Frost Security: The Complete 5 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  He flipped it around to the back. “Yeah. Used to see these kinds of tracts all the time back when I was growing up. Heaven’s Gate wannabes, doomsday cults, Krishnas. Good banana bread, though.”

  “Ew.” I made a face. “You actually ate their bread?”

  “What? I was poor and hungry, and needed the potassium.” He flipped open the pamphlet as he sat down next to me, the bed sagging under his weight. He began to read from the pamphlet’s back text: “‘And, lo the wolf god will eat the moon and the stars from the sky, and only the sinners will find the light through their savior. For he shall be the righteous path, and those who stray from his path shalt be like lambs to the slaughter and fall like wheat before the scythe.’”

  A shiver went down my spine at the words. “Think this has something to do with Eve?”

  He shrugged, his eyes wide as he flipped it around to look at the front. “Lupo Congregation. I dunno. Who the hell are these guys, anyways?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said with a shrug. I flipped through the Bible in my lap until I found the bible verse listed and began to read from it: “‘Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased.’”

  “Well that’s fucking pleasant. Nothing like the Old Testament for apocalyptic imagery, I guess.”

  “Good old fire and brimstone.”

  “What do you think?” he asked, handing the pamphlet back to me. “You know your sister. Would she go in on this kind of thing?”

  I sighed, considering it. Eve had always taken more after Mom than I had, with all the zodiacs, astrology, the charms, and the burning of sage to cleanse spirits. I, on the other hand, took after Pops. Don’t get me wrong—I understand why Pops fell in love with Mom. She was a beautiful, loving, feisty woman. But he was a pretty concrete guy and a hardcore atheist. He just indulged her in a lot of her stuff.

  I wasn’t nearly as militant as Pops had been, of course. Where he’d been hard and unyielding on most points, I’d grown up in a community surrounded by churches, communes, old hippies, and deeply Catholic traditions. Even after more than two decades on Earth, and having listened to all sides I could, I still didn’t know what to believe. I guess I was spiritual, but not really religious.

  Eve, on the other hand? She even had a dream catcher over her bed and kept little Kachina dolls around her room back home.

  I almost envied Eve, though. Who didn’t want to believe in magic or that there was something beyond us? The supernatural or whatever? It must be nice.

  “Yeah,” I said finally, “she might. Especially if she thought it was a good place to hide out.” I flipped the brochure open and looked through it. There was a map on one page, showing a turn off from Highway 259, which branched off I-25 north of Casper. I pointed to it and handed it back to Jake, pointing to the star on the map. “I think this is the place, right here.”

  He scratched his beard. “Yep. Looks that way.” Well, let’s do some research tonight. See what we can find about this Lupo Congregation, then head out there tomorrow morning to see if they’ve seen your sister. How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Good. There’s a burger place I saw on the way in and a gas station across the street. I’ll run out and pick up something to eat, grab a few drinks, then we can get down to some research.”

  My stomach grumbled in agreement. “Good idea.”

  I walked him to the door and Jake made sure I locked the door after he left. “Safety first,” he explained.

  I just rolled my eyes. What did he think would happen? A Big Bad Wolf was going to come along and eat me?

  But who was I kidding? His worry and protectiveness over me was actually kind of sweet. Well-founded, too. A hitman did threaten us at lunch. At least he didn’t give me his pistol and insist I sit in the bathroom with my gun trained on the door. That was almost exactly what Pops would have done.

  With my phone out, I climbed back on the bed and started to do a search for “Lupo Congregation Wyoming.”

  Their web page popped up at the top of the search engine, and I clicked on the link. The destination site was really old-looking and poorly designed, like something from the early days of the internet. It had a turquoise background and purple text that you could barely read, with links all over the place. I hadn’t seen anything this bad since I was in middle school. After seeing their pamphlet, though, I don’t know why I expected something slick and swanky.

  I’d read through the front page, which was really just a rehash of their flyer, when I decided to click on the “About” link to their founder. A portrait popped up on the front of a good-looking older guy, maybe in his early fifties, with the name Reverend Fenris below it. His hair was cut short, and he seemed to be smiling like the entire world was his playground and he was just excited to have a chance to explore it.

  His short bio was below his image. Apparently he’d been lost with a dead-end job, his family dead from their home burning down. He’d been doomed, he thought, contemplating shooting himself on the night of the full moon. But a wolf’s howl in the distance had stopped him just as he put the barrel to his head. The wolf, he preached, saved his life. He lowered the gun and the black wolf came down from the mountain, took the pistol from his hands, and ran away with it into the desert. When the end comes, it will be the wolf that aids in the judgment.

  I rolled my eyes as I hit the back button and returned to the home page. “You’ve got be fucking kidding me.” This was ridiculous even by Mom’s standards. I flipped through the rest of the site and began reading through everything. It seemed to be a combination of old myths, Amerindian legends and folk-lore, and just a hint of traditional eastern and western religions thrown into the mix, like they’d taken some sort of belief-blender and tossed them all in together, and what they poured out into the party’s red Solo cups was laced with wolf fur.

  My phone sounded an alert as I clicked on the last page.

  It was a text message from an unknown number.

  Ask Jake Wayne about what happened on the mountain last summer.

  Last summer on the mountain? What was that supposed to mean? And what about Jake?

  Who is this? I texted back. What do you want?

  A few minutes passed as I sat there, chewing my lower lip.

  It’s important, my unknown informer texted after about three minutes had passed. He has a secret that you need to know.

  Immediately, my mind went to the darkest places it could. Was he a rapist? A cold-blooded murderer? A serial killer? I shook my head. No, none of those made sense. If he had been a rapist, he sure was dropping the ball, what with all these missed opportunities. I mean, maybe he’d done something like that in the past. But I didn’t think so. Jake just didn’t seem the type. And, if he was a murderer, why was he helping me find my sister? Wouldn’t he have been cold and callus?

  What secret? I texted back finally.

  An important one. I have info about your sister. When you want it, send his answer and I’ll give it to you.

  I dropped the smartphone in my lap, the wheels of my mind turning slowly as I tried to figure out just who exactly was sending the texts. It had to be someone who knew about me, someone who had my number. It also had to be someone who knew Jake well enough to know his secrets.

  Could it have been someone back in Enchanted Rock? One of the bartenders?

  Or even someone that worked with Jake? Surely, he’d told them who I was and where he was going on this trip. I drummed my fingers on the cell phone’s dark screen, contemplating what to do.

  I guess I could just ignore the text, right? We were already one step closer to finding Eve. And she was close, I just knew it. I could practically feel it in my gut.

  But what if they had some incredibly important bit of information? Like she�
��d really fled to Portland, Oregon and this was all just a sham, a red herring to throw us off?

  And, more importantly, I couldn’t know this wasn’t just someone looking to use me to dig for blackmail information on Jake. Maybe the person on the other side of the texts just thought something had happened up on the mountain, and they wanted confirmation.

  With my teeth still gnawing away at my lower lip, I turned my phone’s screen back on and unlocked it. I reread the short exchange of text messages, and thought about why I was sitting in a shitty motel room in a shitty little town in the middle of Wyoming. Eve. That’s who I’d come here for. Not for Jake. Not for anyone else. Just for my baby sister.

  If whoever this was had one bit of an important clue about my sister, I needed it. I had to have it to make sure I did the best I could when it came to finding her. I silently nodded to myself.

  No, I countered with myself, it wasn’t just about finding her anymore, was it? Yeah, she was the beginning of why this had all happened, the point this all rested on. But Jake, and what I felt for him, held the same weight. I could practically feel the way my attraction to him was boring into my heart, how it was going deeper and deeper with every word we spoke to each other, with every single glance and touch.

  The sound of his breath, the look in his eyes, how his shoulder had felt so perfect beneath my head while I’d drooled all over it, how fucking right his hands had felt on my body as he guided me out of Crossroads.

  But if the feelings inside me for Jake were real, didn’t I deserve to protect myself also? Shouldn’t I try to get these deep dark secrets out in the open before I wasted any more of my life chasing after something?

  Each man and woman, we’re only granted so many days and nights, so many weeks and months on this planet. And I’d already spent so much time taking care of Pops, expended all those months by his bedside when I could have been out living my life. Now that I’d found a man like Jake, I owed it to myself to make sure things went right, that the dark, cobwebbed corners of our lives had a flashlight shown in them.

  “Yeah,” I said to myself. “What if it is really bad? Like, really fucking bad?”

  That was it. I was going to have to ask Jake about his secret.

  No mincing words. I’d do it as soon as he got back.

  I mean, how bad could it be?

  Chapter Thirty-two – Jake

  My heart stopped the moment Elise asked me about what happened on the mountain last summer.

  Everything had seemed fine and dandy for the first few minutes. I’d come in with the beers and burgers, as well as an order of French fries and an order of onion rings on the side because I hadn’t bothered to check to see which she’d like.

  I mean, she’d seemed a little tense. Like a geyser just struggling to see whether or not it would burst. After a moment of waiting, trying to hold back, she finally asked her question.

  But the mountain a year ago?

  She could have asked any question. Why that one? Had she overheard me and Spike? I slumped down in one of the chairs at the small table and cracked open a beer.

  “I got a text,” she explained as she, still sitting cross-legged on the bed a good distance from me, pointed at her phone for emphasis. “They said if you told me your secret, and I texted what it was to them, they would give me more information on Eve.”

  I gritted my teeth and tried to swallow. My mouth was dry, though, and it was like trying to choke down a glass of sand. I tipped back the bottle, slugging down about half of it in one go. “Elise,” I murmured, stopping to wipe the back of my hand across my mouth. “Don’t.”

  She rolled her shoulders forward a little, slouching down, defeated.

  “How bad is it?”

  “You can literally ask about anything else. My childhood, what I did in high school, who I popped my cherry with, my time in the Special Forces over in the sandbox. But not this. Please not this.”

  “It’s a big secret, then? Too big to share with me?”

  “You mean you don’t have any you wouldn’t share with me?”

  She sighed, looked away. “Look,” she said after a long while, “I’m going to be honest here. I know you served in the military. I know you were a cop. I know you’ve done things you weren’t proud of, things you wish would just go away. That’s the way life is, sometimes. I even know you’ve probably killed people.”

  I took a long swig of my beer, trying to think of what I could tell her to get her off my back. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her. Or that I wouldn’t ever tell her. It’s that the time wasn’t right.

  “But why is this such a big secret? What happened up there, Jake? Why won’t you tell me?”

  How do you politely explain to the woman of your dreams that you’re actually a wolf in human clothing? Or a human that could pull on wolf clothing? Not only that, but what she wanted to know was going to probably fundamentally alter her entire life.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but just decided the beer bottle needed to be there before any of my half-assed, stupid words tumbled out. I took another drink. Yep, that was a good plug.

  “I just,” she said after a minute or so of my silence, “I thought you cared about me and I thought you cared about helping me find my sister. That this was important to you, and I was important to you.”

  I looked up at her, eyes wide. “I do, Elise.”

  “I know we haven’t spent a lot of time together yet, but I think the last person I spent this much time with was my pops. Before that, it was probably my best friend Jeanine. And that was in high school!”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I get it. Last people I spent this much time with were my unit. I don’t even spend this much time with my co-workers.”

  “Why won’t you tell me, then? What’s so bad about it? Did you hurt someone?”

  I wiped a hand down my face and scratched my beard as I groaned out loud. “It’s not that simple. It’s not an ‘I killed a man in Reno just to watch him die’ kind of thing. It’s bigger than that.”

  “Like a government secret?”

  I shook my head. “No, neither of us would go to jail if I told you. Well, I don’t think we would.”

  “Then just tell me, Jake!”

  I’d slowly begun to realize that arguing with her wasn’t going to get me anywhere. The look on her face, the set of her chin, and the way her brow was furrowed told me she wasn’t going to back off. I sighed again.

  “Jake? I…I care about you, too, okay? But I need to know now. If this is so bad you don’t want to tell me, then I feel like I have to know. I have to be able to say whether this is bad or not.”

  Another swig of beer and silently regretted that I didn’t pick up a fifth of whiskey to go with it. That was it. This was the moment I knew I was going to have to tell her what I really was. I was going to have to open that part of my life to her inspection, so she could at least see how deep the rabbit hole went, and how big and bizarre the world could really be.

  But, still, I needed to check to make sure she wanted to go through with it. It was the only thing that was right. Hurting her was the last thing I wanted.

  “Okay,” I said before draining the last of my beer and grabbing two more. I popped both tops and got up to give her one. “I’ll tell you. But before I do, I need you to know that this is going to change things.”

  She took a drink of her beer. “Between us?”

  “Everything. What I’m going to show you, you’re not going to have ever seen anything like it before.”

  She leaned forward, saying in a voice barely above a whisper, “Do you have, like, two dicks or something?”

  I gave her a blank look. What? “Fucking seriously, Elise?”

  She shrugged, turning a little pink. “What? That’d be pretty wild, wouldn’t it?”

  I sighed and shook my head. “I’m serious. This is big.”

  “Okay,” she said with a nod, “okay, I get it. So what’s the big secret? Just tell me already.”

&n
bsp; “I’ve really gotta show it to you. You won’t believe me otherwise. I promise you’ll just think I’m crazy.” I set my beer on the nightstand before turning and heading for the bathroom.

  “This isn’t like a stripper routine or something, is it?” she asked me.

  I looked back over my shoulder. “Elise. Please just open the door when I signal you to, okay?”

  She gave me a wide-eyed looked as she took another swig of her beer. “This is going to be bad, isn’t it?”

  “It’s gonna be something. Just…just don’t be alarmed. I mean, you will be, but there’s no need to be scared, okay? I’m right here.” I stepped into the bathroom and saw Elise’s look of confusion and unease before I closed the door. I took a deep breath and began to strip out of my clothes. This was the biggest decision I’d ever made in my life. Bigger than joining the Marines. Bigger than joining the police force. Even bigger than choosing to move out to Colorado and join Frost Security.

  It wasn't that I was worried about my wolf taking over. Like I said before, I've never had a problem around humans. Lacy had seen me as a wolf before, and I hadn't gone for her. Hadn't even considered it. No, this was more about telling my mate.

  “Everything okay?” Elise called as she got up off the bed and came over.

  “Yeah,” I said as I folded everything carefully and placed them on the small counter, which was so cramped part of my stack of garments overlapped with the sink. “Just give me a minute. I’ll let you know when you should open the door.”

  “Why don’t you just come outside on your own?” she asked, sounding a little confused.

  “Doesn’t work that way, that’s all.”

  Then, I began to shift. I took my time, not wanting to cause myself any pain or any more noise than I had to. The little enclosed bathroom was barely able to hold me as a human, let alone when I was shifted into my wolf form. But I didn’t know how else I could do this without her freaking out over the way my body changed. Fur sprouting, bones changing positions? Not exactly an attractive sight.

  Naked, I dropped to all fours, my fingers shortening as I splayed them over the cheap linoleum flooring, my body arching, my tail growing, my jaw lengthening. As slow as I was going, none of it particularly hurt. But I was still structurally altering my body, so it wasn’t exactly what you’d call comfortable, either.