While Liam caught up on his much needed sleep, I began to close up the cabin. I put anything we hadn’t used, which wasn’t much, in one of the cabinets, stored all our tools, and had a bonfire with all the left-over garbage. I swept out the cabin, covered the smoldering embers with snow, and rounded up all my animal traps. And then I waited. And waited. And when I got bored with that, I had nothing to do but wait some more.
More than once I checked to make sure he was still breathing.
“I’ve got everything ready to go,” I said once he was finally awake and dressed.
All the tenderness and vulnerability was gone from his face when he said, “Go where?”
“America?”
His eyes narrowed. “This is America.”
“This is Canada.”
“Which is in North America.”
Silly Canadians wanting to be part of the Cool Kids Club. “Fine. The States. The good ol’ USA. The land of the free and home of the brave.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?” While Prince Not-Always-So-Charming got his beauty sleep, I worried about how I would be able to face him without dying of embarrassment and shame after what transpired before he escaped to Dreamland. That worry quickly turned to anger at his superior, condescending tone.
“We’re not going to the United States.”
“Yes, we are. It’s time. I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be. And we’re going to do this on my terms. Not theirs. Not hers. Not yours.” I pushed into his personal space. “We’re returning to civilization so I can rebuild my strength and put on a little more muscle.” We hadn’t starved over the winter, but we hadn’t been eating well enough to keep our weight up with all the training we were doing. Both of us fought a constant battle to keep our clothes from falling off our shrinking bodies. “When I’m back to a hundred percent, I’ll make my Challenge.” I jerked my chin up, putting the force of my conviction into my words. “I’m ready.”
A muscle jumped in Liam’s jaw. “And if I say no?”
“You can’t stop me, so don’t even try. It’ll be a waste of breath.”
I’ve heard people talk about the air being charged before, but I didn’t really get it until that moment. Liam and I stood face to face… or face to chest if you want to be technical. But even though I had to crane my neck to look him in the eye, I didn’t feel small or disadvantaged. In fact, I felt powerful, as if the Dominance I had seen on other Shifters, like the Stratego, was pouring off of me in waves. And that Dominance? It was colliding up against the Dominance Liam was throwing off just as strongly. If I could have broken eye contact without yielding I would’ve looked around to see if it was actually happening, but I didn’t really have to. I felt it in every cell of my body.
Just when I thought we were going to have to solve this with a fury of fists, Liam dropped his eyes, sighed, and ran his hand over the back of his head.
“We don’t have a canoe,” he said, all aggression bled from his voice. “There’s another path back to civilization, but it’s going to take more than a night to get there, and there won’t be anything fit for our human forms between here and there.”
“What are our other options?”
“There will be a boat waiting for us after June first. We wait until then and go back the way we came.”
No way was I sitting around here and waiting until then. “I can hold my wolf form long enough to get us wherever we’re going. We’ll leave today.”
Instead of arguing, Liam asked, “When today?”
I looked around the cabin that had been my home for half a year and knew there was nothing left for me here. “How about right now?”
Chapter 23
“Everyone is staring at us.”
Liam glanced up from his All-Star Special. “If by ‘everyone’ you mean a nearly comatose drunk man and the homeless woman having a conversation with the salt shaker, than yes. Everyone is staring at us.”
We were in Ely, Minnesota. I think Liam may have been aiming for Fargo, but we got a little off course somewhere.
“The waitress keeps cutting her eyes over here,” I muttered without moving my lips. I tugged on the XXL Harley Davidson hoodie engulfing me. “What if she recognizes the clothes and calls the cops?”
Liam grabbed a piece of toast off my plate. “She doesn’t recognize your clothes,” he said, not even attempting to be discreet. “And even if she did, she’s not going to call 9-1-1 over some stolen pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt when I’m pretty sure her co-worker is cooking up a side of meth to go with everyone’s waffles.”
I tugged on the hoodie again. It felt wrong against my skin, all scratchy and sinful as if I was having an allergic reaction to immorally obtained clothing.
I had never stolen anything before in my life. When we were kids, Jase took a Snickers from the Five Star when Mom wouldn’t buy him one. I ate one bite, and it felt like a lump of lead sitting in my stomach. It was my last brush with thievery until Liam and I assumed human form again for the first time in several days. I hid in the bushes while he broke into the house and procured something to cover our nudity and enough money for a Waffle House smorgasbord.
Maybe I would have felt differently if he thought to grab me something other than a pair of four inch too-short pink jogging pants and a hoodie big enough for two Scouts to fit in.
Liam, meanwhile, was sporting a pair of snug fitting jeans and an almost-too-tight black shirt, which might have been the true reason for our waitress’s frequent glances.
A bell jingled as a couple of men in matching work shirts came through the door.
“We’re going to have to get out of here soon.” Liam mumbled around his coffee cup.
I nodded, noticing an old SUV and beat-up station wagon pulling into the parking lot. “Yeah, it looks like the breakfast crew is arriving. Any ideas about where we should go?”
“I can get my hands on a phone and call Miriam and have her send us some money, but it’ll take an hour or two before she can get it, and then we’ll have to find a Wal-Mart or something with a Western Union.”
I nodded at the building that held my attention through much of the evening. “Let’s go there,” I said. “They’ll probably let you use a phone, and there are some books I want to look at again.”