Damon watched the cops get their stuff, and drop a couple twenties on the table. From across the room, he could read the print on the bills. That stuck in the back of his mind, but he had other things to consider.
The first of them was that if Devin was on the loose, that meant the Carak alpha was tearing around town, and if he was causing as much carnage as the police said, then his transformation was soon – if it wasn’t already happening.
That was bad. It meant a war if he couldn’t stop Devin. A war the Skarachee probably wouldn’t be able to win with an inexperienced alpha and dwindling numbers scattered to the winds.
“Lily,” he said under his breath, as he put the dish bucket down on the ground. “Oh no, no, no.”
Damon threw the bloody towel on top of a plate, then thought maybe that was a health hazard, grunting as he stuffed it back in his pocket.
Aside from the transformation ritual, there was one other thing that an alpha needed to complete his coming of age.
A mate.
“Lily,” he whispered again, clenching his recently healed fingers into a fist so tight his knuckles went white with rage. “I’m not going to let this happen. Never.”
Damon looked through the kitchen window at his boss, who was passively jabbing a pencil at a ledger while watching a TV judge berate someone for fathering children they couldn’t afford and then pretending he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Dan laughed, maybe a little too hard, as Damon pushed out the back door and into the blistering white of the Arizona sun. The motorcycle between his legs was still warm, either from the sun or from being ridden an hour before. Either way it felt good.
It felt safe.
“You’re not going to hurt Lily,” Damon said under his breath as he stood up and kicked the gas. “I’ll kill you first.”
Damon hated to think what Poko would have said about his swearing to kill if Lily was threatened.
Somehow, in that moment, he just didn’t care.
* * *
Damon’s mind flickered, faded, jumped and pulled as he approached Lily’s house.
He had vague memories that browned out, then came into focus, then squiggled out of his vision. Poko warned him about this. Something about the wolf vision blurring the lines between real and dream. The elder told him he’d go through blackouts, wake up in places he didn’t remember, but this was a new sensation.
His bike’s engine slowed to a drawling putter, and when he finally killed it, Damon felt like he was somewhere he didn’t recognize, though it was a place he’d been a thousand times before.
Not a hundred feet away on his left was Lily’s house. His safe place, his comfort, the only person in the world he needed to see, to make sure she was okay.
In the opposite direction lay a small field. Some short desert grass and a couple of rogue daffodils sprang up defiantly from the rocky, orange dirt. When he looked at that little clearing, his mind instantly shut off.
Damon jerked his head back and forth, almost panicked but not quite. He could still remember who he was, or at least who he was supposed to be. Even though he could no longer recall whose house he was at, it was a safe place for him to be. Looking back at the field, more blackness spread out behind his eyes until all he could visualize was the fire in the cave.
The cave. Need to hide, need to sleep, or run, or...
“Damon?” A voice called out. It wasn’t the one he needed to hear, it was a man’s voice. Old, but not Poko old. “Meathead Donnie? Is that you? We’ll I’ll be...”
Why can’t I remember? Why can’t I think? That voice, that nickname, is sounds familiar, but...
“It is you! There’s a face I haven’t seen in a while. Come on in, I just made some tea. Real cold.” The voice had an arm that followed it, and touched Damon’s shoulder.
“You okay? It’s me, Joe – you remember me, don’t you? Lily’s grandfather.”
“Lily,” Damon stuttered. He blinked hard, then clenched his eyes shut and shook his head.
The taste came back into his mouth and a moment later, memory returned in a flush of color that threatened to outshine the sun for a split second.
“It can’t be... can it?” Joe’s kindly eyes went back and forth. “Hold on a sec, let me see this.”
He drew close and looked straight into Damon’s eyes, and then let out a satisfied grunt. “Can you focus?”
“Y – yeah,” Damon said as his stupor lifted. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t know what happened, I just felt this... wave or something kinda come over me. Is Lily here? I need to see her, I—”
Joe grabbed his hand and dragged him toward the house. “No, she’s not, but she’ll be back shortly, and you need to come in. You’re probably about ten degrees hotter than you should be.”
Inside the house, the air conditioner immediately cooled sweat that Damon didn’t know he’d poured. It felt like ice running down his chest, forcing him back to reality. He shook his head again, clearing the rest of the cobwebs.
“Thanks, I really appreciate this.” Damon rolled the huge glass around in his hand, watching the condensation roll over his fingers. He took a drink that turned into a gulp, and before long he drained the whole thing in one go. “Is there any—”
“More?” Joe smiled and poured him full again. “Lily, she’s running off some pictures she found. For the story she’s writing, she probably told you about it.”
Damon shook his head, immediately feeling guilty. He’d been so volatile that Lily hadn’t done a whole lot of talking about anything lately.
“You’ve been in a way, I suppose. Happens to the best of us.”
Looking up from his glass, Damon cocked an eyebrow.
“Well, you know what I mean.” The old man smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “Not exactly all of us. We go way back, which I bet you don’t know. I think he talked to Lily about it during one of her trips to that cave. You know, I told that old bastard he was going to catch a cold in there, but I suppose it does him well enough.”
“I’m sorry, I...”
“Oh, you don’t have to play dumb with me. I’ve been here a long time, son. A long, long time. I remember Pokorann when he was about as strapping as you. Of course, at the time he was, what, about seven hundred years old or so? I guess the last forty really do a number on everyone. Forty-five maybe? Hell, I can’t remember anymore.”
Damon’s mouth fell open. “I thought that was something kept secret, I had no idea.”
A wizened, almost spry smile crept across Joe’s face. “I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of the whole business, just what he told me, and like I said, it was a long, long time ago. But listen.”
“Yes sir?”
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. If you ever need a friend, or a place to lay your head, my door is always open. Except you’ve got one thing that Poko never did. There is one extra thing that makes you more dear to me than you are even my old friend.”
“Sir?”
“Lily,” Joe answered. “She’s done nothing but talk about you for the last month. Anyone my little girl loves as much as she does you, well, I’ll just leave it at that. Old people flap their gums too much.”
Joe shook the pitcher and topped Damon’s glass.
She loves me? Still? Even after everything I did?
In the other room, the television buzzed with a news alert. Both Damon and Joe turned to see what it was.
“These things have popped up more in the last week than I remember in all my years,” Joe said, scratching his chin. “At least since your grandpa Poko and that crazed wild’un he faced off against. Back then there was barely television though. I got my news about that scuffle from patching Poko up since he wouldn’t go to the hospital. Damn good thing I learned how to sew up a cut in the war.”
Damon grunted a laugh. “Wouldn’t need to do that with me,” he said. “That’s my gift. I heal. But I’m nowhere near as strong as my elder. Poko is... well, I’m scared to replace him. I
don’t know how I’ll manage. He’s wiser than I can imagine anyone being.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Joe said. “Anyway, he’s got about seven centuries on you. Hard to compare to that sort of experience.”
“Does Lily know? I mean, she knows about me,” Damon said with a worried look on his face. “But does she know the rest about you and my elder and all that?”
Joe laughed and pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing. “Well, all I can say is I told her some stories. Now, whether or not she believes them? That’s a whole different story.”
Fourteen
I pushed the hair out of my face and tried to tie it back. Eight seconds later, I pulled the rubber band out, put it in again, and pulled it back out.
Sitting at one of the big, square, four-seat tables, I had somehow still managed to pile up photograph books, mounds of old folk tales, reel-to-reel tapes I could barely understand, and a whole mess of some weird microfiche things that I had to wait on a guy researching his family tree to use. The library, of course, only had one microfiche machine.
“You know how it goes, first time in a year someone wants to use that thing, and then twenty minutes later someone else wants it,” the librarian said, in between double-gulps of coffee. She was probably the only person in the world more stressed out than me, judging from the circles under her eyes.
Between nursing him back to health, and then our can’t-take-a-werewolf-to-physiotherapy physical rehab sessions where I spent entire days walking him back and forth in the cave and coaxing Damon through all kinds of exercises, I’d put this story off for way too long.
Somehow, the summer was already half over, and even though Jolie Evers from the Times had never given me a firm deadline, the increasing number of calls I got from her told me that she probably wanted something soon. And don’t get me wrong – I loved that I had the opportunity. It’s not that. It’s just... turning like six hours of stories from Grandpa Joe, eighty some-odd books on local lore, and my own experiences – whitewashed to make me not sound like a lunatic of course – into a two-thousand word story is a lot harder than I thought it would be when I said I’d do it.
“You need anything?” Annie, the librarian, came by. “I’m on my way to my dinner break.” She rolled her ‘er’ sounds into ‘a’ sounds. She’s about my age, or maybe a little older, I can never remember.
I looked around at the fort I’d built. “No,” I said. “I think I’m okay for now. I need you to show me how to use that micro-thing, but that guy probably won’t be done before you get back anyway.”
My phone buzzed in my purse, rattling against my keys and making a whole bunch of noise. Instinctively my hand shot out to turn it off, but Annie laughed. “I’d tell you to turn it off, but I don’t think you’ll bother him.” She turned to the family tree guy at the microfiche who had some of the biggest, 1970’s DJ-style headphones I’d ever seen in my life wrapped around his head.
We both giggled for a second as he be-bopped his way through another birth certificate, and made some notes on a tablet, and sang half a word. I only wished I could enjoy what I was doing that much.
“All right, see ya in a while,” Annie said, turning and dialing someone on her phone before she was out the door.
I’d almost forgotten my phone the second time it rumbled. It took a second to fish it out of my purse after navigating the research material minefield, but when I did, I saw it was Grandpa Joe. Texting? Something had to be wrong. I chuckled to myself, which after everything I’d done, is what finally got microfiche guy to turn around and shush me.
Which made me turn red I tried so hard to stop myself from laughing more.
He shook his head in the most comically disdainful way, and returned to his birth certificates from the 1750s.
“Dear Lily,” the text began. Of course it did. My grandpa is the only person on earth who writes texts as though he was drafting a letter to the Queen. I snorted a little, but the guy didn’t turn around that time. Maybe he was too pissed.
“I’ve got a visitor here. Damon showed up, very agitated about something. I think you be—”
With that, the first one cut off. He never had gotten the hang of brevity. I was already up by the time I checked the second one, which did exactly what I thought it would do; told me that Damon was asking for me and that I better get home pretty quick.
It also had a lot of apologizing for rudeness and so on, like only a grandpa can do. Funny thing about my grandpa – he’s never, ever rude in anything he writes. He says it’s a horrible idea to ever put anything into words you don’t want found a hundred years later. As I stared at the pile of stuff – letters, books, and all other kinds of dusty old business – I’d collected, that made perfect sense.
I was out the door before I remembered all the research material I had piled up. It bit me deep, jabbed at my orderly nature, to leave it all out and not returned to the rack for re-shelving. A quick glance around the completely empty library let me relax a little. I thought that probably, Annie wouldn’t mind. It’s not like anyone had ever – and I mean ever – looked at any of the stuff I had pulled.
And it wasn’t like anyone had been in the library that week.
Heaving a sigh, I climbed up into the old Bronco, slammed the key in the ignition and pumped the gas. A few seconds and a belched-up cloud of exhaust later, the old girl roared to life and I was on my way.
It wasn’t until just then that I remembered how weird it was for Damon to go to my house. I mean, sure, he’d been there plenty of times when we were dating, but he was always a little reticent. He was supposed to go back to work today, or at least go talk to his boss about his two week vacation. I wondered if he had, or if there was something going on he needed to talk about.
Whatever it was, I realized that I liked the idea that he came to me. I thought maybe, just maybe, all that stuff he said was true. About how I made him feel safe, how I was “home” for him. At the time I convinced myself it was just the fever, though I hoped it was true.
In the back of my mind, too, was the hope that he had gotten over his fear, come around to believe that maybe – just maybe – our love was worth the risk. It was to me, anyway, and as I got in the car and turned on the engine, I got a lump in my throat that lasted all the way home.
“Oh my God,” I said out loud with a gasp I pulled to a stop, flagged by a police officer in the middle of the last intersection before the turn to my house. “How did I miss this?”
A shredded pile of metal, twisted, gnarled and horrifying to look at lay in the middle of the road.
“What could have,” I trailed off when I saw the bumper. I’d know that collection of bumper stickers anywhere.
There were a couple of Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin stickers right next to one with a bunch of religious symbols that spelled out ‘tolerance’. And right between them, one that said HARVARD UNIVERSITY on it.
“Caitlyn,” I whispered.
My stomach went right into a knot when I saw the claw marks on what was left of the door.
With my next breath, “Devin” came out. My voice shuddered.
Reaching for my phone, my hand trembled so violently I could hardly swipe the touch screen to send a text. There was only one person, or whatever, that could handle this. If Devin had really done this, that meant...
The reality was too awful for me to really deal with, but I knew I needed Damon. Needed to at least let him know as my hands trembled on the keys. I fat-fingered my way through a message before I remembered that the last time the two of them met, Damon’s phone was the only permanent casualty.
Good thing he’s with grandpa.
One car at a time went through the intersection, every last one of them rubbernecking like assholes at the mess of Caitlyn’s car. The only saving grace for the whole business was that there wasn’t any of that tell-tale orange powder all over the ground that soaked up blood. In fact, there was no Caitlyn either.
Empty car, torn to shit, with claw
marks running down one side of the doors – all I could think was how fast everything changed. I thought the big drama of the summer was almost sure to be my article, or maybe nursing my werewolf boyfriend back to health in his cave-house. I shook my head.
Caitlyn was with him. He had her. Even worse, I imagined she had no idea what in the hell had overtaken her formerly human-all-the-time boyfriend. Sure, he had been a dick for as long as I’d known him, but bending over and turning into a mythical creature is going to catch pretty much anyone off guard.
“Devin’s got Caitlyn”, I texted. “Tell Damon please.”
A couple of seconds later, I got a very hastily worded reply. “On my way. Stay safe.”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant. I mean, what could be dangerous to me? Whatever was going to happen already had. And yet, in the back of my mind, it was clear there was something to his words.
“C’mon, get on through,” the traffic cop said, waving at me. “Go on, miss.”
I needed Damon. I couldn’t leave until he came.
“People gotta get places, young lady,” he said as he approached my window.
“That’s... that’s my friend Caitlyn’s car,” I said, sticking both my hands out the window and craning my neck. “Did she have a wreck? Gosh that looks terrible. Where’s the ambulance?”
He smiled disingenuously and leaned on the side of the car, pushing up his sunglasses. “When have you ever heard of the Fort Branch Police Department giving case details to someone not five minutes after a case has, uh, happened? Wait a minute,” he pulled his glasses down. “Lily Kyle? You two weren’t friends.”
“Things changed,” I said. “And also I’m working for a paper now.”
He cocked his eyebrow, obviously not impressed. “Let me see your credential.”
Is he serious? He’s serious.
“I can call my editor?” I offered.
“You don’t have a press pass?”
“Just got hired,” I said. “It’s in the mail.”
“Well hell, Lily, it ain’t like there’s anything to see. Give me the name and number. I’ll have the department call it in before you can poke around. Local paper, right? I don’t remember the last time Ellie hired a new writer.”
Fated Mates: The Alpha Shifter Boxed Set (12 Book Bundle) (Insatiable Reads) Page 39
