Dawn Redeemed

"If you really think," Alexander snorted, "you saw a wolf, I doubt if it would be playing fetch with Fallon. Wolves are usually more afraid of us than we are of them."

"Usually. Uncle Alexander, please. I don't want Fallon to get hurt."

"Ok, ok. After supper I'll give Mack Brown a call. Have him come out and take a look around."

"The County Sheriff?"

Alexander shrugged, "Closest thing we've got to Animal Control around here. You're not in Washington, D.C. anymore, Erica." He turned his attention back to the TV. He knew the wolves meant no harm. He knew about them and their secrets. What could possibly interest one of the pack enough to lure a wolf out of the safety of the woods? "If, and I say If, there's a wolf in the woods, Mack will take care of it."

"Thanks, Uncle Alexander." He hadn't seemed too concerned with her 'alleged' wolf sighting. But at least he was going to give the local authorities a call tonight. If a wolf was on the loose, people needed to know about it. "Where is Fallon anyway?"

"Outside playing. Too nice of a day to keep her cooked up in the house." Alexander kicked back his recliner and propped his feet up.

"She knew she wasn't supposed to go outside alone. Didn't she tell you that?"

"Must have slipped her mind." Alexander watched from beneath a cracked eyelid. Erica pushed back a heavy lined drape and stared out the window. "Uncle Alexander," Erica gasped, "she's almost in the woods."

"You played in those same woods all day when you were her age," Alexander justified.

"There wasn't a rabid wolf stalking the woods then." Erica slid the curtain back and stomped toward the front door.

"And there isn't now. You're making too much out of this 'wolf' sighting. Like I said, it's probably the neighbor's dog. Nothing to worry about."

Erica rested her hand on the latch and pushed open the screen door. "Uncle Alexander, she's just a little girl and I don't want her out there alone." Her fingers trembled in outrage. Struggling to keep from yelling at her uncle for his oversight. He was just trying to be the good guy. Everyone was trying to be so nice...too nice. Carefully avoiding the more difficult subjects like her mother's death, her failed business venture, and the fact that she was broke as a joke and didn't have any promising leads on a job. Their overt niceness was driving her nuts. It was ok to talk about the hard things. In fact, it might help if they did.

Once she found a job, if she couldn't trust her uncle to watch Fallon, she'd have to put her in daycare after school. It was an expense she couldn't afford. The extra money she spent paying someone to take care of Fallon would have to come from somewhere. Probably, her apartment fund and then she'd never get out from under her aunt and uncle's roof. The thought of that was too dismal to think about. Her uncle was such a push over and Fallon far too bright for a kid her age.

"Dad," Alex cautioned. Her dad was digging the hole deep and deeper for himself. Erica's emotions gave off a scent. Worry smelled like burned wax. Anger was acrid like sulfur. Despair gave off the sweet, choking, cloying scent of garbage left to rot in the sun. Erica smelled of all three. She was lost, humiliated at what she considered a defeat, and confused about a great number of things. And she'd only been in a world she didn't even know existed for a few short weeks.

Alex nodded when her dad snapped his mouth shut and watched Erica with his blue eyes pinned on her back. Her dad sometimes could argue a point to death, sort of like a terrier with a bone. He needed to let it go. Fighting with Erica and trying to convince her that what she saw, obviously a wolf, was a dog wasn't going to work. Alex had a strategy of her own. Her dad knew the score. He was always hip deep in the know. And he knew exactly what and who Fallon's father was.

"I'm sorry. I'll keep a better eye on her from now on. I promise," Alexander said contritely.

"Thanks," Erica said as she worked to contain her anger. Opening the screen door and letting it slam behind her, she went out on the front porch. "Fallon! Time for dinner!" When Fallon didn't immediately come, she walked across the front yard determined to drag her daughter out of the woods by her red hair if she had to. The grass was spongy against her stocking feet. So unlike the concrete sidewalks of D.C. Her uncle was right she wasn't in the city anymore. But the dangers weren't any less. The city had thugs and criminals hiding around every corner. The country, with its rolling meadows, flat acres of farmland, and thick, deep woods had threats, different threats, all of its own.

The wolf cocked his head at the sound of the slamming of a screen door and a woman's soft foot falls coming closer across the grass. A little yip escaped his black lips and he nudged the little girl with the tip of his sleek, cool, shiny nose. Bounding into the safety of the woods, he left the little girl. The woman was a mother protecting her young. The wolf could understand.

Fallon shuffled her feet in the grass. "I'm sorry, mom." She knew she was in trouble. The expression on her mother's face gave no hint to the punishment she had in mind. But, that determined look said it all. "Uncle Alexander said I could go out and play." She looked up hopefully at her mom.

"You didn't tell him you couldn't go out by yourself did you?"

"No." Suddenly the uneven bright spring green grass beneath her tattered sneakers seemed much more interesting. "Are you mad?"

"Disappointed. Come on, it's time for supper, after that young lady, you get in the tub and take your bath and then straight to bed." Erica gave Fallon a gentle shove between the shoulder blades and marched her toward the house.

"Ok." Arguing would only make her punishment worse. If she zipped her lip now, she might get to watch TV or read a book before bed. If she pouted or argued, she'd lay there awake in bed staring at a dark ceiling for hours. "I promise from now on I'll make sure I have an adult with me when I go out to play."

"You'd better." Erica marched Fallon through the living room. She felt her uncle's eyes on them as they walked past the TV. Uncle Alexander watched her from beneath his half closed eyelids as he pretended to be dozing in his recliner. "That goes for you too, Uncle Alexander. She doesn't go out alone from now on."

Alexander nodded and winked at Fallon. They were both in the dog house and they both knew it. From now on, they'd have to be on high alert around Erica until she relaxed a bit. "Ok."

Alex leaned close to her father's ear. Erica was busy helping Fallon wash up for dinner and change out of her school clothes. Well out of earshot where she couldn't hear the conversation. "Torr?"

"Could be. Hell, they all look alike to me in their wolf forms. I can't tell one from the other."

"Erica doesn't know," Alex whispered.

"Yet."

Alex nodded. "I'll have a talk with him. He has to tell her."

"Soon." Alexander turned up the volume on the TV. He watched his daughter go from pretending to be human to being what she was, a graceful preternatural predator, an ethereal being of both beauty and fear, in less than a split second. Erica slid out of the screen door without as much as stirring the air or making the floorboards creak beneath her feet.

Chapter 5

Layers of soft, spongy loam carpeted the ground beneath Alex's feet. Stark tree trunks of black, brown, tan, pale ash, and evergreen bordered a long twisting path. Alex walked deeper into the woods, looking for what she could smell and sense, but not see. Branches green with spring leaves and the fragrant aroma of dogwood, apple blossoms, and the heavy, fat buds of pink blooms drooping from the tulip trees formed an archway over her head.

Alex had never been much of an outdoor girl. Not since she had been a kid and used to play in these woods with Erica. She preferred museums filled with dusty artifacts, and musty books and parchments to fresh air and lush scenery. She reached out with her preternatural senses and listened to the overwhelming noise of the quiet. She heard the slightest flutter of a bird's wing from yards away. Squirrels and chipmunks softly chattered from their burrows. A wary rabbit munched on tender shoots of grass, his velvet ears flicking every which way at the sound of her footsteps.

The wolf was close, silently watching her from his hiding place. His brown fur blended in with the bark of the trees, making him impossible to see. His musky scent was thick in the air and she could hear his light exhales. For some reason Alex felt a little like that rabbit and those squirrels and chipmunks burrowed in their dins. She felt like prey caught in a predator's crosshairs.

The wolf was one with nature and the solid ground beneath his paws, but he was not a natural wolf. Torr was goddess blessed and an equally cursed by the wolf sharing his preternatural skin. Alex wasn't afraid. It was just a little unnerving and well, creepy to be in the woods at dusk with a wolf's golden eyes pinned on her back. After all, things hadn't exactly work out too well for Red Riding Hood in the end now had they?

The wolves of the not so natural variety were wickedly fast, fiercely intelligent, and efficiently lethal in the hunt. They were massive in their forms, thick bands of muscle and sinew covered by a deceptively soft, downy coat of luxurious fur. Even the females, typically smaller than the males, were roughly about the size of bull mastiffs and twice their width in the shoulders and chest. Their teeth and their razor sharp claws were nothing to take lightly. Only an idiot would offer his throat to the wolf and expect to live to tell about it.

The vampires held their own nicely in the preternatural world. But, their world was one of planning and careful posturing, of laws and consequences. Even the brotherhood, to a degree, relied on reputation to maintain order. Vampires were solitary by nature. They had community, but were not communal. It wasn't so with the wolves. Their very natures made them what they were. Many honed by instinct and drive into a singular, unstoppable force.

Alex put the widest tree she could find, a gnarled old maple tree as big around as a house, at her back. Wolves interpreted body language and scent more than they relied on what was said. With Torr in this form, she wasn't exactly sure if he could completely understand words and concepts. Part of the two blended halves of him did. Otherwise, she'd be lunch for a hungry predator by now.

Alex hadn't swallowed the Kool-aid. She'd learned the ancient language for a more practical purpose. When she wasn't dreaming dreams or seeing visions. She did as she'd always done and lived precariously though a long forgotten past. She took the bits and pieces of so many lives and made some kind of sense of the random order of history. Artifacts of a people scattered to the wind had been preserved because she took the time to do it. Scrolls and scraps of weathered paper were translated and passed down to the next generation, not because a few of the brothers weren't old enough to remember the distant past, but because she felt it important enough to do the work. The dead spoke from their graves and the hodgepodge of the things they'd left behind was their voice. Sometimes the living were to busy living to care, but she did.

She cleared her throat. Not because the wolf wasn't paying attention. Somehow, it just seemed like the thing to do. Alex rarely spoke the ancient language aloud. The Midwestern nasal twang of her accent hardly did the beauty of the words justice. It'd be no different if she were speaking French or Spanish or any other foreign word. There'd be a lilt of a syllable, the missed silent H, or mispronounced roll of an R, that wouldn't quite come out right. And there was nothing worse than butchering someone's native tongue. "Brother Wolf," she said, trying to get it right. "I need to speak with the man who shares your body."

The wolf gracefully stepped out of his hiding place and pinned her in the depths of his golden citrine stare. His dark nostrils flared wide capturing her scent. His ears were perked high atop his broad head and twitching like mini radars honing in on a sound. His tail flicked in irritation as if she'd offended him with her request. He flashed his sharp teeth in a gesture of supremacy. Alex froze under his watchful gaze, looking everywhere but meeting his unearthly yellow stare.

Torr's wolf was a magnificent creature. Larger than most with soft rich walnut brown fur and a brush of cream on his forelegs, the tips of his ears and tail, and dusting his underbelly. He was big...very, very big. The aura of raw, primitive magic pouring off of him in waves was breathtaking. Energy sizzled along the hairs of Alex's arms and her skin prickled from the sting of so much power. Torr was no ordinary pack wolf. The man might deny what he was born to be. But, his wolf sure as hell didn't. She was looking at an Alpha pack master and reeling in the force of him.

The wolf sized her up and tested her scent on the air. With a flick of his massive tail, rattling the brush in protest and reluctance to give up his hold on his shared body, he turned in a fluid, graceful movement and bounded into the bushes. Alex's stomach wrenched in her throat at the sounds coming from the thick cover of things she'd rather not see or think about.

The noise of the transformation from wolf into human was soft as a whisper and yet deafening in her ears. And damn, it sounded painful. She gritted her teeth at the thick, fluid, almost gloppy sound of flesh molding over snapping tendons and crunching bone. There was a rustle of wet leaves and twigs being dragged over the ground by sharp claws as they turned into fingernails.

The worst of it confirmed her suspicions. Torr's restrained gasps of pain, his heavy panting behind tightly clamped lips and grinding molars, and the grunt of his confusion were more than enough for her to get an all too clear mental image of what was happening behind the bushes. The whole process took less than a minute or two, yet it dragged on and on for what seemed like hours.

Alex sat on the ground, leaning her back against the tree trunk and waited. At this point, she didn't know which side of the preternatural family got the better end of the deal. Wolves could eat and drink. They enjoyed the sunshine on their faces. They had families and children. They were born to be what they were. She'd always believed despite what she'd been told, having never seen it for herself, that the transformation was a graceful thing...painless and sort of magical, just a poof and a wolf or a man appeared. That was so not the case.

Vampires were made, not born. The human body had to in effect die to be reborn. The rebirth was horrifying and painful. But, like so many awful things, the mind had a way of protecting you from the worst and it was easy to put that kind of agony away on some mental shelf and forget about it. She couldn't eat. She couldn't tolerate the sunlight. Alex missed those things about living. She'd chosen to become what she was and there was no way out of it once the choice was made.

The wolves had no choice. Well, they did, but the choice was something worse than death. To deny what was so much a part of you...down deep into the core of your being was a kind of living hell. Like being kept alive on a ventilator, conscious but not conscious, and never taking so much as a gasp of air on your own volition.

No life, it seemed was without tradeoffs and consequences. Humanity had plenty of penalties for being born as they were as well. They could do about anything, eat, drink, sunbathe, have children. But the price for it was heavy, sixty or maybe, if a person was lucky enough eighty or ninety short years. And then it was game over forever. Alex did her best to keep her mom and dad around for as long as she could. But, the only thing she was really accomplishing was buying them or perhaps herself a few extra precious years.

Torr groaned and rolled onto his back blinking up at the cool dim purple of evening twilight. He hated when his wolf dumped him in the middle of nowhere like an old burlap bag. He'd have to give his wolf time in their shared body or streak through the woods naked till he found the backpack with his clothes he'd stashed away under a fallen log. Great. Damned wolf. The confusion after a shift was the worst. Far worse than the pain of changing back. He sat up and shook off his the logy, hazy feeling that came with not exactly knowing where you were. Sort of like when you woke up in a strange place. Sometimes, it took a minute for everything to come back on line.

Someone was here. He heard the purposefully noisy shuffling of leaves beneath feet. Wonderful. He ducked low and peeked through the brush, cursing as a stray thorn pricked his finger. A woman, at first in his dazed confused state from the transformation, he thought it was Erica. Then he realized that the woman wasn't Erica but her cousin, Alex. "I'm naked." His voice sounded gruff and harsh.

"I assumed that." Alex felt her cheeks heat to a blush. She sounded flippant, as if his current state of dress didn't phase her, but it did. "I came to talk to you about Erica and Fallon." She moved closer to the bush and sat on a downed log a few yards away. Alex focused her eyes on her hands, on the beauty of nature...anywhere instead of the naked thigh extending out from the cover of sparse spring leaves.

"I'm kind of in a compromised state here." Torr sat up again. Doing his best to stay covered by the brush. Nudity didn't effect him the way it did Alex. For the pack nudity was a fact of their lives. For her, clothing was not optional. He could see the reddened blush spread across her cheeks and the way her eyes flickered up and down, everywhere but looking at him. He spotted an orange strap peeking out from beneath the log she'd taken residence up on. "Could you toss me that backpack please?"

"Huh?" How many wolves carried a backpack with them. "Oh," she said as it dawned on her that he must have stripped and transformed into his wolf close to the house. Her fingers wrapped around the orange straps and hefted the backpack from underneath the log. Trying her best not to catch a sneak peak at him, she tossed the bag in his general direction.

Torr caught the bag easily with one hand and got to work getting dressed. Alex must want to talk to him pretty damn bad to chase his wolf through the woods. "Thanks."

Alex heard the whisper of a zipper and the rustling of clothes sliding over naked flesh. Damn, it was hard not to risk a peek at Torr as he dressed. She shyly looked down at her hands. Back before, she used to love to wear nail polish. That had been a different woman in a different time. As happily married as she was to Chance, Torr emanated an aura of raw sexuality that was pure male that, quite honestly, was hard to resist. Dried foliage crinkled under the sound of his shifting body weight as he stood. He walked with the grace common to all big predators. The log shifted as he sat down next to her. Even dressed he effected her on some level, but he didn't seem to notice and she tried damn hard not to. Straddling the rough bark between his thighs had her thinking things no potential cousin in law ought to think. "Have you been seeing Fallon?"

"Yes. At least, my wolf has. It's the only way I can get close to her as of right now. I promised Erica I wouldn't push and I won't. Fallon is very comfortable around my wolf. And I hope you know this, she is perfectly safe." Torr settled into a more comfortable position on the log. Alex's cheeks were burning red and she still refused to meet his eyes. Sometimes he didn't get women. The female members of the Grey family were a particular challenge. Alex blushed as shyly as a schoolgirl and fiddled with the zipper of her jacket. He sort of wished she'd just get to the point and say what she'd tracked him down to say. For a preternatural being with one foot in the visionary world of the future, she was so damn human.