by L. L. Ash
I put my hand on his arm but he shook me off, leaving the room after Clarence, abandoning me in the empty conference room.
Obviously Eddie needed a moment to himself, and I didn’t begrudge him that so I took the time to join the men in whatever activities they’d started.
Over the next couple of days I spent more time in the warehouse, playing with the children the most, and demanding intense breaks with Eddie in the bedroom. I would have thought I’d have worn him out by the 3rd day, but he was fit and ready as ever. His stamina was not to be questioned.
The children loved me and I loved them, though some of their habits were more animalistic than human. I tried to teach them manners and politeness, but a couple days weren’t enough to instill such nonsensical things into stubborn, childish heads.
As I talked and played with the boys, the men enjoyed watching and playing too, always trying to back me up when I corrected a boy’s English or action. Eddie liked to watch, though he would growl whenever the men got too close to me.
He’d become extremely jealous and possessive over the last few days, and after reading about a wolf’s heat patterns, it made sense. The anger and possessiveness bugged me, but I didn’t know what to do. So I tolerated it, trying to gently remind him that I could talk to another man without letting him mount me. He seemed positive that every one of his men would swoop in and take advantage of me if he left me alone for one minute. But now that I could use my claws, I wasn’t so worried.
On the 6th day of being a werewolf, I woke up, luxuriating in the silky covers and plump pillows surrounding me on the bed. Eddie’s head rested on my bare chest, his arms tightly wound around me and a leg tossed over mine in possession.
I wiggled out of his grasp, intent on using the bathroom when he held me tighter, nuzzling at me. I laughed and pushed him off, but that made him tighten his grip.
“Eddie! I’m going to pee on the bed if you don’t let me go!”
His eyes opened, a grin on his face as he met my eyes. That’s when his grin melted and his eyes narrowed.
The look of worry in his face caused me to panic.
“What is it?” I asked him, looking into his eyes.
“Your...your eyes… There’s brown in them.”
“What?” I questioned, stumbling to my feet and running for the bathroom.
I looked at my reflection and sure enough, my eyes looked almost marbled, some green, some of my natural hazel.
“What is it?” I asked, wondering if I had some kind of werewolf disease.
“I’ve got no idea,” Eddie came up behind me, looking at me in the mirror as well.
We stared for a minute before he looked at me saying, “I think we need to call Mason. He’ll have the best guess on what’s going on.”
I gave Eddie my phone with Clarence’s number pulled up before getting into the shower, my hands shaking from the fear of the unknown.
By the time I was done in the shower and dressed in short shorts and a tank top, Eddie informed me that Mason had already arrived. A benefit of being in LA now instead of Tucson.
When Eddie had told me he’d moved me to LA during my illness, I didn’t quite believe him, but after shopping with Jo that day, I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, if you know what I mean.
I followed Eddie out, not feeling that lower gut pull toward him that I had the few days before. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything. My skin was no longer oversensitive, and I didn’t crave physical attention as I had before. Maybe it was just a weird thing to do with coming out of heat, but I was just grasping at straws, trying to make sense out of something that was absolutely senseless.
Mason sat impatiently in the conference room, Clarence at his side, but standing instead of lounging as Mason was.
“Well hello again, Doll,” Mason grinned at me, tapping his fingers on the table top.
“I still don’t like you,” I told him sincerely and he laughed.
“Oh believe me, the feeling is mutual. It’s just a shame we need each other.”
Nodding, Mason looked at Eddie.
“So you’re the pup, huh?”
“Who are you calling pup?” Eddie narrowed his eyes on Mason who rolled his eyes.
“God, so touchy. Children,” he sighed, looking toward Clarence to agree with his comment.
Clarence just glowered from the other side of the room.
“Well, now that we all know we hate each other, what can I do? It sounded urgent over the phone, and I’m pretty positive you didn’t call us here so we can exchange insults.”
“I called YOU here, not him,” Eddie corrected.
Rolling his eyes again Mason stood and took a few steps toward me, looking into my eyes.
“Fucking bloody curious...” he mumbled, taking a little pencil light out of his bag before looking again.
He tilted his head in a questioning gesture before going back to his chair and picking up a brown paper sack that smelled like heaven.
“Well, let’s try this, shall we?” Mason said, putting the sack on the table and removing a greasy hamburger.
“Disgusting stuff this is...” he sighed as he laid out a raw steak right beside the burger. “Now, you’re hungry, yes?”
“Extremely,” I admitted.
“So, which shall you eat?”
I looked from one to the other. The raw meat looked disgusting for the first time since my change, and I stared at the greasy burger like it was manna from heaven. Picking up the burger I dug in with gusto.
“Well...fuck me!” Mason exclaimed, plopping on his chair again as he watched me eat.
“Clarence,” Mason said slowly. “I’ll need you to leave the room.”
“No.”
“I need to ask personal questions that might be offensive to you.”
“No,” Clarence said again, more forcefully this time.
Sighing, Mason looked toward Eddie and started in what would likely be a long line of questions nobody wanted to answer or hear the answer to.
“Clarence said she was in heat what… 4 days ago?”
“Yes,” Eddie nodded, answering for me.
“And? Heat lasts 6 days. Is she still in heat?”
Eddie licked his lips and shook his head.
“Not since last night.”
Clarence’s hand tightened up in a fist as he listened.
“And you’ve been fucking?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Not a whole lot, but some clarity is nice.”
“Fuck off.”
Mason chuckled and continued with his questioning.
“And her eyes were like this this morning?”
“Yeah. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“And her other abilities? Claws? Teeth?”
Eddie looked toward me.
I paused in my burger eating to stare at my hand, urging the claws to appear like I’d practiced. My throat closed up around my bite of food and I choked.
“I can’t,” I said softly,
Mason sat back against the chair, tossing one leg over the other and folding his arms.
“And have you fucked since she came out of heat? Has anything changed in her responses since last night?”
“A little,” Eddie admitted.
“Well, it’s obvious to me what is happening, and I think you know too, Eddie. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“What? What’s going on Eddie?” I asked him, putting the last couple bites of my burger down on the greasy paper it came wrapped in.
He turned to me, pain and confusion on his face.
“I think...you’re turning back into a human.”
My jaw dropped.
“That’s not… that’s not possible… Is it?”
My question was aimed at Mason now and he shrugged,
“A lot about you isn’t possible, Addie. I’ve given up on being surprised by the things you manage to pull off.”
“But… but that means...”
“You can’t be a permanent werewolf,” Mason answered for me.
Eddie shut his eyes quickly, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to look as if he wasn’t affected. But he was. We both were.
“So, what do you do now, Sweet Pea?” Mason asked, bored again.
“How is this possible Mason?” I growled at him, not feeling the rumble in my chest that I’d grown used to.
“Well, the only thing I see as a possibility is that your little piece of vampire DNA keeps you from completely turning. It’s like the rabies that is a werewolf bite tried to take over but quickly realized that you’re already taken.”
“So would it be the same for the virus?” Clarence asked now, hope suddenly lighting up his face.
“Honestly I don’t know. It may be that the virus is the only thing she’d be susceptible to, since she’s already got part of it in her.”
Gasping, I tried not to give in to the panic attack that was overcoming me. Eddie grabbed me around the shoulders and lowered me to a chair.
“Breathe, Honey. Breathe.”
Clarence came to my other side and took one of my hands in his.
“Can’t you smell it?” he asked the other men. “She smells almost human.”
“The scent is getting stronger every hour,” Eddie agreed.
“So what happens next?” Mason asked again.
“She’s coming with me.”
“She’s staying here.”
They each answered at the same time.
“I need a minute,” I butted in weakly before leaving the room.
I heard them arguing about what I should do as I walked away. I needed some fresh air to absorb the fact that once again, my life had been flipped upside down. So I wouldn’t be a werewolf. Could I just jump back to being a human again? It felt like so many things in me had fundamentally changed in the past week and I’d accepted things as truth that turned out not to be the truth after all. I had a chance to be with Clarence again, but I’d already made silent promises to Eddie.
One of the men opened the door for me and I went out into the burning hot morning sun. Taking a turn around the warehouse I walked slowly, trying to let my thoughts catch up to me.
“Well well, hello beautiful,” a deep, dark voice came out of the shadows from around the corner.
A large man appeared, not much older than Eddie, but with a lifetime’s worth of experience in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, do I know you?”
He shrugged.
“Sort of,” he drawled, his green eyes catching the light. “I did have my mouth all over you, but I thought you’d be dead by now.”
My heart started pumping quickly in my chest. This wasn’t one of Eddie’s men. This was the werewolf that had tried to kill me.
“Remember me now?”
I turned and started to run, shrieking as a strong arm banded around my stomach and hauled me toward the street at a fast pace, shoving me into the backseat of a car. The door closed and locked behind me and I saw the man get into the front passenger seat as the car sped off. In the back window I saw commotion erupting as men flooded out of the warehouse.
“Hello, Madelaine,” a raspy voice said from beside me.
I looked up and saw the most intimidating man I’d ever seen in my life. He wore a rich suit and gloves, with a felt hat and a trench coat on top. But it wasn’t his clothes on his lanky body, or even the pallor of his skin. It was two dead, evil eyes that stared back that had me wetting my pants and passing out.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I blinked, my lids glued shut to my dry eyes. There wasn’t much difference between eyes closed and eyes open. Wherever I was, it was completely black and cold. I had a feeling of a large, empty space around me. Maybe underground. Some kind of basement, most likely.
Shit, I had to stop passing out. Since when did I pass out? Maybe that was a normal human reaction to the supernatural. Even still, I was scared out of my mind, and decided to save my self-criticizing for a later date. For now, I just needed to focus on getting out of wherever I’d found myself tied up.
I was sitting in a chair. There, that was something. Sitting in a chair and my hands were tied behind my back, attached to said chair. Ok, there’s two things. I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know who took me. I knew the werewolf who put me in the car was the same one that had tried to kill me and ended up biting me. And I also knew that wherever I was, I had dozens of werewolves and two savvy vampires looking for me.
That thought alone helped me breath in the musty air a little easier.
Minutes, hours passed. I wasn’t sure how long before I heard footsteps in the distance. Then a creak, probably a door. Lights flicked on, buzzing as I slammed my eyes closed.
Too late, I as already blinded.
“Ah, she’s awake,” the same gravelly, rusty voice said blandly as the footsteps grew closer. I fluttered my eyelids open and closed, trying to see what was happening while at the same time trying to adjust my pupils to the blinding light that was now filling the room.
“So this is the little she-devil who is causing all the trouble, is she?”
I saw the same man from the car, and beside him was the werewolf.
“The one and only,” the werewolf responded “We got lucky that she came out of the den. Eddie keeps a tight, full crew there. It would have been an all out war to retrieve her otherwise.”
The man grunted in response, a gentle sound, and a bored one.
“You werewolves...always warring and drawing blood for vanity’s sake,” the man said, sitting up then standing, coming closer to me. “You’ve yet to find pleasure in your gifts. Instead you are always fighting amongst each other like children.”
Cold, pearlescent fingers touched my cheek and I shivered, yanking my face away.
“You’ll give us what we want soon, my child,” he said in that low rusty voice before turning and heading out the door again.
As the werewolf moved to follow, I spoke to him, hoping he would give me information in his anger at what the man had said.
“Hey,” I called and he stopped, looking over at me, his hand on the doorknob.
“Don’t speak little girl. It’ll go worse for you if you do.”
“Please, I’m cold, I’m thirsty and hungry...”
Grimacing he went to a tabletop, rustling through some things before coming back to me.
“You’ll not get human food here,” he told me, coming back over with a bag of liquid that looked an awful lot like an IV bag.
He hung it from a nail near the low roofline before crouching near me.
“Where am I?” I whispered.
He poked the needle into my arm harshly, likely not even getting my vein.
I shrieked and he pulled it out, trying again but silently.
“Please, what do they want from me? Why did you kidnap me?”
He paused and looked up into my eyes.
“I can’t believe Eddie chose you over Jo. I mean, really?”
My chest tightened.
“Oh yeah, she told us everything. That girl was so put out after being abandoned. I saw her on the streets of LA, just wandering, the poor thing. Of course I stopped to talk to her. Nobody sees a woman werewolf and doesn’t stop to at least say hello.”
Poking into my arm again, he speared my vein, cursed, then tried for a third go.
“When I was told what happened, that girl squealed like a fuckin’ pig. She’d overheard everything, knew all your secrets. She’s been an immeasurable help. Now she’s wrapped warm, living in the lap of luxury while you sit here, tied up and prepared for torture and eventual death at the hands of the coldest bastard I ever had the pleasure of knowing.”
On the third try he managed to get the needle in and tape it down with duct tape before he stood.
“Enjoy your deathbed, Kid. Nobody’s going to find you here, and even if they did, this place is a fortress. Best of luck with the torture and everything. I suggest you ta
ke a page out of Jo’s book and squeal baby, squeal.”
He slipped through the door and turned off the light, plunging me in darkness.
It seemed like days before the door opened again, or before I heard anything, really. Eventually, when I did, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to. I knew the person who would come down was the strange man, the vampire as I’d surmised. I didn’t know his name, but those cold dead eyes would stick with me forever.
The door opened gently, with not even a squeak before the man almost floated in, looking to be in a good mood. The vampire followed next and another man who I didn’t know came into the room and stood near the corner. The tall, well-dressed man had a leather case with him. He stopped at the table and unrolled it. I heard metal instruments clink together before he paused and stood straight, looking over at me with a pleased expression.
“Today is the day,” he said happily. “Today you tell me what I want to know, or I will extract it from you.”
He paused and looked around the room before leaning forward and saying in a conspirital manner, “I hope you fight. Oh my, I hope you fight.”
Fussing again with his leather roll, the other vampire stood silently between me and the vamp, looking jittery but still looking strong as ever.
“Now,” the man came forward, but he became distracted with the sight of the duct tape and needle in my arm. His gaze swung over to the werewolf, his tongue tsking as he came, kneeling before me and gently removed the tape, removing the empty, sore IV.
“Tis no way to treat a guest, Rory,” the man said, looking over his shoulder at the werewolf.
Rory, that was a name. Good.
Taking away the empty IV, the man dumped it in the trash before coming back to me, hands clasped behind him.
“I came for one thing, my child,” he said, his voice extra creepy today. “I wish to know where the brothers hide.”
I gulped.
“I hear some say they are in LA, others say they are only here because of you. And even others say they visit here and live elsewhere. I, for one, am sick of guessing and looking and finding nothing. The werewolves are good for nothing but brute strength and numbers. They are not good thinkers, after all.”
