He found that the path that wound up the cliff face was just as steep as he had thought. He was gripping the rock face and slowly moving up the valley wall. The smell of moss and wind filled his nostrils. After not having smelled anything for two days everything smelled as fragment as perfume and twice as strong. Of course, that also meant he had to smell the dank smell of rot and decay. For some reason the moss that clung to the rock wall had begun to grow stale and rotten. Instead of a rich green that most moss had this stuff was almost black and greasy to the touch. Aceso didn’t seem affected by the rank smell at all and continued to climb up the winding trail.
At some point he stopped to look out over the forest of the brotherless. It really was a beautiful sight. He could see the whole of the valley. This is what they missed in the darkness when they first entered this valley to get away from their pursuers. That Blackhawk helicopter was always going to be a problem. Pheromones and false trails wouldn’t do them much good against machine rotors and searchlights.
It hadn’t been the helicopter that had found them though. They had avoided the loud machine before, and they would continue to do so. He looked up and the sun had moved past his zenith. He looked up the cliff face and saw they were well on their way to scaling the cliff. The trail wasn’t as steep here and it was at the bottom of the valley. This also meant they would not move up the cliff face as fast as they had when they started. There was still plenty of sunlight left and he had no worries that they would reach the summit well before nightfall.
Aceso scrambled up the last bit of rock and she momentarily disappeared from his vision. He had to pull himself up over the lip of the cliff. The last bit of trail had been washed away with erosion by wind and rain. Once he pulled himself up onto flat ground he stood up and looked out over the valley they had just exited from.
The dense forest below them looked like the softest kind of carpet you could imagine. He thought for a moment that if he jumped out over the forest, he would land on the fluffy green carpet of the forest canopy and be unharmed. He knew that was crazy, but it didn’t diminish the apparent softness of the valley floor.
The sun was still in the sky, and he knew that they had to get away from here and find some shelter for the night. Here on the exposed mountain once again he knew that they were in danger of being spotted. They had a few precious hours to put as much distance between them and their pursuers. Even though he had no doubt that Tasha would keep her word, she wasn’t here. He knew that he and Aceso were alone once more.
After a few moments and one final glance over the valley Aceso kicked off the rock and ran. He followed her and they raced over the rocky, uneven terrain. His body was rested, and the climb hadn’t taken too much of a toll on him. He found he could keep up with Aceso with no problems at all. This was almost easy.
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As they ran, he closed his eyes for a moment and felt the wind as it slapped him in the face and passed around him. The slight howl it made at it passed around his ears. He inhaled and smelled Aceso’s musty earthy smell that he had become so familiar with over the past few days. The wind passed around him cooling him and he felt almost as alive as he did when he had run with his pack. Except now he was nothing more than a beta.
He opened his eyes and watched Aceso as she ran. He found that he didn’t mind being the beta of such a proud and beautiful animal. She had earned her title and his fealty. She had saved his life more than once and he had done nothing but eat the food that she had killed, drink from the streams that she had found, and sleep in the shelters that she discovered. He wondered if he would ever have the opportunity to repay her for all that she had done for him. Maybe he would someday. Somehow, he knew that Mount Shasta held the key to unlocking the secrets about himself that would allow him to be more than just a liability for her.
The rocky terrain they were running over was rough and uneven. He had to pay attention to where his feet were going. After so many days of hard running on stone and rock his feet didn’t have any trouble adapting to the surface he was running on. Still, he would have preferred to be running on grass or pine needles. The stone held the heat of the day and the old man in the sky still had about an hour or two of dominance over the sky.
He looked north and towering over him and his companion still disembodied from the rest of the earth, hovered their destination, Mount Shasta. The single mountain dominated the landscape and its peak was coated in white snow, snow that never quite melted. He wondered how long it would take them to get there. At the speeds that they were capable of traveling it might only take a few more days.
The rock he was running on dropped away from him and his leg slammed down into a depression. His knee locked and jerked up from the sudden change in footing. He stumbled forward and almost fell. He recovered without falling and kept running. That could have hurt a lot worse than it had, he would have to pay more attention to where he was and not where he was going.
Aceso hadn’t turned around nor had she slowed down, if anything she was increasing her speed. They were running in the crags of the mountain. They were protected on both sides by stone and rocks. It was good ground to avoid detection but from the sky they were still exposed. Aceso must have known this because she didn’t slow down even as the sun was touching the horizon to the west.
His eyes would not be able to see the ground and the sharp obstacles that littered his path once the sun set but Aceso was running at speeds that were close to the fastest they had ever run together. He took a deep breath and followed her at her pace. He hoped she found some kind of shelter soon otherwise he was likely to hurt himself again.
He still felt stupid and a little ashamed of that night. He had twisted his ankle and he had snapped at his alpha. Of course, at the time he didn’t know that she was his alpha but that was no excuse for his behavior toward her. He glanced to his left and saw the sun was already well on his way to sinking below the horizon. He wondered if he would ever again be able to watch the sun set like he used to do in his valley.