by T. S. Joyce
Dean’s backyard made the perfect place to Change. The transformation took ten minutes before he slipped into human skin once again, eternity as each bone broke and reshaped. When he was finished, he lay there waiting for his body to feel like his own again. Clenching his jaw, he shoved himself upward and staggered on his feet. God, this was weird, walking upright again. His fingers were clumsy and useless and his feet didn’t work efficiently. His balance was unsteady as he moved toward his truck. On the porch, he found his clothes washed and folded neatly on the railing. Leaves littered the top layer like they’d been lying there for some time. He dressed slowly, careful of skin that still sparked with an uncomfortable sensation at the slightest touch. Felt like he’d rubbed every inch of his skin with sandpaper.
With a grunt, he pulled himself into the driver’s side of his truck and closed the door.
His patience thinned as he inhaled. Where he’d expected leather and the tree-shaped air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror, something soft and feminine filled the cab instead. “Marissa, get out.” His voice came out hoarse and barely recognizable.
“I can’t stay here.” Her voice shook and she smelled of sorrow. “Logan and Jason are coming over later today, and I don’t want to be here when they get here. They won’t leave me alone.” Misery drenched every word.
Grey sighed heavily and leaned his head against the steering wheel. “I get it. I really do. You were way too young when you got Turned, and now you have two wolves waiting on you to become old enough to choose a mate. It’s a lot of pressure, kid. I know. But you aren’t safer with me.”
“Yes I am.”
Grey growled and leaned back on his chair, rested his head on the head rest and prayed for patience. “That’s a mistake, thinking that. You’re young, Marissa. And you’re maybe desperate, or fuck, I don’t know. Kid, I’ve got nothing left. I am literally the last person on earth that has an icicle’s chance in hell of fixing anyone’s life for them right now.” He rolled his head toward her and let his exhaustion show. “Surely you can see I’m not myself.”
“I don’t want anything from you but a ride, Grey. I don’t want to talk either. Just ignore me if you want. Here.” Marissa handed him a hand-written list from the back seat. “Mr. Brennan called here asking for you. He said you weren’t picking up your phone. I kept your phone and answered your calls. Hope you don’t mind, but if Morgan called, well…I thought someone should pick it up and fix y’all’s shit.”
“Don’t cuss,” he growled.
“You cuss all the time.”
“Yeah, well I’m basically Satan, so good luck changing me. Do better with the language, Kid.”
“Stop calling me that,” she mumbled.
She shook the paper in her outstretched fingertips and he took it, unfolded it and read the list.
“Mr. Brennan said you need this stuff to close tomorrow. The meeting is at two o’clock. The address is on there too.”
“Tomorrow? How long was I in the woods?”
“Two weeks today.”
Shit. No wonder his body hated him. He tried to get a feel for Wolf, but the animal inside of him had apparently been sated with running the woods so long and was content and quiet. Was the damn thing sleeping, or dead? God let him be dead.
I heard that, Wolf said lazily. And now I’ll give you nightmares all night. You’re welcome.
The stiff leather of the seat squeaked as he relaxed into it and scanned the scribbled list. Most of the paperwork he needed was from the bank, but since he was paying cash and not taking a loan out, it was doable to get everything done before tomorrow. He needed to meet Derek Brennan at Stewart Title Company and sign the papers tomorrow, and if all went well, he would own the land he’d become so connected to in less than a day. This had to go right. A hot shower and big dinner would have to wait a while longer. “I have errands to run. You can come along if you want, on one condition.”
“Name it,” she said from the back seat.
Grey looked at her through the rearview mirror. Her sandy brown curls were pulled back in a ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing any make-up today, so her freckles stood out. She looked so young, but when she locked eyes with him, they were a hundred years old. “Call Dean right now and tell him where you are, and why you want to come with me. I want you upfront and honest with him so he doesn’t think I’m stealing his kid.”
With a muttered, “Yes, sir,” she made the call. After she hung up, she handed him the wooden box he’d carved for Morgan with the black velvet ring holder inside. “I kept it safe for you.”
He nodded and shoved it into the glove box and rubbed his eyes. It had been a grueling Change and they were dry. With a quick glance at the girl in the back seat, he shoved the truck into first gear and eased his foot onto the gas.
If he’d been in a laughing mood, he would have at least cracked a smile that Marissa felt safe enough around him to skitter closer when the growing line at the bank caved in on her. The damned line was out the door and people were trying to escape the winter chill by crowding the place. He put on sunglasses and swallowed a growl for a man who elbowed Marissa by accident. Eventually, he gave in and shoved her in front of him to keep the line from pushing.
Holding the door open for her as they left, he asked, “Did you eat lunch yet?” The paperwork he held clutched in his hand fluttered in the breeze as he climbed into the truck behind Marissa.
“Yeah, earlier, but I’m hungry again,” she admitted.
“What do you feel like?”
“Food. I don’t care. Whatever you want.”
He pulled into the parking lot of a burger joint and ordered four cheeseburgers and fries with soft drinks to wash it all down. They carried the bags of food to a picnic table out behind the restaurant. It was chilly, but he hated eating inside restaurants now. He got claustrophobic around humans, and smell of fast food and grease inside was so overpowering, it was hard to smell anything else. Eating outside kept Wolf’s pissing and moaning to a minimum.
Marissa ate in silence and looked anywhere but at him. When she had swallowed her last bite of burger, she cleared her throat feebly. “Morgan has been to the house a couple of times. She brought Lana with her.” Her hazel eyes darted to his and then away as her freckled cheeks colored in a soft pink blush. “She tries to act tough, but she’s hurting. Everyone can tell.”
“Does she look okay? She’s not losing weight, is she? How is Lana?”
“Honestly? Morgan looks like she hasn’t slept since she was Changed, and yeah, she’s losing weight. Lana is her happy-go-lucky self. I can tell Morgan is hiding the hurt from her and just being positive and fun. But when Lana isn’t around, Morgan just stares at a wall a lot. She won’t let anyone around her but me, and sometimes Rachel. The wolf…well she gets defensive fast. She confuses me.”
“How so?”
“She seems submissive to my wolf, but then she’ll pick a fight with the boys. Even tried to pick a fight with Dean the other day. With Dean, Grey. She went after an alpha. I mean, afterward, she apologized a lot, but she ain’t steadying out. I can’t tell where she would rank in the pack. And there’s something else.”
“What?” he asked, feeling gutted with all of this.
“I heard her crying in the bathroom after a Change. She was spending the night at Dean and Rachel’s, and it was really late, I was asleep and she was trying to be quiet, but it woke me up. I went in to check on her, and when I opened the door, she was crumpled up on the floor with her knees tucked up and her arms around her stomach, and she was crying. And her eyes were so bright purple, Grey.” Sadness swam in Marissa’s eyes. “They never turn green when she’s at Dean and Rachel’s. I know. I watch.”
He wanted to flip the table. He did, and what a monster he was, that this was his reaction.
“I can’t fix it, Marissa. I can’t fix anything. What can I do?”
“You can be patient. You can wait. You can build a life like you had planned and hope she heals enough to real
ly see you again.”
Holy shit. Marissa was an old wise woman in a young girl’s body. “You care about her, huh?” he asked.
“Very much. Pain recognizes pain.” She shrugged and wadded up the empty wrappers of her burgers. “I don’t want her to be alone, so when she comes over to Dean’s, she never will be. I just follow her around at a distance and make sure she knows someone is there. I’ll do that until you figure out how to be there for her.”
Huh. He liked this. He liked that Marissa had gotten protective and caring, and that Morgan allowed her around. He liked that Marissa had stepped in when he’d gone Wolf and quietly taken care of what he couldn’t. And he hadn’t even asked her to do that. She’d just seen a need and quietly taken it on. Good kid. “Come on, let’s go.”
The small grocery store near his apartment was a ghost town at the odd weekday hour. Grey hadn’t been back to his place in a month, and any food he did have would be long spoiled by then. Marissa didn’t say much as they shopped. She held on to the side of the metal cart until her knuckles were strained and white. He wanted to ask if she was all right, but every instinct in him said she would run if he pushed her to talk about whatever was bothering her. That kid had problem in public, around people.
When they were done with that errand, he drove them back to his apartment. Marissa had never been here before. He opened the door and the smell of Morgan hit him like a thick fog. Overwhelmed, he set the bags of groceries down. If it smelled like her, he couldn’t stay here, so he set to work. He removed the sheets, still messed up from Lana jumping on the bed, and threw them all in the wash. Marissa sat on the couch and watched him silently as he removed the pictures of Morgan and Lana from the refrigerator and shoved them in the bottom drawer of his dresser.
He grabbed the trashcan and shoved everything that was in the refrigerator into it. The smell of rotten food clung to everything, but at least Morgan’s scent would be masked.
He set the garbage bag by the front door to take out later and wiped down the inside of the fridge. Next, he unloaded the groceries, and Marissa came in to help. A tiny object sticking out from under the bed caught his attention and he went to pick it up. In his large palm lay one of Lana’s little gloves. Anger fueled Wolf and he yelled, throwing the mitten into the wall. He ran his hands through his hair and Marissa disappeared out the front door with the trash bags in hand.
He jumped in the shower and let the hot water soothe his screaming muscles. Leaning against the teal-colored tiles, he let the memories of what he’d had wash over him. He couldn’t go forever without thinking about her. She’d been everything once. A man didn’t just get over someone who’d changed the course of his entire existence for the better. He’d lost her. Lana too, and that wound would be held open, unable to heal, for the rest of his miserable existence.
By the time he got out of the shower and dressed, Marissa was asleep on the couch. Her face was completely relaxed when she slept, and she looked even younger than her eighteen years. When she was awake, she always looked haunted. Like some terror in her life had aged her eyes.
He cocked his head to the side. When they’d met, Wolf had terrified her. She hadn’t even been able to look directly at him, much less hold a conversation with him until the night Alexis had Turned Morgan. For all the months of fear, it was strange that she felt safe enough around him to fall asleep in his den.
He didn’t want to wake her, so he turned the television down and covered her with the red down blanket that was draped across the back of the couch. He collapsed in his sheet-less bed and passed out just as the light of afternoon shifted to that of evening.
Moments later, someone shook him awake. Bright hazel eyes hovered over his face and he lurched straight up in bed. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m hungry,” Marissa whispered.
Panicked, he searched the dark. Where was he? Where were the trees of the forest and the clean breeze?
“You’re home,” she said, cowering to the edge of the bed. “Everything is okay. I just need food.”
Slowly, his muscles relaxed and he rubbed his hands over his face. “What you need is to go home. Let me find my keys.”
“I already called Dean, and he said I can stay over here if I want to. Logan and Jason are still there, and I don’t want to deal with them.”
“You have to deal with them sometime,” he snapped. “They are in your pack, so you are bound to run into them sooner or later.”
She arched her eyebrow. “I still need food.”
“Fine. We’re going out though. I can’t stand being cooped up in here anymore.” He needed to build a house. A big one out on his land. Living as a wolf for a couple of weeks had greatly skewed his view on living in his cramped city apartment. The walls were inching in by the minute.
The tiny diner down the street with the eye-scorching neon sign and black and white checkered floors would have to be good enough. The food was terrible there, but it was the only close place he could think of that he hadn’t taken Morgan and Lana. When they slid into the sticky seats of a booth, he ordered them a couple of root beers and flicked the menu in front of his face to deter conversation.
“Have you ever heard the phrase every werewolf has a sob story?” Marissa asked.
He peeked over the menu and narrowed his eyes at her. Maybe he’d been wrong about her ability to take hints. “No,” he said with a sigh. “Why?”
“Did Dean ever tell you why I’m here?”
“Like why you are here on this planet?” he asked, confused.
“No, why I’m here in this pack. I’m from Nevada originally.” At his blank stare, she pressed on. “Okay, did you ever hear about a serial killer a few years back in Nevada? It was before your time, but he was a werewolf, a man-eater, whatever you want to call him. He went on a huge killing spree through three states before the Old Ones were able to track him down and end him. They called him the Lady Killer, because that’s what he was.”
He dropped his gaze back to the menu. Werewolf story time didn’t interest him any more than the picture of greasy chili-cheese fries featured on the plastic in front of him.
“Well, he liked little girls. They were sort of his specialty.”
“Marissa,” he said, putting his menu down. “Is there a point to this story, other than to kill my appetite?”
She huffed a sigh. “His name was Raul, and he was my maker.”
“What can I get for you,” a burly waitress with eye-scorching white teeth interrupted, but Grey was frozen in horror to his sticky seat.
“I want a number seven, please. Can you hold the peppers though?”
“I sure can,” the waitress said with a smile.
“Uuuh, that sounds good. I’ll have the same. Thanks.” He smiled stiffly through his sunglasses and handed the waitress his menu. He didn’t even know what he’d just ordered and he didn’t care. Marissa’s maker was a man-eater?
The waitress sauntered away and he leaned forward. “What happened?”
“He picked me up about halfway through his little murder-spree. I lived with my mom at the time because my dad died when I was a baby, so it was just us. Raul came into our home one night, forced us in the trunk of his car and took us out to his workshop. That’s what he called it. I won’t bore you with the details, but my mom didn’t make it. Raul decided he liked me and Turned me. He kept me in a cage as his little pet until we moved to the next location. I couldn’t control the wolf. I was only fifteen at the time and it was awful. So I stayed animal in that cage, and he seemed to love having a pet werewolf. We moved a lot. He had this van he would put me in the back of. No matter if I was human or wolf, I stayed in the locked cage. And sometimes it was so hot in there, when he left, I thought I would die. He did bad stuff to me when he felt like it, but that wasn’t the worst part. He would make me watch him kill other girls. They were my age. But after I watched my mom die…well nothing touched me the same and I didn’t understand myself for a long time. Sometimes, I stil
l don’t understand myself.” Her voice faltered, and she paused and closed her eyes. Her hands shook and she pulled them into her lap, out of sight. “Look, my point is, when a girl goes through something traumatic, such as watching a person she loves die, her view on the world gets messed up. She wonders why did she lived when the person she loved didn’t?”
“Are you talking about Morgan?”
“Yeah. You’re a boy. You’re built the same as every other boy. You want to fix things. You’re fixers. But sometimes us girls don’t need to be fixed. We need to deal with our shit—”
“—no cussing—”
“—with our issues on our own, and we just need you there to listen. Not get loud and want to stomp out anything that hurt us. Sometimes we need that, but not always. Right now, she needs you to be her backbone while she’s learning how to stand on her own.”
“She doesn’t even want me around her,” Grey murmured. “How can I be her backbone?”
“All you have to do is let her know she isn’t alone,” she said softly. “That’s what Dean and Rachel did for me. Morgan is pushing you away because she’s scared. Life is short, and losing her sister like that? It will make her want to live her life to the fullest to honor her. She won’t want to tether herself to a man for the wrong reasons. She’s wrong, obviously. Even a human could tell how strong your connection is, but she’s scared of making the wrong decision. She’s feeling like you don’t want to marry her for the right reasons, so she’ll push you away and test how quick you’ll give up. Don’t. You have to show her you care about her. Her. Not the Silver Wolf. Morgan. You are a beast, Grey. Your wolf is a freaking brute and you just let her leave. I get that you don’t want to push her after everything she’s been through, but buck up. Let her know you still care.” She leaned back for the waitress to put her plate of food in front of her. “But then again, what do I know? I’m only a kid.”
He took a long pull of root beer and studied the girl. No wonder she had been afraid of him. She looked like a young girl, but really, that part of her life had been stolen from her. And for as much as she seemed to function normally, what Raul had done would haunt her life forever. He wanted to kill the man who’d done this to her. And there it was, she was right, he was a fixer. He imagined torturing the black soul who would ruin a little girl like that psychopath had done. She was wise beyond her years and she was right. Everything she’d said made sense, where he’d felt nothing but confusion for weeks. He’d messed up and explained it wrong to Morgan, made her feel like she was a chore, not the love of his life. And when he should’ve been fixing things with Morgan, he’d let Wolf take over instead. “When did you become so brave, telling the Big Bad Wolf when he is being an asshole?”
