Driftwood - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,2

himself get red. "Sorry." And red wasn't the only thing he was getting. What had he been thinking? She was right: he'd left his brains up there with the seagull shit.

"This was your solution?" she scolded, rubbing her forehead. "No cell phone, no rope, and now we're both down here?"

"It's really small down here," he said, trying not to sound tense. "It didn't look that small from up top."

"It's a hole, Boy Scout. Not a cavernous underground lair."

He scratched his arm, and when his elbow knocked against the side of the hole, sand showered down, which made him itch more.

"Can you breathe okay?" He tried not to gasp. "Is there enough air down here? I don't think there's enough air down here."

"Oh boy oh boy. I am not believing this. You actually took a terrible situation, made it worse, then made it more worse. Are you all right?"

"It's just that there's no air down here." He clutched his head. "None at all."

"You're claustrophobic and you jumped down into a hole?"

He groaned. "Don't talk about it."

"But why, Boy Scout?"

"Couldn't just leave you here. But you're not really here." He sniffed hard. Her hair was a perfect cap of dark curls (he thought; there wasn't much light down here) and under normal circumstances he would find that extremely cute. He sniffed her head again. "I don't think you're here at all."

"Boy Scout, you have lost what little tiny cracker brains you had to begin with." She managed to fold her arms over her chest and (he thought) glare at him. "If this is some elaborate ploy to impress me in order to get laid—"

"I can't have sex with you. You're not here." He gasped again. "I can't breathe. How can you breathe?"

"Well, apparently I'm not here," she said dryly. "And don't get me started on why the whole oxygen thing isn't a problem for me. I—What are you doing?"

He stumbled around and was scrabbling at the sandy walls, digging for purchase and doing nothing but pulling a shower of sand down on them both.

"Boy Scout, get a grip!" She coughed and spat a few grains of sand at his back. "You're just making it worse!"

She was yammering at his back and he didn't hear, couldn't hear, sand was everywhere, in his mouth, in his ears, in his eyes, and it was so close, it wasn't a hole, it was a grave and it was filling up, filling up with him in it.

He clawed at the wall, pulled, yanked, scrabbled, tried to climb, and he could hear the woman yelling, screaming, feel her blows on his shoulders and they were as heavy as flies landing.

Then the moon was there. The moon came for him in the grave and took him out, took him up and out, and he was able to gouge himself out of the grave with two ungainly leaps and then he was screaming, screaming at the moon, howling at the moon, and she wasn't screaming anymore, the grave was full and she was quiet, at last she was quiet and he ran, ran, ran with the moon and his last thought as a man was, "What have I done?"

Chapter Four

"It's around here," Burke said, so ashamed he couldn't look up from the sand.

"Around here?" Jeannie Wyndham, his pack's female Alpha, poked at the small dunes with a sneakered toe. "That's pretty vague for a guy with a nose like yours. Is this the spot or isn't it?"

"I… think it is. It's hard to tell. I can't smell her at all. I can just smell me. And I'm all over the place. After I got out of the gra—

hole, I just ran."

Michael, his pack leader, was crouched and balanced on the balls of his feet as his yellow gaze swept the area. He said nothing, for which Burke was profoundly grateful. He couldn't have borne a scolding, as much as he deserved one.

"Burke, give us a break," Jeannie said, sounding (no surprise at all) exasperated. "You stumbled across a woman who needed help—"

"And I left her to die."

"—and you did what you could. You guys are—Every werewolf I've ever met is such a screaming claustrophobe you should all be on tranqs, but you jumped into a hole to try to save her before you Changed. She didn't have a chance in hell anyway."

Burke could think of several chances the poor dead woman might have had, but it wasn't prudent to correct Jeannie, so he stayed silent.

"There, I think," Michael said. There