Native Wolf by Glynnis Campbell

his head. "You’re as white as your kilwe father." She may not know the Hupa word for evil, but she couldn’t mistake the tone of his voice.
    "She wasn’t my real mother," she admitted breathlessly. "My real mother died when I was a little girl."
    He attempted to ignore her chatter, but she clutched his arms and continued hammering at his thoughts like a woodpecker at an oak trunk.
    "But she cared for me like a daughter. She told me stories and sang songs for me. She healed me when I was sick. Yoema was the only—"
    He sucked the breath hard between his teeth and knocked her hands free.
    Her voice sounded deceptively innocent. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
    His heart pounded, and his breath rattled in the deathly still of the cave. She knew his grandmother by name. Was it possible? Had his grandmother been the woman’s personal slave?
    “Don’t speak that name,” he muttered.
    "Yoema? But she—"
    He lunged forward, grabbing what he found of her person to shake her. "Do not speak my grandmother’s name!"
    She gasped. After a moment of breathless silence, she murmured, “Your grandmother?"
    Chase could feel the woman’s rapid pulse under his fingers, for he’d caught her by the throat.
    "But how can that..." Her unfinished sentence hung between them as tight and deadly as a drawn bow. Then he felt her swallow beneath his thumb. "Oh. Oh. If she’s your..." She let out her breath. "Then you're... You must be... You're one of the...the Two-Sons."
    She said it just like that, Two-Sons, as if it were one word, under her breath, an unutterable curse, just the way his Konkow grandmother would have spoken it.
    To the Konkow people, it was a curse. It was the reason his parents had left their village to journey north to Hupa. Twins were an anomaly among the Konkows, unnatural and dangerous. Though his parents never spoke of it, Drew and he knew what they were. They also knew they had cheated death. If they hadn’t been carried away to Hupa as infants, either one or both of them would have been killed. Such was the Konkow way.
    And because the boys were essentially dead to her, their grandmother would never have learned their names.
    But apparently she hadn’t forgotten them. She’d spoken of the Two-Sons to this white woman. Despite their exile, she’d held her grandsons in her memory. The thought touched his heart, even as it widened the crack of sorrow there.
    “It’s true, isn’t it?” the woman murmured. “You are one of the Two-Sons.”
    He didn’t answer.
    “The twins who had a Konkow father and a white mother,” she said.
    He didn’t answer.
    “Who traveled far away to the north.”
    She obviously knew all about him. There was no point in denying it.
    He grunted in confirmation.
    She nodded. “Then there's something I've waited a long while to ask you.” She pried his hand from her neck. “Where the hell have you been?”

Chapter 7
     

     
    Chase flinched. Like an expert hunter, the woman had found the gap in his defenses and shot an arrow straight into his heart.
    “She said you would return," she bit out. "She believed you and your brother were coming home." She punctuated her angry words by poking him in the chest. "But you never did. I began to think there were no Two-Sons at all, that she'd made them up.”
    He seized her hand to stop her poking, then lowered his brows in a defensive scowl as he growled, “We were never told our grandmother was alive.”
    Her voice was bitter. “It never occurred to you to try to find out? For years she waited for you,” she choked out. “She died, waiting for you.”
    “Now wait just a damned minute,” Chase argued. “It was your world that destroyed my grandmother. You and your father killed her."
    "What!”
    He cursed at her in the Hupa tongue, then bit out, "You don’t think I know what your father did?" A confusion of emotions—fear and anger and despair and regret—swirled together, melting like ore in a crucible, and poured out in an