Justice raised one eyebrow at me before gathering his twin up into his arms and following me down the stairs. “You expect him to snatch his wolfsfell back from a serial killer then, what, shift and take him out?”
“Bastion doesn’t have to shift,” I promised. “Clarence has cancer. He’s been stealing all of his energy from Bastion. Break that connection and Clarence will be the one barely able to lift his head.”
“I can lift my head.” Bastion didn’t bother opening his eyes as he answered, but he really did sound better. No wonder since my legs were already turning to spaghetti. I grabbed the railing to steady myself, which is when I noticed what I should have grasped from the get-go.
The living room below us wasn’t empty. Instead, Slim had actually taken Luke up on his offer of a cold one. And he must have asked for a refill too, because he’d been left alone to amuse himself on his host’s couch.
A nearly empty beer bottle dangled from one hand as Slim peered up at us. His eyes, as usual, were full of interest and intelligence. He’d heard—and understood—every word.
Chapter 32
“The wolf in the forest....” Slim rose and took a step toward us, his stance more inquisitive than menacing. Still, I considered retreating up the stairs and fleeing out the back window. Too bad Bastion lacked the energy to even stand upright without help.
I shook my head, pushing aside cowardice. If Slim shared what he guessed, the result could be as catastrophic for woelfin-kind as the loss of my family’s pelts had been a decade earlier. We couldn’t just leave. We had to fight.
“Honor.” Justice’s voice behind me was tense, demanding. “This is on you. My hands are full.”
His hands were quite literally full of his dozing brother. Meanwhile, my pelt draped across Bastion, the separation dulling my senses and reaction time.
Still, I took a step down. Another. “Slim,” I started. “You’re making a mistake. This isn’t your battle....”
As I walked, my gaze skipped over his weaponry. Or rather, over my weaponry. Slim had belted the stun gun I’d left behind onto his waist, but his hand drifted beneath the opposite arm to caress the butt of the pistol. His voice, when he spoke, was high-pitched and almost girlish. “Your eyes are glowing.”
They weren’t glowing. Woelfin eyes didn’t send out beams of light like you’d see in a comic book. But I was located in the dim, windowless edge of exposure where light might reflect off my corneas and make my eyes appear luminous. The clouds outside were deepening. The effect wasn’t helping my cause.
What I needed was a distraction. Something to make Slim forget what he’d guessed, to turn us into comrades united against a shared enemy....
As if answering my silent plea, a throat cleared. Not Justice’s or Slim’s. Instead, all of our gazes were drawn to Luke’s body filling the opposite doorway.
“Honor’s right. You’re sniffing up the wrong tree,” he growled.
Yes, growled. The words came out half wolf and half human. Even as he spoke, his skin began rippling.
He was starting to change.
As kids, we’d learned to strip before shifting. Transforming from one body to another is complicated enough without tangling yourself up in unwieldy fabric in the process.
But Luke was a professional. He sidestepped with the grace of a dancer while his body contorted. Clothing fell smoothly away as fur emerged underneath.
“Whoa.” Slim slumped to the carpet, totally missing the edge of the sofa he’d been sitting on moments earlier.
“Yeah, whoa.” Bastion’s voice was loud in the silence. “You have now officially been deputized into the werewolf militia.”
And just like that, my fiction-loving cousin was back.
“YOU KNEW ABOUT THIS?” Slim asked as he unlocked his car door and offered Bastion shotgun. Being part of the werewolf militia agreed with the aging bounty hunter. After regaining control of his muscles, he became ready and willing to lead the charge.
He did, however, have questions. Dozens and dozens of questions. Luckily, Bastion was well enough to answer or divert as he saw fit.
“Did you really think Freckles was just a dog?” my cousin replied. “Even when it leapt into a burning building to save a baby?”
I rolled my eyes as I always did when Bastion wrote me into his stories using my childhood nickname. Woelfin had to be called something other than “hey you” before choosing our self-names. Still, if Bastion had asked me, I would have requested that he make up something dangerous-sounding for my fictional wolf form.
Fang. Bruiser. Anything other than Freckles.
Speaking of dangerous...I grabbed onto Slim’s headrest to pull myself forward from my spot behind him. “You can’t share this.”
His eyes in the rearview mirror were wide. “Of course not. I’ll take it to my grave.”
Maybe that was true. If not...we’d deal with Slim’s loose lips if and when they started flapping.
For now, Luke leapt into the back seat to press up against me in fur form while Justice slid in beside him. I glanced at the clock—we’d wasted so much time already. The instant Justice’s door clicked shut, I demanded: “Drive.”
Slim was an efficient chauffeur, but the weather was against us. Wind buffeted our vehicle before we’d traveled a block. Dense thunderheads loomed in the near distance. The first soft patters turned into a staccato of heavy drops against the metal rooftop, then the pounding deepened as rain was joined by hail.
The windows fogged. The car slowed. Minutes ticked past faster than they should have. What would Clarence do if I was late?
Start cutting off fingers and toes maybe? I kicked myself for not dreaming up some magical reason why Grace had to remain safe and whole until I returned to them.
Luke’s head landed on my knee. Warm, comforting. My fingers slipped into the soft fur at the base of his ear.
Then we were fighting traffic as cars streamed away from the Smythewhite residence. The garden party must have ended abruptly with the onset of foul weather. Whatever the reason, we might as well have been walking....
“Pull over,” Bastion called over the drum of hail. Within seconds, Slim was angling into a parking spot.
Rain gushed around my feet as I opened the door into a curtain of water. At least the foul weather gave us an excuse to run.
Excuse notwithstanding, clipboard lady materialized as we turned in through the gate of the Smythewhite residence. She was dry beneath a tremendous black umbrella. The papers attached to her ubiquitous clipboard barely curled from the damp.
We were drowned rats in comparison. No wonder she took a step sideways to block our entrance. “No.”
“What? I work here....”
My voice trailed off. Clipboard lady wasn’t talking to me. She’d taken offense at Luke’s furry body. Dogs, apparently, were forbidden on the Smythewhite grounds.
Grace could have talked her way out of this. I instead froze...which meant Slim was the one to save us.
“Okay,” he shrugged, reaching down to grab the ruff of what he knew was a werewolf. “Come on, poochie. We’ll go back to the car.”
I DIDN’T WANT TO LEAVE behind half of our forces, but there was no alternative. Smiling tightly at clipboard lady, Justice, Bastion, and I sidestepped her. The instant we were past, Bastion slumped like a windup toy whose spring had abruptly unwound.
“Hurry,” Justice demanded, teeth gritted. His arm dropped down until it hugged his twin’s waist, the support allowing the two of them to keep moving forward.
Bastion’s skin was red, and I had a feeling rain wasn’t the only thing that had slicked his hair flat against his cranium. The burst of energy my pelt had offered was fading quickly. We had to get to Clarence before it ran all the way out.
“This way.” I led them in through the front door, ignoring the way water puddled on the marble as we stepped inside the residence. If I hadn’t lost my job already, I’d be fired as soon as someone saw the trail dripped across an intricately
hand-woven rug.
Not that it mattered. Once we regained Bastion’s pelt and my twin, there’d be no reason to remain in the Smythewhites’ employ....
At the top of the stairs, I pointed at Clarence’s door in silence. No need to alert him prematurely. Instead, I trusted Justice to guard this obvious entrance while I snuck in around the back.
Given the storm, Clarence would likely be expecting me to enter through the door my cousins now hovered outside. After all, the only other entrance—the balcony—was inaccessible using human hands and feet.
But I wasn’t merely human. My feet squelched within soaked shoes and socks as I slipped into the master suite, dropping clothes right and left as I hurried through the opulence. Within seconds, I’d pushed out the French doors, back into the deluge.
This balcony was ten feet from Clarence’s, the latter barely visible through pounding rain. At least it was no longer hailing. Still, my pelt became soaked so rapidly I found it hard to spread across my back.
After that, though, the transformation was easy. One shiver, then I stood on four paws.
Four paws...with a body less than half the height it had been a moment earlier. The railing was unclimbable. Good thing a lounge chair eased my path aloft.
Even so, claws refused to cling to the slick metal surface. Clarence’s balcony was further away than I’d imagined.
But Grace needed me. Bastion needed me. This was for my family.
Eyes wide open, I leapt.
Chapter 33
Rain drummed on my shoulders as I shifted upwards on Clarence’s balcony. My legs wobbled twice as badly as they’d done on Luke’s stairs. Still, I straightened, taking a step forward. My twin was so close now....
Unfortunately, the shades were drawn across Clarence’s glass doors, blocking my view inside. My twin-sense was ominously quiescent within my chest. All I knew was that the deadline was well past and Clarence had never claimed patience. I depressed the lever and stepped inside.
“Phhhbbbt....” A whoopee cushion beneath my foot exhaled pseudo-flatulence. From the other side of the room, Clarence complained: “You’re late.”
I spun, bracing myself for attack. Nothing happened. The room was empty.
“He-llo. Ho-nor.”
I paced forward. Lupine eyes would have made short work of the shadows left by the storm clouds. But even my human senses promised that Clarence was close....
“Marco!” Clarence cackled in amusement at his own cleverness before answering himself. “Polo!”
No sign of life from my sister. Air conditioning flowed across my rain-slick skin and I shivered. Wouldn’t my twin-sense have told me if Grace was cowering under the bed or hiding in the closet?
I knelt beside Clarence’s half-made bed anyway, refusing to accept the alternative. Grace wasn’t dead. I hadn’t been gone that long.
Swiping at the hem of the comforter so I could peer underneath it, I yelped at an explosion from the other side of the room.
No, not an explosion. The door to the hallway had shattered inwards. Justice stood in the opening, panting as his foot dropped back to the ground.
“Bastion?” I asked.
Justice pointed back over one shoulder in lieu of an answer. His twin was, presumably, propped up against the wall outside.
“Grace?” he countered.
My nostrils flared as I shook my head. I was almost glad when Clarence answered for me. “Oh, so you are interested in her survival?”
A word at a time hadn’t been enough to pinpoint the teenager’s location. But a complete sentence....
I turned my head. The serial killer wasn’t under his bed. Not in the closet....
I yanked open the drawer of his desk to reveal a cell phone with video chat active. On the screen, Clarence’s t-shirt was dry despite the slick tree trunks in the background and the rain I’d run through to travel from Slim’s car to this bedroom.
The serial killer winked at me, all teenage impishness. “Wow, the look on your face. Totally worth it. Nearly as funny as when you interrupted me going after Luke then tried to console me for ‘kidnapping’ myself.”
This was my chance to find out more, so I did my best to keep him talking. “You’re right. You’ve outsmarted me. How did you...?”
Unfortunately, he was having none of it. “Time’s nearly run out,” he warned.
Then he ended the call.
“I KNOW WHERE THEY ARE.”
It was all I could do to keep my feet moving slowly enough so Justice could keep up the pace while weighed down by a sodden Bastion. My bare feet kept trying to skip past him as we strode two abreast down the curving front stairs.
Bastion’s eyes were closed, but he was still the one to answer. “Hopefully nowhere in high society. I don’t think the naked look is in this season.”
He was right—I hadn’t been able to talk myself into wrestling back into the sodden clothes dumped in the master bedroom. I shrugged. “I doubt there’ll be anyone in the park to see us after that hailstorm....”
But we hadn’t made it to the park yet. We were dripping our way through a heavily trafficked residence...and the lady of the house had just stepped into the foyer at the foot of the stairs.
“Honor? Good.” She’d heard me but not yet seen me. “Are you with Clarence? I....”
I tried to hide behind my cousins, but there was no covering my nudity as my employer turned to face the stairwell. No wonder her cheeks turned as pale as the lace curtains half-blocking our view of the front lawn.
“Oh my.”
“Mrs. Smythewhite, I can explain....”
I couldn’t. But speaking gave me an excuse to keep walking forward. Speaking prevented my boss from calling out for clipboard lady to escort me off the premises...and possibly to the nearest psych ward.
The distraction wasn’t enough. She raised her cell phone, slid one finger across the screen...
Then the big front doors banged open behind her. In the doorway, Slim stood soaked to the skin beside Luke in wolf form. The pair of them might as well have been living rough for decades, skin smudged while burs knotted fur and hair alike.
Despite his disarray, Luke’s presence was as good as a shot of espresso mainlined into my bloodstream. He barked once. Short, sharp, and meaningful.
Mrs. Smythewhite spun.
And Justice, Bastion, and I hit the bottom of the stairs before breaking into a run.
SHE DIDN’T TRY TO STOP us. Nothing stopped us. Streets steamed as sun baked away the remains of the hailstorm. We parked in an empty lot surrounded by trees.
Car doors slammed. Luke and Justice hefted Bastion between them. Slim offered me a weapon, but I shook my head.
“No, I’ll be faster....”
I blinked. I’d forgotten. Slim was only human.
Human...yet quite perceptive. “Go ahead, Freckles,” he told me. “Do you mind if I watch?”
Luke growled out a complaint, but I didn’t wait to hear it. Grace, Grace, Grace. My stomach warned of imminent danger.
Unlike at the DAR brunch, I didn’t ignore the twin-sense. Instead, I was lupine and running. Lover’s Leap was a mile away along the footpath, but my queasy stomach promised a shortcut. Grace was up this hill and down another....
I’d thought when the time came that I’d hesitate. Would second guess throwing myself into danger to protect my sister.
But I wasn’t fifteen years old and afraid of my shadow. I’d grown into my self-name. Grace was my sister. Her danger yanked at me like a fishhook attached to my gut.
So even though leaves dripped leftover rain into my eyes, I could have traveled blind for all that deterred me. A bedded-down deer exploded into motion, yet my tunnel-vision was interested in one thing only—the huge cliff coming into view ahead.
Clarence had been dry, which meant he was underneath that rock ledge. The same one his third victim had played beneath. So I looped around to come in sideways, waiting for my nostrils to pick up the teenaged killer’s musk.<
br />
Pausing among the jumble of tree-covered boulders where the little girl had stashed her action figures, I perused the landscape. Plastic dolls and horses were gone now, carted away as evidence by meticulous police detectives or gathered up by her parents to commemorate her short life.
And nothing had replaced them. Rain had wiped Clarence’s trail clean, assuming he’d ever been here. The space beneath Lover’s Leap was devoid of life.
I huffed out confusion. The rain dampened sound and smell alike. Lupine senses weren’t helping. Maybe the evidence would look different in my human skin.
It was annoying to shift hidden behind a boulder. My elbow banged against the rock and I stifled a curse when a thorn pierced the soft flesh above my ribcage. But everything I’d seen and felt told me Grace was close. I couldn’t afford to transform in the open, revealing my ace in the hole to a serial killer’s eyes.
Of course, there was nothing to be done about my nakedness. I didn’t even try to cover it. Just draped my sodden pelt across my shoulders and rose onto two bare feet.
Which is when I remembered what else was missing. The swing. At first glance, the long rope with its two-by-four platform appeared to have been removed just like the dead girl’s toy menagerie. But when I tilted my head back and peered up at the limb it had been attached to, the line was still in place.
The rope didn’t dangle, however. Instead, it was looped in a complicated manner that led around tree after tree before disappearing on top of Lover’s Leap.
And there, leaning over the edge to peer at me, was Clarence’s smiling face.
Chapter 34
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