Greylock Manor: A Wolf Shifter Romance (Wolf Mountain Pack Book 1) Page 2

  “And you?” he wondered as he looked me over. I couldn’t help but notice the approving expression in his eyes. “You don’t look like the type to be taking a nature hike.”

  I looked down at my sneakers and laughed. “No, I suppose not, but a girl’s got to work with what she has.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying, but you have quite a bit to work with.”

  I whipped my head up and revealed my colored cheeks. “Yeah, well, I have my mom to thank for that.”

  The man took my hand in his and lifted the top to his lips. “She must be beautiful.” He kissed the top of my hand before he released me. “Hopefully we’ll meet again someday.”

  “Y-yeah,” I stuttered as he strode past me and slipped into the car.

  I turned and kind of stumbled over my own feet to watch him back out. He waved and I waved back, and then he was gone.

  Damn.

  With a heavy heart I stepped inside and ordered a hamburger, not burnt, and a piece of apple pie. If there was one thing I could say about that guy, it’s that he was a great salesman for pies. And sex.

  In an hour I was back on the road and on my way up a winding two-lane highway. The craggy hills rose up on either side now and featured scraggly trees and a few bushes. Every now and again the rock face had been blasted to make room for a pull-off. I was approaching one of them when a pair of flashing red lights pulled up behind me.

  “Ah shit.”

  3

  I pulled over into one of the blasted parking spots.

  The cop car followed me, and we both shut off our engines. The officer stepped out and walked over to me. I rolled down my window and gave him a stupid, shaky smile. “What seems to be the problem, officer?” Yeah, nothing stupid about that cliche.

  He leaned down and smiled at me. “I just wanted to tell you your license plate is loose. Did you want me to try to fix it?”

  I blinked at him. “Seriously?”

  He laughed. “Why not? I’ve got tools in my trunk. Shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.”

  I nodded my head like a bobble-head. “T-then sure, work away.”

  He returned to his car, and I stepped out to inspect the ‘damage.’ My license plate was indeed a little askew. The officer returned with a small, flat toolbox in one hand and knelt in front of the plate.

  “Looks like just a loose screw,” he commented as he pulled out a ratchet with the right size head.

  I snorted. “Story of my life. . .”

  A quick couple of turns and he grinned at his job. “There. That should do her for another few thousand miles.”

  I swept my eyes over the narrow canyon and furrowed my brow. “Do you know much about this area?”

  “Yep,” he replied as he put away his tools and shut the toolbox. He stood and smiled at me. “Born and raised just ten miles down the road.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. “Then you don’t happen to know any place called Greylock Manor, do you?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, never heard of the place.”

  My shoulders drooped. “I see… well, thanks for the help with the license plate.”

  “No problem,” he returned as he followed me to the front of my car. I slipped inside, but he put one arm on the windowsill and looked me over. “If you don’t mind my asking, what brings you up here?”

  Both of my eyebrows shot up. “What makes you think I’m not just passing through?”

  “Because you’re not the first person asking for directions to that place,” he revealed with pursed lips. “I’ve been hailed five times today from people asking about it.”

  A feather could have knocked me over, provided it was a very big one. “What did they say about it?”

  He shook his head. “Not much. Just wanted to know a way to the place. I couldn’t help them, of course, but they seemed determined to search around, anyway.”

  I stared ahead and pursed my lips. “You don’t happen to know if there’s an old hiking trail or road a few miles up ahead, do you? Sort of near the summit?”

  He nodded. “Yep. Just up a ways and on the right. You might miss it, but there’s a small turn-off like this one just before the mouth where you can park.”

  “Did it used to lead somewhere?”

  He jerked his head in the general direction up one of the taller mountain peaks that hung above us. “To an old ski lodge, but that place hasn’t been used in years. It closed down about fifty years ago after some rich guy bought it for himself. I heard he still lives there, but nobody’s allowed up his private drive beyond the paved road.”

  I nodded at the highway that stretched out before me. “And this leads to the private road?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly. That is, the trail you’re looking for doesn’t lead to the private road. It goes up the old road that folks used before the new one was punched in the fifties. You won’t get very far on that one, though. The park service closed it up about a mile off the highway. Too many people got to snooping around and getting lost up there.” He paused and studied me with that funny look again. “They said they saw wolves up there.”

  The color drained from my face. “Were they right?”

  He pushed off the window of my car and shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen one, but sometimes my headlights play tricks on me, and I see something dart across the road that I can’t explain. Anyway, it was nice meeting you.”

  “Likewise,” I returned as he strode back to his car.

  I started my vehicle but waved at him to go ahead. He passed by me with a wave and a honk, and I pulled out. The scenery was just as beautiful as ever, but I hardly saw any of it as I drove up the gentle slope toward my destination. But then, what was my destination? The trooper just told me there was no such place, so where was I going?

  “For a nice, gentle woodland stroll,” I teased myself with a laugh.

  Still, I couldn’t deny that there was a map in my head that I hadn’t put there, and the irresistible urge to follow it was still gnawing away inside me. With those two things spurring me on, along with my curiosity, I drove onward and soon arrived at the turn-off the officer had mentioned. It was a hollowed-out section of the rocky hillside in the shape of a half circle. The road turned to the left and allowed the forest to crowd in on the far side of the turn-off.

  Much was my shock when I noticed a familiar mustang already parked there.

  The space was large enough for both our cars, and I grabbed my bag and climbed out with my eyes on the mustang. The car turned out to be empty and the doors locked. I looked around but didn’t see any sign of the handsome stranger.

  “Easy there, Alex…” I muttered to myself as I strapped on my bag. “You didn’t come here to fall in love with a wealthy guy.”

  But I wouldn’t have said no to it, either.

  Before I headed out, I pulled out my phone and looked at the reception. Deader than a full cemetery. I winced at my own joke and pocketed the phone.

  “Not a good time to be mentioning a graveyard…” I scolded myself as I looked around.

  I found the abandoned road among the trees on the far side of the turn-off. There were little more than two indents left of the road, but that was enough for me to follow up the somewhat steep incline. The stone walls of the mountains gave way to a thick mess of woods that surrounded me on both sides. The drop on my left grew higher with every step I took along the meandering road.

  At a hundred feet I paused and looked over the steep side. The slope was so steep I would have had to crawl up it, and the drop was now two hundred feet to the bottom where a pile of rocks awaited any unwary traveler.

  “Not today, Mother Nature,” I muttered as I continued my climb.

  Just as the trooper mentioned, the road stopped around a sharp bend in the road some three hundred feet up from the highway. A tall pile of rocks and dirt had been bulldozed into place, but I scaled the fortification and found that my double-path had narrowed to a single one. The forest had reclaimed the
rest, and only a narrow rut was evidence that any road had once been there. Even the flat ground had fallen away during countless rainstorms and fed the rocks far below me.

  “It’s okay, Alex,” I murmured to myself as I adjusted the straps on my bag. “You’ve still got the rut.”

  Me and my big mouth. The rut ended two corners further ahead and I found myself forced to walk along a narrow animal trail, complete with little nuggets of surprises placed every few steps. My little game of hopscotch with turds distracted me from the creeping fear that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Still, I had a bright sun above me and a bag full of clean clothes and some food behind me. Things could be worse.

  4

  Things got worse. My animal trail turned feral and turned a sharp right up the slope and out of sight over a lip made of stones. The reason was because the rest of the road had been washed away by a mudslide and didn’t resume for another twenty yards. I looked across the chasm with a heavy heart before I turned an about-face to the uphill trail.

  I clapped my hands and rubbed them together. “Time to find out if you can still crawl.”

  I gripped the loosened clay dirt with my hands and dug my feet into the earth and began my climb. Bushes on either side brushed against my face and sharp stones dug at my fingers. To this fun was added the loose soil that kept coming away in my hands. More than once I found myself tottering on the brink of falling backward before I threw myself against the hillside. By the time I neared the stone lip some twenty feet up the front of my shirt and pants matched the soil beneath me.

  That same soil was becoming looser the higher I climbed. By the time I reached the lip I was climbing twice as much but going nowhere as the ground gave way beneath my flailing hands and feet.

  “Should’ve taken that rock-climbing lesson…” I muttered to myself as I reached for the first flat stone above me.

  The upper half of my fingers caught the rock and I tried to pull myself up. The stone proved to be a critic, however, when it gave way beneath my weight. The rock tumbled between my legs and instinctively I leapt out of the way. My feet landed on the loose soil which in turn crumbled beneath me. I found myself falling backward with my hands stretched out in front of me.

  A hand shot out over the ridge and grabbed one of mine, stopping what would have been a nasty fall. I looked up into the face of the bemused apple-pie man from the restaurant.

  He grinned back at me. “Funny meeting you here.”

  I stepped my feet along the slope in the hopes of finding some spot to support me, but the loose soil fell away. “I’ll laugh after you pull me up!”

  He grabbed my other arm and slowly pulled me over the lip. I landed with a soft ‘oomph’ on my stomach atop the solid, flat ground and he plopped himself down beside me. A backpack lay on his other side.

  “You okay?”

  I rolled onto my back and stared up at the trees and clear sky. “I will be when I figure out why I’m doing this.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

  I climbed onto my arms and looked up at his curious expression. “Have you ever had the urge to do something stupid?”

  He shrugged. “Well, there was that one time at band camp.”

  It was my turn to lift an eyebrow. “Please tell me it wasn’t the cheerleader.”

  He sighed. “No, it was the trombonist.”

  I shook my head and clicked my tongue. “That’s even worse, but I’m not talking about blowing other peoples’ instruments. I’m talking about an urge to go out and follow your heart when your head is trying to tell you’re being an idiot.”

  The man studied me for a long moment before he smiled. “I think I know what you mean, and that’s what brought you out here?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed as I swept my eyes over the rocky ledge. The flat top stretched forty feet in both directions, and at our backs was a mound of stones and dirt created by weathering. “And I still want to head out to-”

  “-find Greylock Manor?”

  I whipped my head up and stared at him with wide eyes. “Yeah, but how’d you know that?”

  He pursed his lips. “Because that’s where I’m headed too.” He snorted. “Or trying to. It doesn’t show up on any maps I found. All I have is the one in here-” He tapped the side of his temple.

  My jaw hit the stone ground. “So do I!”

  He blinked at me. “Really?”

  “It’s a fuzzy map, isn’t it?” I guessed, and he nodded. “And you got it in a dream after some creepy guy with one yellow eye and-”

  “-one white eye told me to come to Greylock Manor,” he finished before he stared at me for a long moment. “It seems the two of us have been sharing dreams.”

  “And we’re not the only ones,” I revealed as I pointed in the general direction of the highway. “A state trooper told me he’d been asked all day about where Greylock Manor was.”

  The man’s eyebrows shot up. “And could he tell them?”

  I shook my head. “No, he’d never heard of it, though he was born and raised around here.”

  The stranger cupped his chin in one hand and furrowed his brow. “Interesting…”

  I snorted. “Interesting nothing. This is downright creepy.”

  He climbed to his feet and held out his hand to me. “Do you want to see how creepy?”

  I leaned back and eyed him with suspicion. “What do you mean?”

  He grinned. “Why don’t the two of us incorporate and see what all this dream stuff is about?”

  I folded my arms over my chest and looked him over. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “John Smith.”

  I could see the twinkle of mischievous in his eyes. “Try again.”

  “Christopher Dayton?”

  “Now that sounds better,” I replied as I accepted his hand. He pulled me to my feet, and I gave his hand a shake. “Mine’s Alexandra Shaw, but I like to save time and letters by having everyone just call me Alex.”

  He inclined his head. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Alex, and you can shorten my name to Chris. Now then-” He offered me a bent arm. “Shall we?”

  I looped my arm through his and grinned. “Let’s.”

  Together we hiked down the long patch of stone and across the ridge line, forsaking the path far below us in favor of the devil we knew. That itch in the back of my mind told me up was the right direction, anyway. Brush and trees stood in our way, but Chris gallantly took the lead and the brunt of the bushes, breaking them with his broad shoulders and cute ass-wait, what?

  “Get a hold of yourself, Alex...”

  He paused and looked over his shoulder. “Did you say something?”

  I flashed him a stupid smile and pointed at a tree. “I just said ‘get a hold of this ash.’”

  He looked at the specimen and arched an eyebrow. “That’s a pine.”

  Alex, you idiot. “Is it? Silly me.”

  He cast a bemused and knowing look in my direction before proceeding onward. I slapped my forehead before following him. Our ‘path’ led us at an angle upward, but after a half mile of diagonal walking, we rediscovered the animal trail which now led straight up the less sloped hillside. We trudged upward, but with each step the way leveled off until we found ourselves along a winding flat trail.

  I swept my eyes over the forested scenery and frowned. “How far do you think it is until we find-well, whatever we’re looking for?”

  Chris stopped so suddenly that I ran into him. I grasped his backpack and glared up at him. “What’s the-” His whispered voice interrupted me.

  “There’s someone up ahead.”

  There hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. “Who?”

  He shook his head. “No idea, but there’s a few of them. Men and women, too.”

  I tilted my head to one side and strained my ears. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “They’re about a hundred yards ahead.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. “You have good ears
.”

  He grinned. “It’s a gift, but ready to go meet our fellow dreamers?”

  I readjusted my bag and shrugged. Then I readjusted my bag again. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Chris led the way and we marched down the trail. The trees opened up and the path parted at the hundred-yard mark to reveal a small clearing. Green grass and flowers covered the ground except for at the far right end of the meadow where a flat boulder sat.

  Ten other people were already there, making us an even dozen. They were from a variety of backgrounds, some with expensive clothing and others wearing jeans even more worn than mine. Some were tall and others short, and more than one had a bit of girth around the waist. Most had backpacks, and some even sported hiking boots and poles.

  At our coming they stopped their chattering and turned to us. I gave them a sheepish smile and a wave. “Hiya.”

  One of the women frowned at me. “Just what we need, more of us.”

  I folded my arms over my chest and frowned back at her. “Hey, I brought some food to the potluck.”

  She cast one look at my bag and wrinkled her nose. “I’d rather starve.”

  Chris grasped the straps of his bag as he strode up to them with a smile. “We’re guessing that you guys had the same dream.”

  One of the men nodded. “Yeah. Something about a Greylock Manor and this place.”

  I followed Chris and swept my eyes over the clearing. “Nobody happens to know where we go from here, do they? Because I’m not seeing anything in my FMM.”

  The same wrinkle-faced woman rolled her eyes. “And what is “FMM?’”

  I flashed her a mischievous grin. “It stands for Fuck-”

  “How long have you been here?” Chris spoke up. I cast an annoyed glare in his direction, but he gave my arm a bit of a push with his elbow. I rolled my eyes.

  “Two hours,” one of the others piped up, a scrawny chap with a baseball cap spoke up. He lay on the ground with a cell phone in his hand and a scowl on his face. “And all of that without any reception.”

  My bitter rival rolled her eyes at him. “Who cares about your stupid little video games.”