Wild Invitation

favorite engineer. However pleasure wasn’t what awaited him when he fell into bed.
    At first, all he could hear was rain.
    He was sitting under a lee of rock outside the den, sheltered and snug from the cold droplets, enjoying its music. He’d always liked rain until that night. Every so often, he’d twitch his tail to shoo away a suicidal crow he couldn’t be bothered to snap his teeth at—
    —and then he was in human form on a long, slick road, watching two huge lights bearing down on him. He wasn’t afraid. He knew who they were, and that they’d stop.
    They did.
    Opening the door, he got into the backseat as if it was an ordinary thing to get into a car from the middle of the road. His mother turned, laughing at something his father had said as she reached out a hand toward Cooper, the pearl earrings she so loved flashing in the flickering firelight.
    Except, there shouldn’t be a fire. They were alone on the dark, twisting road—
    He was outside the car, screaming at them to stop, but they were both still laughing, dressed in the clothes they’d worn to attend the wedding, and they didn’t hear him, didn’t even see him—
    —fire! He was trapped inside the car and the flames were blistering his flesh. He cried out, reached for his parents…but they’d turned to bone, charred and black. “No! No!” he screamed as his flesh melted.
    Cooper jerked awake on a scream, the echo of it hanging in the air. Shuddering, he thrust his hands through sweat-soaked hair and checked the status of the audio shield round his room.
Thank God,
he thought when he saw the switch flicked in the right direction. The last thing the den needed was to hear its lieutenant screaming in terror like a child.
    Shoving off the sheets tangled around his legs, he walked into the shower. Scalding, that’s how he wanted the water. To thaw the lump of ice that was his heart. Always, he woke from that nightmare chilled to the bone. He’d never understood it, not when the fire was so
hot.
    He stayed until the shower stall was so full of steam, he couldn’t see the hands he’d braced on the wall. Wrenching off the tap, he stepped out, dried off, and—towel wrapped around his hips—stared into the mirror. His jaw was dark with stubble, so he focused on that, shaved. The task took a bare few minutes, and then he no longer had even that slim buffer against the echoes of nightmare.
    It had been worse this time, because he hadn’t expected it, hadn’t prepared himself for the horror that awaited him in the dark of night. It had been so many years since he’d been trapped inside that phantom car, burning and burning and burning.
    “Enough.” It was a quiet command to himself.
    Leaving the bathroom, he pulled on underwear, jeans, a black T-shirt, socks, and boots.
    The den was quiet when he stepped out, not unexpected at five in the morning. He almost turned toward Grace’s room, wanting desperately to ask her to let him hold her, just that. But he didn’t have the right to push for those skin privileges, so he took himself up to his office and began to go through a number of financial reports Jem had forwarded.
    His fellow lieutenant kept an eye on Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, was the one Sebastian in San Diego called first if he had a problem. Cooper, by contrast, looked outward to the border with Arizona, Joshua Tree, and the arid Mojave falling under his mandate.
    His and Jem’s geographic closeness—relatively speaking—meant they could get together in person every so often, but they did most of their work via the comm. Both having an aptitude for and training in finance, they were in charge of the pack’s investments, working with a small, dedicated team to ensure SnowDancer stayed healthy on that level. Normally, Cooper found the intricacies of the work invigorating, a complex jungle of a different kind, but today it felt like wading through quicksand. Still, he got it done, then began to plow steadily through the other paperwork that had built up on his desk.
    All the while, the rain continued to fall beyond the window, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t forget the charred black of his parents’ bodies.
    •   •   •
    GRACE returned to work on sector 4B the next morning, after a systems and tech meeting where it was revealed the previous night’s storm had done major damage to the solar panels. Specifically designed to blend into the environment so as not to give away the den’s location,