Page 18 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
“Okay. Good. I just wanted to ...”
“I need to—go,” Jace said sharply. He turned on his heel, strode into the bathroom, and closed the door firmly behind him.
Holly stared at the closed bathroom door. It didn’t reopen.
“So ... your breakfast’s on the table?” she offered after a deeply awkward minute. “I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to, uh .... we can go back to not talking about it. In fact, let’s do that. If you can come down to the tree farm later, Dad wants to meet you.” Oh, that came out twenty kinds of wrong. “I haven’t told him!” she added. “Anything. I mean. I’m leaving.”
She grabbed her coat and all but ran out the door. Outside, she stood for a minute gulping cold air.
This was going to be averylong couple of weeks.
JACE
Jace grippedthe edge of the sink so hard that, when he took his hands away, he was horrified to see that he’d cracked the wooden frame. At least he was no longer turning into a wolf. He looked up to meet his regular brown eyes in the mirror, with just the slightest rime of gold remaining around the pupil.
The door closed. Holly leaving. She probably thought he was a total weirdo now, if she didn’t already think that after he’d bitten her.
He absolutely did not need to think about that right now.
It occurred to him that he didn’t actually know for sure that werewolfismwasn’ttransferred by biting. He didn’t think so; he’d never heard anything from other shifters that would make him think so. But he wasn’t completely, absolutely sure.
There was definitely something that had happened when he bit Holly, though. His animal was oriented on her in a way he’d never felt before.
He wished he had someone to ask about this stuff. The internet wasn’t very forthcoming on accurate details aboutshifters. Technically he supposed he could ask Holly’s dad, but he had a feeling that under the circumstances, the Colonel would be the literal, actual worst person to ask.
With shifter-sharp ears, he heard Holly’s footsteps stop on the porch, then clomp down the steps and crunch on the remnants of half-frozen snow in front of the cabins.
Yeah. She definitely thought he was a giant weirdo. That was much better than accidentally mauling her, though.
He had the wolfiness back under control for now, and checking his hands, his nails were pretty normal again, so maybe he could just get away with looking like he had extra hairy hands. They knew he was a shifter here, after all, but he had no idea what other shifters thought of someone who couldn’t fully control their transformations. For all he knew, it was like taking a dump in public or something, not being able to keep control over your animal side.
He ventured out of the bathroom. The smell from the dish Holly had brought was making him ravenous. He was prepared for something that would need to be stuck in the microwave—which the cabin did have—but instead, it looked like it had been freshly cooked. The eggs were getting a little cool and the bacon had lost some of its crisp edge, but this was a farm-fresh breakfast if he’d ever seen one. The toast was even slathered heavily with butter.
Jace tended not to have much of an appetite these days, but he ate it all down to the last crumb.
One thing she hadn’t brought him was coffee, but he found grounds and filters in the cupboards, and made himself a pot. By the time he’d had a cup of liquid ambrosia, he started feeling like he might want to look around the ranch a little bit, even at the risk of more awkward conversations.
And he could find Holly and—he wasn’t sure, apologize to her for walking away like a jerk, maybe.
He put on his coat and boots, which felt woefully inadequate for the cold on the ranch now that he’d seen Holly’s heavy coat and calf-high boots. Hunting around in the closet, he found a few winter things—gloves, which he already had, and a long white-and-red striped scarf that looked like it belonged to a children’s cartoon character. However, it was very soft and felt nice wrapped snugly around his neck.
Mindful of the rules, he turned down the heat, and then stepped out into a bright, frosty morning.
The sun was up, glinting through the trees and sparkling off a layer of frost covering every surface. On the porch rail of the cabin, fine frost feathers glinted in the sunlight. Some of them had already begun to melt. Jace had almost forgotten what it was like to be transfixed by the natural world. Now he found wonder and beauty everywhere he looked.
As he stood looking over the beautiful, peaceful scene, he felt his wolf begin to settle inside him in a way it hardly ever had done in the bustling, busy world of men. On a whim, he made an effort to call it out, to shift at a time that he chose, rather than dealing with the abortive half-shifts.
But his wolf shied away from the brightness of the sun on the fields. He didn’t ever get words from his animal side, but he had a strong sense offear-pain-danger. Fire. Bad.
It’s not fire. It’s cold.
His wolf did not respond.
Jace turned away from the gorgeous view. He found the woodshed Holly had mentioned, and carried a couple armloads of wood to put in the thing she had mentioned by the door. “Thing” was all he could call it; he didn’t know if there was a word for it. It looked like a curved metal cradle with two prongs sticking up on either side. He could tell the wood was supposed to go there by some splinters and scraps of bark in the bottom of the cradle, but otherwise he would have had no idea what it was for.
After filling the wood thing, he dusted sawdust and wood chips off his gloves, and went to see the rest of the farm.
From the top of the hill where Christmas Village was located, he could see most of it. The driveway that he and Holly had driven up on the ATV curved gently, as if to embrace the small cluster of farm buildings at the bottom of the hill. There was a two-story farmhouse, the roof charmingly covered in snow, a barn with an actual silo beside it, and some other buildings he didn’t know the functions of. Equipment sheds or housing for animals, he guessed. There were few signs of any animals, though he had heard a rooster crow this morning, so they must have chickens.
