The Wild Within (Book 2)

by Jeff Hale

  They both just stared at me for a second. I didn’t blame them. I had turned several sentences into one long breath worth, and when I talked fast my mild Irish accent tended to get heavier. I had a bad habit of doing that.

  Alex finally came over and sat on the other end of the couch, while Matt disappeared back into the kitchen and came back with a can of Pepsi. He handed it to me before settling into a nearby chair. I took the soda gratefully, downing half it in one drink.

  Alex glanced at Matt as though asking which of them should start talking. Matt just shrugged.

  “She falls under your people’s rules, Alex, not mine, so it’s up to you.”

  Alex sighed and gave Matt a resigned look. “It’s not like you’re that far removed from it, Matt.”

  I was impatient. “Okay, first off… the shooting. Was that just an accident or was someone trying to hurt Darien… or me for that matter, although I can’t think of any reason anyone would try to shoot me, I haven’t done anything to irritate anyone…”

  “Kat.” Alex’s one word put a stop to my babbling. “Take a breath, girl! And to answer your question, no it was not an accident. There are certain… others… who don’t like our kind and the shooting could have been a message.”

  “Why?”

  Alex was silent a long moment, as though trying to compose his thoughts. He sighed again. “It’s a political thing. Hard to explain if you don’t know all the details I guess. You’re a smart girl, Kat, I reckon you’ve already figured out what we are?”

  I nodded. “I think so. You’re werewolves?” It felt strange saying it out loud, but once the word was out, it felt right, correct.

  Alex grinned. “Sort of, we’re shifters. Darien is a werewolf, I’m… something else. Not all shifters are wolves.”

  “Huh?”

  He shook his head. “The term shifter encompasses all werecreatures—there are more than just wolves. We’ve been hiding what we really are for a long time.”

  “Why?”

  “Kat, when I say shifter, or werewolf, what comes to mind?”

  I thought a few seconds. “Changing into a wolfman, silver can hurt you, killing people… oh…”

  “Oh.” He cocked his head and gave me a shrewd glance. “Oh. Yeah, that’s what most people immediately think. That we are killers, indiscriminate of anything. What do you think, Kat? Do you think I’m a killer? That Darien is?”

  I shook my head. “No, no. I don’t think you would hurt anything voluntarily, Alex.” I glanced toward the other room. “Darien, though, I don’t know. I think he would if he had to.”

  “And you’d be right. But the public at large is a much harder body to convince and the moment anyone heard ‘werewolf’ there would be panic.”

  “But the legends, I mean, there are legends, and if half of them are true, I mean obviously the silver part is true, I saw that with my own eyes, then haven’t people come across your kind before?”

  He nodded. “Sure they have. We try our best to hide but sometimes it just doesn’t work.”

  “So werewolves… shifters… don’t kill at all?”

  “Most shifters don’t. At least not humans. Tends to piss the rest of the human race off and make it difficult to stay hidden. There are certain factions amongst us that do, however.” A pained expression came across him. “Violence is part of a shifter’s life, there is no escaping it. But, like all people on this planet, some enjoy the violence and like to perpetrate it, while some of us fight our natures to rise above it. We are no different than regular humans, other than we have abilities available to us that a normal human does not.”

  “But… the shooting, it makes no sense…”

  “It might, if something was territorial. There aren’t any other regular shifters here, but it could have been someone else.”

  “But Darien didn’t do anything to piss anyone off, did he?”

  “Kat.” He leaned toward me, his eyes going toward Matt, who gave a slight nod. “We aren’t the only supernaturals out there.”

  I laughed. “Riiight. Sure there are.”

  “Kat, didn’t you just sit there and believe with relative ease that Darien and I are shifters?”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “No buts. If you can believe that shifters exist, why then would it be so hard to believe that other supernatural creatures exist?”

  He was right. If shifters existed, why not other supernatural creatures? And had I already run into some? There were times when I had thought some people that I knew might be… different. Maybe if they were, it would explain why they were strange or mysterious or…. Suddenly Aerick’s face came into my mind and I chewed at my lip. Could Aerick be… different? After all, here was Alex, who was a shifter, and Darien was a shifter, and Matt was… what had Alex called him? Vamp?

  I paled, my gaze sliding over to Matt, who sat quietly in his chair with his ivory skin that gave off coolness not heat, that one word that Alex had said to him worming its way back to the front of my memory. He smiled at me as I stared at him, running his tongue across the front of his teeth to worry at a pointy canine I had not noticed before.

  “You’re a vampire.” I breathed the sentence.

  He just nodded.

  I glanced in the direction of his bedroom, started to get up off the couch. Alex’s hand on my arm stopped me. “Where are you going, Kat?”

  I looked back at Matt, then back at Alex, my eyes pleading. “But, Kris, she’s back there, maybe he bit her, hurt her, I need to check!”

  “Why?” Alex asked.

  “Because he’s a vampire!”

  Alex shook his head. “Why, Kat?”

  “Because he’s… because he might have hurt her!”

  “What would give you any reason to believe that Matt might hurt Kris?”

  “Because he’s a…” I stopped short. “Vampire.”

  Alex nodded. “Kris is fine. Matt would never hurt her. Though your instincts about vampires are somewhat on target. Seriously, you meet any other vampires, just run the fuck away. But Matt is just… different. He’s a vampire that started out as a shifter, so isn’t like pure blood vamps. Either way, your everyday human would still have a hard time believing that Matt wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Well, so, don’t tell the world… wait, you’re worried the world is going to find out anyway, maybe soon, especially with all the other weird shit that seems to be happening lately.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But that still doesn’t answer the question of who shot at us?”

  “No, it doesn’t. And for all we know it might have been humans. There are some out there who have figured us out.”

  I sat there for a few moments, digesting the information that Alex had given to me, my brain still in a whirl. I drained the last of the Pepsi from the can, toyed with the can for a bit, trying to get up the courage to ask my next question. Alex watched me expectantly, while Matt’s attention seemed to have been drawn toward the room Darien was in.

  I took a deep breath, then just asked it. “What’s a wilder?”

  Alex nodded as though he had been waiting for that one, but was silent, like he was trying to sort out the right way to answer me. He chewed on his lower lip for a moment, an action that made him look even more adorable, and was about to open his mouth to answer when I heard a movement off to my left.

  “You are,” Darien said.

  He leaned against the wall, still just dressed in jeans, albeit clean ones, that rode low on his hips. His face was pale and he looked exhausted, but the wounds on his chest and neck had faded to small pink scars and he seemed reasonably all right otherwise. Compared to the state he was in when I had first woken after the shooting, he seemed downright healthy.

  Darien walked carefully over to me until he was standing behind the couch, put his hands on my shoulders, leaned down to bury his face in my hair and inhale deeply. He sighed heavily as he moved his face toward the side of my head.

  “Are you okay? How ba
dly did you get hurt?” He lightly traced one of the small cuts on my face with a forefinger.

  “I’m fine,” I said, although now my heart was racing. I was not immune to the sight of him half naked, or the confirmed knowledge that, yes, free from the ponytail, his hair did go down to his hips. I lifted my left hand and rested my palm against the side of his face. “A thump on the head good enough to knock me out for a bit, a few bruises, but I think you took the lion’s share of the damage.”

  He sighed again, rubbing his face against my hand, before moving to crouch next to my feet.

  “So, what have these two told you already?” He asked it in a matter of fact way, but the look that he gave Matt and Alex suggested he was disappointed that they had already said anything.

  I shrugged. “Shifters, vampires, fear of humans discovering you, silver is bad. That pretty much sums it up.” I cocked my head to the side and looked at him. “They were just going to tell me what a wilder is. Seems it has something to do with me after all.”

  Darien closed his eyes for a moment, then gave me a look that suggested I might not like what I was going to hear. “Simply put, a wilder is the child of a shifter… and a human.”

  I just stared at him, my brain refusing to function. I finally managed to stammer, “Say… say that again?”

  “A wilder is the child of a shifter and a human.” Alex repeated it, nodding when I looked in his direction.

  I held up a hand to indicate that I needed a moment, took a deep breath and let it out again. “Sooo… you are saying that one of my parents is a shifter?”

  Darien nodded.

  The room swam for a moment, then steadied itself as this new information sank in. One of my parents was a supernatural critter. I was a supernatural critter. Or at least, that’s what they believed. How could they be sure? I mean, did they have some detector? My heart started to beat frantically. I couldn’t be, I was normal, my parents were normal. My life was… normal, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that to change.

  “Are you sure? That I’m one of these wilder things? I mean, you could be wrong. Right?”

  A look passed between Darien and Alex.

  “We’re sure,” Alex said.

  “Well, I mean, how can you tell?” I asked.

  “Kat, how did you feel when you first saw me, saw Alex? Did we feel, maybe, different to you? Did you feel drawn to us in a way you couldn’t explain?”

  My face turned red as an embarrassed blush began to creep its way across my cheeks.

  Darien laughed. “No, not that way, although I’m glad you do feel that way, at least about me… I hope it’s about me anyway.” He threw a worried glance in Alex’s direction. “But no, not that kind of drawn, more of a, well, like you knew us, or should know us, that kind of thing.”

  I nodded, remembering how I had told Kris that I had to find them, although I hadn’t known why at the time.

  “Shifters can recognize other shifters. What you were feeling was that part of you that is shifter recognizing it in us. I’m going to guess that over the last couple of years or so you’ve had a harder time controlling your emotions, especially anger. And you told me, on the beach, that you were very sick as a young child. I’m willing to bet you never got sick again after that though. Am I right? That’s a wilder thing.”

  I hadn’t. After that long illness that my mother had been afraid would kill me, I had never been sick again a day in my life. And he was right about the emotions part; even I hadn’t thought that they were normal for just being a teenager.

  “Ok. So then, I am half… shifter? Whatever that means.” I didn’t want to accept it, but if what they were telling me was true, then all the signs seemed to point it.

  Darien nodded. “One of your parents is a shifter, of some kind, and has managed to do a decent job of hiding it since you don’t know. Do you have an idea of which of your parents it might be?”

  I thought a moment. “Couldn’t it be both? I mean, couldn’t both my parents be shifters?”

  “It’s possible,” Alex answered. “But then you would have already known, you would have already changed by now, several times. And your family would have a history of high infant mortality. Full-blood shifter children are very rare. As it is, half-bloods like yourself are rare enough. Just because a human and a shifter get together, doesn’t mean that they will have children together; impregnation or fertilization doesn’t occur very often.”

  “So then how does one become a… a… shifter?”

  “You’re either born one, feral, like me,” Darien said, indicating himself. “Or you’re savaged and turned, like Alex, or you’re a wilder, which still involves being turned, but takes very little to do so.”

  “Oh.” I fidgeted in my seat. “As for which of my parents, well, I’m not sure, but I know that while I love my mother to pieces, I don’t have that draw toward her that I do toward you guys.”

  “What about your dad?” Darien asked.

  “I honestly wouldn’t know. He died when I was a baby.” A thought occurred to me. “Do any of you know where Kris put my purse?”

  Matt pointed toward a counter top. I stood up carefully so as not to dislodge my towel, got my purse and dug through it for my billfold. I flipped it open to my pictures, pausing briefly at one of myself, Aerick, and Nina taken when I was in Vegas. A small wave of wistfulness came over me, but I shook myself and kept going till I found the one of my father—the last one that had been taken before he died—and held it out toward Darien.

  “Can you tell by looking at a picture?”

  “Doubtful, unless the picture was taken while he was in his shifted form.” He chuckled, but looked at the picture anyway, shaking his head.

  I held the wallet out toward Alex and Matt. Alex leaned forward and took a look, but gave me the same ‘who knows’ shrug that Darien had. Matt looked longer at the picture than I expected, then gave me a blank look and shrug as well.

  “It was a thought.” I shrugged.

  “Still, if you don’t have that pull towards your mother, it’s a good bet that your father was the shifter,” Darien said.

  I was silent for several seconds as I put the picture away. “They said I got a lot of your blood in my mouth, that I was covered in it. Does this mean I’m going to become like you, like Alex… like my… dad?”

  Darien nodded. “I would be incredibly surprised if you didn’t. You see, normal humans, it takes a lot to change one. Don’t believe the old stories of a singular scratch or bite doing the trick. The wounds don’t have to be mortal, but they do need to be mauled pretty badly.” He paused for a moment. “Wilders on the other hand are already half way there, so it takes very little to turn a one. A singular scratch or bite could very well do it.”

  “Or a mouthful of blood.”

  He nodded at me. “Or a mouthful of blood.”

  I absorbed that a second, the words that would mean a change to my very existence not quite sinking home all the way. They would, eventually, and I would probably cry and scream, or maybe I wouldn’t, I didn’t know. “So, will I be a werewolf like you, or whatever my dad was?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. You will be whatever you will be.”

  “That’s rather cryptic.”

  “It is, I know. For us, how it works is like this. The shifter… virus for want of a better word, is spread through blood, bite, claw, et cetera. This virus then changes the person. What they change into, well it’s all magic, so what they change into is an extension of their own spirit. Now, there are some limitations. It will almost always be a predator of some kind. Our very nature is predatory. Although there are some rare exceptions.

  “Look at it as something like a totem. We all have our own personal animals, the ones that call to us, speak to us. When you become a shifter, the creature you turn into is an extension of your totemic creature, what we also call our Aspect. That’s about as close an explanation as I can get.”

  I just nodded absently. “An extension of my totemic c
reature.”

  He just gave me a look, then gestured to himself. “Look at me, what did you expect? I’m half Native American and I had this explained to me by a tribal medicine man. I’m sure there are other ways to explain it, but that’s what makes the most sense to me.”

  “So it’s random?”

  Darien half nodded. “I suppose it’s random, but there are determining factors. You, the environment, land, in which you were born or raised. For instance, someone born and raised here in the States more than likely will not turn into, let’s say, a tiger, because there are none naturally here.”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  There was a brief silence after my noncommittal noise. It was broken by the sound of a door opening and Kris shuffling out of Matt’s bedroom. She rubbed her eyes and yawned, stopping mid yawn, her mouth partially open, as she noticed us staring at her.

  “G’morning,” she said. “You guys all have serious face. What all did I miss?”

  Once again, trust Kris to get right to the point; she had a knack for it.

  “You sure you want to know?” I asked her.

  She yawned one last time, gave her eyes a final rub, walked the few feet into the living room, and plopped down on the floor not too far from Matt’s chair. “Of course I want to know.” She eyeballed the empty can I was still fiddling with and looked at Matt wistfully.

  He chuckled, got up and headed into the kitchen. I assumed he was finding her something to drink.

  I took a deep breath. “Well, apparently one of my parent’s was a werecreature of some sort and due to getting Darien’s blood in my mouth I am going to turn into a werecreature, shifter, of some sort myself.”

  She just stared at me, her brow furrowed in contemplation.

  I felt the need to explain further. “See, Darien and Alex are werewolves, well Darien is at least, not exactly sure what Alex is, and Matt is—”

  She waved a hand to cut me off. “I know, I know. Matt is a vampire. I’m not dense, ya know.”