I interrupted him. “Luna,” I turned to her, “could you take me to your Dad, please? I need to know exactly what he wants from me because otherwise I’m leaving. Right now.”
“Okay, I’ll take you to him.” She motioned for me to follow her. “You’re pretty tough. You were going to throw her into a tree.”
“I’m a Warrior. I’m designed and trained to fight monsters. Plus, it’s actually hard to hurt me when I’m not, say, being whacked from the back of the head with no warning.”
She grinned at me, and she looked like Jason, which made my heart hurt.
Not a good sign.
“Fair enough.” We walked in silence together into their house-slash-tent. “I’ve never seen him do that before, kiss anybody. I didn’t know Jason knew how.”
“Oh, he knows how.” Very well, in fact. So well I had to wonder exactly how many times he had done the same, or more, with Abigail Skyler to give the sobbing lunatic the impression she had dibs on him. But I wasn’t going to say that to his sister.
“When he smells you, it’s different for him. To all of us, you smell like Rachel but to Jason, it’s very profound. I’m hopeful that some day that will happen to me.”
“Luna, a couple of things. First, if I had wanted a heart to heart, I would have asked Autumn to take me inside. You struck me as less touchy-feely.”
She grinned again. “True. I’m trying my best here, he is my brother.”
“As to that, I think kissing your brother was a moment of absolute insanity on my part. I can’t stay here. I don’t want to. What I want is to know what your father needs from me so I can go and do it and go home. Your brother and me, we’re nothing guaranteed. We’re not even likely. No matter what I smell like.”
“I think that you and I could be friends.” Luna put out her hand for me to shake and I took it. We now stood outside of a door marked ‘office’. “It’s been a long time since I had any new friends. Feels like ten years, but it’s longer than that.”
I nodded. “I don’t know if we’ll be friends. But I would like you to describe the world to me as it was before. Almost everyone who ever saw it is dead.”
She knocked on her father’s door. “Tomorrow. Before you leave to do what my Dad is going to want you to do.”
“I’m not spending the night here with all of you, not on a Full Moon.”
Luna opened the door and walked in. I noticed she didn’t wait for permission to enter. The knock seemed more like a warning than a request.
I never went in my father’s room if the door was closed. It almost never was. He was usually too drunk to notice things like doors. Sometimes he fell through them if they weren’t open. I’d gotten good with a hammer and nails, good at patching things up that had been broken.
If I ever found him behind a closed door, I might worry he was dead.
Andon’s office was sparsely decorated, but then again, how could they have very much furniture at all? It was a tent and they always had to leave. He stood by a window looking out. Now that I knew we were in a tent, I could see a slight wrinkle in the wall that I hadn’t noticed before.
Luna spoke. “Dad, Rachel wanted to see you.”
“I heard.”
That didn’t make sense to me. How could he have heard in the minute it took us to get from out there to in here? “Who told you?”
“No one told me.” He tugged at his left ear as he grinned at me, again with Jason’s smile. The whole family owned that look, but I had a feeling it would always be Jason’s grin to me. “It’s one of the perks of being a Werewolf. No secrets for miles around.”
Luna laughed and turned to walk out of the room. “See you tomorrow, Rachel.”
I pulled my glasses off my face and looked out the window of the room. The light didn’t bother my eyes coming through the window, probably because it was almost dusk. I knew the Werewolves would shift as soon as the moon was in the sky. That didn’t leave us much time to take care of business.
“I’ll cut to the chase.” Jason’s father had an uncanny ability to read my mind. It was a little creepy, actually. “Tomorrow, when you get up, I’m going to take you to see something I want you to witness first hand. Then, I would like it, if you could take this information back to your people. I’ll leave it to them to decide what it is that they do with it.”
“That’s it?” All he wanted me to do was report back on something I saw?
“Hopefully it won’t be more complicated than that.” Andon rubbed his eyes. He looked tired. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like every day having to keep his entire pack safe.
“That sounds a little scary. Hopefully.”
“Young lady, I have learned, as I’m sure in your brief lifetime you have learned, that nothing goes exactly as we plan.”
I nodded because he was right. Nothing in my life went as I either planned or imagined it would. I had certainly never foreseen this situation.
“What’s the deal with this cage you want to put me into?”
He nodded and walked to the side of the room. He pulled down a dark blanket as he uncovered a large, metal cage. “I just put it together for you while you were outside with Jason. It’s been a long time since we had a human around to protect, but I still remember how to do it.”
“I don’t understand. I thought Jason was adamant that you guys aren’t monsters.”
“He’s touchy about that word.” Andon sat down in his chair. “In the past, we could protect our human mates or friends by going off into the woods a distance away from where we would be. They were protected from us. We’d run through the woods, lose ourselves to the thrill of the wolf, and then shift back in the morning. No one was ever hurt. But we still had the cages, just in case.”
I walked up to the cage. It didn’t look like the worst thing in the world. They’d put a blanket down. I hadn’t slept in days. I might pass out and not notice anything was different until I opened my eyes the next morning.
Maybe.
“Jason, Luna, and Autumn did okay with me in the woods. They didn’t attack me. Why is tonight different?”
“We, as Werewolves, don’t have to shift except once a month under the Full Moon. We can choose to shift other times, but it’s different. Last night, the kids could keep control of their higher senses. They were wolves, but they were also people. If Jason’s wolf wanted to eat you, Jason had control to say, ‘no, don’t eat her.’ Under a Full Moon, only I, as Alpha of the pack, am still aware of who I am. Everyone else becomes completely wolf. Some of the pack members can’t even recall what they did the next day.”
That was scary. I wasn’t sure what was worse, staying in here alone knowing that could happen or going out into the woods and risking it on my own. “So someone could come in here, eat me, and they wouldn’t know it?”
“In the history of my pack, before forty-six years ago when the unthinkable happened, no one had ever hurt a human under the Full Moon. We made sure of it. You are our first chance to do it right since we awoke.”
I tapped my foot. “So I’m kind of important, then. You will all feel better if I get in this cage and you keep me safe tonight. “
He smiled Jason’s grin. “Exactly.”
“All right, then I guess I’ll get in the cage.”
He jumped up from the chair. “Really? That easily? I thought I might have to persuade you or beg you.”
“No, I’m easy. If something makes sense, it makes sense. I really don’t want Jason eating me.”
“He really doesn’t want to either. Trust me, I’m his father, I know.”
I stepped into the cage and sat down on the blanket. Yes, if he turned off the lights I could sleep in here easily. He might not even need to turn off the lights. My head still hurt on and off from where Luna whacked me and some peace and quiet was in order.
Tomorrow, I’d go see whatever it was I had to see for myself and then I’d go home. Maybe I could forget this whole thing ever happened. Especially some blond-haired guy who
sometimes became a wolf and maybe had a girlfriend he hadn’t mentioned.
Andon shut the cage, locking it with a key he wore around his neck, and walked to the door. “By the way, I know this is none of my business but, for the record, as far as I know as both his father and his Alpha, he has never shown Abigail Skyler the least amount of interest. Many of the young girls have hopes for him. We don’t have other people to meet. Jason’s going to be Alpha some day.”
“Then maybe he should stick to kissing other wolves and leave me alone.”
I didn’t pretend to not have kissed his son. That would be foolish, considering Andon could hear and smell everything.
Andon touched his nose, and I wondered if I was supposed to know what that meant. My scent? Was he suggesting it was my scent that made Jason kiss me?
“His mother was human. You might say I have sympathy for his plight as I remember what it was to woo a non-Werewolf.”
He shut off the light, and I lay back in my cage. I closed my eyes and knew that within moments I’d be asleep, happily, in my cage.
***
I jerked upwards. My body was stiff and I was freezing. I shivered all over. No, this wasn’t just cold. This was like how it had been out in the woods. I knew this feeling. This was bad. This was Vampire.
And I was locked in a cage. Where was it? I stood up. The room was dark, almost pitch black, and I had no weapons to help me. The wolves had taken them off me when they brought me here. Like an idiot, I hadn’t even thought to get them back. I was with wolves, why would I need weapons?
Was it in the room or just in the tent? I looked out the window. It was cloudy but I could just see the shape of the Full Moon from where I stood. The pack would be running, lost in the thrill of it, somewhere nearby. No one—save Andon—would be able to help me, because they were all fully wolf by now.
I thought of Jason’s blue eyes as his teeth had dug into that Vampire. I’d do anything for that kind of assistance…
“Lookie, lookie, what the wolves left us. A little Warrior stuck in a cage. Do you think they will miss her if we take her away?”
The Vampire was talking and that meant that there was at least more than one in the room with me. Oh, bad. This was very, very bad. Stupid, Rachel, stupid.
“Yes, you’re right. We’ll share her.”
I hadn’t heard the second Vampire answer the first, and I’d been listening closely. That meant it was one of the old ones who couldn’t speak aloud anymore. I supposed I just answered one of our scientists’ questions. Yes, they could still communicate with each other, even after they couldn’t speak to us.
“Let’s get her out of that cage.”
And just like that, they pounced on the metal of what was supposed to be my safe zone. One hand swiped to the side. I caught a glimpse of its face. Same red veins and pointy ears. It smiled and ducked back into the darkness where I couldn’t see it.
The other Vampire shook the cage. I wish I could say I didn’t scream, but I’d be lying. I screamed. Loudly. I had no weapons. I had no help. It was me stuck in a cage with two of the scariest beings on earth waiting to kill me in a cage that Andon had put together himself only hours earlier. I wasn’t altogether confident it would hold together.
No one was here to witness whether or not I was brave, so I decided to give into my very human desire to scream at the top of my lungs. I grabbed for anything and picked up the blanket that Andon had left me in the cage. Quickly, I wrapped it around my arms and neck. It wouldn’t give me much protection, but at least it might help keep their fingernails from scratching at me.
In the unlikely event that I lived, I didn’t want to have to fight off a Vampire infection from one of those cuts. It was always a fifty/fifty shot with those things. You either lived or you died.
The Vampire shook the cage more vehemently and to my horror, the top bars of the cage came loose. So much for Andon’s safe cage. The wolves would have broken through the cage, too.
The only good news was that if they could get it open, I could get out. If I could do that, then I could find a weapon. I didn’t care if that meant that I had to break Andon’s chair in half to make a stake, that’s what I would do. The bars came loose and the Vampire threw them over his head.
I jumped and kicked the Vampire, hard in the gut. He groaned and stepped backwards, hissing like a snake. I’d never thought of Vampires as serpents, not the whole time I’d studied them, but now I would never think of them as anything else again.
If I lived to think at all. I kicked again, pushing it back even further. It felt good. At the very least, I could say I fought back. I don’t know who I would tell it to, but I would know it. With my last dying breath, I would know it.
The other Vampire grabbed me from behind. He pulled me back into his arms until his face was pressed against the side of my cheek. I kicked my feet but it was no good. He had me and he had me good. Not to mention, he had total and complete access to my neck, since the blanket had fallen to the ground.
This was it. I was dead. Just like my mother, I would perish by a Vampire bite to my jugular.
“You’re going to taste so good. It’s been so long since I had Warrior.”
I laughed, it was a desperate sound and I knew it. “I hope you choke on it. I hope it gives you a sour stomach.”
He dug his long fingernails into my cheek, and I cried out. So much for not getting cut. Really, what was the difference at this point? Still, tears filled my eyes. I didn’t want to die like this. This was terrifying, painful, and so downright awful I didn’t know what to do with myself.
A sob choked my throat.
Just then the door burst open, shattering from the force placed on it on the other side. Growling, and snarling so fiercely that it made me shudder was a blue-eyed wolf I’d seen once before.
He didn’t hesitate. With one long stride, he took down the Vampire that held me. Grabbing onto its arm, he bit down and tore the limb from the Undead creature’s body. The Vampire howled and dropped me. I fell to the floor like a bag of flour.
Jason killed the Vampire. I’d never been so happy in my life. But, I knew something he might not know, and that was that there was a second Vamp in the room with us. Hauling myself to my feet, all I could think was how much my cheek burned from where I’d been cut. I ran to the chair and broke it over Andon’s makeshift desk. It shattered into usable pieces, and I picked one up.
I wasn’t weaponless anymore. I darted right and left and spotted it. The speechless Vamp was getting ready to attack Jason. I kicked it from behind. It made an oomph as it fell forward. I jumped on it, rolling it over until I had a good look at its chest.
The thing about training is that you hate the work, but love having the skill when it counts. That’s what they’d always told us. They were right. I raised my stake and as if I’d done it a million times, I took out my first member of the Undead.
It groaned and then its eyes went sightless. I stood up, pulling my stake up with me as Keith had taught us to do. I was sweating and shaking. How much of it was from the adrenaline and how much of it was from the Vampire infection I had roaming through my body, I wasn’t sure.
Jason growled as he got off his dead Vampire. He looked up at me, and I knew that unlike the night before, his blue eyes were not seeing me with human thoughts. Andon had told me as much. Even if he hadn’t, all it took was one look to know that at that moment Jason was pure Werewolf.
I shivered. Did I smell like food to the Werewolf?
What had brought it to me? My scream? Did I smell like prey? Or had it wanted to kill Vampires and I’d taken one of its kills from it?
It stalked forward at me, pushing me with its head. It growled and I stepped backwards. It charged at me and I moved again. Again. Again. Finally, I was out in the hall shaking like my father did when he was coming off a drunken binge, and I knew I couldn’t walk anymore.
I fell to my knees, catching myself with my hands on the floor.
I regarded
Jason from a submissive position. If he wanted to eat me, he could.
The whimper that came from his mouth startled me. I could barely think at all. Everything felt muddled. The Werewolf came closer, so close that I could feel his hot breath on my face. He opened his mouth, and I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to watch him eat me.
The feel of his tongue on my facial wound caught me off guard, and my eyes flung open.
“Jason?” My voice shook. He was cleaning my wound with his tongue. Why would he do that?
“Are you in there?”
The canine made a grumpy noise that was not at all human, and lay down next to me. Instead of looking angry and scary, he looked soft and inviting. Did I dare?
Really, what was there to lose at this point? I let myself fall all the way to the floor as I cuddled up against his warm fur. There I stayed, shaking, until I couldn’t stay conscious anymore. I don’t know how long that was. I just know I was never alone. The Werewolf who I had once contemplated decapitating never left my side.
Chapter Nine
I don’t know how long I lay on Jason in his Werewolf form. I know that eventually someone picked me up in strong arms and carried me to another location. I couldn’t make out the voices around me. There were too many of them, and they were too loud.
Oh heavens, I was hot. And then I wasn’t. Then I was cold. Then the heat came back again.
I knew I was never alone. That was nice. At home, I’d have been alone a lot. Tia would have had to go to school and Carol had her own children to take care of. She couldn’t always be with me. My father wasn’t much use to me when I was sick.
Days might have passed. Maybe weeks. In the brief periods of time when I could open my eyes, someone would press a spoon in my mouth or try to get me to drink something. They were blurred images, no more, no less.
I had a pretty good idea that I was leaving the world of the living. I was so hot or so cold that I couldn’t bring myself to care about it very much anymore. I was sorry that no one would know what really happened to me. It dug in the pit of my stomach that the Icahns would think they had beaten me. But other than that, the only lingering worry in my mind was that I never got to thank Jason for saving me. He’d come when I’d screamed. Even as a wolf he had tried to save my life. I didn’t want to leave the world without delivering one last thank you.