Chapter 45: Protective

Theo

I’ve gotten back from my family’s traditional crack-of-dawn Christmas present opening extravaganza. I have a big family, lots of aunts and uncles and cousins, and every year we gather at one of their houses and exchange presents. The little kids get real gifts, but the rest of us exchange the silliest and most ludicrous things we can imagine, and it is always a hilarious time. I haven’t laughed this hard all year. My Dad and Uncle really outdid themselves this year: they both unwrapped enormous, complicated packages from each other, until they got to the contents. My Dad Theodore, for whom I am named, gave my uncle a single tea bag, and my uncle Thomas gave my dad a single golf tee. It took us all half an hour to stop howling with laughter over the unplanned and uncoordinated “T” puns.

The nice thing about celebrating so early is being finished by noon. When I get back to the packhouse, it is completely deserted - everyone else is still off celebrating Christmas. That’s fine with me, I have a project to work on, getting ready for tomorrow.

I’m in the garage, taking stock of the supplies that we have obtained for our cave exploration, when the Dark Woods SUV pulls in. Dom and Amelia get out, glowing with happiness, both wearing something silly. She’s got a ridiculous ugly sweater on, and he is wearing a little red cap on his head.

I grin at them. “Merry Christmas!” I say. “It looks like my family isn’t the only one that exchanges joke gifts!” I point to Dom’s silly hat.

“What?!” he gasps, hand over his heart as though fatally wounded. “I’ll have you know that this is the best gift I have ever received! Don’t you recognize it from the show last night?”

“Erm…”

Amelia laughs. “I gave it to him, because he loves the Doctor so much. He wears a fez like that.”

“Ah…”

They laugh. “What are you doing here?” Amelia says.

“Beta Malcolm wanted me to get the supplies ready for tomorrow. I’m gonna haul all this stuff in and start loading it into our packs.”

Dom grins. “You mean the TTSBPPs?”

“Ha! Yes.”

“We’ll help,” Amelia says, and soon we are all carting armfuls of gear back from the garage towards the packhouse. I was planning to do this alone, but it’ll be nice to have help.

Evan

She bites her lip, staring at me.

“Well?” I say. “Start talking.”

“Um, what do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with how big is the rogue gang you were with? And where are they?”

She sighs, like she is reluctant.

“Look, either you’re going to help me or not. It will be easier for you if you just answer.”

She looks away from me. “I’ll help. I just… I might not have liked all of them, but they kept me alive, and some of them are my friends.”

I guess she doesn’t want to betray the other rogues. I’m tempted to just huff impatiently, but then I see her shiver a little, and take her free hand up and start rubbing her other arm with it. It is getting very cold out here.

“If I let go of you for a second, do you promise not to run? Like you said, I’d just catch you again.”

She nods. I release her wrist, just long enough to pull my sweatshirt off and hand it to her. “Here, put this on, you look really cold.”

Her eyes meet mine with an expression of complete shock. She hesitates, and she looks suspicious, like she can’t figure out what on earth I am doing, how this might hurt her.

“I’m not trying to pull anything,” I say, “just put it on.”

She puts her arms in the sleeves, zips it up with trembling fingers, and pulls the hood over her head, and seems to shiver even harder for just a moment while my body heat lingering in the sweatshirt starts to warm her up. She closes her eyes with an expression of absolute bliss, then opens them again and whispers, “Thank you. Um, let me know if you get cold and want it back.” I notice that her eyes are a soft gray color, not blue at all, just a true gray.

She clearly isn’t used to anybody being decent to her. I shrug. I’m wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt, I’ll be fine.

She holds her left hand out to me, obviously prepared to have me secure her by the wrist again. “Just don’t run, all right?” I ask.

Again, she says, “Thank you.” Then she pulls her knees up to her chest and tucks the sweatshirt down over her bare legs, sitting there wearing my big shirt over her whole body like some kind of tent. It’s actually really cute. And this helps me - with her knees stuffed up inside the shirt it would take her longer to untangle herself and start running.

“Okay,” she says, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” I think she has realized that there is no point in protecting the rogues any more, if she really means what she says about never going back to them. And she is probably calculating whether helping me will help herself - she’s at least already warmer. “There are about fifteen people in the group, but it changes sometimes. People come and go. I don’t know where they are now. We - I mean they - move around a lot.”

“Where were they last you saw them?”

“In a cave,” she says. Maybe she’s telling the truth after all. If she was lying, trying to protect the rogues, she wouldn’t tell me above the cave.

“A cave?” The cave we’re exploring tomorrow is a drive of an hour or two away from here. It would have taken her a long time to walk here, I guess unless she got a ride or shifted. I’m starting to doubt her story again.

“How’d you get to Arcata?” I ask.

“I walked.”

“Shifted?”

She looks back down and shakes her head.

“Where was the cave?”

“A few miles away from Arcata. A few miles north.”

Okay, I think she must be making this up. That’s not at all where the cave is, it’s quite a distance east, not just a few miles. But then she goes on, “There’s little caves, like tunnels, all over this area. I don’t think anyone else really knows about them, there aren’t any signs or roads or anything.”

Huh. Do they have more than one cave? Is there, like, a network of caves? I’m staring at her, trying to figure this out, and I think she is encouraged that I seem so interested in this.

“We were at a different cave until a couple of weeks ago,” she offers, “we move around a lot.”

Hm. “Where was the other cave?”

“Um, up a bit northeast of the 299 where we….” She falls silent, and looks down again.

Ah. “Where you attacked our pack.”

She nods, looking genuinely ashamed.

Well, that could be the cave we’re exploring tomorrow. “Are they going back to that cave?” I ask. “The one northeast of the 299?”

She shrugs. “I don’t really know, probably sometime, but not for a while. They were talking about heading up the coast.”

I sit still, considering, watching her carefully to make sure she doesn’t try to bolt. She has stopped shivering, and I’m glad I was able to at least help her out with that. I realize that sitting and talking with the rogue has changed my perspective. She isn’t a bit intimidating or aggressive or even unfriendly. She just seems sad, and lonely.

Something else occurs to me. “Hey, if you’re hungry, there’s a granola bar in my pocket there that you can have,” I say, nodding to the sweatshirt she’s wearing.

Her mouth drops open, like that is the most astonishing thing she’s ever heard. She pokes one of her hands out of my long sleeve and fishes in my pocket, and pulls out a granola bar.

“It might be a little squashed,” I say, “sorry.”

“Are you sure?” she asks.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

She opens the granola bar, and eats it hungrily, while I am considering what to do.

I think I believe her. The information about the cave tracks with what we know, and I didn’t mention it to her first. But I don’t know what River Moon would do to her if they get hold of her. The low level wolves like Amelia seem nice enough, but I don’t really know their leaders. I don’t know their Alpha at all, and it would be his decision. They might just execute her immediately if I turn her in to them.

And I realize I don’t want that. My inner wolf has been silent, but I think he agrees - if he thought she was some kind of threat he’d warn me. There’s something about her that makes me want to, I don’t know, I guess, protect her. She’s pretty, with her long dark hair and gray eyes and slender body currently curled up inside my sweatshirt, but it isn’t just that. It’s her quiet voice, her submissive demeanor, her shock to find me doing the slightest nice thing for her. It’s like she’s never experienced a kind word or deed from a man in her life. I’m glad I have been different.

So do I just let her go? I could. I could just pretend I never saw her. Nobody would ever know, I don’t think. She has given me some useful information, the number of rogues, but even more important the fact that there is a network of caves they use, and that they are currently moving up the coast. That’s information we can use.

But I’ll bet there is more to learn. If we are going to have a battle, the more we learn about our enemy the better.

“Thank you,” she says again, finishing the little granola bar. I’ll bet that’s all she’s had to eat all day, unless she has shifted and hunted. But I suspect she hasn’t. I’ve noticed a couple of times that she has seemed a little reluctant - she could have gotten away from me by shifting, and she apparently walked here on her human legs. Maybe shifting is hard for her. It can be painful, and some people aren’t as good at it as others.

I nod, making a decision. “Look,” I tell her, “I should take you back with me, so our leaders can question you.” Her eyes grow wide with panic and she hunches further into my shirt, but she still doesn’t try to run. “But if you want,” I go on, “I’ll just leave you here. I won’t force you to come with me.”

She doesn’t look relieved, to my surprise, she looks worried.

“So what do you want to do?” I ask, wondering what’s going through her head.

She bites her lips into her mouth and wrinkles her forehead. “I don’t… I don’t know. Would they… hurt me?”

I sigh. “I don’t know. Like I said, it’s not my pack. We’d have to go back to their packhouse, it would be their decision. I think if you tell them everything you know, though, they’d be more likely to be fair to you.”

She brushes her hand, hidden again inside my sleeve, across her eyes again, apparently to stop tears from leaking out. She looks around the forest where we are sitting, the trees, the undergrowth, the rocky hillside. The branches of the deciduous trees are bare, having already lost their leaves, so the cloudy sky shows overhead. It looks like it might start raining soon. I don’t know if the elevation here is high enough for snow - I’m not that familiar with the area. She must also be considering this. If I leave her alone out here, exposed to the elements, it would be miserable, possibly dangerous. I kind of hate to do that.

She shakes her head, and the tears that she had tried to wipe away start again. “I don’t think I can come with you,” she whispers. “Not if you think they might hurt me.”

“Well, how about this. Come partway with me, and wait a couple of miles away from the packhouse. It’s pretty remote, there’s plenty of places to hide away from humans or wolves. I can try to figure out what to do next. At least you’ll be closer, maybe I can at least bring you some food or something.”

I realize as I’m saying it that I have become invested in this girl, without knowing the first thing about her except that she is sad and cute and triggers my protective instinct. And that she’s a rogue.

“First,” she says, and I wait to see what other condition she would want to impose. “What’s your name?”

Oh. Yeah. “Um. My name’s Evan. You?”

“Corinne.”

“Okay, Corinne, want to come or not?”

She sighs, and looks around the forest, and nods her head. “Yes,” she whispers.

“It’s several miles, we should probably shift,” I say.

She looks at me with a spark in her eye, the first time I have seen any fight in her. “I’m not shifting in front of you!” she says indignantly.

Really? She’s shy? That’s her concern, in light of everything else that is going on?

“Okay, fine, we’ll walk. We’d better get going, this is going to take a while.”

We start heading down the hill, in the general direction of the packhouse. I have a very good sense of direction, it is a wolf thing. We’ll get there, but walking as humans this is going to take us a few hours.

We talk as we go. I continue questioning her about the rogues, which morphs into her explaining how she got where she is today. It’s the saddest damn story I have ever heard. Orphaned, abused, neglected, raped, exiled, used, and now alone. By the time we are a couple of miles away from River Moon not only am I completely convinced of her truthfulness, but I’m ready to take these rogues on myself. Her original pack was horrible to her, but the rogue men used her badly as well, and I am pleased to know we’ll be destroying them. People like that don’t deserve to live. I realize a couple of times that I am growling, and it reminds me suddenly of how Dom sounded the other day when I mentioned asking Amelia to have dinner with me.

Huh.

We get about as close as I think she can safely approach the packhouse without being detected. There’s a little sheltered grove, some evergreen trees growing along the side of a rocky cliff, that should provide her a little cover if it rains. I look around. “I’m going to shift and run the rest of the way. You should be okay here. I’ll try to come back later with some food. Just wait right here.”

She nods, then I say, “Take the sweatshirt off.”

She immediately complies, and she probably thinks that I’m taking it back with me. But I don’t want to carry more than I have to while shifted. So I strip my t-shirt off over my head, and tell her, “Here, you can wear this too.” Her eyes are on my chest as I hand her the shirt. I wait while she puts it on, then the sweatshirt I am holding for her. She looks like she wants to say something, but instead she is silent.

I sit down on the ground and take off my shoes and socks, while she watches. “I’m not bringing my socks either. I don’t know if you want my stinky used socks, but you’re welcome to them.” I loosen the shoelaces of my shoes and tie them together so that there is a foot or two between my shoes. Then I strip off my jeans, loop them around the shoelaces, and drape the whole thing over the back of my neck. I know she can tell what I am doing, it’s a fairly common way for wolves to carry their clothes while shifted.

I turn away from her before I drop my underwear. I’m not bringing that either, but I’m not going to insult her by offering it to her. The moment they are off, I shift, morphing into my big reddish wolf, trying to duck down just right so that the shoes and pants stay across my shoulders.

Damn. They slip off anyway. I probably wasn’t careful enough, feeling a little unsettled with her watching me, and the bundle drops to the ground. I poke it with my wolf nose, trying to see if I can get it back up without having to shift back and use my hands.

“Hold on, I’ll do it,” she says, and lifts the bundle, drapes it carefully around my neck, secures it underneath with the ends of the laces, and lets her hand run softly over my fur before she steps back.

I look at her, and would say “I’ll be back” if I could, but instead I just start running.