A Pack of Blood and Lies

by Olivia Wildenstein

  I stepped over rocks and splashed through a creek. At some point, I caught a whiff of white jasmine and something else. Something chemical—Windex. I was approaching a house.

  You’re going the wrong way.

  I froze. I wanted to ask which way was the right way, but I’d chew off my paw before I would admit I was lost.

  The Flatirons are to your left. Liam’s low drone carried over to me like the buzzing fireflies flitting around my ears.

  I’d been relying on my sense of smell but had forgotten to look. I tipped my head up and located the Flatirons. And then I raced over earth and downed logs, muscles smacking against my hide like elastics. When the inn materialized, I slowed my pace. Bodies moved on the spacious terrace, glasses clinked, and fire snapped in a wide copper pit set between the Adirondacks.

  I scurried along the lip of the forest, hoping the centennial trees would keep my wraith-colored form hidden from the guests having dinner. The scent of chargrilled meat and tangy barbecue sauce wafted toward me. My stomach gave a violent growl.

  I loped around the side of the inn toward the parking lot but froze before turning the corner.

  I couldn’t enter the inn in wolf form.

  I would need to shift back, but I’d be naked. And my bag? Where was my bag? It must’ve fallen outside Liam’s house. I squeezed my eyes closed, my tail whacking the wall in frustration.

  Jeb would have a second key.

  Craning my neck, I looked around for Liam—I’d lost his scent at about the same moment the inn had come into view.

  He was gone.

  Finally.

  Taking in a deep breath, I closed my eyes and let my human form bleed over my animal form. In seconds, I was a girl again. A bare-assed girl covered in dirt, with twigs tangled in her snarled hair. Thankfully, it was long enough to hide my breasts, revealing only their underside. I rose from my crouch, and shielding my privates, I crept toward the revolving door.

  A mother with her child walked by, and I slammed my backside against the wall, praying they hadn’t spotted me. Once I heard their voices peter out, I peeked inside again. The coast was clear. I pressed my muddy palms into the glass and pushed the door, then sprang toward the bell desk and dove behind it. Feet—small with copper-polished toenails—appeared underneath my face.

  I craned my neck and locked eyes with Lucy. A sigh of relief whooshed out of me.

  Her irises were framed with so much white that I could tell the feeling wasn’t mutual. “Ness,” she hissed, but then she flinched at the sound of approaching voices and all but shoved me inside the back room that stank of potpourri from the shelves full of drying petals. “Are you insane?”

  “I lost my bag. And my clothes.” Which was self-evident.

  “What do you think we run here? A kennel?”

  Ouch. “I didn’t do this on purpose, Lucy.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “Can I please get a bathrobe? Or a towel? And another key?”

  “Another key?” Her cheeks were so red they looked like candied apples. “You lost yours?”

  “It was in my bag.”

  “Which you lost.”

  “Which I misplaced. But I’ll find it.” I stood back up, slowly, covering myself with my hands again.

  My uncle’s voice floated from just outside. Lucy jumped to block the office entrance, her collection of metal bangles jangling wildly on her freckled wrist. “Jeb, can you grab an extra bathrobe from the linen closet?”

  “A bathrobe. Why do you need a bathrobe?”

  She shifted to hide the sight of me. “Ness needs one.”

  A beat. Then. “Oh.”

  Once he left, she walked to a wall with lots of tiny hooks and grabbed a key—I supposed it was a spare. The hooks weren’t numbered, but her system didn’t seem very secure. I sensed it wasn’t the right time to offer advice, but it increased my longing to have my own place, a place I could stroll into naked if I wanted to.

  I thought of my apartment back in L.A., then of my childhood home here. I wondered if I would remember how to get there. Wondered if anyone lived in it.

  A white bathrobe smacked me in the face. I hurriedly donned it, tightening the belt until it dug into my waist.

  “You can come in,” Lucy said, I supposed to Jeb.

  My uncle stepped into the room. After he took in my disheveled hair and mud-splattered face, he said, “I thought you were going to dinner with Everest.”

  Right. “I did, but he had a date afterward. He asked me if I would be okay to walk home.” I dragged my hair off my face. “I got lost. And then I changed…and well…I managed to find my way back.”

  Lucy was shaking her face in disbelief. “That’s incredibly irresponsible.”

  I wondered if she was talking about me or about Everest. I didn’t ask.

  She huffed. “Oh, and she lost her key.”

  “Keys are replaceable,” Jeb said.

  “Was it a master key?” Lucy asked suddenly.

  “No. I don’t leave the inn with the master key.” After cleaning the rooms, I always put it in the safe.

  My uncle sighed, a deep, rattling sigh. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the type of key I’d lost though. He sounded tired.

  “I’m going to call Everest. I’m not pleased with him. Not pleased at all. We raised him better than this.” He lifted his phone to his ear and watched me as he spoke into the receiver. Everest must’ve corroborated my story, because when Jeb hung up, he was shaking his head. “He says he’s sorry.” He exchanged a weighted glance with Lucy.

  “Can I go?” I peeped.

  He waved toward the door, and I slid by them, stepping quickly over the wine-colored runner, hoping the sconces weren’t casting too much of a glow on my face. The second I arrived inside my bedroom, I sidled against the door and crumpled to the floor.

  For a long moment, I didn’t move, didn’t flick on the lights, didn’t take a shower. I just sat there on the floor with my knees tucked against me, and I breathed. Just breathed.

  The adrenaline vanished from my body the same way it had come—quietly and completely.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Lucy had me start work early the next morning.

  She stopped by my bedroom to ask that I vacuum the common areas and rearrange the furniture on the terrace. Neither of us mentioned the previous night’s happenings. It was easier to pretend that I hadn’t erupted into the inn like a wild animal.

  I grabbed my earphones from my nightstand drawer when I remembered I didn’t have a phone, which meant I had no music to listen to during my chores. I sighed. But that was the least of my worries. I also didn’t have my wallet. And a key to my room was somewhere in the wilderness, etched with my room number and the Boulder Inn logo, which was basically an invitation to visit.

  After I finished my chores, I would need to retrace my steps to Liam’s house. Would I even recognize the way? Hopefully my wolf scent still clung to the forest floor, and I would be able to follow it back.

  The motor rumbled as I pumped my arms back and forth, dragging the nozzle over the thick rugs and hardwood floors. My shoulders ached, but I pressed on. At some point, my body would adjust to my four-legged activities, and my muscles would strengthen. Besides, the ache paled to the pain that had ravaged my body after the first trial.

  Which reminded me that I had to meet with everyone this evening at Heath’s old place.

  Which reminded me that I would have to sit in the same room as Liam.

  The thought made me vacuum faster and harder. I crouched to get the nozzle underneath the couches, then plucked off the throw pillows decorated with Native American motifs and vacuumed the seats, before fluffing the pillows and arranging them like dominoes. I turned to start on another sofa when I bumped into someone.

  My first instinct was to apologize, but my first instinct fizzled out the second I saw who it was.

  Liam’s nose and jaw were almost healed. It was his dark eyes that looke
d bruised. I guessed he hadn’t slept much, and I hoped it was because of me…of what he’d done. My thighs clenched as I remembered him sniffing me, and the urge to slap him frothed upward.

  “Ness?”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard him. Heart thumping fast—too fast—I moved around the room, hauling the roaring nozzle over every inch of floor, even the areas I’d already scoured. If only I could suck him up inside the hose.

  I heard his slow inhale again, and a bolt of indignation sparked inside my core. In my peripheral vision, I saw him step toward me. I put more distance between us. Finally, he got the message, because he walked out of the living room. It took several minutes for my breathing to return to normal.

  I shut off the vacuum, and as I dragged it back through the double-storied room, I spotted something on one of the couches. Something that hadn’t been there before.

  My bag and my shoes.

  Making sure the doorway was still empty, I strode over and checked the contents of my bag. I even unzipped my wallet. I didn’t carry around much cash, but the little I had was there. I took out my phone, half expecting it would have died during the night, but it had a full battery. Liam had probably charged it to peruse its contents. Sure my phone was password-protected, but the code was my birthday—it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to crack it.

  I had two new text messages.

  One from Everest: Need me to pick you up?

  One from August: Heard you were still in the running. What’s going on? Call me.

  I didn’t answer either. I stuffed the phone back into my bag, returned the vacuum to the closet, and tidied up the terrace. Once I was done, I stopped by the kitchen for food. During lunch, I asked Evelyn if she would accompany me on a little trek: to my old house.

  Although hesitant, she’d agreed. We left the inn in the early afternoon and walked up a long stretch of winding road that ended in a cul-de-sac.

  “One winter, I skidded on ice and fell all the way down the hill. Mom almost fainted when she saw me. I had cuts all over my cheeks.”

  “Was it ghastlier than the way you were returned to me on Saturday?”

  I flashed her a sheepish grin. “Probably not.”

  She looped her arm through mine, her bad leg slowing our pace. The skid of rocks underneath her sneakers worried me—she wasn’t even lifting the foot attached to the damaged calf.

  “Is this too hard on your leg?”

  “No. It is good for my leg.” The ends of Mom’s silk scarf, which Evelyn had wound around her ponytail, fluttered in the warm breeze. “I do not exercise enough, and it is becoming stiff.”

  I kicked a pebble that landed noiselessly inside a clump of heat-bleached grass. The road, which used to be smooth, was pockmarked. I hoped that whoever owned my childhood home was maintaining the house better than the path that led to it.

  When slate shingles rose in the distance, my heart sped up and so did my pace. But then I remembered Evelyn’s leg, and I slowed.

  No smoke curled out from the chimney. Then again, it was summer.

  As we neared the house, I told Evelyn the story of how I forbade my parents from kindling a fire one Christmas, terrified it would char poor Santa. I’d believed he was real until we’d left for Los Angeles. After all, werewolves were real, so why wouldn’t Santa be?

  Moss flecked the purple-gray stone walls, making my house resemble a witch’s hut…if witch’s huts had broken windows.

  I frowned at the shattered glass.

  “Was all of the land your family’s?” Evelyn ran her finger over the heavy purple blooms of the wisteria that wrapped around the beams of our porch and spilled their heady scent into the hot air. After Mom planted the vine, it took years for it to bloom, and then one summer, it purpled and pinked.

  As bees pirouetted lazily next to the blooms, I peered through another cracked, dusty window. There wasn’t a trace of life in the house. It was abandoned.

  “This was my bedroom,” I told Evelyn.

  The previous owners had stripped the mint wallpaper from the walls and painted them a blaring sunflower yellow, but the floor was the same faded-honey color with scratch marks they hadn’t been able to sand down. I remembered leaving them there the first time I’d changed.

  The only feature that remained in the room was a built-in closet that hung open like a gaping, toothless mouth.

  “And in here?” Evelyn asked.

  I went over to her. “That was Mom and Dad’s room.”

  Only a bare box spring and an iron headboard remained. Like my room, it was barren and grubby. My heart squeezed as memories trickled into my mind: dawn-tinted bedsheets, the space between their warm bodies, soft lips on my forehead, fingers running lazily through my hair.

  They’d coddled me—their only child—with unyielding affection and infinite gentleness.

  And Aidan had taken that from me. Desire to understand why he’d shot Dad and then insisted on dining with me made me shake with anger.

  A hand wrapped around mine.

  “Oh, querida.”

  I leaned into Evelyn, and she tightened her grip, tugging me around the empty house to a wall that was all sliding glass doors.

  “The kitchen was Mom’s favorite room.”

  Evelyn turned her gaze up to the strip of sunshine pouring through the mottled gray skylight Dad and Nelson had put in one summer. August had assisted our fathers while I’d served them extra-sour lemonade to show them what I thought about not being allowed to help. I’d felt immense satisfaction when they’d all squinted from the bitter taste.

  My parents didn’t want me climbing high, afraid I’d fall and break my neck. I hadn’t shifted yet, so although everyone watched me closely for a sign that I’d inherited the Boulder gene, I was still deemed a delicate human.

  One night, though, after Mom had headed into town for a girls’ dinner, Dad had let me climb up on the roof with him. With our backs against the sun-warmed slate, we’d gazed up at the sheet of stars. He’d told me how he’d once wished upon a shooting star that Mom would marry him and bear him a healthy baby.

  “Are you sad I’m a girl?” I’d asked him.

  He’d fixed me with his eyes that resembled the surface of Coot Lake at sunrise—a deep gray that veered to silver—and stroked my cheek. “No, sweetheart. I am terribly happy you were born a girl.”

  I touched my cheek as his caress ghosted over it.

  Evelyn stepped in front of me, the scent of menthol eddying thickly around her…around me. “Enough. We are leaving.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You are not okay.” She swiped her thumbs against my cheeks.

  Finally, I relented with a deep, rattling sigh. She was right. I was experiencing a sensorial overload and needed distance. As we walked away, my phone vibrated inside my bag. I checked who was calling—August. I didn’t pick up.

  “Boy trouble?” Evelyn asked.

  “No. I just don’t feel like talking to anyone right now. Except you.”

  She snaked an arm around my waist and gave me a long squeeze.

  “Are you liking it here?” I asked.

  She bit her rouged upper lip before answering, “Sí. Jeb is a kind man.”

  “But Lucy isn’t?”

  “Your aunt is a little…bossy, which is not to say she is malicious. I just prefer your uncle.” Once we’d reached the junction with the main road, she said, “The boy who brought you home on Saturday…he is handsome.”

  Her words flicked my heart. Nope. I was not touching the Liam subject with a ten-foot pole, or a fifty-foot one for that matter.

  “He was very worried when he dropped you off…”

  My cheeks burned with the memory of how he’d violated me. I would never dare tell Evelyn what he’d done. She’d be disgusted, but perhaps not only with him. Perhaps she’d be disgusted with me too. Because she’d ask what prompted him to do such a thing.

  It was a can of worms I had no desire to open.

  Not now.

>   Not ever.

  Chapter Thirty

  I arrived for the meeting five minutes early, but I was still the last one there. I breezed past Liam sitting at the sleek wooden bar that separated the kitchen from the living room.

  Lucas was his usual jovial, annoying self, leering at me from underneath the baseball cap he’d fit sideways on his head. “Have a good time at Robbie’s engagement party?”

  Instead of freezing up or ignoring him, I pasted on a fake smile. “It was awesome.”

  The five elders clenched their jaws, and gazes met and lowered to the chopped centennial tree trunk used as a coffee table. I guessed they’d all been brought up to speed about my visit to the Pine Pack.

  Lucas’s gaze tightened on the elders, their lack of condemnation obviously irritating him. “I have an ethical problem with Ness competing in this trial.”

  Eric shifted on the tan suede couch. “Perhaps she had a good reason for attending.” The clear glass globe pendent suspended over the living room cast a white sheen on his bald head.

  “I did. I wanted to get to know our neighbors,” I said. “Isn’t that required of Alphas? To be aware of everything and everyone around them? Besides, wouldn’t it be nice if the Boulders and the Pines could interact without violence?”

  “They’re calculating pricks,” Lucas hissed.

  “Because you’re not?” I tossed back into his face.

  Lucas scowled.

  “You’ve been plotting my downfall since I signed up for this, Lucas. That’s the very definition of being calculating and a prick.”

  “Aren’t you a little firecracker today?” He laid both his elbows on the bar behind him and leaned back. “Why are we even allowing her to continue? She broke the rules.”

  “She shifted to help Matt,” Frank said, his bushy white eyebrows shadowing his eyes.

  Lucas snorted. “He would’ve been fine.”

  “Still,” Eric said, “empathy is commendable.”

  Lucas’s nostrils flared. His hatred for me was as acrimonious as the sweaty half-moons staining his gray muscle tee.

  “Ness, why don’t you take a seat so we can discuss the second trial?” Frank tipped his head toward the barstool between Liam and Lucas.