CHAPTER TEN

Zip line? Goddess give him strength.

Bowman started out of bed, was brought up short by his splint, let out a frustrated groan, and said loudly, “No!”

“Aw, come on. Everyone’s going. Cade’s careful. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt us little cubs.”

No, he wouldn’t. Cade was good with cubs, and all Shifters knew it. Bowman also knew that Ryan was playing up the cute cub angle to get his way. At age twelve, he was a master manipulator.

“You’re leader’s son,” Bowman said, dropping back to the mattress. “No one will think less of you if you don’t go. They’ll think you’re smart for not doing something stupidly dangerous.”

“No, they won’t.” Ryan’s voice came firmly through the door. “They’ll say I’m a coward. Leader’s son should be the first one on.”

“Leader’s son shouldn’t be pushed around by a bunch of cubs,” Bowman called back.

Kenzie was up, her naked body touched by winter sunshine. Bowman fell silent as he watched her lean over to sweep up her clothes. A stretch of her arms, and her shirt skimmed down her body, Kenzie glancing at him as she settled it over her breasts. Another bend, and her jeans slid up her thighs, over her smooth ass, hiding herself from him.

“I’ll walk him over,” she said. “He’s right—leader’s son shouldn’t hold back from new things.”

“Leader’s son shouldn’t break his bloody neck on a stupid idea of Cade’s.”

“You’ll be all right by yourself, won’t you?” Kenzie asked. She was good at ignoring him. “I can have my grandmother look in on you.”

Kenzie’s grandmother, Afina, was a clan matriarch, and didn’t have a high opinion of Bowman. She let her disapproval of everything he did, said, wore, and thought come loudly out of her mouth. Afina could insult him in Romanian and also Russian, or in English with a heavy accent, every word barbed.

“No.” Bowman growled. “I’ll be fine.”

Kenzie winked at him as she opened the door. Bowman was grateful the sheet had settled back over him, because that wink had him harder than the headboard behind him.

“Of course you will,” she said. “Besides, I want to try the zip line too.”

Another smile, and she and Ryan were gone, leaving the room empty, Bowman alone and feeling it.

* * *

Kenzie and Ryan walked through Shiftertown, which was a widespread neighborhood of small houses. The roads that wound through it were narrow, climbing up and down hills. Clusters of houses, families of clans clumped together, were scattered throughout, with woods and space between the clusters.

Around this bend, it was Felines, Jamie’s family. The next, another Lupine clan. Down the hill, the roofs visible from where Kenzie and Ryan walked, Kenzie’s clan’s homes. The bears lived on the far side of Shiftertown, their houses the largest. Bear clans tended to be small—making up the lowest percentage of Shifters overall—but bears took up a lot of room.

“Kenzie.” A muscular man in sweats came jogging up out of the woods to fall into step with her. “Hello, Ryan.”

“Uncle,” Kenzie said cautiously around Ryan’s more friendly “Hey, Uncle Cris.”

Cristian Dimitru was Kenzie’s mother’s much older brother. Kenzie’s father had been a lone wolf, clanless, his small pack and clan having been killed during the war the humans called World War II. Kenzie’s dad had been in a human army fighting the Nazi regime—the humans had not known they’d had Shifters join them.

All that had proved, Cristian had said, was that bullets hurt Shifters as much as they did humans. Cristian had come across Kenzie’s father, wounded and alone, and Cristian had carried him home, his clan taking him in.

Kenzie’s father had mated with Cristian’s sister, and died just after Kenzie had been born. His injuries and exposure to chemicals used in wartime had sickened him, and he’d never fully recovered. Kenzie’s mother, grieving from the broken mate bond and exhausted from bringing in Kenzie, had not lived much longer.

Kenzie therefore had been raised by Cristian and her grandmother, Afina. They’d both loved her plenty, but she’d always known they’d considered her father weak. A fool, Cristian had said, to join the humans. Cristian’s clan had hidden out in the mountains during the war, waiting for the stupid humans to grow tired of killing one another.

That war had changed everything, though. Wild lands became fewer and farther between as humans took them over to feed a growing population. Automobile and airplane use became commonplace, erasing the quietude of the wild. It became increasingly difficult for Shifters to hide their true natures, simply because humans were everywhere, even in the lesser populated areas of Eastern Europe. Living behind an iron curtain made things even more difficult. A few of Kenzie’s clan had gotten out to Western Europe and the States, but they’d found themselves alone there.

Once the wall fell in Berlin, things had begun to change even more, and Shifters had to make choices. Then Shifters had been outed. Kenzie’s clan was rounded up and shipped off to the States. They’d learned English on the fly, and had found themselves dumped in a high school gym in the state called North Carolina, where Kenzie had seen Bowman for the first time.

Cristian spoke English with a thick accent, though his accent came and went depending on who he talked to and how much he wanted to manipulate them. When he was alone with his pack, he ceased bothering with English altogether, as he did now.

“What happened last night?” he asked her in a dialect of the Transylvanian mountains. Ryan, in a hurry to rejoin his friends, slipped his hand from Kenzie’s and jogged on down the road toward Cade’s place. “My Lupines are giving me garbled accounts, and Bowman’s trackers won’t talk to me at all.”

Probably because they didn’t trust him. Neither did Kenzie. She loved her uncle, but Cristian was slippery, had preferred the world when he was leader, and wanted to be leader again. He was still alpha of his pack, but he hated to be subordinate to anyone else.

“You’re getting garbled accounts because we don’t know what happened,” Kenzie answered. “Whatever attacked us was huge and not normal. We don’t know what it was.”

“And Bowman brought it down himself?” Cristian threw her a skeptical look. His hair was dark, but brushed with gray, the same color as his wolf’s fur. His eyes were a deep gold, like Kenzie’s and her grandmother’s. “Our fearless leader took down an animal ten times bigger than any Shifter? By himself?”