Page 2 of A Brighter Yellow
That was his mission. Save the girl. Get her home. After that… Well, there was no point in talking about after that. At the wordpack, the tension eased slightly in her body, and her head came up. Ochre took that as a sign of agreement and began the mental process for creating his path.
As usual, the siren call of the woods echoed in his bones, and it took him a moment to reject the call to abandon his purpose and go deeper into the woods. He sometimes wondered how long it would be until he answered that call, but today wasn’t that day. Instead, he refocused on what he had sworn to do—help Anna. Ochre stepped forward, coming close enough to Anna that she could surely rip his throat out if she wanted. She eyed him with bright blue eyes that seemed entirely untrusting, but at least she had stopped growling.
“Come on,” he said. He closed his eyes and let his feet find the path. When he opened them again, he was standing on a spindly deer track. Anna was watching him with an entirely disapproving look. “Every journey begins with a single step,” he said, giving her a smile and set out on the path.
Episode 2
The Fairy Woods
Anna
Anna unhappily followed the bastard in front of her as he walked down the interminable trail. She had been tempted several times to shift and talk to him, but the lack of clothing seemed like it would be a thing. And besides, she was still mad at him.
He had picked her up and thrown her. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had dared to do that or had even been able to. She was sizable as a wolf and a woman. Who the hell did he think he was? She followed along behind him on the narrow track. Whoever he was, he moved with a sure-footed, smooth gate and his ass was… biteable. He looked back, and she glared at him.
He smelled of spring and fresh growing things. It was enough that Anna wanted to roll in him, like a pup with all four feet in the air, and then fuck him… not like a pup. Like a woman. As a shifter, she had long ago gotten used to human and wolf impulses competing within her brain. But usually, the shape she was in dictated and dominated which instincts were foremost. He was pushing both sets of her instincts to the forefront, and it was very distracting. Even more so than the fact that the woods around her smelled like all forests, all at once. Every time she turned her face and dared to smell something that wasn’t the man in front of her, it was like being hit with a brick wall of scent.
The second time she had tried it, she had gone off into a sneezing fit as her nose got utterly overwhelmed. He had been very concerned about it, which was monumentally embarrassing. And then he’d tried to feed her a banana. He’d been apologetic about it. But all his bag seemed to contain was fruits, nuts, and cheese. She’d finally eaten all of his cheese and dried blueberries out of desperation. He had a bow. He clearly knew how to use it. She couldn’t figure out why he didn’t have any meat. Maybe these woods didn’t have any animals? She put her head cautiously down to the moss in front of her and picked up the odd impression that animals had been here before, but every few inches, the scent disappeared. It was as if a multitude of different squirrels had been in one location. Or perhaps as if the moss had been pulled from different forests and stitched together into one whole.
Up until college, she had never dabbled much in magic. Most shifters didn’t. Sure, the odd spell or two, but nothing fancy. The general attitude of her pack was that being a wolf was magic enough. They were already superior to everyone else—they didn’t need to learn more. But the more she’d been out in the world, the more she’d realized that the wolf attitude was parochial, small-minded, and short-sighted. Most of her pack had been suspicious and dismissive of her ideas. On more than one occasion, her father had bellowed that college was a waste of time and money and only gave her stupid notions. But as always, she’d persevered on her own. But all the magic she’d learned since then paled in comparison to these woods, and she had no idea how the man in front of her was controlling it, let alone moving them through it safely.
She considered the man again. He troubled her. His smell was so appealing, but all that she knew about him was that he could wield a fuck-ton of power and could pick her up and toss her around like a child. All of that was attractive but also a bit worrisome because it meant that she wasn’t sure she could win if she had to fight him. What did he want? How had he found her in the first place?
She edged closer and took another sniff of his pant leg. His smell had shifted a little as they walked. She was uncertain how long they’d been in this strange place. It seemed like hours, but the light was some sort of peculiar twilight that never seemed to break into day or night. His step was still as firm as ever, but she could smell him sweating as if the walk was becoming increasingly more challenging.
Abruptly, he stopped, and Anna looked at him nervously.
“Sorry,” he said, looking down at her. “This last bit is a little tricky. I’ve never been to your pack before, and they really don’t want magical intruders. Locating them is proving harder than I thought.”
He was goddamn right they didn’t want intruders. She’d cobbled most of the protection spells together herself from her grandmother’s journals with video instructions from her friend Charlie. Anna hadn’t thought the spells were great, but apparently, they were actually working. Just when she didn’t want them to. And now she was going to have to tell this man-person who didn’t smell precisely human how to break them.
She focused on her human shape and tried to change, only to find herself blocked. She tried again and began to panic when she realized she couldn’t.
“Hey!” he said, kneeling down. “Breathe. It’s OK. Whatever you’re doing, just stop and breathe.”
She sat down on the trail and panted, trying not to freak out.
“I don’t suppose you could change and talk to me?” he asked.
Anna wasn’t sure what movement she made, but if she could have exploded in anger, she would have.
“That’s what you’re trying to do, only you can’t, and now you’re pissed at me for asking?”
Anna gave a very firm nod and went back to glaring at him.
“Huh,” he said. “I actually got that one. OK, that’s OK. I don’t think I need you to change to get us there. Just do me a favor, try and picture your home, the place you want to be. It would help if you picture any trees nearby, but I will work with whatever you can give me. Picture it as clearly as possible and think of it as something that youwantto show me.”
She thought about her pack and their homestead in the Appalachians. She thought of her father’s stone tower, built by hand and looking as though it had grown out of the rock. The copse of birch trees just behind it had sheltered her on many summer afternoons. She pictured the softly tossing leaves and the dappled grass just below, warm and soft. She felt his fingers caress just above her eyebrow ridge, and he sighed.
“Oh, that’s pretty. Let’s go there.”
She opened her eyes in surprise, but he didn’t notice because his eyes were closed. He stood up and put one hand on her ruff, burying his fingers into the thick fur, and, keeping his eyes closed, took one giant step forward.
Anna fell out of the birch trees and transformed all at the same time.
“Ohhh,” she groaned, rolling over and looking up through the branches of the birch trees to the sky beyond. “I think I’m going to barf.”
“Well, then we’ll be a complete set,” said her brother, bending over her. “I think I just about shit myself. Where the hell did you come from, Anna?”
