River Marked

I took a minute to picture Darryl playing paintball.“Scary,” I muttered.

“You have no idea.”

Adam rubbed his cheek against mine and went back to his task.“I could just pull this apart, instead of unbuttoning it,” he said ten minutes later. It was a serious offer, spoken in a hopeful-but-doomed voice.

“You do, and you get to sew all the buttons back on,” I told him. “Jesse is pla

“Soon?” he asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“Somehow,” he grumped, “that’s not as reassuring as it ought to be.”

“Gabriel’s going to college in Seattle in the fall,” I reminded him. “I think you’re safe this year.” My right-hand man had a thing for Adam’s daughter, and right now he was living in the tiny manufactured home that the insurance had replaced my old trailer with. A situation that madethem happy and Adam antsy. He liked Gabriel, but Adam was an Alpha werewolf—which put him off-the-scale protective of his daughter.

Eventually, Adam managed the buttons. While I hung the dress up and put it in the closet (yes, there was a closet), Adam stripped off his tux and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He didn’t often dress down that far. Except for when he was working out, usually slacks and a button-up shirt was as grubby as he got. My clean shirt and jeans were dressed up for me. I was a mechanic by trade, and it was a rare thing when my fingernails were clean. Somehow, we fit together anyway.

He bought us milk shakes and burgers (one for me, four for him) from the nearby restaurant, filled the diesel tanks in his truck, and we were back on the road.

“Are we going to Portland?” I asked. “Or Multnomah Falls?”

He smiled at me.“Go to sleep.”

I waited three seconds.“Are we there yet?”

His smile widened, and the last of the usual tension melted from his face. For a smile like that I’d … do anything.

“What?” he said.

I leaned over and rested my cheek against his arm.“I love you,” I told him.

“Yes,” he agreed smugly. “You do.” *

THE COLUMBIA GORGE IS A CANYON THAT RUNS nearly eighty miles through the Cascade Mountains, with the Columbia River cutting through the bottom. It is part of the border between Washington and Oregon. Most of the travel is on the main, divided highway on the Oregon side, but there is a highway on the Washington side that runs most of the length of the gorge. Though the western part of the gorge is a temperate rain forest, the eastern section is dry steppe country with cheatgrass, sagebrush, and breathtaking basalt cliffs that sometimes form columnar joints.

Adam turned off the highway at Biggs and took the bridge back over the Columbia to the Washington side. That bridge is one of my all-time favorites. The river is wide, a mile or nearly so, and the bridge arches gracefully up and over the water to the town of Maryhill.

It was founded by financier Sam Hill (as in“where in Sam Hill?”) in the early twentieth century. He’d envisioned a Quaker paradisaical farm community and named the town after his wife, Mary Hill. She might have thought it was cooler, I suspect, if it weren’t out in the middle of the desert with about two inches of soil. There isn’t much left of the town—a few small orchards, a couple of nearby vineyards, and a state-run campground—none of which made Maryhill special.

But Sam Hill hadn’t stopped with the town. He built the very first WWI memorial, a full-sized replica of Stonehenge visible from the highway on the Oregon side of the river.

We turned west once we were over the bridge, though, away from Stonehenge and Maryhill. After ten or fifteen minutes of driving down a narrow highway that cut its way along the desert-steppe country of the Columbia Gorge, we came to a campground. Though it was groomed to within an inch of its life, there was no one inside. Adam pulled in the driveway, took a card off the map holder on his sunshade, and swiped it though the control box next to the gate. A green light flashed, and the gate slid open.

“We have it to ourselves,” he said. “I did some of the security here, and they told me we could stay even though it doesn’t officially open until next spring. I’m sure the shower in the trailer works, but the ones in the restrooms over there are a lot bigger.”

I looked around the campground, where tall oaks and maples gave shade to the graveled RV spaces. The big trees weren’t natural for this part of the state, any more than the green, green grass—someone had spent a lot of time tending them.

Adam pulled into a spot halfway between the gray stone restroom and the river. I found myself frowning at one of the trees. It must have been sixty feet tall, its roots buried deep in the earth where it wouldn’t disturb the groomed campground.

“Ten days,” I said.

He knew how my mind worked.“Zee has the shop,” he said. “Darryl and his mate are watching Jesse, who told me before we left that she didn’t need a babysitter.”

“To which you answered that they were bodyguards, not babysitters,” I said. “But she argued that bodyguards usually didn’t get to tell the people they are guarding what time they have to be home.”

“And you weren’t even there for the argument,” marveled Adam. “Darryl broke in, and said, ‘Family does.’ And that was the end of that. So what else are you worried about?”

“Stefan,” I said. “I asked Warren to look in on him, but …”

“I had a talk with Stefan,” said Adam. “Unlike you, my conscience didn’t prevent me from telling him he needed to fill out his menagerie. One of his problems is that he doesn’t want to hunt in his backyard, and he can’t leave his menagerie alone. Ben offered to watch his people, and Warren should leave for Portland tomorrow with Stefan. Anything else?”

“Ten days,” I said, giving him a broad smile. “Ten days of vacation with you. No interruptions.”

Adam leaned over and kissed me—and that was the last time I worried about anything for some time.

3

WE SWAM IN THE RIVER—OR RATHER I SWAM AND ADAM waded in chest high because werewolves can’t swim. Their muscle mass is too dense to be buoyant, so they sink to the bottom like anchors.

The campground was built around a fair-sized backwater that was fast enough not to be stagnant but slow enough to be really good swimming. Strategic growths of Russian Olive and a selection of shrub-sized plant life I couldn’t name, as well as a ten-or fifteen-foot drop just before the river, gave the swimming area a feeling of privacy. The temperature had risen to somewhere around a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, so the water felt really good.

We splashed and dunked each other like a pair of kids, and I laughed until I had to go out and sit on the shore to catch my breath.

“Coward,” Adam said from the river, his hands just below the surface where he could gather ammunition to splash me.

“Not a coward,” I vowed, panting as the sun tried to bake the water out of my hair, skin, and swimming suit all at once.

“Then what are you doing up there?” he asked.

I opened my eyes wide and batted them at him.“Watching the wildlife.” I lowered my gaze to his midsection, where all sorts of lovely muscles were displaying themselves. Werewolves are seldom out of shape, but Adam was a little more ripped even than the average werewolf. “Some nice scenery around here,” I purred.

He made a soft sound, and when I raised my gaze, his eyes were hot.“I have to agree,” he said, stalking out of the water with purpose.

I squealed and came to my feet, laughing—and something out in the water beyond him caught my eye. He spun around to see what I’d noticed, but it was gone. A log maybe, I thought, floating a little below the surface. Hard to judge the size at this distance, but it had been too big for a fish.

Before the dams went in, some of the sturgeon got pretty darn big, upward of twelve feet if I believed Zee. Whatever I’d seen had been bigger than that. But it was gone now, and I’d distracted Adam from his hunt.