Читать книгу Lying with Wolves - Cynthia Cooke - Страница 9
ОглавлениеCelia’s sobs racked her chest, making each breath a painful gulp, as if she were trapped deep under the ocean, drowning on her tears. Wave after wave of debilitating pain crashed over her then, like the tide, rolling out, allowing denial to roll in.
This wasn’t right. Couldn’t be right. Her mother couldn’t be dead.
Awareness hit her and she found herself on the floor, clutching Malcolm, her face pressed against his chest, his shirt clutched in her fists, his scent in her nose. Furious, she tried to push him away, but he held her even tighter as she beat against his chest.
“Get out!” she blurted, and tried to stand, to put as much distance between him and herself as she could. “Get away from me.”
“Celia—”
She didn’t want to see him, didn’t want him to see her like this. He released her and she pushed away from him, quickly getting to her feet. “Don’t start. Just leave. Now.”
“I can’t. I won’t leave you. Not like this.”
“I don’t believe anything you’re saying. You’re lying. Trying to manipulate me. Trying once more to maneuver everyone around you. I’m not falling for it, Malcolm. I’m over you.”
His dark eyes widened with shock. “Do you really think I’d lie about something like this? How could you think that about me? After all we’ve been through?” He took a step toward her, his hands outstretched.
She backed away from him, brushing up against the counter as her mind finally came to accept what her heart already knew to be true. A fresh wave of pain washed over her. She wrapped her hands around her middle, grasping for something, anything that could explain the unexplainable.
That could make sense of the nonsensical.
“How?” she asked.
“Accident,” he murmured. “In the woods.”
She heard his words but couldn’t fathom them. Couldn’t wrap her mind around the possibility. “What am I supposed to do now?” Her kind, their kind, lived a long time. They didn’t have accidents. They didn’t just die.
Unless the demons...
But that wasn’t possible. The Gauliacho couldn’t get into the Colony; they couldn’t get past the crystals. She started walking around the shop, pacing, moving faster and faster. “I have to get out of here.” She swept her hands through her hair. Moving round and round. Back and forth. Muttering to herself.
“We need to go back to the Colony,” Malcolm said, his voice calm. Authoritative.
“No. I won’t.”
“The crystals need to be rejuvenated. It’s already been four days since... We need you.”
She stopped pacing and looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “Go without me. I will be there when I can. I can’t just up and leave right now.”
“Celia. You can’t send me away.”
“Really? You mean like you did to me?”
He stilled, distress crumpling his face.
“Why can’t I?” she demanded, not wanting to hear his excuses, his denials.
“I told you. I lost my bracelet in the canyon when an Abatu attacked me.” He touched the wound on his head. “They’ve already got my scent. I’m afraid I led them right to you. There will be more coming soon. Coming here. We need to leave now or we’ll be trapped in this store.” He gestured toward the crystals, their protective force field shielding their presence the only thing keeping them safe at the moment.
What he said was true. Soon the Abatu would be congregating right outside the door, walking up and down the street, knowing they were close but not knowing where.
“You did this to me,” she said, her voice low and deadly. “They didn’t know I was here. They wouldn’t have known had you not come.”
He hesitated a brief moment as guilt flashed through his eyes. “How could I have not come? I wanted to be the one—”
“The one to break my heart all over again? You like seeing me in pain, Malcolm?” She heard the shrill tone to her voice and knew she was being unreasonable and impossibly unfair, but she didn’t care. Hot fury was burning a large path swiftly through her, and he made such a damned good target.
“I love you,” he whispered. “I wanted to be here for you.”
Her eyes narrowed at his audacity. “You don’t know what love is. You’re not capable of feeling love.”
He took a step back as if she’d physically hit him. “Fine. I guess I deserve that. But you’re wrong about me. I only hope one day I can prove it to you.”
She looked at him then, really looked at him. At the sincerity in his eyes and the heartbreak and desperation in his voice. Something inside her softened, cooling the anger that had been burning for so long. She turned away. “I can’t do this right now.”
“I get that. But we have to. We have no choice. You need to come back to the Colony and we need to go together. Now.”
There was no use fighting it. She couldn’t let everyone back home die at the hands of the Gauliacho just because she couldn’t stand the idea of spending the next three days trapped in a truck with the man. She looked around the shop that she’d worked so hard to create, that she was so damned proud of, and fresh tears filled her eyes.
“Don’t you see, Malcolm? I finally got away. I made my escape from the Colony. This shop—” she gestured wide “—you’re standing in is my new life. For the first time ever I’m on my own, discovering who I am, without you. Without the other shifters. Without my—”
She paused as the finality of her words set in. Without my mother.
Now she was forced to find her way alone. Without her guidance, no matter how overwhelming it had sometimes been. Fresh pain seared her insides.
“I like it here, Malcolm,” she said, pushing through the words. “No, I love it here. And here you’ve come, riding back into my life, trying to take it all away from me.”
“I don’t want to take anything from you. I wish I didn’t have to. But you don’t belong here in this dry desert. You belong at home.” With me.
He didn’t say the final words, but she heard them anyway. She knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. What he was feeling.
“I know I hurt you,” he said. “I made you doubt who you are and drove you away. But it’s time to come home. I’m sorry about so many things, more than you’ll ever know. I just hope I will have the chance to make it up to you. To show you I’ve changed.”
“Malcolm, I don’t care if you’ve changed.” Finally her shoulders slumped and she exhaled a breath tasting of defeat and sorrow. As much as she hated to accept it, she would have to go. After a few minutes of silence, she turned back to him.
“I want to know what happened to my mother.”
He stilled.
“What kind of accident? We don’t have accidents.”
He just stood there, his face losing its color.
“Malcolm, what aren’t you telling me?”
She could see his pain visibly racking his face. It scared her. “What?”
“Your mom was shot.”
His words reverberated around the room.
“Shot? How? Who?”
“Scott. We think. We don’t know for sure.”
She faltered, leaning against the counter.
“It was an accident.”
“How do you accidently shoot someone? I didn’t even think... Why would he even have a gun?”
“He was aiming for someone else and missed.”
“Who? This is crazy.”
“I know.”
She looked up at him. “Who could he have wanted to kill so badly, Malcolm?”
And then she thought she knew. It was him. It had to be him. That was why he looked so damned guilty.
“Shay.”
She looked up sharply. “Who the hell is Shay?”
“Dean Mallory’s daughter.”
“You mean your wife?” she said. The caustic taste of her words burned her throat. He actually had the audacity to look confused. His stupidity enraged her all over again. “The woman you threw our lives away for? The woman you’d never met but insisted you must marry? The woman who was supposed to solidify your leadership of the Pack and to hell with everyone else?” She pushed her lips together, refusing to rehash the devastation he’d reaped on her life.
“I’m not married to her.”
The softly spoken words ricocheted through her mind. She stared at him as fury hardened her eyes and trapped her tongue.
“She fell in love with Jason before she ever got to the Colony. They’re probably married by now and leading the Pack together.”
Disbelief overcame her bitterness and broke something loose within her. “But you sacrificed everything, threw everything we had away, just so you could marry this woman and maintain your position of power leading the Pack. And you lost it all anyway?”
“I was an idiot. I know that.” His eyes locked on hers. “I am so full of regret and remorse, I doubt I’ll ever recover.”
“And my mother died because of this woman?”
“Your mother died because Scott or someone in his group wanted Shay dead. They fired, they missed. And now we’re all going to pay the price. But you’re right, I sent Jason to get Shay, I brought her to the Colony. My plans, my scheming set all this in motion. Help me make amends to you, and to the people of the Colony. Come home, Celia.”
She shook her head in disbelief. After all she’d been through, after all he’d put her through, now she had to go back and help him make amends. Every fiber within her rebelled bitterly at the thought. More than anything, she wanted to throw him out, to throw him to the Abatu, but she couldn’t. The other shifters needed her. If she didn’t go, if she didn’t rejuvenate the crystals around the Colony’s perimeter, then within days everyone she knew would be dead.
She couldn’t let that happen. She had to go back.
Even if she had to go back with him.
* * *
Malcolm’s stomach folded in on itself as he watched Celia fall apart and desperately try to pull herself back together again. He longed to reach out and hold her, to comfort her and somehow make it all better again. But there was no way he could do that.
No way he could fix this.
He was a man who got things done, who made things happen. Standing on the sidelines helpless was not something he knew how to do. All he did know was that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he’d been lost without her. She grounded him and kept him sane. Kept the shadows at bay. And he’d screwed that up, too. But he’d learned his lesson. Somehow he had to make her see that. And then maybe she just might be able to love him again.
A passerby stopped in front of the large picture window, looked in at them and then hesitated.
An Abatu.
“Celia, we really need to go. Now.”
Her gaze followed his. She saw the man, and then looked around the shop, her eyes desperately flitting this way and that. “I can’t just pick up and leave without notice. I have a business here. I have partners. My cousins.”
“You have to. There’s already one out there.”
“They can’t see us beyond the crystals.”
“Maybe not. But they know we’re around here somewhere. I was still bleeding when I got here. They can smell my blood. Soon there will be more. Then what will we do? Never leave again? Stay in this shop for the next year?”
“I still have my bracelet.”
He stared at her, then sat in a corner chair. “You’re right. You can leave. This isn’t your problem. I’ll move in until you’re ready to go. Do you have somewhere for me to sleep?”
Her gaze hardened. “Fine. I’ll call the twins.”
He smiled. “I thought you’d come around to my way of thinking.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Malcolm. I’m not doing this for you. I couldn’t care less what happens to you. I’m doing this for the others. And I will come back one way or another. My life is here.”
Was here. He’d make her see that, because if there was one thing Malcolm was good at, it was getting people to come around to his way of thinking.
* * *
Celia climbed the stairs to her bedroom above the shop. Unfortunately Malcolm was right on her heels.
“There is no reason for you to come up here,” she called behind her.
“Call it curiosity,” Malcolm said, suddenly too close for comfort.
“We both know what that did to the cat.”
He smiled at her. That wide, charming smile of his that had made her fall in love with him in the first place. She took a deeply annoyed breath and stepped into her small one-bedroom apartment.
“Wait here,” she muttered, and went into her bedroom and pulled down an overnight bag from the top of her closet.
“Nice place,” he called from the front room.
It wasn’t nice; it wasn’t not nice. It was convenient.
She stepped into the bathroom, collecting her makeup and toothbrush. When she walked back into the living room, Malcolm was standing by the window, his smile replaced with worry.
“There are three more.”
“Surely not hovering in front of the shop.”
“No. Walking up and down the street. They know I’m here, they just don’t know where.”
“It’s the blood on your clothes. Here, take that shirt off.”
“What will I wear?”
She hurried back into her closet and pulled his T-shirt down off the shelf.
“You kept one of my shirts?” he asked, surprise lifting his voice.
“It was an accident. Don’t read anything into it,” she said drily.
But he wasn’t buying it. A huge smile filled his face as he took the shirt. He stripped out of the dirty one and she couldn’t help staring. She’d always loved his chest, sculptured and bronzed. She knew every plane, every soft spot, intimately.
And dammit if a part of her didn’t still long to reach out and touch him once again. To run her fingers over the hard ridges of his muscles and feel them flex beneath her touch. He might be an ass, but he was a damned good lover. And they had been real good together.
She looked up and his eyes caught and held hers. He knew what she’d been thinking. He knew her that well. Too well. She might be a fool where Malcolm was concerned, but she wasn’t a pushover. “Just because things didn’t work out for you with that woman doesn’t mean you can come running back to me and I’ll take you back.”
“Never thought you would,” he said, then broke into that easy smile. “Though a man can hope.”
“Are you ready?” she asked, losing her patience.
“Baby, I was born ready.”
“Then let’s go.”
With his dirty shirt in her hand, they went back down the stairs and into the shop. Even more men were in the street. Malcolm hovered by the window. “Any chance you have another bracelet?”
“Nope. There weren’t a lot of them to begin with. Besides, honestly, with that many out there, I’m not sure how well the bracelet will work.”
“What are you saying?”
“We’re going to have to make the change. They can’t smell us in our true from. We can run out the back, down the road to the hills beyond.”
“But it’s only dusk and there are people everywhere. We will be seen.”
“What choice do we have? If we wait any longer, as soon as we walk out the door they’ll pounce.”
“Have you changed here before?” he asked.
“No.”
“Have you hiked up into those hills? Are they very secluded?”
“No, and I don’t know.”
“Well, we can’t very well run all the way back to the Colony.”
“I’ll have Jade meet us in the canyon with your truck.”
“What about your car?”
“I’ll leave it here. I’m coming back, Malcolm. This is my life now. This is where I belong, and you and the others are just going to have to accept that.”
He nodded, but she could see in the stubborn glint in his eyes that he wasn’t accepting anything. She picked up the phone and called Jade, telling her what she needed her to do.
“Does she know about us?” Malcolm asked.
“No.”
“Then how are you going to explain this?”
“I have no idea. We’ll need to put our clothes in a bag on the counter next to your keys and my overnight bag. She’ll take them and drive your truck into the canyon and leave it there for us. Her sister, Ruby, will follow her and bring her back.”
“What if they hang around and wait for us? What if they see us?”
“We’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
He glanced once more out the window at the growing number of Abatu walking up and down the street. “You realize there are a million ways this can go wrong.”
“Yep. But we only need one way for it to go right.”
* * *
“Here, give me the shirt,” Malcolm said, and dumped the trash out of the metal trash can onto the floor. Celia threw the shirt inside the can and then he doused it with the oil from her oil lamp on a nearby table and set the shirt ablaze.
“Make sure you don’t burn my shop down,” she said.
“You just get undressed and leave this to me.”
“Fine,” Celia said, but she wasn’t fine. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to leave and she certainly didn’t want to strip in front of him. It was stupid, she knew that. She’d undressed in front of Malcolm a hundred times before, and yet this time it was so much harder.
She tried to be nonchalant, to act as if it were nothing as her fingers fumbled over that first button of her shirt. But it wasn’t. Without looking at him, she pulled her shirt off, folded it and placed it in the bag. Next came her skirt. This was no big deal, she told herself, even though she knew it was a lie.
Malcolm’s eyes were on her. She could feel his gaze boring into her skin as he watched her every movement. “Do you mind?” Her eyes narrowed with annoyance.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Celia. You can’t blame a man for wishing.”
“Turn around,” she snapped.
“Fine.”
He did, and within seconds her clothes were in the paper sack, and her purse and keys were lying on the counter next to her overnight bag. They were lined up and ready for the twins, who should be here within a matter of minutes.
She unlocked the back door, opened it a crack and hoped, not only for herself and Malcolm, but for the whole Pack that her plan would work. She began walking around the room, concentrating on the feel of her steps, the wood beneath her feet, her breath deep and steady, the pattering of her heartbeat, the pulsing of her blood. Each part of her, changing, transforming.
Her vision sharpened in the semidarkness until she could see clearly into each dark corner. She smelled the subtle differences in the hundreds of delicate scents used in the products they sold—the candles, the incense, the lotions and oils.
And the Abatu outside.
She dropped down onto all fours. Malcolm was beside her, his powerful energy filling her. It had been a long time since they’d run together, since she’d felt the tenuous strings connecting them. As they drew her to him, to his power and strength, she felt compelled to lean into him. To let him guide her. She fought the pull. She wouldn’t fall for it again.
With her nose, she nudged open the back door and left the shop, walking onto the narrow street behind it. Malcolm was close on her heels. They moved slowly at first, getting a feel for their surroundings, the scents and sounds around them. The location of every Abatu and each human. There were so many.
They moved steadily down the alley behind the shops, sticking to the shadows, their nails clicking against the asphalt. They passed cautiously by a large Dumpster behind a busy restaurant halfway down the alley. A man reeking of alcohol and body sweat was sprawled next to it. His eyes opened as they passed, saw them and started to scream.
Spotted. Celia cringed. Back doors opened. Blinds lifted, curtains moved. Abatu were everywhere. Moving toward them, trying to capture their scent. They ran down the alley toward the hills and safety.
People were pointing. Staring. Some with amazement. Some with disbelief. Some with horror. They moved quickly, not wanting to burst out into a full run in front of everyone, but the time for not drawing attention to themselves was over.
A police cruiser turned down the alley, a mounted spotlight capturing them in its hundred-watt halogen glow. This was it. Their only chance. They took off running, fast and hard. Sounds of people screaming as they scampered away filled the air, boots slapping against pavement behind them, the squeal of tires, the burning smell of rubber.
Finally they reached the end of the street and tore up the side of the hill, bolting up the embankment. Running hard. Running fast. There were a million ways for this to go wrong. They’d only just begun, and Celia wasn’t sure they were going to be able to make it.
Below them on the highway, people stopped their cars and stared at them, two wolves racing up the hill, chased by the police. Their shouts filled the night air, some with excitement, others of fear. Soon there would be a party of men with guns searching for them, not because of what they’d done, but because of what people were afraid they would do.
When they crested the top of the hill, Celia stopped and turned back, taking one last look at the cop car parked at the bottom of the hill, the cops on their radios calling for backup, the rear door of her shop swinging wide-open as Abatu filed inside, tracking their scent.
She hoped and prayed they wouldn’t touch Ruby when she arrived to pick up the keys to Malcolm’s truck and their clothes. If only she could warn her somehow. But then she saw a cop go into the shop, and she hoped he’d take care of them and lock up behind him. Though that was probably too much to hope for.
She heard a bark behind her, turned and saw Malcolm waiting impatiently for her at the top of the ridge. He was right; they still had a long way to go before reaching the rendezvous point. Reluctantly she pulled her gaze away from the shop. It wouldn’t be the last time she saw it, she promised herself, then tore off after Malcolm into the night.
They crested the next hill and disappeared into the mountains, running fast and free. Sand shifted beneath her feet as she bolted up the mountainside. Small animals froze in fear or scurried from their path. They ran through the canyons, around, up and over mountains, following the moon as it rose higher and higher in the sky. Finally she was running free, stretching her muscles, breathing deep the sweet desert air. And all she wished was that she was back in her shop, not having to face the horrors to come. The thought that she could be trapped in the Colony; the fact that her mother was dead.
She pushed the thoughts from her mind as they dropped down into a dry riverbed traveling its meandering path up to the red rock canyon, where hopefully by now Ruby had already left Malcolm’s truck and was long gone.
Malcolm.
She didn’t have to look to see if he was there; she could feel him next to her. His emotions were wide-open and easy to read in a way they hadn’t been in a long time. Their connection was stronger than ever. She tried to block it. She didn’t want to feel him, even if he had changed. Even if he really was sincere about wanting to make amends.
Even if he really did love her.
So what? It didn’t matter if he loved her or not. Some love wasn’t worth having. It was too late for them. There was too much damage between them. Too much to forget or forgive. What she needed to focus on now was her future, and how she could save the Colony without becoming trapped there.
