by Eden Myles
“Yeah, sis,” he told her, trying to neaten the mess he’d made. “But I’ll have Burt look in while I’m gone.”
Burt was their super, who lived across the hall. He often looked in on Hannah when Kevin was at work. Their building was a surprisingly tight-knit community, even for New York City.
Hannah plopped down on the bed beside his duffle and started arranging his clothes neatly. “Kev, I’m not a fucking baby, you know. Besides, Matthew’s coming over this weekend to help me study, should I need anyone to protect me.” She rolled her eyes dramatically at that.
“Good. Though I’m not so sure he’s a good influence on you, given your potty mouth of late.”
Hannah gave him a hard look—or as hard as she was capable of with her watery pale blue eyes fixed somewhere other than his face. “Fuck you, big bro. I had a potty mouth long before Matthew. You know that.”
For a moment, Kevin feared there would be an argument. Then they both burst into laughter. Kevin leaned forward and kissed his sister’s forehead, shushing her long bangs out of the way. “I know, sis. But can’t you just let your big brother worry about you?”
Hannah gave him a tight hug. “Only if you let me worry back. What do you do up there in the mountains? I know it’s not fishing. You’re no good at that.”
“Hiking, sleeping…nothing that would interest you,” he lied.
She grinned mischievously. “I think it’s where you keep your porn stash, but whatever.” She hugged him again and he tweaked her nose.
“I’ll be back by Sunday night. Don’t get in trouble, Hannah Banana.”
“That’s me—trouble-free.” She got up to leave the room, trailing her fingers across the wall to guide herself. Hannah getting in trouble was highly unlikely, he knew. She had dreams of being a famous attorney someday and was a serious study horse. She wanted to prove a person’s disability didn’t define them. Besides, if Matthew was showing up, Hannah wasn’t going to be going anywhere. They’d been dating for four years now and Matthew was fiercely protective of his girlfriend.
Ten minutes later, he was heading for the door, the duffle over one shoulder. “I’ll have my cell turned on all weekend,” he called to Hannah. “And there’s beef stew in the fridge. You just need to heat it up slow!”
“Got it!” she called back. “And I hate you!”
“Why?”
“You eat so much and never gain a pound!”
Kevin grinned. “Don’t burn it!”
“I won’t!”
“And don’t let Matthew eat it all!”
“Yes, Mom!”
Less than an hour later, he was well on his way up to the Poconos. It was a two hour drive on the back roads, but serene and scenic once he got past Jersey City. It wasn’t long before he hit the mountains and the road became steep and winding, the dense green pines and blue firs closing in on both sides of the highway. He drove with the windows down even though it was hot and humid, almost the height of summer, and his old secondhand Jeep did, in fact, have AC. He wanted to breathe in the piney, wild forest air as the sun slowly sank beyond the mountains and he wended his way up to his boss’s cabin.
Jolene had won the place in her divorce settlement. She hated the country but had kept it out of spite. She knew her ex loved it and was huge on hunting. Jolene had been lending it to Kevin for years, one of the many reasons he liked his job at the Barracuda. It wasn’t much, little better than a hunting shack, but once every two weeks or so, Kevin called it home for a weekend. It was private and tucked away, didn’t even have electricity, just a generator in a shed in the back. Jolene rarely ever visited it, but she was happy to lend it to Kevin because it kept the local troublemakers from ransacking the place for valuables like copper fixtures, a common problem in the area. It looked as tranquil as a forest postcard when he pulled the Jeep up the final stretch of gravel road and cut the engine. “Or like something you’d see in one of those teen slasher movies before it all goes to hell,” he joked with a wry smile—except he wasn’t worried about being surprised by a mutant redneck wielding an ax like in all those movies. After all, he was more a monster than anything that could be living in these woods.
The cabin was rustic, made of all hand-cut, redwood logs, with pine and elm trees abutting it on both sides. Little of the surrounding forest had been cleared away. Behind the cabin was the shed, then the dock and, finally, a quaint little fishing hole with some wild trout in it, a rowboat tied to a pylon. Kevin had never used the boat or been out on the water. He had no interest in fishing, though he did consider himself a formidable hunter.
He felt the hum of unspent energy as he got out, listened for a moment to the busy birdsong in the treetops—a sound so very different from the constant, angry roar of the big city—and then hurried up the creaking, plank wood porch stairs, letting himself in with the key Jolene had given him. He didn’t bother turning the power on just yet; he could struggle with the old, rusty 2-cylinder generator on his return from his run.
Run, he thought, his mouth virtually watering with anticipation. Hunt. Feed. The most primal of thoughts filled him with a nervous, ravenously hungry energy.
He threw his duffle bag on the cot in the corner and immediately shucked his clothes off, throwing them in every direction and kicking away his shoes. The cool, slightly musty air tickled his naked skin as he disrobed. He sniffed the air, found it good, shook himself all over like he was casting away his city life, then he was out the door and racing into the forest just as fast as he could.
He bounded nimbly over fallen trees, forest brush, and huge, jagged rocks thrust up from the ancient Pennsylvanian bedrock. He ran, his feet barely touching the ground. He leaped a nearby stream with no effort at all, lading easily on all fours, then took off again into the forest, breathing hard in and out, muscles bunching and working, mind racing and yet strangely sedate in his present, almost meditative, state. He felt comfortable, alive. His humanity sloughed off with every step he took and the wolf came awake. He scattered birds and small animals in his wake. And somewhere along the way, he shifted.
***
Chapter Three
Kevin was fourteen years old when the wolf came to him the first time. He was making out with a boy named Josh when he felt the first crackling, electrical twinges of the change washing over him.
Josh was the definitive jock. He played basketball and every girl in their freshman class had a major crush on him. Ironically, Kevin never looked twice at him. He just wasn’t into jocks, period. He was tall and slender and redheaded pale. Other than the occasional soccer game for PE, he hated playing sports. He liked reading and playing video games with his small circle of friends. He liked animals and going to the zoo. He didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he wanted it to be something spectacular—a doctor or lawyer.
Then Josh passed him a note one day in English, and Kevin’s whole world changed. The note read, I know what you are. Meet me behind the bleachers at 3:30.
Kevin threw it away. But at quarter after three, he found himself plodding across the football field, his shoes and the cuffs of his jeans wet from the rain that had fallen that afternoon. Josh was waiting for him. He was alone, no one lying in wait, which made Kevin feel somewhat better. “Is this a joke?” Kevin said anyway, because you never knew. “If it is, it’s not funny.”
“No joke,” Josh said. He had a couple beers stashed in his knapsack, which he pulled out and opened. He gave one to Kevin. “I like you. But I don’t want them finding out, is all.”
“Who?” Kevin said, accepting the beer like it wasn’t his first.
Josh shrugged. “Everyone.”He drank down a sip. “You wanna go to the movies or something?”
Kevin shrugged too. “Can’t. I have to pick up my sister, walk her home.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“She goes to a special school for the blind.”
“Oh.” Josh nodded. “How about Saturday?”
That week
end, in the darkened movie theater, Kevin kissed a boy for the first time. It was a nice kiss, warm, not too sloppy. It was swiftly followed by many more weekends, and many more kisses. That summer, after school let out, Kevin and Josh went to Youth Camp in the hopes of finding some alone time away from parents and teachers. When they could get away from the counselors and daily activities, they spent their time making out in the woods.
One night, after they’d snuck away from their cabins and met up in a clearing outside camp, they laid down together in the leaf litter, kissing and touching, and Josh said, “You taste really good, you know that? But your eyes look funny in the dark.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.” Josh touched Kevin discreetly between the legs for the first time, gently squeezing his balls.
Kevin lurched from the sudden, unfamiliar sensation and sat up. Josh looked worried and said, “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Kevin said. He’d liked how it felt, actually. It made him feel more alive than he’d ever been. The forest looked brighter, lit in shades of bright grey, and the air was alive with scents so powerful he could taste them in the back of his throat: the decomposing leaves, the cool, damp earth, the sap of trees and musky scent of animals. He could smell the thin sheen of sweat on Josh’s skin, the coppery tang of blood underneath it. He realized he wanted to kiss Josh’s skin, his blood.
When Josh pulled him down for yet another kiss, Kevin nibbled his bottom lip, followed through with a quick, sharp bite to the side of Josh’s neck. Josh moaned as a little blood trickled loose.
He was half afraid that Josh would tell him to fuck off, but Josh seemed to like it, and Kevin did too. He sniffed along Josh’s hair and neck. He licked at the tiny wound he had made. The scent of Josh’s blood burned coolly in the back of his throat. He kissed Josh, and they made out while they fumbled with each other’s pants.
Kevin licked along the other boy’s lower belly, licked and snuffled along Josh’s skin until Josh was stiff and almost bursting with arousal. They rolled over, blowing each other and giggling like idiots. It was the most fun Kevin had ever had since sneaking out of the house with Hannah to see a horror movie at the local cinema when they were younger.
Afterward, Josh got redressed and hurried back to camp. He said the woods were too spooky to sleep in at night. Kevin stayed. He didn’t think they were scary; he thought they were beautiful and full of life and energy. He didn’t want to go back yet. A few drops of Josh’s blood had fallen to the damp earth from the place where Kevin had kissed him. He could smell it. When Josh was out of sight, Kevin carefully licked the earth where they had fallen.
He shivered all over as the wolf took him over, quickly and efficiently. He’d seen enough werewolf movies to know what was happening, but this wasn’t anything like those horror movies that he and Hannah had seen late at night. It didn’t hurt. It was like a rush of adrenaline. He felt fear, triumph, and sudden, overwhelming…freedom. In seconds he shimmered from a young man to a four-legged animal, his russet fur glinting in the moonlight.
He was hungry, ravenous. Soon he was racing with wild abandon through the woods, his heart pumping, his human thoughts a low, steady murmur in the back of his brain. He knew who he was and he knew he had no wish to hurt anyone, but also knew he was a wolf, and the wolf needed to hunt. He bounded easily over rocks and deadfalls. He splashed through streams, the icy water soothing his fever and soaking his plush, reddish pelt. His feet barely seemed to touch the earth. He felt less like he was running and more like he was flying. His energy was boundless; he felt he could run all night long.
And he did, gobbling up whatever prey fell into his path—squirrels and chipmunks, snakes and frogs. He drank from a nearby riverbed, then ran again. His hunger to be free seemed insatiable.
Come morning, he woke on the outskirts of camp, muddy and naked, lying behind a rotted log. Thankfully, he was up before anyone else and was able to sneak back to his cabin without being seen. He thought about what he was, but it didn’t seem awful, just another part of him that needed to be accepted, like being gay. And it wasn’t the last time the wolf visited him, though he never told anyone about the wolf—not his parents, not Hannah, though he told her everything else.
He came to accept what he thought of as the wolf’s visits. The wolf was not something to be feared, exactly, though certainly respected. He supposed it was similar to how Hannah felt about her disability. It was as much a part of her as anything else. After his first shift at age fourteen, Kevin became rapidly obsessed with lycanthropy. He read all the books, saw all the movies. He studied every “real life” account he could find.
He didn’t find much that helped him, though. The wolf didn’t walk only during the full moon like in the movies—it could appear almost anytime. Silver and wolfsbane seemed to have no effect on him. He didn’t know what, if anything, could kill him, but he wasn’t big on finding out. The only thing he knew for certain was that the wolf wasn’t his enemy, though it did require time off the leash.
Over the years that followed, he and the wolf learned to compromise and coexist. It let him live his human life, but if he didn’t let it run at least a couple times during the month, it became wilder, more demanding, more difficult to control. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, least of all Hannah—after their parents died when he was eighteen and Hannah twelve, she was all the family he had left—so he took pains to give it space and let it run.
The job at the Barracuda became a godsend. Jolene was a great boss, the best he’d ever had. He was a good barkeep, watched after her dancers, did her favors all over the place, and in return, she lent him the cabin and time off when he requested it, though she had no idea what he did with that time. No one did. Hannah thought he had his porn stashed up here; Jolene figured he had a married boyfriend he was hiding. Both of them were wrong.
How do you explain to your boss, your friends, and your kid sister that you change into a wolf a couple of times a month? How do you tell your lovers?
The wolf made him stronger, faster, more intuit. But in return, he had to respect its boundaries. He had to run his life around it. A career was out of the question. He knew there was no job he could take where he could make his own hours. He couldn’t be a doctor or lawyer. He would never do better than the Barracuda, and sometime during his second semester of college, he got practical and dropped out. It hurt to give up, to give in, but he managed. He knew he wanted more out of life than to be a barkeep forever, but he didn’t know what that was or how to get it.
It hurt more to know he would be alone for the rest of his life. He never told Josh, or any other lover he ever had, about the wolf. They wouldn’t understand. They’d figure he was a freak. But not telling them left him feeling like a liar, like he was deceiving them. He had this huge secret, this massive, private part of his life, and he couldn’t share it with the one he loved. There were boys in high school, of course, and during his college stint, he’d been with a few guys, though he never let things get too serious. He made it just about sex. The emotionally-distant relationships he developed never lasted for very long.
No, he thought even as he cut soundlessly through the trees and leapt effortlessly over ravines, the forest skirting by him in a dark green blur, he couldn’t trust his heart to anyone. His heart, like the rest of him, belonged to the wolf. The wolf was all. The wolf was all he would ever be.
His lungs, brain and body filled with the lush wildness of the evening forest. He loved the woods and he loved to run. In a way, it was his lover. He let it fill his senses to overwhelming, until the aching, haunting loneliness inside him subsided once more to a low and almost imperceptible murmur. In the twenty-eight years of his life he had never met another werewolf. He was likely the only one of his kind, maybe the last werewolf on planet earth. He could never allow himself to fall in love. It just wasn’t in the cards for him.
Then he met the black wolf, and everything changed.
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***
Read a 3-chapter excerpt from Lone Wolf (The Wolves of Wall Street #2) by Jay Ellison:
Chapter One
Chef William Le Feuvre was putting the finishing touches on a Coq au vin, a French dish of chicken braised with Cognac, mushrooms and garlic, when he spotted Dylan Mackenzie from across the hot, bustling kitchen. She was standing in the bistro’s pantry, having snuck in the employees’ door, and was quietly observing the controlled chaos taking place in the kitchen of the La Bistro Moderne, the restaurant he and his business partner Nat owned, and one of the hottest French bistros in Chelsea. Sous-chefs and pastry chefs, all under William’s rock-solid command, scurried by on one mission or another, and servers in smart uniforms banged in and out of the swinging doors to the crowded dining room beyond.
Dylan’s sudden appearance made William’s heart leap in his chest. As always, the sight of the pretty, petite girl sent him back to another time, another place. His workplace, co-workers, Nat—all of it quickly faded away around him. His chest swelled with pride at the amazingly graceful sight of her. My little girl all grown up…how beautiful she is!
And she was that—slender and leggy, dressed in a smart grey turtleneck with pearl buttons and a long twill skirt and ankle boots, her ribbons of dark, curling hair pinned up with just a few tendrils drifting around her sweet, mocha-colored, heart-shaped face with its lush, dark eyes, soft, full lips, and heavy black lashes.
“Will!” Nat sputtered from the dessert station, waving her arms wildly to catch William’s attention. She pointed at the pot in front of him.
Jerking back to the present, William looked down where he was pouring Cognac wildly, and without paying much attention, into his Dutch oven as well as over the surface of the counter and onto the linoleum floor. Cognac had even splashed down the trousers of his once-immaculate cook’s whites. “Bloody hell,” he said, setting the bottle down with a sigh. The chicken was burning out of control and Cognac surrounded him in a slippery, treacherous puddle. He made a low growl of displeasure in the back of his throat, which he thought—hoped—the other cooks couldn’t hear, and swiftly carried the flaming chicken to the sink to put out the fire.
