“But well, obviously they didn’t, and when I woke up to the ranger calling my name, they were gone.” Zach grinned, a rueful quirk of his mouth. “I guess some part of my brain figured one of the wolves had come to finish the job when I saw Ellis. It’s probably why I ran, because that night, I was scared shitless even if that was probably when I’d been the safest. It’s stupid, because they were trying to protect me, but some lizard part of my brain refused to listen to reason.”
“It’s different if you’ve got two hundred and fifty pounds of wolf on your heels than a couple trying to get you to drink from a river.” He patted Zach’s hand, then reluctantly drew his back. “From their size, it sounds like you’ve already met a couple of shifters. You’re what? Twenty-five? Wolves were introduced back into the park in the mid-90s, so your ranger working the park back then probably knew a hell of a lot about the reintroduction projects and the size of the wolves in the area.”
“Yeah, no one believed me. Everyone spent a lot of time showing me exactly how big a wolf could get, and none of them were close to the ones I’d seen—the ones I’d been with—that night. My father kept telling me to stop lying, and it took a long time before anyone in the family would believe anything I said. I think that’s when I decided to bury everything that happened. Until yesterday, I hadn’t really thought anything about it. Hell, my brain waited until I was in your bathroom before unloading a bunch of memories I’d tucked away.” Zach shook his head, then whimpered, rubbing at the small mark on his temple. “God, that was a mistake—just like me telling anyone I saw a giant wolf yesterday. I am literally the boy that cried wolf.”
ZACH WAS fading. Gibson could see it. The flush of color he’d had from walking across the floor was seeping away, leaving behind a pallor, and his eyes drooped, his lashes sweeping down slowly when he blinked. There was a small protest, barely worth mentioning, when Gibson maneuvered Zach back to the couch, but he settled into the sectional’s crook without much complaint. A bruise was beginning to come up on Zach’s forearm, an angry purple mottle going black around the edges, and Gibson didn’t even want to imagine how the rest of Zach’s body looked after his fall. Well, he didn’t want to imagine. He wanted to see the man naked and spread out over his bed, uninjured and ready for him, but considering Zach was probably covered in a tapestry of black-and-blue blotches, now wasn’t the time for anything more strenuous than a cup of tea.
Daytime wasn’t for a few more hours, and even then, Gibson didn’t have any assurances that the sun would be able to break through the storm. The howling had picked up again, making Ellis’s ears twitch even in his sleep, and Gibson didn’t like the sound of the snow striking the cabin’s shuttered windows. The wolf had taken himself upstairs after a loud series of thundering rattles, and Gibson resigned himself to a bed full of black fur covering his sheets. If anything, the storm sounded as if it was angry it couldn’t reach them, striking the cabin in full fury. And while the gusts of wind made it difficult to hear at times, Zach’s whisper was clear enough.
“Just want you to trust me. I just need someone to believe in me.” Zach slid down against the cushion, cradling his head against the back of the couch. “It looks like you’re doing this alone, with your brother. I’ve been that alone. It sucks.”
“My brother nearly killed you,” Gibson pointed out, tucking a quilt around Zach’s torso. “I don’t know what he was thinking. Hell, I haven’t known what he’s been thinking for almost two years now. Moving away from here might be necessary. I just don’t know.”
“Would you tell me if he’d bitten me?” Zach’s eyes went owlish, a bit of crazy creeping into his alarmed expression. “How long does it take before you know that… before you change into… what did you call yourself? Shifters?”
He looked so serious, not scared but concerned. Rubbing at his side, Zach stared steadily at him, as if bracing himself against a fait accompli looming on the horizon. Chuckling to himself, Gibson sat on the edge of the cushion next to Zach, angling his body to face him. In the few times he’d been confronted with a human discovering his blood’s secret, he’d known them, each of them a good friend who’d stumbled upon a part of him he’d been told to keep in the shadows. Now he had to peel apart the armor he’d worn his entire life and expose the most tender parts of himself to a man he wanted but didn’t know.
Instinct was so much a part of who he was, but nothing was preparing Gibson for what he had to do, for what he had to say. There was still fear in Zach’s scent, a thread of bright bitterness woven into the sweet masculine musk on his skin, and its presence made Gibson wary, even as Zach’s nearness stole his breath away and made it hard to think.
“It doesn’t work like that.” Gibson chuckled despite the seriousness of the conversation. “You can’t catch this…. The wolf isn’t something I can pass on to you. You have to be born this way, born into a family that carries the bloodline. And not everyone changes. Sometimes it skips a person or even an entire generation. But you can’t get it from a bite or sharing blood. It happens at conception, and even then we are few and far between. Usually a shifter couple only has one kid, maybe two, and there’s no guarantee their child carries the shifter gene. So even if he had bitten you, the worst thing we would have to worry about would be infection.”
“God.” Zach slurred a bit, and then his face went sharp and attentive. “I’ve got so many questions. I don’t even know where to start. I mean, do you know how many are out there? Is there, like, somewhere you all keep in touch?”
“Well, the families know each other, but I suppose there could be some out there that we don’t know about. It’s not the easiest thing to bring up. Not like I can be riding on the subway and say to the guy next to me, Hey, by the way, I can turn into a wolf, how about you? Everyone I know… the families I know of… come from Ireland. I suppose there are other areas, other nationalities, that carry the shifting gene, but I don’t know what they are or even how to start looking for them.” Gibson shrugged. “We’ve mingled over the generations, so I know where it all began, but I don’t know where we are going to end up. I suppose at some point there will be even less of us, or maybe I am looking at it as if we are adding water to a shot of whiskey, diluting its strength, when in fact it doesn’t matter about the human element. The wolf will always surface somewhere.”