“Let me check my ass.” Westley patted himself down. “No.”
“Good. I probably wanted to, though, right?”
“When don’t you?” Westley asked. He grinned. “Hell, when don’t I?”
“Thanks for letting me in, anyway.”
“You’re not that big a threat, Tom.”
“No.” Tom shook his head, determination clear in his otherwise queasy expression. “Just because we do it sometimes doesn’t mean I should take advantage.”
“You didn’t.”
“If you were smaller—”
“Tom. You didn’t do anything. You didn’t try to do anything. And you wouldn’t have even if I couldn’t kick your ass for trying. Got it?”
Tom looked uncertain, or greener.
“Geez, man, what is wrong with you?”
“Don’t know.” Tom lurched up again. Westley patted his back as the last of the night’s festivities hurtled out of him. “Just feel weird, I guess.”
“You drink too much.”
“No. Felt weird before.”
“Probably because you’re getting old. Come on.” Westley helped him up and over to the sink. “Let’s get you rinsed out and then I’ll finish making you that tea.”
“What if we got mated?” Tom wobbled at the sink as Westley held him up. “I could make an honest wolf out of you.”
“You are not asking me to be your mate after you puked on my tiles.”
“I could make you.” Tom’s voice grew stronger. “You’d have to say yes.”
Westley squeezed him, a solid threat. “You do, and it will be the last word I ever say to you.”
Tom stared down at the running water. “Guess I wouldn’t have to worry about dinner conversation being awkward.”
Westley pushed a Dixie cup to his lips. “Drink this and shut up.”
Tom nodded, his face pinched and sad. He swished and spat. “Thanks. Sorry I tried to make you the happiest wolfman alive.” He leaned over and put a chaste kiss on Westley’s shoulder. “And about your tiles.”
“Weirdo,” Westley said, with fondness. Then, “I don’t know why you’re talking about mating with me anyway. You’re going to settle down with a nice she-wolf and have lots of puppies and I’m going to settle down with a nice beta or alpha male, or, you know, Cody, and you’ll make your parents proud and mine might start speaking to me again, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“And that’s that?” Tom asked.
“That’s that,” Westley said, as kindly as he could.
JAYLEN CHECKED the knots around his ankles. He’d had to run the rope beneath the mattress. Damn motel beds had nothing to tie onto. He bound himself secure enough that he couldn’t thrash out of it, but loose enough that he could get free when he was lucid again. Reaching to the nape of his neck, he pulled loose his cloth-covered rubber band and freed his individual cornrows. Once he had his hair arranged so he could lay comfortably, he stuck his knife in its thick leather sheath beneath his pillow. With the door locked and warded in wolfsbane and the sun shining on the other side of the thick brown curtains, he started the harsh process of sweating out the drug.
If he had his preferences, he’d stay on it all the time, always know how to tell a monster from a human. His body, however, had other plans. He’d been lucky to finish cleaning up at the Curlicue. By the end, he wasn’t sure if he was on his knees scrubbing the floor because it was a better way to get the blood up or because it hurt too much to stand. Ignoring detox and continuing to use the drug left him as weak as a baby. Recovery could lose him days—days in which the Alpha could track him or move on as it pleased. Hard to tell sometimes who was chasing whom.
Detoxing was no picnic either. But it was over in hours versus days, and if he timed it right, he could keep the symptoms down. He couldn’t stop the hallucinations that came with it, but the part he found hardest to tolerate was the leveling moment when everyone became the same; first monster, then human, and he couldn’t tell which was which, filled by a vengeful rage at the first and an abiding fear at the second, struggling with his gut feeling against what his senses were telling him. YOU ARE SAFE. NO MONSTERS HERE. SAFE. SAFE. SAFE. For this reason, he locked himself away to detox, lest he accidentally kill a human, or that a wolf might slip beneath his mind and take its revenge for the hundreds of its kind he’d slaughtered since he’d first picked up his knife.
The first etchings of a headache made an appearance beneath his temples. Reaching for one of several opened bottles of water on the nightstand, he chugged it halfway down. It did nothing to ease his parched throat. He set the bottle down, only shaking slightly, and rolled onto his side, bracing himself as a wave of nausea struck. He blinked through it, and another. After checking the knots again—he could never check too much—he laid back as his vision blurred. With his only comforts the solid feeling of his knife beneath his head and the knowledge this could be so much worse, he looked toward the swirling ceiling and succumbed to the process.
TOM TUCKED HIS long legs underneath him on the couch. “God,” he moaned. He cupped his half-empty mug of hangover cure in both hands.
“Headache not any better?” Westley asked.
“Worse. There’s buzzing. I feel like...” He paused, mouth open and contorted, eyes wide in pain. “Like killing everything.”
“Maybe it’s, you know, your dad—your instincts, I mean—” Westley said.
“I’m not killing my dad.” Tom shot him a glare. “I wish people would stop saying that.”
“I know, I’m not—” Westley put his hands up. He hadn’t meant to start Tom down this road again.
“Do you know what it’s like growing up knowing you’re expected to tear out the throat of your own father? He’s my dad! I can’t kill him just because ‘nature dictates.’” He made the air quotes look like obnoxious parodies of all the people who’d told him this.
“Sorry, man.”
“You’re omega. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Well, excuse me,” Westley snapped. “It’s not like I don’t have everyone telling me I’d better get myself a mate before I turn into a spinster and shrivel up and die, Mr. Big Alpha About Town.”
Tom managed a pained smile. “Please. That’s Cody, not me.”
Westley took a breath and slumped backwards. “Well, I’m glad you’ll be the one in charge once your dad goes.”
“Assuming I’m the one to kill him, and no one else kills him first.”
“Your dad’s a good guy.”
“The best.” Tom stared morosely at his knees. “I don’t want him to die,” he said quietly.
“Maybe he’ll step down.”
Tom’s gaze flashed over to him, eyes full of heartbreak. “That’s not how it works, West. I have to kill him. I’m twenty-five. He was twenty-two when he killed his father. I have to do it soon.”
“Tom—”
Tom shook his head, warding off Westley’s offer of comfort. “No, he’s acting like it too. He’s been a real dick lately.” Westley nodded. What could he do but sympathize? “Nature sucks,” Tom said.
“You could fight it,” Westley said.
“Maybe that’s what’s causing this.” Tom gestured at his head. “I’ve been fighting it too long.”
“What if... what if there was a way—?” Westley leaned forward, ready to charge into the kitchen, to show Tom his herbs. They could be normal together, him and Tom. No more killing, no more living by instinct. No more shifting.
“You can’t fight nature, West,” Tom said.
“No, I mean, but if you could, would you?” Westley held his breath.
Tom blinked at him. “You can’t be what you’re not.”
“But what if you hate what you are?” Westley stared at him, pleading.
Tom maintained his gaze. “Then I don’t see that ending well.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Forget I said anything.”
“I think this is helping the headache,” Tom said, nodding at the t
ea. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Of course, it could also be that Cody isn’t here.”
Westley’s lips stretched into a slow smile. They loved Cody, they did, but a little of him went a long way. He glanced over at Tom, who was smiling too.
“We could, you know,” Tom said.
“What?” For a moment, Westley thought he was talking about the solution Westley had almost proposed.
“Me and you. Be mated.”
“You’re my best friend.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t see you that way.”
Tom looked down. “Well, do you have someone who you do see that way?”
“No.” Westley set his cup down. “No one. Maybe everyone’s right and I’m destined to be an old maid.”
“Well, yeah, probably,” Tom said, after a moment of consideration.
“Asshole!” Westley tossed a pillow at him. Tom laughed in surprise and threw one back. From there, it was all out war until Tom called a truce in deference to his still hurting head.
FROM HIS VANTAGE point, Jaylen sees feet. Furry feet. And blood-coated snouts ripping flesh. His mother’s dead eyes stare at him, holding her silent warning that he should stay quiet and hidden. Another wolf growls into his father’s corpse. His father’s red-soaked boot is the only part visible to Jaylen. His older brother’s hand dangles limp and open over the side of the bed Jaylen hides under. Jaylen could reach out and touch it.
Something—he can’t tell what—startles the wolves, and the one eating his mother howls. The others join in, and one by one they bound out of the open door. Jaylen catches a glimpse of a silver tail. That wolf turns around and tracks back to the bed. As Jaylen watches, the wolf transforms into a man. He crouches down and leers at Jaylen.
“Big to be hiding, aren’t you?”
Jaylen tries to scramble backwards, but he’s against the wall, and the man... wolf... man reaches in and drags him out. He stares at his family’s shredded remains, at the hole where his father’s chest used to be, at his older brother Sunny’s missing cheek that their mother had kissed not fifteen minutes before. Jaylen can still feel the gentle pressure of her lips on his own cheek. He tries not to let his gaze go over to her, but he can’t resist, and her bloodied nightgown sears into his memory with the rest of the desiccation.
“Why?” It’s the only word Jaylen can say, the only word that matters. It is the last word he will say for two years.
The man shrugs. “Nature.”
Jaylen steels himself to attack, but the man strikes and knocks him down. He towers over Jaylen, who lands at his father’s feet. “Now that I’m not hungry, I’d like to play.” He tilts his head toward the door. “You best run, son.”
He grins to bare his growing canines. Jaylen, shoeless, sprints for his life.
He awoke in a panic, clutching the motel’s scummy comforter. Denton—he’d learned the wolf’s name later—had chased him up a tree and trapped him all night.
“Hello, Jaylen.”
Jaylen forced his head to turn. The girl from Curlicue’s beamed at him.
“Remember me? Leslie?”
“Don’t recall wanting your name.”
She feigned a pout. “Oh, my fault. Thought you might care about a sixteen-year-old you murdered.”
“That last word ought to tell you different,” Jaylen said. “Leslie,” he added, pointed. “You and your dad are monsters. Your mother too, I’d bet. I’ll find her next. End her like I did you.”
Her smooth pink face fell. She tugged on her yellow dress. “Trevor said I looked so pretty in this. He was going to ask me to prom.” Tears rolled fat and round down her face. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“Save it for someone who cares.” A wave of nausea sent him flopping onto his stomach, tied legs twisting. When he settled, she was gone, but another took her place, then another. Crying, screaming, bleeding from the wounds he’d made. Jaylen closed his eyes, listened to his strangled breathing, and did his best to ignore them.
He’s sixteen, dropped out of school, and prime suspect in his family’s murder. The case falls apart when he fails every psych test they throw at him, when he doesn’t speak. They stick him in a loony bin and he draws wolves and men and wolfmen and looks at the charts when the aides aren’t attentive and sees euphemisms for “crazy” written on his. He gets out when he’s eighteen; homeless, penniless, and hopeless until a veteran he sits beside outside a grocery store takes a shine to his art (“I seen wolves too, son.”) and puts a knife in his hand, points him at an oak tree and tells him to throw. He does, hour after hour, day after day, until he hits the same spot each time. Until he’s ready.
JAYLEN PULLED OPEN the motel’s thick curtains to let the afternoon’s sunshine in. Good. He could give himself a few hours “sober,” get some work done, and take the drug again in the evening. He’d learned not to waste these buffer hours, not if he wanted to stay standing. The risk of being seen had stopped him from disposing of the bodies as thoroughly as he would have liked, but Jaylen had done the best he could given the parameters he had. (Shut them in the cellar behind a stack of boxes and wiped the place clean.) Depending on how caffeine-addicted the townsfolk were, he figured he had anywhere from an hour to a day before people noticed they were down two citizens. Hell, they could have figured it out while Jaylen was playing self-bondage games. From there, he had maybe a half day before a search heated up. A day after that and he’d come under suspicion as a stranger in town. It was an old song he’d sung a hundred times before.
He’d need to move the bodies.
For that, he’d need nightfall and to know the layout of the town. Where was the best place to disappear a pair of corpses? He’d seen a blocky two-story brick building when he’d first driven through town. He pulled his jacket on and headed for his car to make his way there. “Identify the library first” might seem like an odd rule in these high-tech days, but most of the little towns didn’t have a web presence, and Google Maps didn’t identify any road that didn’t lead a person to the town and straight out of it. For that information, Jaylen had to make nice with a local Marian. Ironic that he spent so much time in libraries now, but when his life had been normal, he’d done all he could to avoid them.
He’d been a piss ass student and damn proud of it. Now he had the fucking Dewey Decimal System memorized. Sunny would be so proud. (Sunny’s real name was Elmer, but because of his disposition he’d been called Sunny since before Jaylen was born. It was the only name Jaylen ever knew him by.)
The sun was high in the sky when he jogged up the cracked cement steps of the library. The main desk was right inside. Two librarians sat behind it. One older, one younger, both out-aging him by ten years. He walked up to it and addressed the older one. “Hi, I was wondering if you have a town map I could look at?”
“Sure.” She pulled a folded map from a drawer. It was frayed white at the creases. “Looking for anything in particular?”
Jaylen offered a good ol’ boy smile. “No, ma’am. Just passing through. My atlas doesn’t tell me anything except how to do that, and I’d like to see some sites while I’m here.”
“Well, you’ll want to see the craft fair over at the Victorian House Museum,” the other one said. “It goes on all weekend.”
Jaylen touched his forehead with two fingers, an imagined tip of the hat. “Yes, ma’am. Sounds perfect.” He waved with the map he’d been given toward an empty table. “Is it all right if I take this over here?”
“That’s what the table’s for, son. You let us know if you need anything el—” She was cut off by the cascading whoosh-thump of what sounded like a shelf of books falling and a man’s startled voice from somewhere in the stacks yelling, “Ah, shoot!”
“Excuse me.” The younger librarian gave Jaylen a tight smile and hurried toward the noise. “Westley,” she said as she got closer, sounding like an exasperated kindergarten teacher.
“I’m sorry, Paula.”
The apology that followed was delivered with a voice as shamed as an embarrassed child’s.
Jaylen glanced at the older librarian and saw her trying not to laugh. “Clumsy young fool,” she whispered. Then, in a slightly louder voice, “Let us know if you need any other help.”
“Thank you.” Map in hand, Jaylen took a seat. He sat so he could face the door and have an eye on the direction of the commotion. Eventually, Paula emerged with a towering young man trailing after her, his Neanderthal arms loaded down with books. His face was hidden by a curtain of sandy brown hair that curled every which way at the ends. He looked down as he walked, shoulders slumped. “I didn’t mean to, Paula,” he said, still sounding miserable.
“You never do, Westley.” She stopped at the table and Jaylen realized with some surprise that, despite ten other empty seats available, Paula intended for Westley to sit opposite him. She pulled the chair out. He sat without question, dropping the books in front of him. Jaylen’s eyes skimmed over Tall Grass Prairie Wildflowers, The Midwestern Native Garden and other titles related to local flora. “Now, please, try not to break anything.”
Westley hung his head as Paula walked away. Jaylen couldn’t help looking, trying to see what was underneath those bangs that reached down to his chin. You’re not dosed up. Don’t go trying to get into a potential wolf’s pants. His gaze zeroed in on Westley’s moving lips, both as thick as one of Jaylen’s index fingers—not that he was comparing—he leaned closer, trying to hear what Westley was saying.
“Is she gone?” Westley spoke almost without sound.
Jaylen nodded.
Westley grinned and closed the distance between them over the table. “One of these days,” he said, his voice as mellow and nuanced as Jaylen had come to expect from the bulls-eye middle west, “she’s gonna kill me.” Being so close, Jaylen couldn’t help getting a good whiff. Westley smelled nice, not like cologne, but pure scrubbed goodness with an undercurrent of sweat. Pulling his map to him, Jaylen gave him a good once-over. Jock build, but he was in a library, so maybe he didn’t have the stereotypical brains to match. Whether from discomfort over the scrutiny or to give Jaylen a better view, Westley pushed a few strands of his hair behind his ears to reveal a slender nose that rounded off at the lightly freckled nostrils and a square jaw dotted with twin smile dimples on his cheeks. Jaylen fumbled with getting his map open.
Wolf Hunter Page 2
