Time Mends (3 page)

They slowed just before coming into view.
There were two of them, small and red. The younger of the two bared
his teeth in a snarl, but the older one stood perfectly still,
confusion evident in his green eyes.

Coyotes. They weren’t the two who killed
Alex, but they looked similar. I pressed my ears back against my
head and growled deep in my throat.

The older coyote snapped at the younger one,
but it was too late. He was racing towards me. All I had to do was
wait for the perfect moment to spring onto him. He was small and
clumsy. I would be able to dispose of him quickly. Just as he was
closing in on the perfect distance a flash of fur darted out of the
bushes, knocking the young coyote off course. I let out a
frustrated snarl at losing my advantage.

The newcomer stood between me and my
adversary. If it had been anyone else, I would have knocked him
aside to get to the boy.

I barked out a plea, but the wolf remained
in front of the boy, protecting him.

I fell back, but then circled around to the
right. The wolf realized what I was doing and snapped at me. I
moved back and he snapped again, this time stepping towards me.

He was running me off.

All desire to fight vanished as I was
overcome with disappointment and humiliation. He didn’t want me.
Not like this. I dropped my head, tucked my tail, and ran away.

I spent the rest of the night slinking
around, following random paths for a while, but never committing to
a hunt. I could feel the sunrise before the first rays broke over
the horizon. My muscles began to twitch and I hunkered down onto
the ground, praying this time the Change would kill me.

I lay naked and confused on the dew soaked
ground. The bad news was I wasn’t dead. The worse news was the
Change back had been just as painful and much longer than the
original Change. The worst news was I was conscious for every
single second of it.

I think he may have been with me for part of
it. Or maybe I was hallucinating. There was really no way to be
sure. My brain was on overload, too much shock and pain to function
properly. That’s why I didn’t realize someone was next to me until
they touched my shoulder, sending a lightning storm of pain across
my new, sensitive skin.

“
Sorry!” Talley crouched
down next to me. “I’m so sorry.”

I wanted to tell her it was okay, but I knew
if I opened my mouth a scream would escape.

“
Here,” she said, working
a garment over my head. “It’s soft and thin. It’ll still hurt, but
it’s the best I could do.”

She wasn’t kidding. It felt like I was
attacking a sunburn with sandpaper. Once we got all my important
bits covered with Talley’s old swimsuit cover-up, I was exhausted.
I slumped back onto the ground, focusing all my energy on pulling
oxygen into my lungs.

I must have nodded off, because the next
thing I knew a hand was brushing the hair out of my face.

“
Scout, can you hear me?”
I nodded my head, but refused to pry my eyes open. “Do you think
you can stand up if I helped you?”

“
I don’t know.” The words
felt odd in my mouth.

A fourth person joined our group. “It’s
okay,” he said. “I’ll get her.”

“
No, I’ve got her,” the
first guy said, and suddenly I was being lifted off the
ground.

He smelled like home and cinnamon.

“
Dude, seriously, I think
she should try to walk.”

“
I’ve got her.” The sound
of his voice echoed in his chest, loud and assertive. Everything
was loud, but it didn’t hurt like before.

“
She’s okay,” Talley
assured Jase. “Let him take care of her.”

I could hear Jase’s teeth snap together even
though he was a good fifteen or twenty feet behind me. Actually, if
I concentrated, I could hear the air as it entered and left his
lungs and the steady pounding of his heart. Somehow the ability to
distinguish individual sounds out of the cacophony lingered
post-Change.

The same must have held true for Charlie.
“You’re hungry,” he said after my stomach gurgled for perhaps the
fourth time. “Did you eat anything last night?”

“
A rabbit.” The memory of
the blood in my mouth, the crunch of bone between my teeth, caused
me to gag. “I ate a rabbit.”

“
You caught a rabbit? Good
girl.”

Something in my chest fluttered pleasantly
at the obvious pride in his voice. Everything was going to be okay.
Charlie was here, and he was proud of me.

It took all of two seconds for my brain to
catch up. My eyes flew open, revealing a familiar curve of neck and
jawline. The physical pain from the Change was fading quickly, but
it felt like someone slammed a fist into the solar plexus of my
soul.

In my head I didn’t see the boy I had loved
since before I was old enough to understand the word, but the
coyote who rolled Alex to the edge of that cliff.

“
Put me down,” I said
suddenly, struggling against the arms holding me tight. “Dammit,
Charlie. Let me go.”

He released me and I scrambled away from
him, my body shaking for an entirely new reason. I barely made it
to the tree line before I started retching. I grabbed onto a limb
to keep from collapsing onto the ground. I looked at the contrast
of my hand against the dark bark and remembered how just an hour
before it was a paw. I leaned more heavily against the tree as
darkness began encroaching on the outer edges of my vision.

“
Scout…?” Talley stood
just behind me, her hands hovering in the air behind my back,
wanting to comfort, but afraid to touch.

“
I’m fine,” I said, slowly
pushing myself back to an erect position. It wasn’t a complete lie.
Other than a throat raw from its recent acquaintance with stomach
acid and some sensitive skin issues, I was physically fine. In
fact…

I ran my hand over my stomach, surprised to
discover my wounds completely and totally healed. I rotated the
wrist which had been encased in plaster until it turned into a
foreleg. It moved as if it was never broken.

“
The Change repairs any
bone or muscle damage,” Talley said. “It puts the cells back where
they’re suppose to be, not where they were. You should be back to
where you were before the accident.”

“
I have scars.” I could
feel the ridges through the thin material of the
cover-up.

Talley’s eyebrows knitted together. “Really?
That’s not supposed to happen.”

I let out a bark of laughter. “None of this
is supposed to happen! Did you miss the part where I grew a tail
and ran around on four legs eating rabbit tartar?”

“
I know this is hard to
understand —”

“
Hard to understand?” I
shook my head in disbelief. “It’s impossible to understand. I’m not
a Shifter, Tal. I’m Scout, normal girl, remember? Unless my dad is
a Shifter and you didn’t tell me,” which was exactly the sort of
thing they would do, “or I’m adopted,” which I doubted, “this
completely defies understanding. I mean, do you have an
explanation? Can you tell me what is going on? Because if you’ve
got so much as a theory, I’m all big, wolfy ears.”

Talley’s fingers were wound up in her hair.
“I… I’m not sure.” She looked to Jase and Charlie for help, but
they didn’t have any to provide. “We’ll figure it out, though.
We’ll take you to Toby and he’ll get the answers.”

This caused another
sardonic laughing fit on my end. It was nice to be able to do so
without feeling like I was being split in two. “Oh, I feel all
kinds of better now I know that
Toby
is going to figure things out
for me.”

“
Toby is the Pack Leader,”
Jase said as though that really did make everything all
better.

“
So?”

“
So it’s his job to
protect and care for his people,” he explained. “He’ll take care of
this. Promise.”

I wish I could be as confident. “I’m not
part of his Pack.”

“
Of course you are. You’re
family.”

“
Really?
Whose?”

“
Mine. You’re my sister,
remember?”

I automatically touched my stomach, still
surprised to find scars instead of stitches.

“
How are going to explain
this?” I asked, refusing to acknowledge Jase’s statement about our
sibling bond. “What am I supposed to tell Mom when she goes to
change my dressing?” The thought of her face when she lifted my
shirt to find a whole stomach...

Oh crap.

“
We have to call Mom!
She’s going to be freaking out!” Ever since the accident Mom
checked on me regularly through the night. “The police are probably
looking for me.”

Talley shuffled awkwardly. “She knows where
you are. We called her as soon as we realized what happened.”

“
She knows what? That I
decided, despite my inability to get out of bed, I would go
camping?”

“
She knows you Shifted,”
Jase answered. “She knows everything.”

That stopped me cold. “Everything?”

For quite possibly the first time in his
life, Jase looked uncomfortable. “Everything.”

I worked hard to keep my voice controlled.
“How long has she known everything?”

“
I don’t know. Since my
dad died? Since I was born?”

Of course she knew. Everybody was in on the
secret. I don’t know how I managed to still feel betrayed by it
all.

“
And my dad?”

“
She was supposed to tell
him last night,” Talley answered. “Parents of Shifters are the only
normal people who know about any of us.”

I tried to imagine how that conversation
went. My practical, no-nonsense mother explaining to my
just-the-facts-and-nothing-but-the-facts father that his daughter
developed the ability to transform into a wild canine when the moon
was full. I’m sure it went over really well.

“
So, all those times you
told her you were going camping or whatever, she knew what was
really going on?”

“
I guess. She wouldn’t
talk to me about it. When I was old enough to be told I was a
Shifter and start going out on full moons with the Pack, I tried to
tell her where I was going and why, but she wouldn’t listen. She
said, ‘You’re going to your grandmother’s to spend the night.
Nothing more, nothing less.’ She wants to pretend like it isn’t
real, like I’m normal.”

I could almost see the attraction of that
attitude. My life had been completely turned upside-down by the
discovery that Shifters existed. If I could go back to a simpler
world, I would do it in a heartbeat, but I didn’t have that
option.

“
What do we do now?” I
asked no one in particular.

Talley volunteered an answer. “Now we go
back to my house. Mom and Gramma are cooking a huge breakfast -
eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits, gravy, pancakes, everything.” I
thought about my last meal and shuddered. A raw rabbit? A
defenseless little bunny, fur and all? “You need to eat, Scout. The
Change burns about a million calories you’re going to have to
replace.”

“
So, we eat.” If I could
get poor little Thumper out of my head long enough to work up an
appetite. “And then?”

Her clear blue eyes met mine. “And then I
don’t know.”

Talley’s driveway looked like a car lot. I
always assumed the Pack consisted of Jase, Charlie, Charlie’s dad,
and Toby, Charlie’s annoyingly self-important brother. I never
thought to include great-uncles and distant cousins.

My fingers dug into the upholstery of the
passenger’s seat. No one said much during the fifteen minute car
ride other than Talley asking if I was okay every thirty seconds.
Maybe if I could have managed something besides a strangled choking
noise she would have quit asking.

I spent the majority of the time trying to
convince myself this was all a horrible nightmare or psychotic
episode brought on by stress, pain, and fever, but seeing all those
cars gleaming in the early morning light somehow undid all my hard
work.

If there had been anything left in my
stomach I would’ve thrown up again.

“
Scout?” Jase’s fingers
clutched my elbow. I gave yet another strangled choking noise in
response. “Scout, you need to listen to me. This is
important.”

I turned my head to find him leaning up
between the driver and passenger seats. “When you go in there,
whatever you do, don’t let them see your fear. You have to be
strong, okay?”

The realization Jase was echoing what Alex
said to me in my dreams was enough to get me back into speaking
mode. “What? What did you say?”

Her jerked back, looking as shaken as I
felt. “Shifters are different than other people. Fear is a sign of
weakness, and weakness is worse than bad. You can’t let them think
you’re afraid. If someone bullies you, you have to stand up for
yourself. Think you can do that?”

“
No.” Honesty is the best
policy, right? “God, Talley, just take me home. I don’t want to be
here.”

“
Not an option,” came
Charlie’s voice from the back seat. “You trespassed on Hagan
territory.”

“
I was in my back
yard.”

“
Doesn’t matter. Rules are
rules.”

I literally felt like I might explode. Rules
are rules? I just had one of the most traumatic events of my life
and they were actually concerned about crap like borders and
territory? And when did Charlie start caring about rules? He was
the kind of guy who believed rules were made to be broken. In fact,
he owned a t-shirt that said, “Rules are made to be broken.”