by D. N. Hoxa
Darkness again. Even there, I heard the footsteps. One set of them stood out from the rest and not just because she was running. It was a she all right.
The view in front of me opened. The stairs were dirty, and I took them four at a time. No, my wolf did.
A scream in my head—probably my own—when I realized where I was. She was letting me see. The stairs, the white door, the cold air and the yellow light…the city stretching below me. We were on a rooftop.
Darkness.
The need to see more had never been stronger. Was I still being chased? Was it Red?
No, it was still daylight. And it was a she. Amara. She was chasing me. Chasing us.
I could feel the texture of my wolf’s tongue, the sharpness of her teeth, the way the ground felt beneath her paws, the sound her claws made when they made contact. I was no longer running on concrete. Grass beneath my feet. Her feet.
Please, please, let me see…
Green. The trees weren’t tall, and the squirrels residing in them ran at the smell of my wolf. She didn’t intend to stop. I felt it in her very core. In our core. I tried to get her to look to the side to get an idea of where we were, but her eyes were stuck straight ahead. Other than the grass, the trees and the orange sky, I couldn’t catch a glimpse of anything else.
Stop it! I shouted in my own head. She had to hear me because I heard her talking in my head. She needed to drop this. We couldn’t run away, not when we had a decent chance of finding Haworth and setting Izzy free.
But she didn’t care. Images of hurt animals flashed before her mind’s eye, and I saw them as clear as the picture in front of me. She was running, though nobody was chasing us now, and she didn’t intend to stop.
When I tried to shout again in my head, she blocked me out, and this time, she didn’t give me another chance.
Waking up all alone in the woods was a disaster. So many memories…
When I was seventeen years old, my wolf took over and killed a man in the woods just two streets down from my house in the Brigham pack in Harriman State Park.
Werewolves are very hard on their children. They need to be, my parents said, because if you let a werewolf loose before adulthood, the consequences were always fatal. It helped that young werewolves couldn’t disobey a direct order from their fathers, but sometimes, some did, and fathers took matters into their own hands. They beat their children until they learned to obey. In the eyes of the pack law, that wasn’t acceptable, but everybody did it. Everybody knew it. Nobody stopped it.
Maybe my father would have beat me, too, had he known that I was never compelled to obey to his orders, but I hid it well. As well as I could. As well as my sister.
But one day, I was just hanging out in the woods with the animals—wildcats, squirrels, birds, otters, even younger deers sometimes—when I heard the screams. This guy I didn’t know had brought his son and daughter into the woods and was beating them with a stick because they’d left school early or something. I started to run then, together with the animals, but I didn’t get far, just like I knew I wouldn’t. My wolf came to life, and she did what she always did—she killed. She killed that man—as if she had any right—while his children ran away screaming.
This attack, too, was going to be blamed on a black bear. Everyone would be surprised that a bear could have killed a grown werewolf, and then they’d all agree that the bear had caught him by surprise. It had happened twice before, but this time I couldn’t control myself when the wolf let go of me.
It was dark, a moonless night, and I ran back home with my hands covered in blood, crying.
By some miracle, nobody saw me. I made it all the way home to my mother and father. My sister was sitting on the sofa, playing on her phone, and my mother was in the kitchen doing the dishes. My father was watching TV, and they all jumped to their feet when I ran inside, crying, covered in blood.
They were terrified. My father grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me, and screamed in my face: “What have you done? What have you done?”
“Oscar, please,” my mother pleaded with him. “Please, let her go!”
But he didn’t. He slapped me, but I hardly felt it. They asked me what had happened, but I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t stop crying.
So they let my sister take me to the bathroom to clean me up.
Isabelle was the opposite of me. Her hair was light brown—mine dark and kind of reddish. Hers was wavy and mine a mess of curls. Both our eyes were blue, but hers were a different shade—lighter than mine. Her lips were long and elegant. Mine were puffy, the upper one bigger than the bottom, which always made me look like I was about to start crying. And she was so positive. At school, everybody was friends with her. They only spoke to me because Izzy was my sister. She loved to hang out with people—I loved to hide in the woods and stay with animals. It beat me how it was possible that we were twins.
Guess I should have known then.
After she cleaned me up and convinced me to stop crying, she took me to my room on the second floor.
“It’s okay,” my sister said. “Whatever you did, it’s fine. We’ll get over it. We’ll fix it. It’s okay.”
She stayed with me for as long as it took me to fool her into thinking I was asleep. Once alone, I focused on myself. On my wolf. I already knew this couldn’t go on. It had gone too far the second I’d killed the first man for kicking his dog. He kicked him every night because neither he nor his family would take him outside to walk and to pee, and when the poor creature peed inside, Jackobson took him outside in the yard and kicked him. The cries of that dog are still part of my nightmares sometimes. My wolf had killed him for it, had dragged him into the woods in the dead of the night and had ripped his throat apart.
I should have told somebody then.
No more.
It took courage and a lot of convincing myself to tell my parents about what I really was. The real reason why my wolf hadn’t made itself known yet. I wasn’t a witch, like they thought I was. Not like Izzy, who never got her wolf, either. But she wasn’t like me. She really was a witch—a Storm witch. She could do magic, move air around with a thought, but not me. I’d tried. My father had wanted me to be like Izzy so badly, but I couldn’t do magic. I wasn’t a witch. Just a weird, fucked up wolf.
That night, when I finally decided to come clean to my parents, I slowly tiptoed my way out in the hallway because I didn’t want to wake Izzy up. I was good at moving soundlessly—always have been. And my parents didn’t hear me when I made it to the top of the stairs. They didn’t smell me. But I heard and smelled them all too clearly.
“I knew it! I always knew this was going to happen! Who knows what she’s done?!” my father was shouting.
“Keep it down, Oscar,” my mother pleaded.
“I told you that first night—it’s too risky. You should have listened to me, goddamn it!”
“For the love of God, Oscar, shut your mouth!” my mother shouted. “Stop this.”
“Stop what?” my father replied. “Any second now, soldiers could knock on our door! All our lives—ruined, and for what? Think about Izzy!”
“She’s our daughter, too!” Mother cried.
“She’s not!”
I should have gone back to my room then. I didn’t.
“The night she appeared at our doorstep, we should have told the Alpha. We should have told someone, but you wanted to take her in!”
I no longer even breathed.
“She’s our daughter as much as Izzy. It was a work of God. She came to us just when Izzy was born. It was destiny!”
That’s when I decided to go back to my room, but by then it was too late.
Guess I always knew I lived in a lie, but I thought I was just being a teenager. I read all about it in social media. Everybody went through this phase of not knowing where one belongs. Except in my case, all of it was real.
I packed my bags that night, wrote my mother a letter, and left home. I never looked back.
Now, I did.
I looked forward and back and to the sides to make sure that nobody was there. It took a few minutes to convince myself that I was all alone. Not even the animals had approached me.
My shirt’s sleeves were a torn mess, and my jeans had now turned into shorts. My socks were on, which was a miracle, but no sign of shoes anywhere. I tried to keep calm and breathe deeply, to try to make out my surroundings and find my way back, but it was impossible. Other than water streaming nearby and trees, I couldn’t get ahold of anything. Tears streamed from my eyes. I felt lost, just like always, and I really, really tried not to hate her for it.
If my wolf hadn’t lost control and taken over, I’d have still been in the city, in the Lair with Red. I’d have been planning to save my sister and myself, but now, Haworth’s men could come after me and there’d be no damn thing I could do about it.
And when I smelled something unusual, I almost passed out again. This was getting too much. My body couldn’t handle it. But when I sniffed the air harder, I realized I knew that smell. Not for too long but it was distinctive, and I’d only ever smelled it on one person. It was chamomile and honey, and Amara with the black and red hair had been soaked in it.
Amara. Her name meant hope to me for a second. Maybe I wasn’t lost. Maybe I could still find my way back. Maybe I could still save my sister.
I wiped my cheeks of the tears, and I began to run in the direction of her smell.
12
I hadn’t gone as far as I’d feared. My wolf had run all the way to the woods around Hutchinson River in Westchester. Amara sat next to me in her small car, turning the heater on as if she thought I was cold. I wasn’t. I was burning with fear and anger and insecurity.
She’d found me with a spell. A Blood finding spell, which she’d activated with a string of hair Red had found on the pillow in his room. She’d driven herself all the way here because Red still couldn’t leave the Lair at the time. Amara didn’t look mad or even a little pissed off that we’d wasted a whole day for no reason at all. I was thankful for that.
“You okay? You want something to eat? I’ve got candy,” she said and reached for her backpack in the backseat, but I shook my head.
“I’m good, thanks.”
“Okay,” she said and finally put the car in drive. I didn’t know how long it would take us to get back to Red, but I was already itching to see him, and that added confusion to the mess of emotions in my chest. I wondered how I could still breathe normally through them.
“I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear, but your wolf is literally the coolest thing I’ve ever seen—and I’m a witch.”
Just like that, my head started to pound. Where the hell did the ache even come from?
I guess I could have said thanks, but my heart wasn’t in it. If she knew what it was like to live with my wolf, to be a puppet to her puppet master, she wouldn’t have been so impressed.
“But Red is right,” she continued. “If Haworth gets his hands on you, it’s over. Nobody will be able to stop him.”
“People thought Erick Adams couldn’t stopped, either,” I reminded her. We’d all thought the world had gone to shit just five months ago.
Amara snorted. “You’re right about that.” And thankfully, she didn’t say anything else.
When we pulled over a block away from the Lair, it took Red a whole two minutes to find us. He came in front of me, put his hands on my shoulders and analyzed me from head to toe—three times.
“Jesus Christ, I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to admit to myself that I was glad he was okay, too. He looked fine.
More than fine, actually, but that’s a whole other story.
“You should have told me. You should have warned me,” he said, and to keep myself from telling the truth, just in case, I rolled my eyes.
“You can’t keep breaking my neck every day, Red,” I said and turned around to leave, though I had no idea where I would go. I just didn’t want to tell him how I’d foolishly thought I could stop my wolf before he stopped her for me—and failed.
“Sure I can. I’ve only done it once, but I can already tell it’s going to be my favorite hobby,” he said, but his soul wasn’t into the joke.
Wait, do vampires even have souls?
I added that question to the long list I was going to ask Red. One day.
“Wanna know what my favorite hobby is?” I asked, and before he could speak, I added, “Fartface?” I could be mean, too.
But for whatever reason, he didn’t get angry this time. He laughed. Took the fun right out of it, damn it. I wanted to piss him off, not make him chuckle.
Anyway…
“We should do it tonight,” I said as we walked up to the Lair. This time, I was less afraid than I had been the first. Possibly because Amara had gone in unnoticed earlier, and she was still alive, walking right by my side.
“We should talk about what happened today,” Red said.
The smell of vampires reached my nostrils. The loud music coming from one of the apartments on the first floor had my head beating like a freaking drum.
Yeah, no. I wasn’t less afraid this time around. Not when I actually saw the vampires and the way they looked at me. I wanted to look back at Amara to see if she was feeling the same way, but I didn’t dare. I just kept my head down and tried to ignore every set of eyes stuck on me as well as I could until we made it to the apartment, what felt like ten hours later.
It was amazing how a wooden door that a vampire could break with a relatively light kick gave you the false sense of safety, but I breathed a bit easier once inside.
“Go change,” Red said. “There’s more clothes in the bathroom.”
“Mhmm,” I said and fell on the sofa. I was tired—more so mentally than physically. I would change my clothes, but for now, I’d hear the plan first.
Red watched me sitting there, very confused. He wasn’t sure what to feel yet. Should he be angry at me for not listening to him, or should he just ignore me and stop trying? It must have been really hard for him to figure it out.
“So, the plan,” I said when Amara sat beside me. “We’re going to do it tonight. We’ll go to the Kaynes because someone in the Brighams’ pack might recognize me. We take a wolf and we tip off Haworth’s men.”
“No,” Red said, shaking his index finger at me as he paced in front of us. “You’re not going anywhere in that condition, Victoria.”
“Agreed,” said Amara.
I looked at her with my mouth open wide. The betrayal! We’d driven in a car for almost an hour together. I thought she was my friend. Brokenhearted, I turned back to Red.
“My condition is perfectly fine, if you can’t tell. I might be shoe-less, but I—”
“This isn’t a joke, little wolf,” he said, smiling, but the smile looked more like a threat than a pleasant gesture. “You lost control today, and I’m glad you did because you would have blown whatever chance we had to pieces if we’d gone through with it.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have blown everything to pieces, Red. I ran away into the woods—that’s all. I didn’t hurt anyone, nobody saw me—end of story.”
“Nobody saw you?” Red laughed heartily. “Try at least fifty vampires, humans, and every other paranormal that happened to walk by here in those moments.”
Oh, shit. “But they don’t know what I am, so it’s fine.” I rubbed my forearms to try to get rid of my goose bumps, but it was no use.
“It’s not fine, Victoria,” Amara said as if she was already regretting speaking.
“Okay, I’m just going to go ahead and say it, but you two are paranoid. My wolf is my business. If she happens to take over again, she’ll just run into some woods. She’s not going to ruin anything, I swear. You’ll just have to carry on without me until I’m back, and that’s if it happens again.”
As much as I wanted to deny that this was a problem, I knew my words would fall on deaf ears. They’d both seen it, Red for
the third time now. They were right—it was an issue but not one big enough to stop us from trying to nail Haworth.
“There’s no if here. She will take over again, and we’re not doing anything or going anywhere until you learn to control it,” Red said. “I will not put our lives in danger because of recklessness, Victoria.”
“Oh, no. You’ll just put our lives in danger for a thing,” I spit.
Surprised, Red shook his head. “I’ve got a proposition. Give me one week to help you—”
“No.”
“One week, Victoria.”
“No! Izzy is out there doing God knows what for those people. The longer we sit here, the more she’ll suffer.”
I understood why he didn’t get it, but it was so hard. He didn’t know that I’d turned my back on her once. For five years! And look what had happened. I could have stopped it. If I’d just been there with her, at home, when they took her or when Dad got her back, I wouldn’t have let her become one of Haworth’s people. But I didn’t. I was a coward and I ran away.
That was the last time.
“But you’re not going to help her by getting caught,” Amara said.
I expected nothing better from her, considering I’d only known her for a few hours.
“Would you please just skip this part so we can get to planning?” My head was killing me. I could barely keep my eyes open. Too many memories, too much guilt.
“There will be no planning,” Red said, shaking his head. When he wouldn’t even meet my eyes, I realized he was serious.
“Red, please,” I said, but I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“I’m sorry, Victoria, but letting you go now would mean leading you to your death and I won’t have that.”
I jumped to my feet and walked over to him. If he wouldn’t look at me, I’d make him.
“Oh, so you want to play that part now? You want to pretend you care? Nobody’s buying it, Red. Grow a pair and admit it—you don’t want to wait any more than I do!”
