He could measure her growing nervousness by the slow shrinking of the distance between them.
When she finally spoke, she was near enough that she accidentally stepped on the back of his snowshoe with hers. "Sorry."
The resultant stumble hurt his wounded leg, but he'd never have told her that. "No problem. Are you all right?"
He saw her consider a polite lie and discard it.
"It's kind of creepy here," she said finally.
Charles agreed with her: there were a number of places in the Cabinets that felt like this. He couldn't be sure, but this felt worse than usual-it was certainly worse than the part of the mountains they'd crossed yesterday.
Her observation made him give a thorough look around them, in case she'd noticed something he hadn't. But there was nothing to be seen, nothing more threatening than the cliff face that rose above them and cast its shadow over the valley and the thick growth of green-black trees on all sides. But he didn't discount other forces at work.
The spirits of these mountains had never been welcoming, not like the Bitterroots or Pintlers. They resented intruders.
It might be that the spirits were just more active in this valley-or something could have happened. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that it was more than just spirits making mischief. From last week or a hundred years ago, he couldn't tell, but something dark lingered beneath the snow.
"You're a werewolf," he told her. "Creepy shouldn't bother you."
She snorted. "I was never afraid of monsters until I became one. Now I'm afraid of my own shadow."
He heard the self-directed derision and snorted right back at her. "Baloney. I-" He caught a wild scent and stopped, turning his nose into the wind to catch it again.
Anna froze, watching him. He waited until the scent got a little stronger; their stalker was not worried that they would notice him.
"What do you smell?" he asked her softly.
She sucked in a deep breath and closed her eyes. "Trees, and whoever you stole these clothes from and-" She stiffened as she caught what he had. "Cat. Some kind of cat. Is it a panther?"
"Close," he told her. "Lynx, I think. Nasty-tempered but not a danger to us."
"Cool," she said. "What a-" This time it was her turn to pause. "What's that?"
"Dead rabbit," he said, pleased. "You're starting to pay attention to your nose." He took another breath and reconsidered. "It might be a mouse, but probably rabbit. That's why the lynx is still around; we've interrupted his dinner." He was a little surprised that they'd run into a lynx here; cats usually stayed away from places that felt like this. Could it have been driven here by bigger predators?
She looked a little green. "I really hate it that part of me is getting hungry smelling raw meat."
It hadn't bothered her to smell Jack's blood. But he hadn't fed her in an hour, and she was hungry. Her body was burning up calories to stay warm. But hungry or not, it wasn't the time to feed her a real meal; he needed to get out of this little draw. So he handed her a bag of peanut butter crackers and got them going again. The peanut butter would make sure she started drinking out of her canteen; he wasn't sure she'd been drinking enough.
They hiked until the valley was behind them, and the dark feeling stayed behind, too, confirming his guess that it wasn't spirits.
"Lunchtime," he said, handing her a granola bar and stick of jerky.
She took them, brushed most of the snow off of a downed tree, then hopped up on it. "I was fine until we hit that valley. Now I'm bushed and frozen, and it's only one o'clock. How do humans do this?"
He sat beside her eating his own jerky-it tasted a lot better than pemmican, though it wasn't nearly as strengthening without all the fat. "Most of 'em don't, not this time of year. I pushed us a little hard to get out of that valley, that's what you're feeling." He frowned. "You haven't been sweating, have you? Are your socks dry? I brought spares. Wet socks mean frostbite-you could lose a toe."
She wiggled her snowshoes, which dangled a foot or so off the ground. "I thought being a werewolf meant indestructible, short of death."
Something in her face told him she was thinking about the beatings she'd been given to try to make her into something she was not.
"It might grow back," Charles said, soothing Brother Wolf, who didn't like it when Anna was unhappy. "But it wouldn't be fun."
"Cool." Then as an afterthought she told him, "My socks are dry."
"Let me know if that changes."
* * * *
The snowshoes were dragging at her feet. She gave Charles a mock-resentful glare-it was safe because she was glaring at his back. Bullet holes and all, he was obviously not having any trouble. He was barely limping as they scaled the side of another mountain. He'd slowed down, but that didn't help as much as she'd hoped. If he hadn't promised her an early camp at the top of the current climb, she probably would have just collapsed where she stood.
"Not far," he said without looking around. Doubtless her panting told him all he needed to know about how tired she was.
"Part of it is the altitude," he told her. "You're used to more oxygen in the air and have to breathe harder to make up the difference."
He was making excuses for her-and it stiffened her spine. She'd make this climb if it killed her. She dug the edge of her snowshoe into the snow in preparation for the next step, and a wild cry echoed through the trees, raising the hair on the back of her neck as it echoed in the mountains.
"What's that?" she asked.
Charles gave her a grim smile over his shoulder. "Werewolf. "
"Can you tell where it came from?"
"East of here," he said. "The way sound carries out here, he's a few miles away."
She shivered a little though she shouldn't be afraid. After all, she was a werewolf, too, right? And she'd seen Charles wipe the floor with her former Alpha despite having been shot several times.
"He won't hurt you," Charles said.
She didn't say anything, but he was watching her face and his eyes softened. "If you really don't like me using my nose to tell what you're feeling, you can try using perfume. It works a treat."
She sniffed and smelled only the people who had loaned Charles their clothing. "You don't use perfume."
He grinned, his teeth white in his dark face. "Too sissy for me. I had to learn to control my emotions instead." Then he removed whatever starch she had left in her knees when he added, a little ruefully, "Until I met you."