When I finally caught up to Callie, her ears were pulled back, tail snapping behind her in anger. “Listen, I get that I’m not going to be able to convince you to turn around and get somewhere safe, so can we compromise? Can I at least go first so if there’s something dangerous out here, I can protect you?”
“I don’t need your protection.”
I sighed heavily and tried again. “Please, Callie.”
She tipped her chin higher and shot me a small sideways glance. “You can walk next to me. That’s the only compromise you’re going to get.”
I closed my eyes for a moment to let the irritation fizzle out. Honestly, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I shouldn’t have expected anything less from Callista McCoy.
“Okay, fine. Just don’t take off again.”
“No promises.”
I just barely held back another sigh, and instead, focused on what we were doing. The smell was getting stronger and more rank the closer we got. And worse, the sinking sensation in my stomach was getting harder to ignore. I had an awful feeling I knew what we’d find at the end of this trail and I just hoped I was wrong.
We walked in silence for a few minutes, both our hackles rising higher the farther we went. Finally, we stepped into a small clearing and found the source of the stench.
Lying at the base of a massive pine tree was a scantily clad woman who had clearly been dead for a while. She looked like she was in her twenties, with dark brown hair and eyes that were open, vacantly staring at the canopy above us. A shiver raced down my spine as all my senses ramped up on high alert.
“Callie. I need to get you out of here.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
“Callie. I’m serious. We don’t know who the wolf is that did this. I need to get you somewhere safe.”
“Wolf? You mean a werewolf did this?”
I winced internally. Clearly Abraham hadn’t divulged that much to his sister. “Yes.”
“Are those bite marks on her?”
My stomach clenched as my eyes caught each bite wound covering her exposed legs and arms. There must have been a dozen. “Yes,” I said again.
She started pacing, walking back and forth between me and the body. “I don’t understand. How do you know this was a werewolf and not a regular wolf? Or a mountain lion? Or a bear? We are in the mountains.”
I swallowed harshly and nodded toward the poor woman lying lifeless on the forest floor. “She’s partially shifted, Callie.”
She stopped in her tracks and slowly turned her head to peer at the dead woman again. I could tell the moment she noticed the small tufts of fur and the way her legs were bent at odd angles like they’d been broken.
Everyone knew humans rarely made it through their first shift. It was what stopped my own father from trying to turn my mom. He wouldn’t take that risk with her life. So, what was this wolf doing? Why did he keep biting these women when they all just kept dying? What could his motives be?
Her hackles rose higher, tail pointed straight in the air. “Who would do this?” she whispered in my head.
I didn’t have an answer for her, but I didn’t think she was really expecting one. All I knew was I needed to get her somewhere safe. Every shadow, every creak or whistle of the wind was a potential threat, each one putting my nerves further on edge.
“We need to go.”
“What’s that smell?”
I sighed again, knowing there was no way I was getting her to leave. She was too inquisitive, too independent, and too damn hard-headed to do what I asked, regardless of the circumstances.
Instead, I closed my eyes and took a deep inhale, weeding out the typical scents like pine, dirt, woodland creatures, and the decaying body in front of us. It wasn’t hard to figure out what she was talking about. It was pungent and intrusive.
“It smells like piss.”
“Yes, but don’t you smell the chemicals in there too. It’s not just urine. It’s something else too.”
“Wyatt. We’re following your scents. We’ll be there in moments,” Abraham said, cutting into my thoughts.
“Your brother’s almost here,” I told Callie.
She nodded as she slowly crept around the body, careful not to touch anything. “I think they used store-bought wolf urine.”
“That’s a thing?”
She turned around to give me an unimpressed look. “Yes. We encourage farmers to use it instead of harmful pesticides to protect their crops from animals like deer and rabbits. This werewolf must have used it to mask his scent.”
I stood there stunned. Abraham and all his enforcers, myself included, had been working on figuring out and stopping these murders for months. In less than five minutes, Callie had given us the first big break we’d had in all that time.
Damn.
Was there anything she couldn’t do?
Callie’s ears perked up the moment I heard the distant sound of thumping paws on the forest floor. We glanced at each other before focusing on the edge of the clearing in anticipation of Abraham and his men. Seconds later, five large wolves burst through the vegetation, stopping short just in front of us.
We stepped aside as the new wolves, Abraham, Calvin, Clyde, Huxley, and Beatrice all gathered around the body. They were quiet for a long time before Abraham finally spoke up.
“It’s him.”
Chapter 13
Callie
“It’s who?” I asked.
Abraham swung his big head my way, blue eyes narrowing. “What are you doing out here?”
I peeked at Wyatt out of the corner of my eye and read the guilt plastered all over his face. But why?
“I… um… was out running and ran into Wyatt.”
“You were out running alone?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. And?”
“I’d prefer if you stuck with the pack. Or at least one of our sisters.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I didn’t say you did. I would just feel more comfortable if you weren’t out this far alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. I was with Wyatt.”
He turned to look at the wolf in question. “What were you doing out this far?”
I glanced at him too and found an interesting array of emotions on his face. He looked guilty, but there was something underneath that. Resignation? Surrender? Whatever it was, it didn’t make sense in this situation. None of it did.
“I was just out for a run.”
Abraham’s eyes narrowed as they darted between the two of us. I knew if he dug too deep, he’d find something to harp on and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with his nonsense. A subject change was in order and I had just the thing.
“What’s going on here, Abey? You don’t seem surprised to find a dead woman in our woods.”
He winced and glanced at the ground before just barely meeting my eyes. “This doesn’t concern you, Callie. You should go back to the lodge and let us handle this.”
I snorted and planted my feet more firmly on the ground. “Not going to happen. Tell me what this is all about.”
“It’s an enforcer matter.”
My tail went stiff and my hackles rose as I bared my teeth at my brother. “Abraham McCoy, I am a part of this pack and deserve to know what’s going on. If there’s someone killing women in our woods, I should know about it.”
He sighed and dropped his head. “The fewer who know about this the better. I don’t want to start panic in the pack.”
“Well, one more in the know won’t hurt. Now spill.”
He sighed again, this time longer and louder, but I didn’t care. He might have been the boss of this pack, but he was not the boss of me, and he’d better remember that.
“It started seven months ago.”
“SEVEN MONTHS AGO?! Why am I just hearing about it now?”
He grit his teeth and growled softly. “Do you want to hear this or do you want to yell at me?”
I dipped my head and he continued
.
“We don’t know who it is, but he kills every few months and the women always look the same. Dark hair, dark eyes, and partially shifted. That’s about all I know.” He grunted that last line and I could tell he wasn’t happy about it.
“This one smells old,” Clyde piped up.
Abraham nodded his big wolf head. “At least a few weeks I’d say.”
“It’s closer though. We’re only a few miles from the lodge,” Huxley added.
Abraham growled softly. “He’s getting bolder.”
“We need to search the scene and then have Paul get out here with a few other police officers,” Beatrice said.
Abraham shook his head. “This isn’t good for us. We don’t need the human police poking around our woods. We’re lucky we have Paul on the inside, but that’s only going to help for so long.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Callie, I need you to get back to the lodge. Wyatt will go with you.”
I was just about to argue when Wyatt beat me to it. “Actually, Alpha, Callie had some insight about this murder you should probably hear.”
Abraham turned to look at me, his blue eyes equal parts weary and determined. It was clear the murders were wearing on him. I felt a twinge of guilt for giving him a hard time, but it passed as soon as I remembered he shouldn’t have kept this secret from me to begin with.
“What is it, Callie?”
“I think the werewolf doing this is using store-bought wolf urine to mask his scent.”
“How do you know that?” Calvin piped up for the first time. He’d been hanging around the back of the pack of enforcers, and I’d assumed it was because he didn’t want to be any closer to the body. My cousin, although one of Abraham’s enforcers, was still just as sensitive as always.
“I recognized the smell.”
“That’s great information, Callie. Thanks,” Abraham said.
I raised a brow as I stared him down. “If you’d confided in me sooner, you’d have had this information sooner.”
He sighed loudly. “Not now, Callista.”
I was inclined to argue some more, but the slump of his shoulders stopped me. My brother was a good guy and a great alpha, he just needed a reminder once in a while that he had more resources than just his enforcers. And that he didn’t need to protect his sisters from every bad thing out there. We were stronger than he gave us credit for.
“All right,” I conceded. “I’ll head back. But just know that we’re having a chat soon. All of us. It’s time you stopped keeping secrets in this family.”
His only response was a grumble about how much easier brothers would have been, but I ignored him. With one last look at the poor woman left in our woods like trash, I turned around to head back toward the lodge.
I knew Wyatt was close behind because, even in wolf form, I could feel him deep inside me. Somehow, it was even more intense than it usually was. Like he was an organ I’d been missing my whole life. Something integral to my survival.
I wish I knew what it meant, but there were other things occupying my thoughts right then.
“I wonder who she was.”
Wyatt fell in step with me. “I wonder who she left behind.”
“She might have a family waiting for her to come home. A husband or kids that’ll never see her alive again.” The thought sent a wave of emotion coursing through me.
“Yeah, she might, or she might not. Either way, she’s got a mom somewhere worried about her, and that’s what gets me the most. I couldn’t imagine how my mom would react if she lost one of us. It was bad enough when my dad died, but no mother should have to bury their child.”
I turned to study his wolf’s profile, noticing how somber his caramel eyes were. “You’re really close with your mom, huh?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Some people grow up and grow apart from their parents.”
“Not me.”
“I see that.”
Wyatt turned to look at me, our eyes meeting and sending that warm feeling rushing through me again. It felt like I was at the top of a steep rollercoaster, ready to tip over the edge and plunge head-first into the unknown. Alongside the excitement and fear was the most comforting feeling I’d ever had. Like his eyes were home and I’d been lost for a long time.
I looked away before I did something stupid and concentrated on the pine needles and old leaves beneath my paws. “I’d like to meet her,” I said before I could really think it through.
Wyatt was quiet for so long that I risked glancing at him again. It was harder to read him in that form, but he looked uncomfortable for some reason. Had I said something wrong? Was there a reason he didn’t want his mom to meet me?
“Yeah. We’ll have to do that one day,” he choked out.
Part of me wondered at his curious behavior, but the rest was back in that clearing with the dead woman who’d lost her life to a werewolf like me. For the first time in my life, it made me ashamed of who I was.
Sure, we had several physical advantages over humans, but we never took them. And it was true that most wolves didn’t care for humans, but werewolves were by nature peaceful and only wanted to live their lives without fear of discovery. The fact that one of us had gone so bad they’d become a serial killer didn’t sit well with me
To make matters worse, it had to be a wolf we were familiar with. Someone from a neighboring pack that one or all of us knew. Otherwise, why mask their scent? And if it was a wolf from a neighboring pack, did the fact they were leaving bodies in our woods mean they held a grudge against us? And why?
“Can we run?” Wyatt asked, breaking into my dark thoughts. “I feel like I need to get some of this energy out of me.”
“That actually sounds great.”
Our eyes met once more, and I gave myself a moment to get lost in them before I shook my head and leapt into a sprint.
“Callie! I’m supposed to be escorting you back to the lodge!”
“Then I guess you’ll have to catch up!”
The run back seemed shorter, but isn’t that how it always is? Before long, the familiar scents of my pack filled the woods and then we were in the clearing behind the lodge. There were wolves scattered around the field in various activities, but I was looking for two in particular. Soon I found Del and Evey by themselves near the tree line, which was good because I had a lot to tell them and didn’t want anyone else involved for now.
I turned to Wyatt. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”
“I guess so.”
The awkwardness seeped into the space between us until it felt like I was suffocating. Part of me didn’t want to leave his side, but that didn’t make sense and I hated when things didn’t make sense.
“Okay. Bye,” I said awkwardly before turning around and walking away. He didn’t respond, but I could feel him watching me as I crossed the distance to my sisters.
Just before I reached them, I turned around to find him just where I’d left him, those light brown eyes trained on me like I knew they’d be. I shook out my fur and tried to forget him. I had bigger things to deal with right then.
After I filled my sisters in on what happened in the woods, we spent the rest of the night speculating about the murders and complaining that Abey had kept us in the dark. Even though most of my brain was centered on my sisters and what we’d found out, that didn’t stop a small part of me from keeping tabs on Wyatt.
Despite my best efforts to push thoughts of him aside, I watched him like a hawk for the rest of the night. It was easier when he began sparring with an enforcer named Jason as it gave me a reason to watch him. Other pack members circled the two wolves to observe their match, but I knew no one watched as closely as I did.
Wyatt was magnificent. He was fast and agile. Quick and smart. He won round after round as I tried to keep my tongue in my mouth and not let it drag on the ground.
Worst of all, it seemed like he was watching me too. Over and over his eyes would meet mine, and ever
y time, there was a sadness in his. A resignation that I didn’t understand. His gaze would trace my body up and down before gritting his teeth and looking away. I wished I knew him better so I could have a chance at understanding, but I had no one to blame but myself for the distance between us.
Now, for the first time, I wondered if that was the right choice.
As the night wound down, my packmates began to curl up in groups to sleep off the rest of the full moon. I’d wandered away from my sisters a while ago and found myself walking the perimeter of the field. I didn’t want to be alone, but I also didn’t want to be with my sisters right then.
My mind was full of thoughts of the woman in the woods, of Abey’s secret-keeping, but most of all, Wyatt. He’d disappeared into the forest a while ago and I hadn’t seen him since. I knew he wasn’t far though, because that feeling in the pit of my stomach was still so acute.
When I’d fully worn myself out, I circled a small patch of lush grass beneath an elm tree and curled into a ball. Tonight had been emotionally and physically draining, and I just wanted it to be over. In the morning, I’d deal with everything I’d learned and figure out how I could help, but for tonight, I just wanted to lose myself in the blissful ignorance of sleep.
Just as I was drifting off, I heard the crunch of paws through the fallen leaves heading my way. Too tired to open my eyes and see who it was, I decided to ignore them. Moments later, a warm body snuggled up next to me and the scent of leather hit my nose.
It was Wyatt.
With my defenses completely disarmed for the first time since I met him, I let myself enjoy his presence. His warmth. His scent. The safety I felt with him lying at my back. Even though I’d only known him a short amount of time, I had no doubt that nothing could hurt me with Wyatt there. I inched closer to him and let out a contented sigh as I drifted off to sleep.
Having spent so many full moons as a wolf, it didn’t even faze me anymore when the moon changed places with the sun and the magic that forced my body to shift disappeared. I simply curled into the warmth behind me and fell back asleep.
Chasing Callie (Southern Werewolf Sisters Book 1) Page 11
