Page 34 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
After they stepped out of the chicken coop, the Colonel regarded him for a moment. His eyes were a clear, striking golden hazel, a little too bright to be natural. Abruptly, he said, “Leave that scoop there. We’ll get it on the way back. I want you to take a walk with me, son.”
Jace swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
He set down the scoop, and they went out the back of the barn into a field adjoining the Christmas tree acreage. Rows of lightly snow-dusted pine trees marched off across the farm’s rolling hills, blocking Jace’s view of the shed and parking area he knew to be nearby.
The Colonel started walking in that direction. There was more snow away from the plowed area than Jace had realized. Although some bare patches had been cleared by melting and wind, in other places it was deep enough to be tiring to walk through.
The Colonel said nothing, and Jace struggled not to panic.He said WE’LL get it on the way back. That means he’s not going to kill me and dump my body out here. Probably.
The Colonel must know about Jace sleeping over. Had he known the whole time?
Jace wondered if it would be best to lead with the excuse which also happened to be the truth—I didn’t touch her, wewere in separate rooms all night, I was just worried about her... Of course then he would have to explain what he was worried about, which meant breaking Holly’s confidence, and he would rather die than do that.
Hopefully dying wasn’t on the table.
The Colonel said nothing until they reached the wooden rail fence that abutted the rows of Christmas trees. Then he turned to Jace. “Dave told me you’re a shifter,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Yes, sir.” Now that the Colonel had raised the point, Jace figured he could just ask openly about it. “I know you are. Are any of your daughters?”
“No,” the Colonel said. “None of ‘em got the trait. Girls usually don’t, you know.”
“I didn’t know that. One of the only shifters I ever met was a girl.”
The Colonel nodded a little, as if something had been confirmed for him. “You part of a pack or clan?”
Jace swallowed. “No, sir.”
“Were you ever?”
“No, sir.”
It was a little more complicated than that, but still basically true. Back in the group home, the shifter children could recognize each other, and at one point he and two others, a boy and a girl, had played at having their own pack. But they hadn’t had any idea what being a pack entailed, or how to make it real; they had fought over who would be the alpha, and finally went their separate ways when one of them was fostered. Jace wondered what had happened to those other kids.
Once he was an adult, the occasional other shifters he’d met had already been part of something—a clan, a pack, a family. They might be in the military now, or working somewhere away from home, but they always had a home to goback to. Shifters were both territorial and highly family-oriented. Jace had never really been able to make friends with other shifters at all.
Now he tried to meet the Colonel’s golden eyes without flinching. It was astonishingly hard.
“Now then, son,” the Colonel said quietly, his voice soft but deadly serious. “Let me see your hands.”
JACE
He had the briefest thought—verybrief—of lying about it. But as he had already gathered, you didn’t lie to this man.
Jace peeled off his gloves and tucked them into his pocket. His hands were even worse than before, the fingers shortened and slightly bent. He had noticed, now and then, items trying to slip out of his fingers when he was working on the omelets. Now he could see why. His right hand was slightly better off. His left was hardly a hand at all, curled and gnarled, halfway to a paw.
The Colonel held out one of his big, mitt-like hands. Jace hesitated and then held out his own, and for the second time, his hand was engulfed in the Colonel’s bigger one. The first time, it had been a friendly handshake. Now it was something else. He had the feeling he was being inspected.
He didn’t want to look down at his malformed hand, so he looked at the Colonel’s face in this rare opportunity to observe the man when Jace didn’t have to meet his eyes. For the first time Jace noticed there were scars on his face, just above his left ear, visible through the short-cropped hair andrunning up the side of his face near his cheekbone. Parallel scars, looking like they had been inflicted by claws.
“You have trouble controlling your shift,” the Colonel said. It was matter-of-fact, not a question.
“Yes, sir,” Jace replied quietly.
“Is it always this bad?”
The big hand released his. Jace pulled his hand away quickly, and stuck both of them in his pockets, where he could feel the claws pricking at the fabric.
“No,” he said, staring down at the snow. “It comes and goes. I—I’ve always had a little trouble, even back in the group home when I was a kid, but I kept it under control.” That was also when he’d learned to hide the signs, speaking with his lips closed over his teeth when his fangs were showing, tucking a hand into his pocket or under the table at dinner.
