behind us, ready to use the darkest magic they possess to capture you and kill me. Now is
not
a good time to have this discussion.” She tried to pull away, but he held tighter.

“No running,” he growled.

She turned mulish. “You can't browbeat me into submission.”

He scrubbed one hand over his face, frustrated with her and himself. “Astrid. You loved your husband. I can't pretend to understand what it must be like to love someone and lose them, to have them die in my arms—”

She tried again to wrench away. He still would not release her.

“But I know I would be afraid, too,” he continued. “Afraid to feel anything again. And I'd fight like the devil to keep everyone away. It was like that after I lost my family. But I didn't live the rest of my life that way. I didn't bury myself in the wilderness, hiding.”

“I'm not hiding, damn you!” Her eyes shimmered. “I built a new life for myself. A life apart.”

“Never answering letters? Abandoning friends, family? Living in an isolated cabin with only books for company? That's not a life apart. That's hiding.”

Anguish and anger suffused her face, and he hated causing her any pain, but feeling something, anything, was better than numb detachment. She was too bright, too alive, to waste herself as she did.

“What do you want from me?” she demanded.

“I won't let you run like a deer. Everyone else let you scamper into the bushes and stay there. It's not going to work with me. I'll hunt you out.”

For some moments, she was silent, staring at him with silver smoke eyes filled with guarded trepidation and the smallest, barely perceptible beginnings of hope, before glancing away. “You are a stubborn son of a bitch.”

“Always have been.”

“An
arrogant,
stubborn son of a bitch,” she amended.

“And you're a recluse, a mountain cat who's just as stubborn.” He unclasped his fingers from around her arm. A softer woman would bruise, but she wouldn't. “We need to get back on the trail,” he said, yet added when she let out a small sigh of relief, “but don't think this is over between us. I never back down from a challenge.”

She tilted up her chin. “Is that what I am to you, a challenge?”

“Oh, no, love,” he said softly. He stroked the skin just beneath her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb and was rewarded with a blaze of returning desire in her eyes. “You're much more than that.”

 

Even to an experienced mountain woman such as Astrid, these lands were unknown. She took in the landscape—snow-crowned peaks, open and shaded valleys, evergreen woods—with a careful, assessing eye, but underneath that caution, a gleam of excitement. The same as when she and Nathan had conquered the river rapids.

Yet none of this resonated as deeply as what had just happened.

She'd never been so wild. She had wanted him—still wanted—with a hunger and need that alarmed her. Not only his body within hers, but that greater, subtler connection she had not felt in so very long. And this frightened her as much, if not more so, than the Heirs. They could only hurt her body. But her desire for Nathan could tear her completely apart and leave her in ruins. She knew it the moment they touched. She'd had to protect herself after the searing intimacy of their sex—but Nathan was too strong to back down, to let her retreat. He would not accept her flight.

Infuriating, but liberating, as well. His extraordinary strength shattered her defenses, freeing her, and that freedom was a joy and a terror.

Face this moment, she told herself. The land and people within it were treacherous. She would face those threats and wonders rather than the ones within herself.

He, too, felt the excitement of discovering a new land, she saw, but there was more than that simple emotion.

“Hear that?” he asked as they wended through a sloping pine forest.

She stilled. “An animal? People?”

“A heartbeat.”

Her brows went up. “Perhaps your own.”

“No.” He gazed around, upward, trying to isolate the noise. “Not my own. It's coming from”—he gestured, taking in the land surrounding them—“everything.”

She felt her gaze softening. “Even if I had your sharp hearing, I think that sound is yours alone.”

He nodded slowly, half dazed, as though suspended in a dream. Not a sleepy, languorous dream, but the kind that revealed hidden truths previously unknown to the dreamer. “This place wants something from me. I can feel it….”

She stepped closer to him, compassionate, cautious. After their sex had shattered the walls between them, something had shifted, a tentative intimacy growing in their now exposed and tender core. “These lands, they are in you, just as the wolf is in you. Buried for years. Until now. A homecoming.”

The word was so foreign to him he started. “Homecoming,” he murmured. “Home. Never had one, not truly. Are these ancient mountains and primeval woods my home?”

“Nathan,” she said softly, drawing his attention, “I think you should change into the wolf.”

He looked at her with surprise but said nothing.

“Whatever it is in this territory,” she explained, but gently, “it's calling to you. It
wants
you to find the other Earth Spirits.”

“And the best way to do that is to take on my other form,” he concluded.

“At the least, you could scent the Earth Spirits out. Your senses are better when you become the wolf, aren't they?”

“Yes, but I wouldn't recognize their scent.”

“I think you will.” Quiet confidence in her words, both in herself and him.

Woven into his flesh and soul were the means by which he could transform himself. The world he had known no longer existed. The man he'd been seemed to fade into something else, but what that “else” might be remained to be discovered.

“You would have to carry both packs,” he cautioned.

“I'm strong.”

“That I know,” he said, admiration plain in his voice. He glanced around. They stood amid bracken and pine. It would not be difficult to step behind a tree, take off his clothes, and there, unseen, shift into the wolf. She could sense that it was easier for him to summon the animal now. He didn't have to wait for a threat. He could do it. Privately, as he'd done before.

Astrid saw the hesitation on his face. “I can look away or,” she pointed several yards distant, “wait for you there.” She understood the exposure he felt to have anyone, even someone who knew his secret, watch the transformation. She understood vulnerability, going to great lengths to hide her own.

He seemed to come to a decision.

“Stay,” he said. He slipped the pack from his back. “Will you put my clothes in the pack?”

She nodded, mute, eyes wide. “I'll—” She swallowed and tried to turn away but seemed unable to move at all. “I will look away.”

“Don't. We shared something before,” he nodded toward the direction from which they'd come, the riverbank on which they'd made love. “We'll share this now.” He pulled off his boots with hands that shook slightly with the intimacy of what he was about to do. A greater intimacy than the joining of their bodies in sex. They both knew that no one had ever seen him so unguarded, so truly exposed as he would be in a moment.

 

Nathan tried to calm his thundering heart. She knew he could shift into a wolf and wasn't afraid or disgusted. But that might change to see him actually transform in front of her.

He had to take that risk. Had to show her what it meant. To him and to her.

He unfastened his breeches and slid them down his legs. A momentary gratification to see the purely female appreciation in her face. He couldn't think of that now. The breeches were folded and put beside his boots, then he rose to his full height. Naked. Poised on the edge.

Hard to tell who was more apprehensive. Her breathing, like his, came in short, shallow gasps, measuring life in tiny increments.

Then, holding her silver gaze with his own, he let it happen. He reached into himself, where the animal dwelt, pacing inside of him, alert and keen. The part of himself he'd always fought against. Indians were animals. That was all they could ever be. That's what he was taught. He'd pushed it away, fighting himself, but that time was past. Now he summoned it.

The wolf stirred and began to push out. It climbed through him with the heat of its being. Hunt. Run. Chase the moon. Mate.

He stared at her, still a little afraid.

Astrid gave him the smallest nod of encouragement. In her face, he saw acceptance, trust. Not only of him as one who could change into an animal, but acceptance of the gift he was about to bestow upon her.

Warm, moonlit mists enveloped him as the wolf sprang forth. It shaped his body. Fur, paws, teeth, ears, tail. Not pain, but the hard, swift change of his bones, his muscles. As the mists dispersed, he threw himself forward. His paws hit the ground.

He and the wolf became one.

He looked around. This was the same world, and entirely different. Filled with scent and sound and life. He could smell it now, the scent of the Earth Spirits, dark and rich, beckoning.

He started toward it, then stopped and turned to Astrid. She stared at him. There was no disgust or fear in her face. Only wonderment. Humility. And ambivalence. She was not certain she wanted his trust, the intimacy, but he had given both to her.

She took a step closer. He crossed the distance. Her scent enveloped him, her woman scent, her flesh, and even the smell of himself on, and in, her. In this form, the combination of him and her together lured, made him demanding, far more possessive than he ever knew himself to be. He rumbled.

“Nathan?” She held out her hand to him.

He pushed his head into it, and growled to feel her fingers in his fur. Experimentally, he licked her hand and growled again to taste her this way.

“Can you find them?” she asked, voice slightly breathless.

He gave a small chuff of confirmation. He had no voice—and felt its loss. He wanted to tell her what it felt like, what new explorations there were behind the senses of a wolf.

“We must go,” she said. “Before it grows too dark for me to see.”

He softly barked an assent. Even enfolded within the beast of the wolf, it pained him to watch Astrid hoist up the other pack with obvious effort and not be able to help. Some rules of society were too deeply enmeshed to be lost. When at last she gained her balance, she said, “Lead. I will follow.”

Her words set him free. He bounded forward, drawn by the scent of the Earth Spirits, feeling the ground beneath him, the joy in running and tracking. The man receded. The wolf came forth. Around him were the mountains and forests and millions of other animals and insects all living and breathing together in the oldest rhythm, of which he was but one small pulsation. It felt right, impossibly right, to run with Astrid. To have her close, sharing the true core of himself with her. Only she understood, only she could run with him in both his form as a man as well as him as a beast.

He felt her. He took in the stories around him. A doe and her fawn had passed this way. A young wolverine, on the cusp of maturity, had hunted nearby. Squirrels chattered to each other in alarm to see a wolf out during the day. He had no way to tell them it was not prey he sought, but his own history.