Chapter 31: Cormac

The smell of the place was the same. Not to a human nose since there were layers and years of dust and decay to contend with but under it, the traces of scent a canine nose could uncover, was the same smell that had been there when Cormac and Maxine lay together in that old brass bed and erroneously thought they had the rest of their lives to do so. Only one of them was wrong though. Maxine had spent what was left of her life alongside Cormac in that bed. Right down to her very last moment. He couldn’t get the image of her face right before the energy, the spirit, retreated back into the ether. She looked at peace, almost happy. More than anything, he hated that she didn’t fight harder; that when it came down the wire, she didn’t have the strength to be angry or determined or even the slightest bit sad. As if she wasn’t leaving him all alone and shattered in the bed where they shared the best of their relationship.

Had she not been a fighter since the day he met her? Cormac had spent more time than he could quantify thinking about the times Maxine would turn on a dime in order to keep the peace. Personally, he had felt her fire and power, and had pictured her as a force to be reckoned with but maybe he was the one who was wrong. Maybe she had been someone more interested in contentment and happiness than being part of an eternal struggle. Maybe the moment that bullet snapped her spine, she had been released from this mortal coil with just enough time to see through the mirage of this world and beyond the veil of the next one.

“I’ve never been particularly ambitious,” she had told him when he asked if there was anything she wanted out of life. She cupped her hand over his cock and balls, kissing his neck at the same time. A single fluid motion. “This is all I’m after now.”

When he pictured her riding up craggy mountain faces and through twisted, gnarled trails, he could believe she had what she wanted. She was blazes, she was sheer and unfettered light; the sun come too close to earth. It had occurred to him once while watching her tear brazenly across perilous rock formations that she hadn’t been created to spend her life on earth. She was here to fly, unstoppable, her feet off the ground.

The mattress on the bed was stripped bare, the blood stain that was once a minatory shade of crimson now a time darkened coppery blotch. Tara had come in after Maxine’s funeral to throw away the bedding that still carried the mark of her but Cormac told her to keep it. He found himself staring at the sheets where Maxine had bled out, observing the stain as it faded in the wash, becoming somehow more permanent and less threatening. Yet on the mattress, it was more grotesque than he expected. This was the first time he had seen it since the day it had happened, and he almost couldn’t bear to look. Then he couldn’t stand to look away. The blood stain transfixed him, and the familiar nostalgic smell wrenched him backwards in time, and he heard the door open behind him, and felt Maxine stepping into their home again.

Under his weight, the mattress indented deeply. He didn’t turn to look at who was coming in. What he wanted was someone to sit next to him, someone to sink into the mattress and roll her hips towards him. He missed the intimacy of having a mate more than any other part of it. He missed having someone’s heat and mass shifting alongside him in the night.

A voice tinged with panic spoke to him, a facade of calm scheming obviously as the voice reached him. “Cormac?”

He glanced over his shoulder before he let himself say the name Maxine. He wasn’t so far gone that he thought it was really her, flesh or spirit, darkening a doorway where she had spent the last of herself. When he saw the wide whites of Isabelle’s eyes, he leapt to his feet as if ready for a fight then he noticed the rest of her: bitten lips and wringing hands; tense, drawn shoulders.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, letting himself surrender to the give of the mattress again.

Isabelle stood in front of him. She was backlit from the window behind her, the nova glow of the sun transforming her to shadow except for the brightness in her eyes. The heat and sweat was curling the ends of her hair and flipping them upward at the bottom so that they gathered around the nape of her neck. Cormac was dumbstruck by the sight of her for a moment; he waited for her to speak, unsure of what else to say.

“I just got off the phone with my boss and-”

“The phone?”

“He was telling me that-”

Cormac rose to his full height. Isabelle took a step backwards then straightened her shoulders and advanced a step. He was well aware that she wasn’t the type to be easily intimidated but this action seemed like a bit of a ploy, a puffed chest in a moment of defensiveness.

“What did you say to him?” Cormac asked, lowly. “Did you tell him you were being held here against your will?”

“I didn’t say anything to him,” Isabelle shot back.

“Good. I’m not saying you should trust me completely but at least let me handle this situation before you-”

Isabelle raised her hand sharply to chest level. “Cormac, for god sakes, you don’t have a handle on this situation so don’t pretend that you do.”

Cormac sank back down. As his weight pushed into the mattress, he felt like he was shrinking. Each second under her glare made him a smaller man.

“I’ve got a handle on it,” he told her, quietly.

“Can I tell you what I came in here to tell you?”

“Did Tara let you call?”

“Cormac!”

Cormac made a zipping motion over his lips and hoisted his palms up in surrender. He wished there was more churning through his mind at the moment but now all he saw was Isabelle’s glowing eyes transposed over Maxine’s dying ones, zen and fading.

“Tell me what you need to say.” He touched the spot next to him. “Do you want to sit?”

Isabelle looked too tense to sit. She wrung her hands together again as she started speaking. “Tara said someone called for me, and that I should call them back before they got worried. When I called, it was this weird unlisted number for my boss and he said something about having a source out here who knows about the shifters and how they’re going to go wide with the story once I put together enough evidence.”

Cormac was glad he was sitting down so his knees didn’t buckle so obviously in front of her. His stomach crinkled into a wad then expanded till he felt a vacuum in his gut that he had never experienced before. This wasn’t just the threat of violence or the possibility of one person trying to convince others of what they saw. This had far reaching ramifications, and it was already out of his hands.

Even when Maxine died, he didn’t have this sudden hole in his stomach like he did right then. When Maxine died, there were a million different emotions to run through, and no matter how terrible he felt, there was a reason for it. A reason filled with loss and pain but a reason, one that had already come to an end. What Isabelle was telling him was just the start of the problems. It was going to get much worse very soon.

Cormac touched the seat next to him again. “Isabelle, can you please sit?”

He tried to hide the fact that his hand was shaking. As she settled next to him, he felt the empty space in his gut shrink a little, and he knew this was a bad sign. Tara had been right about her, about how he was reacting to her. There were a lot of different ways to tell if a shifter was matching scents and energies with a mate. These were similar to how humans felt themselves falling in love but felt more deeply, more intensely. Butterflies in the stomach was near grueling nausea; a pulse quickening was a thunderstorm against the wrists and temples. Cormac had been able to tell that his pupils dilated the moment he realized it was Isabelle darkening his doorway and not Tara or Joey or one of the men. Or Maxine, even. Not that he wouldn’t have been bowled over by her reappearance, in more ways than one, but his body was engaged with Isabelle now. Mechanisms beyond his control were starting their grinding, inexplicable ballet.

He heard a smacking sound as Isabelle’s teeth and lips parted then a clicking noise as her tongue pressed into the roof of her mouth. She wanted to say something, anything that was in her head. It didn’t matter what it was; anything to break the silence. Cormac, on the other hand, very much wanted the silence. He had to think, he had to assess the situation, and in the silence, there was more space for him to twist and burn inside of himself. The silence was like the desert, and there was a reason Cormac lived in the desert.

“I have an-”

Cormac tapped his hand lightly against Isabelle’s forearm. He heard the wet noise of her lips coming back together then he heard her sigh. “Cormac, please. I have an idea.”

“What evidence does your boss have?”

Isabelle threw her hands in the air. “I have absolutely no clue. He said he had a source out here, and he seemed to know stuff I sure as hell hadn’t told him.” She lowered her voice as if worried that the men a quarter mile away in the paddock could hear them. “Do you think any of the ranch hands would sell you out?”

“Sell us out? What good would that do for them?”

“Everyone has a price, right? Maybe they were offered enough money to bring you all to light that it made it worthwhile.” She tapped him on the forearm like he had done to her. “People sometimes think once they’ve got money, they’re safe from reality.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Cormac replied.

“Never known anyone with money.”

Cormac snorted and waved a hand like he was swatting away a fly. “I’ve never known anyone, period. This is actually how I live, Isabelle. The people in the other towns, they could tell ya my name and point me out in a lineup but it’s not like we’re friends.” He looked at her for the first time since she sat down; since the moment when he was trying to tug both of them into the silence and stay there for as long as humanly or not so humanly allowed. “Those men out there workin’, my father, Tara. These are the only people I really know.” He swallowed and averted his gaze again. “And Maxine.”

Out of the corner of his vision, he saw Isabelle study the bed and the mattress filthy with the past. The stain was prominent despite its aged color; it sat high on its canvas and drew attention to itself. When Cormac closed his eyes, he could see the irregular shape of it in neon negative on the inside of his lids.

“I’m going to accept the offer from my boss,” Isabelle said, her focus still on the stain. Cormac made eye contact, and she held it steadily. “I’m going to tell him I’m working on the story then you and I can figure out what the hell is going on. There’s too much weirdness here, you get me?”

“Sorta. Ya mean something doesn’t sit right with ya.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a pretty solid journalistic instinct, and there’s too many dots that aren’t connecting. I want to figure this out just as much as you do.”

Cormac leaned back, gave her an incredulous look. “What’s in it for you?”

“I was mainly hoping to not get slaughtered by a bunch of fucking wolves, if you want my honest answer.”

“We’re not wolves.” Cormac stiffened beside her. “We’re...more complicated than that.”

Isabelle got up as if standing to leave but stood there with her hands on her hips. “Look, all I’m saying is that I’m not trying to get anything out of this except being left alone.” With her hands firmly placed, she bent forward with a roguish smile on her face. “And the hard truth is that I’m truly a journalist at heart. I just can’t walk away from a good story.”