Marked (The Pack)

by Cox, Suzanne

  Deciding that Louise was in as strange a mood tonight as Myles had been, I headed for the stairs. “I’m going to bed now.”

  “I’ll be up soon. Try to get some sleep.”

  I didn’t answer but escaped to my room. Myles and my aunt weren’t the only ones in a peculiar mood. I tossed the skirt and t-shirt in the bathroom garbage before I stepped into the shower. My previously clear brain had begun to get fuzzy again. I wanted to get a hot bath and go to bed. I hadn’t mentioned the pains in my body or the feeling that my hair had begun to stand on end. Louise might think I’d been taking drugs and rush me to the hospital for a pee test. Of course, I had taken drugs, unknowingly again. But how often could I claim I’d been tricked before Louise thought I was some kind of addict. I didn’t like being deceived like this. I needed to regroup and start this whole summer all over again.

  Thirty minutes later I’d showered and lay in the dark, staring at the shadows dancing across the ceiling. They reminded me of the people dancing at Channing’s party, like they weren’t real or at least weren’t people anymore, but liquid bodies in motion. The sound of a howl pulled me from the bed to the window. The wolf was there again, the one with the blue collar. It sat on the ground and laughed at me. I shut my eyes and banged my forehead against the glass. What an idiot I had turned into. A dog couldn’t laugh and it certainly couldn’t laugh at me. I went back to bed and covered my head with the sheet, ignoring the occasional howls I heard.

  ***

  My eyelids refused to part and I rubbed at my mouth in an attempt to wipe away a terrible taste. Tangled in the sheet, I kicked wildly trying to get up. Dried sweat made my skin feel sticky and uncomfortable. This time I really did have the flu. Still trapped by the sheet, I rolled off the edge of the bed, my hands and knees banging against the hardwood floor. The crust gluing my eyes shut broke open. I stared at the mud on the floor, lots of mud. Another color on the glossy wood caught my eye, dark and sticky. It was blood. Running my hands over my arms and legs, I frantically searched for an injury but couldn’t find one. Blood caked to spots on my skin, but it wasn‘t mine. I tried to stop it, but the scream burst past my lips as I stumbled across the room, banging against the wall. The blood, the mud, the leaves, oh God, what had happened. The sickness in my stomach rolled harder. I forced my legs to work, racing to the bathroom. I’d never been this sick in my life. Holding the porcelain, I heaved and imagined my entire body was being turned inside out.

  With gasping breaths, I stared at the mess I’d made and shivered, my fingers pressing against the sides of the toilet until I couldn’t feel them anymore. Behind me the door opened.

  “Are you okay, Alexis?”

  I shook my head not able to get words past my lips yet. My body trembled convulsively and I couldn’t stop it. My brain told my eyes to close, but they wouldn’t. They kept staring.

  “What… What is that?” The garbled question was the only thing that could get past my swollen lips.

  Louise’s t-shirt brushed against my shoulder as she stepped closer and bent over to examine what had been the contents of my stomach. She pulled my hair back with one hand and sighed as though she did this every day.

  “Chicken foot.”

  I scrambled, crab-like, backwards across the floor until my back pressed against the wall and still I kept pushing. Aunt Louise wet a bath cloth, rung it out and tossed it to me.

  “Wipe your face.”

  “What is that, really?” I choked.

  “I told you. It’s a chicken foot. You obviously went out again last night and did some things you shouldn’t have. I tried to tell your mother if we didn’t start teaching you some self control this would happen.”

  “Myles said I might have eaten some brownies laced with drugs at the party. Is that why this is happening? Is it some kind of voodoo?”

  Louise snorted. “It’s not voodoo and no drug caused this. The drugs simply make you have less control of yourself. Something you don’t have much of anyway.”

  “Where did that thing come from?” I pointed to the toilet which she had flushed.

  “I’d say it came from the chicken you ate.”

  Tears welled in my eyes. Myles had been right. The drugs had fried my brain. I’d never be normal again. I should have stayed away from Channing. I should have listened to all of them, should have listened to Aunt Louise. They tried to warn me.

  “Why would I eat a chicken’s foot?” The tears rolled over my cheeks uncontrollably.

  Louise stood in front of me not at all sympathetic or even shocked. “You didn’t just eat the feet. You ate the whole bird, feathers and all. Look at yourself. Can’t you tell something happened to you last night? That it’s been happening to you for months?”

  I studied my hands and feet, dirty and covered in dried blood. “What’s happening to me?” I whispered.

  “You’re becoming. You’re at the age for it. It’s time.”

  “Becoming what?”

  Louise crossed her arms and shook her head. “A werewolf. You’re a werewolf, Alexis. Now get cleaned up and come to the kitchen. We’ll talk.”

  Chapter Twenty

  With now clean fingers, I lightly punched the numbers on the phone. I sat in Louise’s office facing the door. I’d left the bathroom door shut and the water running, even though I’d finished my shower. The ringing stopped. At last I heard my mother’s voice on the other end.

  “You’ve got to come home now. It’s an emergency.”

  “Alexis, is that you?”

  “Yes,” I hissed. “You’ve got to come get me. I can possibly hide for a few days with some friends here, but I can’t stay with Aunt Louise. She needs professional help. She’s losing her mind, okay. I think she may have even killed someone.”

  I heard the sigh on the other end. “Why do you say that?”

  “This morning I was sick and threw up. She said I threw up a chicken’s foot and that I had eaten a chicken whole, as in feet and feathers, everything. Then she told me I was a werewolf. Is that psycho enough for you?”

  Silence. I expected outrage, fear, the phone to drop and the sound of my mother’s feet running to the closet to pack her clothes. But only complete silence came back to me across the phone.

  “Mom, are you there? Did you hear me? I’m in danger here.”

  “You’re not in danger, Alexis. Maybe we should have gone about this differently, not waited so long.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your aunt’s not crazy. She’s a werewolf. And so are you. It’s a gene. I didn’t inherit both genes required to make a person be a werewolf, but I carried one. When I met your father he had the gene, too. I was hoping that somehow it would skip you, but it didn’t.”

  “Mom, are you on drugs?”

  Then she laughed. I knew at that moment I was doomed to handle this without my mother’s help, because she was laughing. “I’m not on drugs, though I imagine it does kind of sound that way to you, hearing it like this for the first time.”

  “So you’re not coming home right away.”

  “No, your aunt is the best one to help you with this. It’s why we took this trip and sent you to stay with her. I saw it coming with the nightmares and sleepwalking. You were changing and it had to be dealt with.”

  “Bye.”

  “Alexis, wait. I…”

  I dropped the phone to its base, not bothering to hear what else my mother had to say. They were all insane. I’d moved to the land of pure crazy and now they wanted to make me crazy too.

  The office door creaked and opened slowly. I rolled the chair backward until it bumped the desk. Louise stood in the open doorway.

  “Alexis, it’s going to be fine. I know you don’t understand this and think we’ve lost our minds.”

  “What did you do to my mother?”

  “Nothing.”

  “She says we’re all werewolves.”

  “Technically, she’s not. But yes, you and I are.”

  My han
ds closed tightly around the arms of the chair. “There’s no such thing. That’s made up stuff.”

  “Many myths and legends are based on fact and this is one that happens to be that way.” Louise leaned against the door facing and raked her fingers through her slick black hair. “You may have never seen or read about it in the newspaper, but we’re out there. If you think about all the things that have happened to you lately you’ll start to understand. The dreams of running with wolves, the wolves coming here and the way your arm healed so quickly after you were attacked that day. All signs of your becoming.”

  “A werewolf.” I stated flatly.

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  She straightened and stepped into the room. A swirl of fear shot through my insides.

  “I’m not nuts,” she said. “You’ll get used to the idea. Give it some time.”

  Time? She thought time would fix this. Help me understand something that was so certainly unrealistic? My anger suddenly swelled much larger than my fear. I got to my feet and walked past my aunt. “I want to go for a ride on the four-wheeler.”

  “That’s a good idea. Let it all blow through your hair for a while. Then we’ll talk.”

  I picked up my tennis shoes from my room and hurried to the front porch to put them on. I wanted out of this house, out of this town and especially out of this nightmare. I started the four wheeler then sat with the engine idling. I tried to think of a way to fix this. I was probably too young to have adults committed, so going to the sheriff wouldn’t work. I couldn’t even imagine the look on his face when the word werewolf came out of my mouth. I started toward Channing’s house then stopped. What was I thinking? I couldn’t trust her with the news that my entire family had lost their mind.

  No, Channing wasn’t a person I could share this with. My gut instinct told me that. I had nowhere to go and no one to take me in now that my family had so obviously gone insane. Spinning the four-wheeler around, I took another path that led to the road. I wasn’t supposed to ride on the road, but there wasn’t a path big enough for the ATV that went where I wanted to go and hey, what could my crazy aunt say. Besides, other people around here did it all the time. Mr. Branton would know what to do. I did trust him and Myles. They’d help me.

  ***

  “Then she started telling me I was a werewolf and she had a gene for it but wasn’t one. They’re nuts I tell you. My mom and Aunt Louise have lost it. They want me to believe I’m some kind of werewolf. Have you ever heard anything so bizarre? And I think Louise may have killed that woman a few weeks ago. I found this shirt…” My voice tapered off because the images that had plagued me for the past few weeks flashed in my head again. I had to admit that I might know something about that woman’s death too. But I couldn’t tell them that.

  Mr. Branton sat on the couch, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. Myles was beside him stretched out with his feet resting on the coffee table as if the whole thing bored him.

  “And you think they’re crazy because werewolves don’t exist.”

  “Exactly, I’m glad somebody finally understands me.”

  The man I trusted to help me clasped his hands together and straightened. “Alexis, I have to be honest with you. They do exist.”

  I pushed against the back of the chair, my eyes darting around the room for an escape route. A mistake, I’d made a huge mistake. I should have realized that Louise’s friends might also suffer from the same delusion. Maybe they were the ones taking the drugs.

  He leaned toward me, but obviously saw the fear in my eyes and leaned back. “Why do you think we all travel around together and home school our kids together?”

  “Because you’re weird.”

  Myles groaned and kicked his feet off the table. “No idiot, it’s because we’re a pack. We have a group that goes to school together and we learn things we need to know to function in the world with our inheritance.”

  “What inheritance?”

  “Our werewolf inheritance.”

  I got to my feet. “Something’s wrong here. It’s like I’m in the Twilight Zone.”

  Myles dad shook his head. “If you stop long enough to think about what’s gone on the last few weeks, what’s been happening, then you’ll know what we say is true.”

  “So, on a full moon you up and turn into what, some half man half dog thing and go around killing people?”

  “You’ve watched too many movies. It’s nothing like that at all. We are true werewolves. We inherited the genes to be that way. But we’ve learned self control to use our gifts in a good way.”

  “This is crazy. I’m leaving.”

  Mr. Branton caught my arm before I could get to the door. “It’s not crazy. You’ve got to accept it and come to terms with it because you’ll have some decisions to make soon.”

  “Well at the next full moon, I’ll be looking for all of you to whip into your wolf costume.”

  “I told you, it doesn’t work like that. The full moon isn’t necessary. We can control ourselves better than that. I’ll show you.” He glanced at Myles. “You’ll catch her.”

  Myles nodded and grinned. “Yep, sure will. But she’s gonna haul butt, and I think she’s faster than any of us realize, including her.”

  Mr. Branton stepped away. Myles took a step toward me. The man made a groaning sound and bent double. For some reason my own skin began to crawl and puddle up beads of moisture. My arms and legs ached. Mr. Branton peeled his shirt off and suddenly in a burst, his clothes seemed to disintegrate as his skin was replaced with thick gray fur. A huge gray wolf stood looking at me, his eyes glistening. I leaned closer and then realized I could still see him in the wolf’s eyes. The eyes were still the same, with the green flecks that had always caught my attention. I took two steps back and, as Myles had predicted, hauled butt out of there. Out the door and into the yard, I ran faster than I’d ever gone before and I’d always been extremely fast. Myles footsteps right behind me made me push harder. I hadn’t run like this since I quit track in junior high. My mom had made me quit because I was beating everybody and it was so easy. At the end of the race when others were winded, I’d barely be breathing hard. My coach had said it almost wasn’t natural… My steps faltered. Not natural. Myles’ hand closed on my shoulder and he wrapped his other arm around my waist lifting me off the ground. I kicked and screamed but he ignored me, carrying me along on his side like a sack of dog food back to his house. He climbed the steps to the deck and flung me in a chair.

  “You’re really fast. Don’t take off again, okay.”

  “What happened in there?’

  “He became.”

  “He turned into a wolf like those hybrid dogs I’ve been seeing.” I stopped. “They’re not dogs?”

  Myles pointed a finger. “Bingo. You’re getting it now.”

  “And you, you do that too. Change into a real wolf?”

  “I can. I don’t control it as well as he does, but I’m learning. You’ll need to learn to. You’ll have to. Or the things that have been happening will only get worse.”

  Every muscle I had went limp. I sat in the chair like a lump of mashed potatoes. Were they crazy? Was I?

  “I haven’t done that. That thing he just did, becoming the wolf. I don’t remember ever doing it.”

  Myles dropped into a chair in front of me. “You wouldn’t remember, not yet, not until you’ve learned to begin to control it and recognize what you are. It takes time, skills, training. But you have changed. Those times you woke up without your clothes, the weird dreams and sleepwalking.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Because I’ve had it, too. We all have, in the beginning when the changes first start. That’s what happens.”

  “And last night. I was really outside, I killed animals?”

  He didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he raked his hand through his hair, frowning. “I’m really sorry about that. I said I was learning, I never said I ha
d conquered everything. If I’d had more control of myself maybe I could have stopped you, but I couldn’t. I have to admit, you were pretty wild, very fast and very strong. More than I would have expected.”

  I didn’t pay attention to everything Myles was saying, but the main point hit me squarely between the eyes. “You were there? You and I were both wolves?”

  “It was a pack of us. It happens sometimes. Like my dad says, the moon doesn’t have total control, but during certain phases it has a greater pull on our inner nature. If we haven’t learned to control it well enough, then we change, without really meaning to. You just really, really, want to.”

  Mr. Branton came out of the house and sat at the table with us. I looked from one to the other. If this was a game or some trick to make me think I was crazy it was working, but I didn’t want to be part of it. My mother should never have left me here. If I’d stayed in Chicago maybe none of this would have ever happened. I knew I was different, inside. I had felt it for months, maybe even years. I didn’t want to be different. That’s why I’d been working so desperately hard to fit in with the popular crowd. They were telling me I was a monster, a freak. I didn’t need this.

  “I’m leaving now.” I got up and started down the steps.

  “Alexis.”

  I stopped as Mr. Branton called me.

  “You may not like this or want it, but you’ll have to think about it because it’s not going away. It’s who you are.”

  My eyes smarted and tears stung, dripping over my lashes. “I’m Alexis Miller, that’s who I am.”

  Standing on the deck, Mr. Branton nodded. “Alexis Miller, werewolf of the Lycernian pack. That’s who you are.”

  Scrubbing my hand across my face I hurried to the ATV. I was going back to Aunt Louise’s house and get in bed. When I woke up, maybe I’d find this was all one of my horrific nightmares.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  My first knock was light, but when I didn’t get an answer I banged harder. Where was Aunt Louise in the middle of the night? I heard howling outside and ran down the steps onto the front porch. Retreating against the wall, I listened to growls and barking that reached me from the direction of the lake. There was a high-pitched whine, then everything went quiet. My breath came in gasps and that weird feeling ran through my body again. The moon hung low and round in the sky giving off a milky light. Next to me the front door opened and I pressed myself deeper into the shadows.