Page 18 of Wolf Reborn

“I’m not making any promises about what happens afterward,” Miles said, not meeting Gavin’s eye. “But I think at least I deserve to be told the truth.”

“I agree.”

“Good.” With that, Miles turned to the door, so Gavin started out ahead of him. “I’m still supposed to have tomorrow off. Does that work for you?”

It was so perfunctorily put, the outcome of the meeting seemed inevitable. Still, there was no way out but through. “Of course.”

As though determined to confuse the hell out of Gavin, Miles gave him that bright smile as he stepped out and turned to lock his apartment. “Good. I’ll see you then.”

Of all possible results, Gavin hadn’t expected to go home with no idea what their future held. More importantly just then, though, was the missing kid. If it was Lyndon—and despite common sense saying it wasn’t, Gavin believed it was him—the pack needed to start searching immediately.

9

Are You Out There

Miles was on the fifth of thirty-seven cabins to the west of the Kismet resort on the north side of the highway. About half of them belonged to the resort itself, little vacation getaway rentals, and the rest were vacation homes for the rich. Any and all had the potential to be a hiding place for a runaway—or more importantly, a kid in need of help.

Miles had been assigned to check the cabins, one by one, and it was going to take forever. He suspected he was going to end up working more than just Brown’s shift, as far from the road as some of the places were. Well, if the impending snow didn’t stop him, anyway.

He knocked on the front door, listening for movement on the other side. When he heard nothing, he knocked again, called out, checked the perimeter of the cabin—just generally did a sweep looking for people who might be hiding on the property. None so far had seemed likely to have anyone in them, all cold and dark and empty.

Still, at least he had something potentially nice to consider while he did his search. For the first time ever, Gavin had come to him.

Oh, Gavin had come to pick him up for dates before. They’d even eaten at Miles’s apartment once or twice, though neither was much of a chef.

But never, after a few days of distance, had Gavin been the one to contact him first. Miles had spent eight months chasing the man, and Gavin had finally stopped running.

Maybe.

His sweet green eyes had been so earnest, and if Miles hadn’t been mistaken, worried. Maybe he was just worried about what Miles was going to do with his people’s secret, but that didn’t make sense. If Miles had been planning to tell people about werewolves, he would have already done that.

Absently, he wondered if there were really people who hunted and killed werewolves, like on TV. If so, they were probably much bigger assholes, and a lot less pretty. In real life werewolves were the pretty ones.

He climbed back into his cruiser and called in his fifth miss.

“You should hurry,” Deputy James answered, his nasal voice sounding even more stressed than usual. “The forecast is turning uglier by the minute.”

“We need that snow,” Miles argued. If there was one thing the town desperately needed, it was a decent snow. No one wanted to go to a ski resort without snow, and the town relied on income from those tourists.

James paused, something the man rarely did. Not that Miles didn’t like him, but he was sort of a know-it-all. “I know,” he finally agreed. “But it’s going to get bad fast. You shouldn’t be up on the side of the mountain at a remote cabin when the worst hits. At best, you’ll get stuck out there.”

“Fair enough,” Miles agreed. He watched the dry dusty flakes from a snow flurry hit the windshield of his cruiser. It could turn ugly fast, but according to the forecast, he had hours yet. He just needed to hurry it up was all. “Okay, I’m gonna get moving on to the next one, but I may not be able to make them all before the worst hits.”

“We’ll just have to hope those people were wrong about the kid being hurt.” James’s tone was somber, and with good reason. A hurt kid on the mountainside when a snowstorm hit was as good as dead.

It wasn’t like locals to sound the alarm for something like a kid out climbing rocks, so Miles didn’t think this was that. They had said the kid looked dirty, had been wearing ripped clothes, and one of them thought he’d seen blood on his shirt. It didn’t sound like a kid playing a little far from home.

No nearby kids had gone missing, and they’d searched national listings as well as possible and turned up nothing useful. It didn’t seem likely an eight-year-old had gotten from Florida to Colorado in two days.

Miles fired up his engine and headed for the next cabin.

Just after three, the snowflakes started to grow—not in frequency, but in size. Over the next few hours, they turned from tiny, dry things to big wet globs of snowflake mashed together. He hadn’t thought the air had warmed that much, but Miles definitely wasn’t a meteorologist, so he didn’t know how it worked.

What he did know, from living and driving in snow his whole life, was that the dry stuff was a lot safer than this.

He tried to hurry, but he couldn’t rush driving unless he wanted to kill someone—namely himself—and it was hard to hurry the cabin checks without missing any lingering signs of habitation. If the kid was out there on his own, he could be really good at hiding himself. And no matter how self-sufficient, no kid should be out on his own.

By the time he hit cabin fifteen, one much farther back from the road than he liked, the snow was starting to pile up. It wasn’t ideal snow for skiing, but it was more than they’d managed most of the year, so he tried to be grateful for it.

---