Scratch the Surface (Wolf Within)

by Amy Lee Burgess

  SCRATCH THE SURFACE

  AMY LEE BURGESS

  LYRICAL PRESS

  http://lyricalpress.com/

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/

  This one is dedicated to one of my best friends, Leslie Johnson Beavis. I’ve known Leslie since I was born. Really! She is a whole month and a half older than me and our parents are friends too. She listened patiently to my endless stories as I read them aloud to her all through junior and senior high school. Thanks, Les. This one you can read on your own!

  Acknowledgement

  As always, thanks to Nerine Dorman, for her sharp editing eye and merciless grasp of grammar. She says working with me is like herding cats, but I think wolves would be more like it.

  Chapter 1

  Wind in my face. I happy! Friend with me! We look at strange water. No move now. Stuck. Put paw on it. Cold! Want to walk on strange water. I scared! Strange water make noise—Crrrack! Paw wet and cold. Friend has tongue out, Friend laugh. Friend look at strange water. I not understand. Water moves. But strange water does not move . Why? Why? Want word for strange water. Want know why it not move. Think! Think hard. Strange water there when it very cold. Me seen it with Him and Her before they go away and not come back. Us run on it. Run, run, run. Me not want run now, me want word. I. I want word. I want word for strange water. Think. Think. Friend watch over me. Think. Think. I so mad. I want word! I want word! No. No get mad. Can’t think for mad in head. Go away, mad. Stop. Think. Strange water not move. Cold. White. Water. Not water. Think. Think. Want word. Word for strange, cold water that not move. Word is...word is...ice! Yes! Ice, ice, ice, ice! I see ice! I see ice! Friend, I see ice! Friend, I happy! I see ice! I lick Friend’s face. Friend lick me. I happy. I see ice!

  * * * *

  The shrill ring of the phone dragged me out of sleep. Murphy and I had shifted the night before and we’d exhausted ourselves in wolf form. By the time we’d shifted back, shivered into our clothes and driven home to Boston, it had nearly been dawn. The sky above my condo had been a pale shimmering pink as I’d fallen onto the bed, my hair still wet from the shower. I didn’t even remember Murphy coming to bed but he was there with me. The ringing phone had roused him too. He was snuggled up against my back, his arm across my waist and he rolled over into a defensive ball, swearing colorfully in Irish under his breath while he tried to shield his ears with one of the fluffy down pillows.

  “Goddamn it,” I muttered. I could tell it was frigid outside. Well, naturally, it was January. Barely. “Happy fucking New Year, Murphy.”

  His only response was more Irish swearing. The phone stopped ringing and I let my eyes drift shut again but that’s when the damn answering machine kicked on with an earsplitting beep.

  “Fuck.” Murphy’s curse was muffled by the pillow.

  “Constance,” said someone familiar. We both scrambled up on our elbows, wildly shifted the covers and tried to get the phone before it disconnected.

  Since the phone was closer to my side of the bed, I won the mad race and scooped it up, panting and out of breath.

  “Hello, Councilor Allerton,” I gasped into the phone while Murphy performed some sort of strange-looking war dance on the cold hardwood floors. I didn’t feel much sympathy. I had told him to wear socks to bed and he had refused.

  “Is there no frigging heat in his place?” He hopped from one foot to the other.

  “Good morning, Constance, did I wake you?” Jason Allerton was a Councilor on the Great Pack’s Council. The Council oversaw all of the packs spread out across the world. Murphy and I were his newest Advisors. He sent us on assignments to other packs to investigate accidents, murders and disputes that could not be worked out by the Regional Councils and other projects as he desired. So far, we’d only been on one assignment for him and that one had been unofficial, before we’d affiliated with Mac Tire—one of the largest, continuous packs in the world. They were based in Dublin, Ireland, but we had yet to go there. I’d only met two people from my new pack—Murphy and the Alpha male, Padraic O’Reilly. The rest were amorphous strangers I supposed I would eventually meet.

  At the moment Murphy and I were in Boston, Massachusetts. I owned a condo and we were in the process of cleaning it, packing up the stuff I wanted to keep and getting it ready to act as rental property. When all this was accomplished, we would go to Belfast to clear out Murphy’s cottage there before we went to Dublin to meet the rest of our pack.

  After Councilor Allerton had asked us to be his Advisors, Murphy and I had been asked to join Mac Tire. In Murphy’s case it was rejoin since he had been born into the pack and had left after the death of his bond mate, Sorcha, but it was a new pack for me.

  Murphy had bought a car in Houston and we’d spent the past two months leisurely driving to the East Coast, stopping at all the major cities that interested us so we could sightsee. I’d seen more of my native country in the past two months than I had the previous thirty-two years of my life.

  We’d arrived in Boston the day before New Year’s Eve, so we’d barely even begun to tackle the condo. Murphy didn’t want to be on a time table. He wanted us to go slowly and explore. I think he meant each other as well as the cities we visited. We’d been thrown together and bonded under extreme circumstances and now that the dust had settled and we were still standing, we had a lot of getting to know each other to do.

  In the three months I’d known him, he’d rapidly become my best friend and confidante. My teacher and my guide.

  After my first bond mates, Grey and Elena, had died in a car crash two and a half years ago, I’d been kicked out of my small pack in Connecticut. Although the Councils had cleared me, my pack had never stopped believing I had been drunk the night I drove that car over the embankment and my bond mates died.

  It had been later proved that it was Grandfather Tobias, another member of my old pack, who had tampered with the brakes of my new Mustang. He was part of an underground movement made up of some of the oldest members of the Great Pack who resented the new ways we were adopting that brought us closer into interaction with the Others—those who were not Pack—and brought money and prestige into our packs by way of this involvement.

  The new direction was integration, although not going as far as to reveal we were Pack and could shift into wolves. The old way was behind the scenes, on the fringes. Jobs in retail were common, but some of us were con artists or magicians as well. The trick was to avoid attention and interaction with the mainstream world as much as possible.

  This movement saw to it that certain young Pack members, who flouted tradition, met with fatal accidents. It was meant to scare us, stop the flow of revenue and destroy the ones with the closest ties to the Others.

  Murphy and I, with Councilor Allerton’s assistance, had discovered and unmasked this movement. We had not stopped it because it could not be halted simply by announcing to the Pack it existed. That would have caused chaos and panic. They had to be stopped one and two at a time—quiet arrests and detainment.

  We’d barely scratched the surface and I knew a lot of work was yet to be done, but after what we’d gone through in Paris and Houston, I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for it.

  This was the other reason for the long road trip—it was a chance to regroup and get myself together.

  Allerton had checked in on us a few times along the way, but I wondered if this phone call heralded the end of the vacation and was a wake-up call in more than one sense of the word.

  However, his next sentence blasted everything out of my mind.

  “We’ve arrested Tobias Green and he’s confessed.”

  Murphy stopped hopping
and swearing when I pulled out the desk chair and fell into it. My legs felt hollow, as if all the bones had melted.

  Tobias Green. I called him Grandfather Tobias. I’d loved and respected him. I’d looked after him more than anyone else in my pack and, although I’d had a sense of duty because he was old, I’d done it more out of genuine love. He was not my blood grandfather, but he might as well have been. I loved him that much.

  Ever since that moment in Houston when I’d realized the grandmother in Paris had deliberately put a lethal overdose of narcotics in the homemade pill she’d given Murphy, it was an easy, yet devastating, intuitive jump to understand that Grandfather Tobias was guilty of killing my bond mates. Once we’d uncovered the grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ plot, it had been horrifyingly clear he’d done something to the car. I’d brought it to him that afternoon and he’d gone beneath it to inspect it because he was a mechanic and he told me he wanted to see for himself that his dear girl and her bond mates were in a safe, reliable vehicle. Yet he’d tampered with the brakes so they’d fail and I’d lose control.

  Without being able to prevent it, I flashed back to the accident.

  * * * *

  “The Comet or Blue Moon, Grey? Which club do you want to go to?”

  I see Grey laughing in the dashboard lights as he fiddles with the CD player. Depeche Mode’s Strange Love morphs into Billy Idol’s White Wedding. Grey has an addiction to eighties music. Sometimes I find it endearing. Sometimes I find it annoying as hell.

  “I don’t care. It’s your birthday, Stanzie. You choose. The Comet or Blue Moon, it doesn’t matter to me.” He turns his head to smile at me. The love he feels for me is written all over his face. His shaggy, dark hair falls into his blue eyes. He’s got the back part confined in a rubber band. When it’s loose, his hair brushes his shoulders. Right now it’s about two inches longer than mine. I’m experimenting with a bob. I’m not sure I like it.

  He needs a haircut. He has an appointment on Monday. I wrote it on the erasable calendar stuck to our fridge. I made it for him yesterday.

  “Elena?” I glance into the rearview mirror to see her beautiful face. She is putting on eyeliner and her bright red purse is open on the seat beside her—a compact in one hand, the eyeliner stick in the other. She frowns at her reflection, with concentration, not because she finds fault with her appearance.

  “Oh, you know I don’t care, I just want to dance with you, Birthday Girl.”

  The Comet is closer and I have a sudden desire to be out of the car. I want to feel the summer breeze and hear my new metallic gold stiletto heels click against the soft, warm pavement of the August night. I want to hear music from this decade. I want to dance, to feel Grey’s hands on my hips as we move together beneath the strobe lights and Elena guards our drinks at the table.

  I make a decision. I take the exit. The road climbs over a small crest then dips sharply. I brake because we’ve been traveling at seventy miles an hour and now we need to slow down. We’ll still be above the legal speed limit, but this is a Mustang GT, metallic gold like my stiletto heels, with an ink-black leather interior. My dream car is a present from Elena who has just signed a lucrative contract with a company that develops PC games. Elena is a whiz at designing games. We have six different PCs and laptops set up in our house in New Britain and she is always perched in front of one of them, sucking absently on her bottom lip as she contemplates the scenarios in front of her on the screen.

  Yesterday she made an important deliverable to the company and they extended her contract for another game, this one even more ambitious—about werewolves. It is slated for tentative release October of 2010, which is two years and two months into the future.

  I put my foot on the brake, but it doesn’t seem like we decelerate. Confused, I press harder then we hit the dip and I see a shadow or a bird or something that distracts me then the wheel is a traitor beneath my hands. Elena screams in the backseat as the guardrail looms closer.

  I have time to think to myself, This is just a dream. This is not happening. This is not—

  The Mustang’s front end smashes into the guardrail with a terrific bang. It crumples with a metallic grinding and tearing. The engine screams in protest.

  “Stanzie!” Elena shrieks. Grey is stiff and terrified beside me. The whole car reeks of our extreme fear. It pours out of our skins like invisible sweat and the mad stink of it paralyzes my muscles and vocal cords. I am a mute statue. I cannot even blink.

  As Billy Idol sings the Mustang turns up and over. Wind rushes in when Grey’s door flies open. I see a blur of movement when he falls out and my paralysis breaks. I reach out for him, but the airbag hits me in the face and something hard smashes the back of my seat. Elena stops screaming. She stops screaming because her neck breaks under the force of her body slamming into the back of my seat. She, like Grey, never wears a seatbelt.

  * * * *

  Pressure brought me out of my trance. Murphy squeezed my shoulder reassuringly.

  Allerton said my name, probably not for the first time.

  The car crash was so vivid in my head I could still hear Elena’s screams and the jagged sound of tearing metal.

  “I’m here.” I swallowed an obstruction in my throat. It was two and a half years ago. It was time to let go and get over it.

  I’d been doing a good job of that, thanks to Murphy, but one sentence made me realize that maybe I would never truly be free. It was not a pleasant thought.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.” Allerton’s voice was rich with sympathy. I visualized his handsome, distinguished face and his dark black hair he wore as fashionably cut as his designer suits. “I thought you should know. There’s something else as well.”

  My stomach sank even though I had no idea what the something else could be, only that it wouldn’t be good.

  “He wants to speak to you. Privately.”

  My mouth dropped open in protest. Sick bile burned my throat and I must have twisted in my seat because Murphy put both hands on my shoulders. I was absurdly grateful for his touch.

  With his Pack-enhanced senses, he could hear what Allerton said, and he could smell my distress. I know I reeked of it.

  “Do I have to?” Tears clogged my sinuses and, if not for Murphy, I would have been bawling like a baby, I knew it.

  “Of course not,” said Allerton at once, and there was just a tinge of disappointment in his voice that I strove to ignore, but it was impossible. Damn him. Damn me for wanting to please him because he was a Councilor.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s being held in the safe house in Hartford. I’m here with him, along with one of the Regional Councilors. Riverglow is not being told the whole story. Just that he confessed to doing it not why.”

  Riverglow was the name of my former pack—Jonathan, Nora, Callie, Vaughn and Peter.

  “Aren’t they even curious?” I couldn’t disguise the bitterness in my voice.

  “He’s saying he accidentally put a hole in the brake lining, causing the brake fluid to leak out, and he realized it when he went over the car after the accident but was too ashamed to admit it.”

  “An accident? And do they believe it?” My voice shook with outrage. “They didn’t believe me. Are they going to believe him?”

  “Constance, he had to say something. We need to keep the knowledge that people in the Pack are murdering others under wraps. He can’t tell them the truth.” Allerton was sympathetic but firm. “And you can ask them yourself what they believe if you come to Connecticut. They want to see you too.”

  I wanted to throw the phone into the wall and stomp on it. I wanted to spit in Allerton’s arrogant face. What I didn’t want was to ever see any of my former pack again—especially Grandfather Tobias.

  “How am I supposed to face them? How am I supposed to look Grandfather Tobias in the eye after what he did to Grey and Elena? To me!” It was disrespectful to say the least to shout at a Councilor, but I rarely paused to think bef
ore I reacted. Allerton took my tirade in patient silence which is what made me stop shouting. My cheeks burned with humiliation.

  “I’m not telling you what to do, Constance. I’m giving you the opportunity to hear the man out. It might provide some closure.” He didn’t say it, but I knew damn well he thought I could use a huge, heaping dose of it.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and heard Elena screaming in my head again.

  “When do I have to be there?”

  “As soon as you can make it.” Allerton paused then said, “He’s not going back to Riverglow. The Council will acknowledge his cover story and accept it, but he won’t return to the pack. He’s going to go to sleep one night very soon and he’s not going to wake up. If you want, you can hand him a glass of warm milk or hot chocolate to help him go to sleep. If you want.” Allerton’s tone was deceptively nonchalant but what he offered was the chance to administer the fatal poison. That would be closure for sure.

  I didn’t answer because I couldn’t. A part of me wanted to kill that old man, not with poison, but with my claws and fangs—in wolf form. I didn’t know if I could be such a civilized murderer. Or maybe executioner was a better word.

  “Can I speak to Liam, please?”

  I thrust the phone at Murphy and he took it, but when I tried to get up, he frowned at me.

  “I want to take a shower.” I had to get out of the room and away from the phone and Allerton and the sound of Elena screaming.

  His dark gaze searched my face for a moment before he let go of my shoulder. He watched me as I stumbled for the bathroom. He acknowledged Allerton then went grimly silent as he listened. I smelled the anger that escaped from his pores and clouded the air around him—protective anger.

  Chapter 2

  I cried in the shower—bitter, painful tears that ripped my guts to shreds. Intellectually, I had known Grandfather Tobias had done something to the car. He was a mechanic. He’d been under the car. I remembered how the car hadn’t seemed to slow down. When I told my story to Councilor Allerton and the Regional Councilors after the accident, I’d told them I didn’t think the brakes had been working. There were no skid marks on the road and that supported my theory. Grandfather Tobias had stood in front of them all and declared that the car had been mechanically sound. It was suggested I’d hit the gas instead of the brakes and that I’d been drinking. I’d panicked and my judgment was impaired.