“You should stop.” A girl sounded nervous. “You heard what Joey said about that stupid dog that’s running around attacking vandals. It’s weird. Like some kind of cartoon animal cop.”
“You’re weird,” her male companion retorted. “You believe in that stupid Bigfoot Wolf thing? That’s dumb. How old are you? Five?”
Zane trotted through the schoolyard past the bus lane toward the hill that rose from the parking lot toward the building. He knew exactly where the kids were hanging out. There was a spot near the back of the school and on the other side of the cafeteria where there were no security cameras. In the past it had been a pretty popular place for vandals to loiter when they had nothing else to do.
“You think I’m stupid? Fine!” The girl’s feet hit the ground. Zane could feel the vibrations through the cement he was standing on. She must have been sitting up on a bench or table or something. Then he heard her stomping toward him. “I’m done with this. I’m going home.”
“I thought you hated your home.”
“It’s better than waiting out here to get attacked by some dog just because you think you can catch it or something.”
“It’s just a freaking dog!” The young man sounded both defensive and excited. “That other day Jacob and his friends got in trouble for attacking some woman in her house. That was totally different. There’s nobody here. I don’t know why some dumbass would go breaking into people’s backyards. Jacob and his friends deserved to get caught!”
“My friend Camille said that there was nobody in that house. They’d hit it before, a long time ago.”
“The lady stabbed Jacob’s hand,” the male said drily.
Zane wasn’t going to stand here letting them talk about the violence that they had perpetuated on Landry. He pushed his way into a circle of light created by a huge floodlamp secured to the corner of the school building. He growled low in his throat and waited to see what they would do.
“Oh shit!” The young man suddenly did not seem so flippant. “Did you hear that?”
“Come on, Ryan.” His girl was chiding and making fun of him. “I thought you were going to catch the big bad wolf. What happened to that?”
The young man was already yanking on the doors of the building. “I thought it was supposed to be unlocked! I thought your friend Kelsey unlocked it.”
“I don’t know if she could!” The girl’s voice was fading. “I’m getting out of here. That’s all I know.”
But Zane could not let that happen. He bounded onto the scene like a puppy trying to play tackle. But he wasn’t a puppy and he wasn’t playing. The growling and snarling was accompanied by his front paws against the young man’s back.
The kid lunged forward toward the surface of the football field. His hands shot out to break his fall and he shrieked in pain as they took his whole weight plus the weight of Zane on his back. The kid tried to flip over, but Zane crouched on the young man and wiggled a bit to grind the kid’s face into the surface of the field. It was a turf field so that wasn’t giving much relief to the young man’s arms.
“Danny!” The girl screamed and kept screaming. Her voice echoed off the walls of the school and seemed to bounce back and forth until it sounded like there were dozens of young people standing there in the courtyard. “Oh my God! Bad dog!”
Why did people say that? There was nothing about Zane that resembled a dog. His fur was coarse and thick. The ruff around his neck was so full that it looked almost like a lion’s mane. He was lean and tall. His shoulders were nearly even with the young woman’s chest. He was well over a hundred and fifty pounds and his claws were lethal.
Speaking of claws, Zane put his front paws on the ground on either side of Danny’s body. He left his back legs planted right in the center of Danny’s body. This kept him down while Zane ground his claws into the field to make a point when he churned up the earth around the young man’s body. Dirt sprayed Danny’s face and made him squeal with terror. The smell of fear was rank in the air. Zane knew that it would not be long before Danny was peeing his pants like a baby.
“Please let go!” the girl was begging. “Bad doggie. Bad dog!”
Zane chuffed out a snort at her. Putting one last bounce on Danny’s body to keep him temporarily squished, Zane jumped to the ground and began to advance on the young woman. She was trembling. Her fear smelled acrid as well. It was a horrible smell. Zane could never understand why some creatures enjoyed the scent of other people’s fear. Zane found it distasteful and even nauseating.
“I’m sorry!” she sobbed. “I’m sorry. We’ll never break bottles again. We’ll never come here again!”
She was babbling and scrambling backwards. At some point she circled back toward her fallen friend. Danny was trying to struggle to his feet. Zane didn’t pursue the young people. He dropped to his haunches instead. Staring straight at the young woman, Zane waited for her to grab her friend. He would let them go if they were really going to retreat. That was his personal rule. He liked the idea of keeping them hostage until the police arrived to take them away if they were repeat offenders, but he had never seen these two before in his life.
“Danny?” she was whispering and sobbing. “Danny, get up, please?”
Danny was moaning and struggling to get to his knees. It was tempting for Zane to go and use his nose to help the kid up off the ground only because he was so eager to get this confrontation over with.
A sudden blip of sirens caused Zane to look around. There was a police car in the parking lot of the school. The lights were just starting to warm up to flashing red and blue. Zane was beginning to see more and more police presence in this area. The sad part of that was the likelihood that this was more because of Zane’s presence than that of the vandals he kept ferreting out and attacking. The police were more worried about the Bigfoot Wolf than the errant kids destroying personal property.
“Freeze!”
“Please help us!” The girl started shouting and running toward the officers. “There’s a huge animal trying to kill us! Save us!”
Zane grunted. In his wolf form it wasn’t like he could utilize much in the way of sarcasm. At the moment the only thing he could do was retreat behind the building. So opening up into a full sprint, that’s exactly what Zane did.
Of course, that was when Zane went ahead and shifted. Once he was sure there were no cameras and no observers, he stopped and shook his dark gray fur. He began to shift quickly. He wasn’t quite as fast as Jason, but he could certainly move quickly. Ears receding, hair diminishing, and finally joints realigning until he was nothing more than a casually dressed human male walking unobtrusively down the sidewalk toward the front of the school.
“Freeze!”
Zane immediately put up his hands. He had even intentionally dressed in athletic clothes to perpetuate the idea that he was exercising obscenely late at night, which was not illegal by far. And he was Zane King besides. It wasn’t like they were going to call him a criminal.
“I’m just a jogger out late, officer!” Zane called out.
The first set of red and blue lights had been joined by a second. Now four officers were patrolling the scene. The one jogged up to Zane and looked him over. At some point recognition set in. “Mr. King?”
“Yep, once again you’ve caught me at my nightly jog. Are you stalking me?” Zane teased.
The officer frowned. Then he gestured back at the two cars in the school parking lot. Zane could see the two young vandals sitting on the curb awaiting their fate. “We’ve got some people who swear they saw that huge animal wandering about. Have you seen it?”
“Are you talking about Bigfoot Dog?” Zane asked with as much humor as he could muster. “That’s hilarious.”
“Bigfoot Wolf, I think,” the officer corrected.
“Right.” Zane pointed to the kids. “I heard someone up here breaking bottles so I decided to cut through on my regular jogging route just to see what I could find, but I never saw an animal. Are they su
re they didn’t just run across a loose dog or something?”
“They swear it was the Bigfoot Wolf.”
Zane snorted and shook his head at the officer. “You realize that they’re making a complete laughingstock out of just about everything. How many kids have you had to haul in for destruction of property in the last few weeks?”
“I’ll admit. It’s been like thirty or more,” the officer said with a frustrated sigh. “The chief was talking to one of the juvenile prosecutors the other day. They’re talking about trying to pass some kind of legislation about the crime so we can just have some kind of penalty in place that doesn’t mean we have to hold them forever. Our jail is getting full.”
“Good.” Zane gave a hard nod. He was already starting to move away from the policemen and their quarry. “I don’t have to tell you how I feel about it. My fiancée has been tortured by these delinquent kids for years now. I’m tired of them just getting away with it. Crap! When I was that age we couldn’t even toilet paper someone’s house without the cops showing up and threatening to take us to jail.”
“Yeah, times have certainly changed.” The officer clapped Zane on the shoulder. “Just be careful out here, man. There is apparently a huge dog or some kind of creature out here terrorizing people.”
“Yeah,” Zane snorted and shook his head before he continued walking. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Have a good night, Mr. King!”
Zane immediately picked up a slow jog and began whistling to himself. He was heading home to see Landry and there was nothing bad about that. He loved knowing that she was there safe and sound at home. He loved walking into the house and smelling her wonderful familiar scent and hearing the light snoring coming from the bedroom. He just wished that he could tell her what he was doing.
As he jogged, Zane considered the fact that he had yet to tell Landry what he was. It wasn’t a secret that the King family shared with anyone other than their future spouses. Landry was certainly that, but Zane was afraid of how she might react when she realized that her future husband wasn’t exactly the same kind of human that she had always assumed he was.
Zane turned the last corner between the school and Landry’s house. He had to tell her soon. They were starting to talk about dates and times and possible venues for their wedding. He had to let her know what he really was. But the lie about his true status as a shifter had been going on since they were children. It was an automatic thing, but now all these years later it felt like more of a real deception than anything else, and Zane was worried that Landry was going to be really hurt. And nobody knew as well as Zane how fast hurt could translate to anger. He just didn’t want to run the risk of losing her.
But as he placed his hand on the doorknob of the house that they now shared, he could not help but think that he would do almost anything to avoid hurting Landry Fisher. Anything. Even if it meant denying his true nature.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Landry woke in the middle of the night for the third or fourth time just that week. It was almost as though there were something pulling her out of a deep sleep. She was beginning to wish that she and Zane were sharing a bedroom. Somehow she felt as though she would not be so restless if he were around. Something about his presence was just soothing to her. As if he could make her feel safe just by being there.
A soft click brought Landry from sleepy lethargy to full wakefulness. She sat straight up in her bed and threw her legs over the side of the mattress. Something was wrong. There was something strange going on. She could feel it. A heaviness in the house maybe. Expectancy. That’s what she felt. So without another thought she reached for the wrap she had laid aside earlier and wrapped it around the camisole and pajama pants she had been sleeping in.
The floor was freezing cold. Landry groped for her slippers beneath her bed and put them on before heading out into the hallway. It was quiet out here and very, very dark. Not a single light in the house was on. Not even the tiny lamp she’d left on in the living room when she’d gone to bed. Landry didn’t like the dark. Not absolute dark. Why would Zane have turned the lamp off?
A chill hung over the tiny dwelling. She listened so hard that she could hear the rushing of her own blood through her veins. What was happening? Zane’s bedroom was only a few feet away. She barely allowed herself to breathe. She was so worried about what she would find. What if something had happened? What if more of those vandals had broken into the house while she slept? What if Zane wasn’t in the bedroom because he was lying hurt in some other part of the house?
Landry clapped her hand over her mouth to cover her whimper of fright. She pressed her hand against Zane’s door. It wasn’t latched. The door was ajar. And now she pushed it open all the way and stared into the room.
The clothing was no longer on the dresser. It had been neatly put away. The bed was between the dresser and the window. But it was empty. She could see right now that there was no sleeping form there. No Zane. Nobody at all. The bed covers weren’t even rumpled. In the narrow glare of light spilling through the open blinds from the streetlamp outside the window Landry could see that nobody had slept in that bed yet tonight.
Zane, where are you?
The question hung heavy in the air. She could not even begin to fathom the answer. Then she turned to walk down the hall and came face to chest with a tall figure dressed all in black. The surprise was so absolute that a shriek ripped from her chest with such force that her eardrums crackled in protest.
“Landry!”
Wait. It wasn’t an intruder. It was Zane.
“Landry, calm down!” He pulled her to his chest and hugged her tight. “It’s okay. You’re just fine, baby. I promise. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.”
His words struck a chord. Of course, that was mostly because her brain was clamoring to know how he was supposed to do anything for her when he’d obviously been sneaking around at night. She smacked him in the chest and pushed him away.
“Landry?”
“Where have you been?” she demanded. Her hand ghosted back toward his room. She pointed vehemently to his bedroom. “That bed has not been slept in, Zane King. I can see that plain as—well, day, but I can see it! So you tell me where you’ve been. Do you understand me? I trusted you. I did!”
He seemed to realize that she was starting to rethink that trust. Taking her hands in his, he gently tugged her toward the living room and not the bedroom. He did not let go of her hands even when he bent over to turn on the tiny lamp that she almost kept burning at night.
Soft white light filled the living room. Landry could see that Zane appeared to be dressed in athletic clothes as though he’d been out for a run or something. But she would have had to be stupid to believe that nonsense. Zane didn’t exercise. It was almost as if he stayed in tip-top physical condition just by wanting to be that way. He never had to make the effort. He never had. Even in high school he’d never put much effort into football practice. He had just always been ready to play.
“Explain yourself,” Landry said angrily. She was feeling betrayed and it stung badly.
He pursed his lips as though he were trying to decide what to say or what not to say. That did not make her feel better, but he did not demure or pass it off as she’d expected. Instead he went in an unexpected direction altogether. “Do you remember those young people who vandalized your porch?”
“Yes.”
“Some friends of theirs were responsible for vandalizing a cemetery a few days before that. In fact, the police have said that there are bands of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen year olds running around terrorizing empty houses and destroying pretty much anything they can find. The police can’t necessarily do anything about it because the kids are minors. That means they ship them to juvenile holding where they then get sent to juvenile hearings that wind up with them getting let off with a series of warnings or community service punishments that are then ignored.”
“That seems very pointless,” Landr
y murmured. She was a teacher. She could well understand the need to rehabilitate and educate young people. That was a given. But if they had no real consequence for the behavior then why would they ever stop. “So that’s who vandalized my house.” She cleared her throat. “I mean this time. The people who—hurt me—before, I mean. They were sentenced to do time in a juvenile facility.”
“Yes, but how many backyards did they destroy before that? How many cemeteries and schools and stores did they vandalize before they got brave enough to hurt a real person?”
Landry did not have the answer to that, but there was one more point to consider. She shook her head. “What does any of this have to do with you sneaking out after I go to bed? Are you trying to tell me that you’re out there patrolling for kids? Seriously?”
Landry gaped at him. He could not be trying to set himself up as some kind of vigilante! Was he honestly trying to use this as an excuse? It was appalling.
“Yes. That’s where I was.” He shrugged. Then he exhaled a big sigh. There was more. She could tell. But right now Landry was ready to toss him out on his ear and start shouting the word liar all over the neighborhood. “Landry,” Zane began slowly. “I know that we’ve known each other for a very long time.”
“Yes.” Oh God, where was this going?
His expression was impossible to read. It was all over the place. “My family has always been a bit different. I know that you know that. And I don’t just mean the fact that my parents had this odd kind of marriage where my mother was a social climbing ragweed and my father was more interested in business and hanging out at his ranch on the weekends.”
“Can you please just get to the point?” She was panting. No. Strike that. She was panicking. She could feel it and the whole sensation was awful. “Yes. You guys are a bit odd. But there are five boys in your family all roughly nine months apart. That’s weird. Don’t you think? I would never have believed that your mother was the type of woman to do that sort of thing.”
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 69
