“You need to go somewhere to change into a wolf?” Porter asked.
“I prefer privacy,” Benedict said.
Which wasn’t exactly a lie, Arjenie thought as she followed him to the far side of the pickup. But she suspected it was the knives he wanted to keep private, not the sight of him Changing. Just like it was his weapons he really wanted her to take charge of, though she’d keep his clothes for him, too. That’s why she’d brought a backpack.
That, and it was a handy way to carry three pounds of hamburger.
“Turn down your light,” Benedict told her as he shucked off his jacket. He paused. “Please. It interferes with my night vision.”
She grinned and dimmed the mage light to firefly level. Benedict was getting better, but he was used to telling instead of asking. She unzipped the backpack and took out the hamburger, which she unwrapped and set on the ground. “Sheriff Porter has the same problem you do. He defaults to orders, not requests. I thought you wanted to ask that deputy some questions? The one who knows something about bears, I mean.”
“I changed my mind.” He slipped out of his jacket and held it out.
She folded it, frowning. “Why?”
“Got a feeling. Partly it’s a smell . . . faint, nothing I can identify, not in this form. But my back-brain doesn’t like it.” He unbuckled his belt. “You can get the knives after I’ve Changed, but I want you to wear my gun.”
Arjenie made a face as she stuffed the jacket in the backpack. Until a couple months ago, she’d never shot a gun. Benedict had changed that, and she agreed that with a war on, however secret it might be, she needed to be able to shoot. The problem—and this was annoyingly girly of her—was that she flinched. Not every time, but sometimes when she squeezed the trigger, she’d flinch and the shot would be off. She’d stopped squeezing her eyes shut when she squeezed the trigger, but so far the flinch still happened about one-fourth of the time, which made her unreliable.
On the upside, when she didn’t flinch she was a decent shot. “I’m wishing I’d let you talk me into bringing my SIG ,” she said, accepting his holstered weapon. Benedict’s .357 was too large for her hand, but she did know how to shoot it. “I flinch less when I use it.”
He touched her cheek. “Is that almost the same as saying I was right?”
She grinned. “Almost. Benedict . . .” In the darkness she could feel the heat from his body. He was so warm. So powerful and alive.
“Yeah?”
“I remembered something else about grizzlies. They have a bite force of twelve hundred pounds per inch.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“A wolf’s bite force is only four hundred pounds per inch. That’s not really an ‘only,’ but compared to a grizzly—”
“I’ll be very careful.” He cupped her face in both hands. “You will be, too.”
“I can make it not see me or smell me.” Smell being especially important, since grizzlies were thought by some experts to have the best nose of all the mammals. Arjenie wasn’t entirely persuaded by the methodology used, but there was no doubt a grizzly’s sense of smell was extremely acute. “You can’t. Plus you’ll be trying to protect everyone.” Because that was what he did. He couldn’t help himself.
“I’ll have help with that. The sheriff’s made sure his people have rifles. My weapon has good stopping power for a handgun, but with a bear, a rifle is better. That reminds me. If you do end up shooting, empty the clip.”
With that romantic utterance, he dipped his head and kissed her.
His taste flowed into her in a sweet rush—musk and man and wild, that pheromic hint of otherness her tongue surely wasn’t clever enough to detect. Yet it did, or she did, or something. He kissed her with the controlled intensity he brought to every task, with a calm focus that announced there was nothing in the world more important than her mouth. Nothing more important than her.
When he lifted his head, she smiled, feeling twice as settled as she had a moment ago. He really was calm. That wasn’t an act to reassure her. Meeting her family might have scared him, but a grizzly bear—that, he knew what to do about.
She rested one hand on his chest. The other still gripped the holstered .357, she was glad to notice. It wasn’t a good idea to drop a loaded gun. “I sometimes wonder if, years ago, you determined the exact amount of fear that would keep you on your toes without being a distraction, and that’s how much you allow yourself to feel.”
“Fear can be useful,” he agreed. “You want me to fasten the holster for you?”
“No, I’ll get it.” She’d worn a belt today, which was lucky, because she usually didn’t, so she undid it and pulled it out of the belt loops. While she did that, he Changed.
In the darkness she couldn’t see the Change, but even if she’d been staring straight at Benedict in bright daylight she wouldn’t have seen much. She’d talked to several of the women at Nokolai Clanhome, asking what they saw when lupi Changed. Their answers were notable for how little they agreed and included things like “a swirling darkness,” and “They sort of fold up and unfold at the same time,” and “They flicker in and out.” A few said they didn’t see anything—one moment there was a man, the next a wolf. Or vice versa. Whatever happened in between, they either didn’t see it or didn’t remember what they’d seen.
The sheer variety of answers supported Arjenie’s theory that the human brain wasn’t set up to process what happened during the Change, so it made things up. Sadly, cameras weren’t set up to process it, either. Digital or film, static or video, all they recorded was a spot of visual static.
Whatever the process, Arjenie knew it involved a great deal of pain, but the pain never lingered beyond the transformation. The faster a lupus could Change, the better, and some places made the Change easier than others. She wished she could ask the enormous wolf now gulping down three pounds of raw hamburger how this spot measured up—compared, maybe, to Changing on Delacroix land—but she had to stick to yes-or-no questions when Benedict was wolf.
He’d finished eating by the time she gathered his clothes and shoes—and not two, but three knives, and where had he hidden that wickedly slim blade?—and got them stashed in the backpack. Then they went back to the others.