by Молли Харпер
Honestly, I gave up. There was no way to keep Nick from finding out about us. He seemed to have some sort of unholy gift for putting himself in exactly the right place at the right time. He was just going to keep doing this sort of thing until he got himself killed. Maybe it was better this way . . . but there was no way I was going to admit that. I held my arms across my chest self-consciously and glared up at him.
“I knew it!” he cried, half accusing, half triumphant.
“Fine, fine,” I spat, throwing up my arms. “I’m a werewolf. Happy?”
“Actually, yes, a little bit,” he admitted, sliding his glasses onto his nose.
“What the hell is that thing?” I asked, snatching the little air horn out of his hand.
“Oh, uh, a friend of mine in the bio department at U Dub came up with that,” he said sheepishly. “He’s still testing it as a defense system for hikers. It works at a decibel level and frequency that are almost debilitating for canines. If you come across a wolf on the trail and use it, the wolf will either run off or be too distracted to chase you when you run away.”
“He’ll make a fortune,” I muttered, slapping it back into his hand.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you. I was just trying to break up the fight—” Realization suddenly dawned on Nick’s face. “Oh, hey, wait a minute, so that means that whole scenario with the nudity and the kissing and the rubbing in your truck—that really happened!”
I blushed. Blushed! I never blushed, and here it felt as if my cheeks were going to burst into flames. “No, it didn’t!”
He grinned winsomely. “Trust me, I keep very careful mental records of the beautiful women I’ve seen naked. And you are a very memorable entry in my—”
“If you say ‘spank bank,’ I will literally knock teeth out of your head.”
“I was going to say—” He stopped in mid-sentence, suddenly aghast. “Where does a nice girl even learn a term like ‘spank bank’?”
“I’m not a nice girl. And I spend a lot of time with barely postadolescent men,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Look, can we have this conversation somewhere a little less secluded and open to attack? What are you even doing out here?”
“I heard Alan make some crack about this being a high-traffic area for the wolf sightings. I came out here to investigate. I saw the wolf . . .”
“And you assumed it was a werewolf and not, say, an actual timber wolf that could rip your throat out and leave your bones scattered all over this clearing?”
“I thought it was Cooper,” he said, paling. “Oh, shit, was that a real wolf?”
“No, that was a werewolf,” I said, shaking my head and eyeing the tree line.
“So, why are you so upset?”
“Because I didn’t know him.”
WE ENDED UP stumbling our way back to Nick’s, although Cooper and Mo’s place was closer. I didn’t want to have to explain to my brother that I’d phased in front of Nick again or endure Mo’s superior little smirks.
I called Samson to tell him I would be away for the night and to watch the borders of the valley for strangers. He was confused, but I was using my “don’t question me” tone, so he agreed. I turned back to Nick.
I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling oddly naked. Well, I was naked. But I felt more naked than usual. How was I going to do this? I wondered. What would this mean for my family? How much of this was I telling him because I wanted him to understand the pack, and how much of it was I telling him because I wanted him to understand me?
We basically stood in his front hall and stared at each other. I turned on my heel and walked into his kitchen. On the wall, he had a map marked with red pins at the attack sites. He had tried to mark the estimated hunting range, with a list of average wolfhunting ranges posted on the wall next to mileage estimates from each attack site to Mo’s house. He had our accident scene marked with a blue pin. He had two huge lists written on two sheets of legal paper. One was marked “Proven” and was completely blank. The other was titled “Total Bullshit—Probably” and included “full-moon phasing,” “bipeds,” “bitten vs. born,” and, finally, “silver bullets” with a question mark next to it. And there was a stack of little notebooks, each one filled with scribbles.
“Technically, silver bullets will kill us,” I told him. “And so will real bullets. Bullets kill pretty much everybody.”
He nodded and pulled out a Sharpie to make a note on his chart. “Good to know.”
“You don’t have any other little James Bond gadgets I should know about, do you?” I asked, eyeing the air horn, which he’d tossed onto the counter. “A gun that’ll launch a net over me? Cufflinks that shoot bear mace?”
“Nope. That would be pretty cool, though.” His lips twitched a little when I glared at him. “But obviously not appropriate.”
Snickering, he tossed me a pair of old basketball shorts and a Reidland High School Greyhounds T-shirt. I turned my back to slip into it.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, suddenly very close behind me, running his fingertips along three slashing scars down my back.
“Angry bear. I was on a run with my brothers at Eagle Pass,” I murmured. “I was young. I thought I was the biggest, baddest thing on the mountain. The bear reminded me otherwise, when I got too close to her cubs.”
“But you heal so quickly; I seem to remember something about that,” he said.
“Sure, we heal, but we still scar. It’s not like we’re vampires.” Nick’s face lit up with delight and a million questions, so I had to add, “As far as I know, vampires are not real.”
“Damn it,” he grumbled as I pulled the shirt over my head and slid into the shorts. Nick lifted my leg and examined the waffle pattern of tiny dents along my thigh. He quirked an eyebrow.
“Never piss off a porcupine, no matter how jolly he may seem,” I explained gravely. “Cartoons are very misleading.”
He pointed to another long white streak on my shin.
“Softball game, sliding into second. Samson wouldn’t get out of the damn baseline.”
He laughed, then traced his fingers along the faint trio of short lines just over my throat. “I’ll get to that one,” I told him. His brows furrowed. “Ask me anything,” I offered. “I’ll tell you all about us, and then I’ll tell you why you shouldn’t share what I tell you with other people.”
His face lit up as if I’d just offered him the Holy Grail, a Babe Ruth rookie card and Megan Fox’s phone number.
Just to take the look off his face, I added, “That reason includes the words ‘because I’ll kill you and make sure no one ever finds your body.’ “
“I can live with that.” He nodded, making little “hurry up” motions with his hands.
“No, no,” I told him. “I don’t start the explanations until you have your little notebook and a number two pencil and all that crap. I don’t like interruptions.”
Patting his pockets frantically, he ran for his notebook, and it was clear that he had pages of carefully scripted questions. His eyes scrambled over the pages for a few moments before he finally looked up at me, pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, and said, “How?”
“How do we change?” I asked. He nodded. “It’s just genetics. Some people have good balance or are really good at making egg salad. We can change into abnormally large wolves.”
I explained to Nick that there were packs all over the world. Our pack happened to be descended from people who lived in the valley. An outsider crossed the frozen oceans, made his way over the mountains, and married a valley woman. He must have come from Russia or northeastern Asia, where there were a lot of packs. Either way, something about the mixing of their bloodlines produced the first wolf-sons, two huge, burly, probably pretty hairy fellas. There was a terrible winter, and the hunters couldn’t get enough food for their families. People were starving. The Northern Man’s elder son wished for the strength of the wolf, so that he could provide for his family and neighbors, and he w
ished so strongly that he was able to phase. And then his brother, seeing what the elder could do, joined in. They were able to hunt up enough food for the whole village and store some away, which was almost being a millionaire in the those days. The other villages kept asking how they did it, but my ancestors were smart enough not to tell. Instead, they shared what they had and prevented jealousy, which was pretty damned ingenious. I like to think my family invented public relations.
“Phasing just became a way of life,” I told Nick. “They had a lot of kids, all of whom could transform. So could their kids, and their kids, et cetera, et cetera. And here we are.”
He was silent, his eyes all shiny and bright like a kid’s on Christmas morning.
“I’m starved,” I said, motioning at his cabinets. “Do you mind?”
He shook his head. I took a carton of eggs out of his fridge and heated a pan. I opened his spice drawer and was shocked to find garlic salt that was at least five years old and what might, at one point, have been nutmeg.
“Mo would be appalled by this,” I told him, clucking my tongue.
“I’ll subscribe to the Spice of the Month Club if you keep talking,” he promised solemnly.
“Well, don’t do that online; you’ll be shocked by your search results.” I cracked eggs, beating them lightly. I poured them into the pan and took a hunk of cheddar cheese from the fridge. I sniffed to make sure it was mold-free. I wasn’t a cook. I didn’t have the knack or the time for it. Plus, my mom never let me near her stove. You melt one microwave, and the woman completely loses her sense of humor. But at the moment, it felt nice to move around the kitchen, to keep my hands busy and give myself some time to work through what I wanted to say.
“Can you make toast?” I asked.
He nodded, coming out of whatever contemplative fog he’d been in. “So, is the pack set up like a real wolf pack? Is there an alpha male?” he asked, sliding wheat bread into the toaster.
“Actually, there’s an alpha female,” I said. His jaw dropped. I grinned and pointed to myself.
“That is so hot,” he groaned. “Not to be a chauvinist, but how do you get dozens of big, burly guys and older, stubborn ladies to listen to your every command? Don’t they resent being bossed around by a woman?”
“Well, Dr. Dolittle, as you well know, there are lots of matriarchal setups in the animal kingdom, including killer whales, bees, and elephants. Mother Nature isn’t completely chauvinist,” I said, chuckling. “It’s not typical for werewolves to be led by a female, but in the absence of the rightful alpha, Cooper, it was the pack’s choice. The alpha serves as a sort of leader for the village. While the lesser pack members have property rights and general free will, all major decisions must be filtered through the alpha couple. Or would be, if I had a mate.”
When he frowned, I could almost see the “sounds like a cult” wheels turning in his head.
I added, “I know it sounds weird. Wolves work together to make sure that everybody in the pack is fed, safe. They’re conditioned to work in harmony under a clear social rule. They need a single voice to lead them, the alpha. So when the alpha tells you to do something, even if you know what he’s asking is stupid or dangerous, you’ll do it. And you’re happy to do it, because it’s for the good of the pack. You need that community, the family, to feel complete. It’s a little harder for me, because I’m not the rightful alpha. Sometimes I have to appeal to my pack’s collective common sense and, well, their fear that I’ll kick their asses, to get my way.”
“So, if the pack is so important, why did Cooper leave?”
I lifted an eyebrow and flipped an only slightly singed cheese omelet onto a plate. I poured more eggs into the pan and grated more cheese. I forked a huge mouthful of omelet into my mouth. “You really don’t know how to ask softball questions, do you?” I asked around my food.
“Well, it’s not like I don’t share!” he exclaimed, handing me a piece of buttered toast, which I promptly devoured. “Now that I know that the truck interlude was real, I know I told you about my crazy childhood. I can break out the stories about being left in the family station wagon while my mom gambled for twelve-hour stints. We can play the ‘whose childhood was more screwed up? game. Because I’ve never lost.”
I countered, “My dad was shot in the head by research scientists because they thought he was going to eat them.”
He pursed his lips. “So, you are a contender.”
Oh, hell. If I was going to do this, I was going all in. He was probably going to find out anyway. My mom would probably tell him over tea and cake. I took a deep breath and told him my story, that when I was sixteen or so, another pack came to the valley and tried to take it. Cooper had only been alpha for about a year. I guess at the time, I didn’t realize how young Cooper was. He was my big brother and always seemed so grown-up to me. But he was practically a kid, and not only was he taking care of me and my mom, but he was running the pack, too. Looking back, I’m sort of ashamed that I didn’t see how much stress he was under. But I was young and, well, stupid.
Late one night, this other pack showed up and dragged me out of my bed into the street. I explained, “The alpha, this huge guy named Jonas, held me by the back of the neck and told Cooper that he’d wring it like a chicken’s if we didn’t just hand the valley over and disappear.”
“Like Roanoke?”
I squinted at him.
“Colonial Virginia . . . whole community disappeared into thin air. It’s like the first unsolved mystery of the New World.” He held up his hands as I flipped the omelet onto his plate. “I’ll tell you later.”
I rolled my eyes. “Anyway, these numb-nuts had apparently hunted their own packlands into nothing, and the valley is known to be a particularly sweet setup in the were community.”
He frowned while he chewed. “I assume that’s a werewolf faux pas?”
“Territory is all we have sometimes. You just don’t do that. Werewolves are genetically programmed to protect their packlands, to stay close. Ripping a pack away from that is just evil. A wolf’s brain is hardwired to protect a certain area of land, to hunt there, to live there. And that’s the way it’s been for our pack for almost a thousand years. So, if they’d managed to snake it out from under us, imagine fighting against that kind of draw, every waking moment of every day. It would be torture. The sick thing is, if they’d come to us and asked if they could stay, I know Cooper would have let them. Hell, he did offer them a place, even when they threatened us. He’s just that kind of guy. He’s better than me, kinder.”
“Eh, you’re not so bad.”
I pressed my hand over my heart. “Thank you, really, the praise, it’s heartwarming.”
“You know that you’re fantastic,” he said.
“Thanks. Back to my story. So, Jonas is shaking my head so hard I can actually feel my brain bouncing around in my skull. And I’m just laughing my ass off, because I know any minute, my brother’s going to open a case of whoop-ass on this guy. I could almost taste the fight, and it was going to be beautiful. I was so caught up in the anticipation that it took me a minute to realize Cooper was just standing there. He was frozen. It hadn’t even occurred to me that he wouldn’t know exactly what to do. I mean, how stupid is that?”
“Everyone idolizes their big brothers,” he said, shrugging, pushing my hair over my shoulder. “What happened?”
“I kicked Jonas in the balls and called him a jerkoff.”
He snorted. “Well, of course, you did.”
I shrugged. “I figured it would wake Cooper up, draw him into the fight. And man, Jonas was pissed. He phased faster than you could blink and went right for my throat.” I dragged my fingers over the faint white lines left behind by his claws. “I thought, Bring it. If Cooper isn’t going do his job, I’ll do it. But damned if Cooper didn’t phase and shove me out of the way. I tried to circle around, get at Jonas myself, but Cooper wouldn’t let me. When I finally got a shot in at Jonas, I jumped at him too early, and th
e fucker pinned me. I would have felt like an asshole, except he had his teeth at my throat. I was too busy panicking.” I twisted my fingers around the blankets and looked down. This was the part of the story I hated. The one I’d never talked about with anyone but Mom and Cooper.
“Go on, Maggie, please.”
“Cooper knocked him off me. And he, um, he killed him. You know what they say about cutting the head off the snake? Well, it just pisses the rest of the snake off. The enemy pack circled on Cooper. They were going to tear him apart, and he took them all on. He killed all of them. He wouldn’t let any of us near the fight. Except for a straggler male who tried to jump on his back. I killed him, without even thinking about it.”
Nick was quiet, picking at the remains of egg on his plate. “Does it bother you?”
“Oh, hell, no,” I exclaimed with false, exaggerated cheer. “It’s awesome to know I’ve taken someone’s life, that I’m responsible for taking a wolf out of this world, when there are so few of us left. My mom brings it up every Thanksgiving, so the whole family can relive the memory.”
“I’m glad you’re taking this seriously,” he dead-panned.
“Cooper had a hard time with it. He had nightmares. He lost weight, stopped running with the pack. He didn’t want to be near any of us. He couldn’t bring himself to touch our mother, wouldn’t even hug her, for the longest time. He said he was afraid of what he was, of what was inside him that let him kill people, even if it was in defense of the pack. If I’d known anything back then, I’d have known he probably had PTSD or something. But I thought he was being dramatic and stupid. Everybody tried to talk to him, to tell him how proud we were, how proud my father would have been. But nothing stuck. He just sort of retreated into himself. The pack suffered. It was like mass depression or something. Nobody wanted to run or hunt. Without a leader, we were more vulnerable than ever. I got scared, and I was hurt . . . and that’s not something I work through very well. There was a lot of, um, lashing out.”
“Imagine,” he said dryly.
