Wolf’s Glory (3 page)

He was really hung up on wolves. “Yeah, temporarily.”

“I like it. It"s pretty.” His forefinger lightly brushed over the stud in her nostril. “And this is pretty too.”

“Yeah.” Glory wasn"t sure she believed him, but his physical reaction was hard—Glory snickered to herself at the pun—to fake. She wouldn"t be here long, just until she contacted the study center and made arrangements to get to her interview. If he wanted to sleep with her, why shouldn"t she go along with it? Even if he was only using her, she would enjoy herself and never see him again. He could laugh with his buddies later, and she wouldn"t be around for it. Sure, a roll in the hay with Mr. Buff and Bodacious, and then off to her interview. She allowed her hand to linger on his muscular shoulder when he lifted her to her feet and gave him a smile that glazed his eyes. Oh, yeah, they could have some fun while she was here.

“Sorry I"ve been such a bitch.”

Just to tease him she pressed a quick kiss to his chin. His arm tightened around her back, and his lips were hot and eager, and not on her chin. Or, not just on her chin. But he ended it too quickly, pulling her back to that blasted horse and lifting her up. The dogs by the horses got up and shook themselves before following along when they started off again.

Shadow watched the woman riding beside him with wonder. At last, his wolf had chosen a mate for him. And what a mate. This was no thin scrap of a woman. No, his mate was tall and strong, with soft lush curves that he wanted to explore in great and loving detail. Her face was a soft oval with startlingly pale blue eyes and a soft, plump mouth that he wanted to taste again. He couldn"t stop looking at her hair.

“Why is your hair pink?” he asked, fascinated.

She flashed a smile at him. “Because it matches my shirt.”

He looked at the shiny fabric half hidden beneath a loose blue jacket. He had heard of women changing their hair color to hide gray, but not to match their clothing. Her clothing was unlike anything he had seen before. The townies—people who lived in towns—tended to wear many layers in cold weather, and even in summer, they covered nearly their entire bodies. He and his people would prefer to go naked if they could, but the Grandmother had forbidden that.

He cast another look at his mate, imagining her without all the layers covering her soft, curved body. Shadow allowed himself the pleasure of that thought for only a moment before cutting it off. He focused on his mate"s clothes instead. Those layers were constructed of unfamiliar fabric. An impossible thought disturbed him. She and the other woman had talked about phones and planes.

“Glory, where are you from?”

“Oh, I"ve lived all over,” she said breezily. “Born in Illinois, grew up in North Dakota, college in Florida and North Carolina, and I live in Minneapolis now. But I"m interviewing for a job in California…” The breeziness died briefly, and turned to fervent earnestness. “I"m really hoping I get this job.”

Confusion struck him. Who could live in so many places so far apart? And a job? His first instinctive thought was that he would never permit his mate to leave him and have a job. His second thought was that California didn"t exist except in history books. His stomach swam with a vague feeling of dread as he looked at his strange mate. If what he suspected was true, then she had no idea what he was.

“Glory…” He hesitated to ask what year she was born, so he quickly changed his question.

“What job?”

“It"s a research position with the Marine Life Study Center in San Francisco. I have a master"s degree in marine biology. It is exactly the sort of job I"ve always wanted.”

She looked so happy talking about her job plans that he didn"t have the heart to disappoint her. They would get that straightened out later. After he had fully claimed her they would talk more plainly, and she would understand where and when she was.

“What about you, Shadow? You said you worked for your dad? Is it a family business?”

“I"m his beta. Second in command.”

She grabbed a hank of that incredible hair and put it behind her ear. Tiny sparkles in her earlobes matched the sparkle on the outside of her nostril. Her personal adornments were fascinating. “What sort of business is it?”

He shrugged. The idea of a job, with set hours and routine, was a townie thing. Mostly, he hunted, taught his younger brothers and cousins how to fight and hunt, and protected the few women of the Clan. The women were their greatest treasures, and now he was bringing another precious woman into the Clan. He would die to protect Glory. “We provide food for communities in the area and trade for what we need. We live as our ancestors did, as closely as we can.”

“Oh.” She clearly didn"t understand. “Where did you go to school?”

“The Grandmother and other women in the Clan teach the children to read and write, and math and history.” Right now he wished he had paid better attention to history. “We live closely with the land. It is important to preserve our culture and our land. We don"t need a great deal of schooling.”

“So … You do historical reenactment?” His mate looked confused, but ready to be

enlightened.

He looked at her blankly. “What?”

“You recreate life in the Old West? Like, you live in teepees and go on hunts and stuff like that?”

“Yes. That is how we live. The Wolf Clan wants to teach others how to care for Mother Earth. That is my family"s business, and it"s important. If we don"t care for the earth now, what will future generations have to live with?”

“Oh, like a naturalist or conservationist company that does education? That"s cool.” She flicked those stunning eyes at him again, smiling with approval, and he felt it all the way down to the base of his spine.

“You have the most beautiful eyes I"ve ever seen,” he breathed.

Glory"s soft pale cheeks flushed slightly, but she let him hold her hand and kiss her palm. Her scent drove him crazy. How soon would he be able to make love to her? He couldn"t wait to get her back to his lodge where he could peel off her layers of clothing and taste every inch of her.

*

After only a half hour of riding they came upon Shadow"s camp. Glory wasn"t sure what she"d been expecting, but it wasn"t dozens of conical tents neatly laid out in concentric circles. An office building with a sign for the Wolf Clan Conservationist Society, maybe, but not this. It was a lot like the teepee encampments she had walked through at the powwows she"d attended in high school in North Dakota. She looked around with interest as Shadow lifted her off the horse. He put her down gently, like she was a fragile doll, made sure she had her balance, and handed her purse back to her. He made her feel special, and she liked it.

There was still doubt lingering in the back of her mind. They had just met. Why would he be attracted to her? She and Jordan, the man she had dated in grad school, had been friends for months before they moved in together. That relationship had been real. Not deep enough to survive him getting a job in a small town in Ohio, but a good relationship of mutual liking. If she could find another guy like that, one who would be willing to move to where she could work in her field, she"d grab him in a minute.

Shadow slid an arm around her waist and gave a sharp look to the teenage boy who came and took their horses. That look didn"t prevent the kid from staring at her. She was used to being stared at. A six-foot-tall woman with black and purple hair, a miscellany of silver studs, hoops, and chains, and wearing an ankle-length black coat tended to attract stares. But this kid seemed awed. Admiring? Weird. Shadow led her through the camp to the central open area to a couple of women standing outside a teepee.

“Mother,” he said to one. “This is my mate, Gloria Peterson.”

Holy cow, he was introducing her to his mom, and he"d called her his mate. Glory wasn"t sure exactly what he meant by “mate,” but it made her imagine hot and sweaty fun in the dark. Things she shouldn"t even be thinking about in front of his mom. His mother was five foot one, dressed in a leather dress, with reddish brown hair threaded with gray and green-gray eyes. Her son must take after his dad. Unless this was just an actress who played his mother in the movie? She clearly wasn"t Native American.
Geez
, thought Glory,
you’d think
they’d find someone who looks a little more like him
. But no, she had decided that he wasn"t an actor in a movie. He worked for his dad"s conservation company and just happened to be drop-dead gorgeous. So this must really be his mother.

Glory nodded politely. “Hi, nice to meet you. I wonder if I could borrow your phone?

Mine is dead.” She dug through her purse to hold up her phone. “I need to contact someone about the plane crash, and I"d like to make a couple long distance calls. I can pay for the minutes.”

The other woman screeched, “Glory?”

Glory stared. This woman was so old she looked like a mummy with thin white hair

dressed in two skinny braids. Shadow took her fragile hands in a very gentle grip.

“Grandmother, this is my mate.”

“She"s my friend,” said the grandmother shakily, milky blue eyes staring at Glory. “We were like sisters.”

Glory smiled uncomfortably. The old lady was bats. Alzheimer"s for sure.

“You"re Glory Peterson,” the old lady insisted. “Gloriana Danielle Victoria Peterson.

You graduated from Hankinson High in 2005. I"m Jill. Jill Lampett.”

She
was
bats! Jill was twenty-eight years old, not 128! Still, how did she know Glory"s full name? No one knew her full name. “Lady… You looked that up on the Internet, I bet.”

“There isn"t any Internet anymore, you twit. You don"t believe me. I don"t blame you.”

Shadow"s grandma raised shaking hands and tugged on her skimpy white braids in a gesture of frustration. “But what about the time in the ninth grade, when we broke your mom"s new lamp while your mom and dad were out? Remember, we walked to the store and bought a new one? Barely got home before they did. Your mom never knew we broke her lamp. I never told anyone about that; did you? So that wouldn"t be on the Internet, now would it? If there was one, which there isn"t and hasn"t been for fifty years.”

Glory gaped before saying weakly, “What?”

“It"s 2064, Glory. Fifty years have passed. I don"t know how you can be here. I thought you died fifty years ago. The day you went off to San Francisco, nuclear bombs wiped out just about every big city in the world. The people who survived ran away to small towns in the country. In less than five years there was nothing left of the world as we knew it. I heard an earthquake dropped California in the ocean.” A shiny tear slipped down her face and lost itself in a network of wrinkles. “I thought you were dead.”

Glory stared at her so hard her eyes burned. “Huh?” She looked wildly at Shadow for help, but the old lady charged on.

“Electricity didn"t work right anymore, and cell phones stopped working after a while. I tried calling you every day until my battery died. Then people started getting sick. Listen, Glory, I"m not kidding! By 2020 there was hardly anyone left alive. And of those left alive, hardly any were women. We called it the Woman-Killer Plague. And there was no

government anymore, just some men who decided how things should be run. And as long as they could get the other men to go along with them they became like kings of their own little kingdoms.”

“What?” said Glory again, more weakly. “Look, lady, I think—”

The old bat rushed on, spitting the words out as fast as her toothless mouth would let her.

“In the Hankinson area the local king was Keith Berenson. Remember him? Used to torment my grandpa? Well, he decided that since there weren"t many women it was up to him to decide how women should live. He figured that women should be locked up—for their own protection!—and married off to who he thought was best. I ran away to the reservation.

Women were treated better there. Some of the Lakota already knew how to live without all the modern conveniences. They left the res and started wandering like their ancestors did. I went with them. I married a Lakota man, and I"ve been with the Indians ever since.” She tottered toward Glory and threw her arms around her and hugged her. The thin arms gripped Glory"s shoulders tightly. “I don"t know how you can be here, but I"m so glad you are!”

Glory gingerly patted the narrow back. “Um, thanks… Um…”

Shadow moved forward to pull his grandmother away and support her elderly frail body with a brawny arm. “Glory"s from the Times Before? I thought she must be, like those other women … Wonderful! But, Grandmother, you shouldn"t tire yourself like this. Glory looks sick too. You should both go lie down and rest. You can talk again later. I"ll take Glory to my lodge. Mother, take Grandmother in and make her rest.”

Glory admired the way the muscles in his chest shifted when he hugged his grandmother.

Jill. Her friend? That was impossible. Nuclear war? Plagues? That old lady needed a shrink, like right now. She watched Shadow"s mom put an arm around the old lady and tow her away. Shadow curled his arm around her own waist and guided her in another direction.

Glory leaned on it, grateful for its strength. She usually preferred to stand on her own two feet, but after the last few days she was glad to have him there. A girl could take only so many shocks in a row before she lost it.

The few men they passed stared at her. She stared back, too tired to be polite and smile.

Since she was practically glued to him she could feel Shadow"s chest rumble when he growled at them. It was cute in a “Me, Tarzan” sort of way, but if she had to hear much more of it she would want to smack him.

A kid around seven or eight years old with hair in two braids all the way to his butt came around one of the tents and stared at her with wide eyes. She could tell it was a boy because he wasn"t wearing anything except moccasins. Geez, where were his clothes? Shadow wasn"t wearing much, but at least he had on something. Glory stared back, careful to look only at his face, until Shadow said something to the kid about finding food. The kid nodded and trotted off, still staring over his shoulder at Glory.