by Ellis Marie
And I’ve never even noticed that they are different.
“I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself, you know,” Cam comments, putting his arm around my shoulders. “There’s a reason no one knows that we exist. We’ve all gotten pretty good at hiding it over a couple hundred centuries.”
I frown and cross my arms, looking out at the garden in front of us as we watch Obi run through the bushes, bouncing his tail from side to side.
“So you’re not rabid, you’re not in a lifelong battle with vampires, and you don’t automatically turn into a wolf at a full moon?”
Cam laughs and shakes his head, squeezing me tight.
“Doesn’t automatically turn us, no. However, it does make us closer to our animal instincts, and our emotions are more at surface. We have less control.”
At least not everything in the movies is true . . . but then, some of the things are and I feel like I’m only going to realise that once it’s too late.
“We . . .” I mumble. Cam slowly retracts his arm, his smile slipping off his face at my tone. “I know other people who are werewolves, don’t I?” Cam eyes me wearily, his jaw tense as he struggles to answer, so before he can try, I put my hand up and stop him with a soft smile. “It’s alright, don’t tell me.”
“I’m alone,” he answers finally. I look at him in shock. “My mum isn’t anything but human, she got a pretty big shock the first time I changed . . . I think we both did.”
I gape at his words but can’t help and chuckle. “She had no idea what was happening?”
Cam shakes his head, his eyes shining as he looks up at the sky. I can see the memories flying through his features.
“My dad was the one with the genes, it seems. She only said that she knew something was different about him when she met him. Hypnotising, she called him.” The easy-going expression is no longer anywhere to be seen and a heavy one has taken its place. The space between his brows furrows as he thinks. Carefully, I reach out and take his hand, intertwining our fingers. The muscles seem to relax as he takes a deep breath.
“It’s been so difficult to do this alone,” he admits, the strong aura crumbling in front of me. “To not know what I am, to sit and wonder every day if I was dying, if there were other people out there like me. I had to learn everything on my own. If it wasn’t for Mrs. Grenway, I think I would have gone crazy, but the first time she met me, she knew what I was. She’s helped me and told me about the others and the basics of what this is, but I still don’t know who I am or where I belong.”
My heart breaks as I watch my best friend look the most lost I have ever seen him, and it’s so foreign to me. Cam is always the positive one and the one keeping me afloat, but this whole time, he’s drowning by himself while holding me up.
“You belong here,” I tell him fiercely. “You belong next to me, with me, like it’s always been. Whether you sprout fur or not. The two of us can take on anything we set our minds to.”
Shining eyes watch me as I speak, but the smile on his lips is almost sad, like he doesn’t quite believe me.
“I love you, you know that, right?” he tells me. I nod. “I would put my life on the line for you, but I still need to figure out who I am.” He looks away from me, taking his hands away from mine. “That’s why I’ve been spending summers looking for my dad, travelling to different packs just hoping I’ll see him. Hoping that I’ll know as soon as I set my eyes on him, or I’ll pick up his scent or something.”
“You can do that?” I question but quickly shake my head and clear my throat when he shoots me a look of disbelief. “You know what, not important. What do you mean a pack? Like a group?”
Cam groans and stands up, shaking his head. His muscles tighten with stress.
“It’s more than a group; it’s a family. Its bloodlines of centuries and stronger genes. It’s the history of the pack, the safety it provides, and the knowledge that you can learn from it. Without a pack, you’re defenceless, you’re weak, and you can’t possibly start a family or keep them safe. A pack is a must for wolves; otherwise, we can go crazy and feral or, worse, you can get attacked by an actual pack and you have no back up.”
My heartbeat thuds in my ears as panic starts to set in my body at his words, the danger behind them not escaping me.
“Why would anyone want to kill you?” I ask. “You’ve never done anything to anyone. Why would they do that?”
Cameron must hear the shake in my voice as I stand up and turns back to me, reaching his arms out to reassure me.
“Why would anyone try to hurt you? And people that are werewolves, too, are you guys not meant to stick together? I don’t—”
Cameron’s hands slide up to the sides of my face. He mumbles soothing words to me, calming down my erratic heart and stopping the chill that runs over my skin with small chuckles echoing from his lips.
“Hey, hey, it’s alright. I’m alright, see? I can take care of myself. No one is out to kill me.”
I look up into his warm eyes and nod along with him, taking deep breaths as I do. I feel a sadness fall over me at the fact that he’s been going through this . . . that this life for him is so unknown and he’s so alone.
I wrap my arms around his waist and pull myself into his chest, my nose pressing almost painfully against it, but I cling on tight, my fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.
“You don’t deserve to do this alone,” I mumble, tears pricking my eyes. “You don’t deserve to be going through this. You didn’t ask for it.”
His hand softly rubs my back, and he squeezes me tight, placing a kiss on my forehead. The familiarity of it places my feet back on the ground and clears my head, my emotions turning back to being manageable.
“So you didn’t go on a cruise this summer?” I ask him as I pull back, wiping my nose. He winces. “I can’t believe you lied to me.”
He rolls his eyes and sits down again. “What was I meant to say to you? ‘Hey, Elle, I’m going travelling all summer to try and find my dad and find out what type of werewolf I am.’ How was I meant to do that?”
I can’t help but giggle at his words as I join him on the edge of the wall. Obi runs over to join us. I softly weave my fingers in his fur, his tail lapping against my leg.
“Is there not a pack here that you can join?” I finally ask. Cameron’s sharp intake of breath and the uneasy laugh that follows it answers my question quite quickly.
“It’s not exactly a thing you can just join, and wolves are very territorial. You don’t really want to risk asking.”
“But there is a pack near us?” My interest piques at the way Cam refuses to look at me.
“Yeah . . . near, but our town’s a no man’s lands. It’s not in a pack’s territory so it’s safe to pass through, but that also means anyone can come into it. So it’s not very safe, but it’s the only place I can really be. Plus Mrs. Grenway has helped with protection spells and such around the house. It’s not bulletproof but it’s enough for me to be able to sleep at night.”
It’s hard to imagine the sweet old lady inside putting up spells to protect my oldest friend, considering I don’t think they see each other that often or are particularly close, but in a strange way, it makes sense. There has always been moments where a look was passed between them, or something they would laugh about that I don’t quite understand, but I always shrug it off as nothing.
How many other people have I spoken to that are actually capable of using magic? How many times have I walked past werewolves that are waiting to rip out each other’s throats?
My mind stills on one face and only one. My blood runs cold, a sweat beginning to form on the back of my neck as my hands shake.
“Is Matt . . .” The words close up in my throat, and I feel like I’m suffocating as I squeeze my eyes shut, not wanting to even think about him.
“No,” Cam answers quickly. “He’s just a complete f*cking assh*le, purely human unfortunately. Your dad too,” he adds like an afterthought. “The way he almo
st pissed himself when he saw me—definitely human.”
It’s silent for a moment before laughter starts to fill the air around us, and it takes me a second to realise that it’s my own.
Relief washes over me, and a weight comes off my shoulders as I lean into Cam, the two of us giggling like school children. Everything feels so normal. It feels like it always does with the two of us—him making comments about the horrible people I surround myself with, and me unable to not laugh at the stupid jokes that he tells.
“What am I going to do, Cam?” I whisper after a few minutes, realisation dawning on me. “My life has just completely flipped around, and on one hand, I’ve been given all this freedom, but at the same time, I feel like I’m going to be looking over my shoulder every time I turn a corner. Even if I’m not, I don’t know what to actually do with this freedom. I’m so terrified.”
For the first time in my life, I’m not being told what to do. I don’t have someone hanging over my shoulder, watching every single one of my moves or controlling them. I don’t have anyone to check in to or explain myself to. I only have people around me who cares about me.
But they also all have their own lives. I’ve lived for so long in my bubble, I couldn’t expect them all to suddenly just have their life change for me. How am I meant to learn to live again? To figure out who I am without someone telling me what I’m supposed to be while also trying to figure out how to live on my own?
“I think that you take it one step at a time, and you’ll figure it out,” Cam assures me, taking my hand. I look at him, begging for him to give me all the answers. “I think that for now, you stay with Mrs. Grenway. Her house is probably the safest place for you right now. She’s got every protection spell there is, and it will let you keep an eye on your house. I can stay whenever too.”
The classic Cameron smile that charms every middle-aged woman graces his lips. I lean into him again, cuddling into the side of his body as he presses another kiss to my hair.
“Like you said,” he murmurs. “We’re in this together, as always.”
I stay at Mrs. Grenway’s for a couple of days and don’t leave the house. She uses every concoction and potion she knows to heal me to the best she can, and the bruises fade a little and the cuts begin to heal, but she says that there’s only so much she can do and the rest I will have to do myself. The only thing she can do is give me pain medication so that I can actually function as a normal human and attend school when Monday comes around. The last thing I need is for the school to get involved with my life and try to contact my father.
My fingers hover over the bruises across my stomach and then the cut on my forehead before resting around my neck. The imprints of his fingers are so large that I could still see them even when my own are covering them—like a child trying on her father’s gloves.
The injuries should still be sore and bleeding, but instead, they look like they’ve been healing for weeks. I carefully pull the neck of my top up and over the bruises and style my hair so that it falls gently over one side of my face, hiding what it can.
Hopefully, this would be the last time that I ever have to do this.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Are they supernatural?” I whisper to Cam as we walk towards school, pointing at a boy sitting while drinking coffee on the front steps with his glasses glinting in the sun.
It’s halfway through the week when I decide to come back to school. After days of sitting in bed and having visits from Cam and Kristie, we all feel like I could do it.
So here we are, back in school.
“No.”
“Is she?”
A sigh. “No.”
I gasp and grab Cam’s arm, stopping us right as we get into the corridor. “Is Mrs. Howard magical? Is she secretly a witch? Or a fairy?”
“No.”
“Oh my god! Is—”
With a groan, Cam pulls me into the side of the hallway. He glances around wearily as he shakes his head, the amused expression long gone.
“You need to stop,” he warns, the grip on my arm tightening while his voice hushing. “For your safety, you need to not let people hear you. Humans aren’t meant to know about us. You’d be putting yourself in danger. By law, I should be killing you for knowing anything. I could get in a lot of trouble.”
The harshness of his words shocks me back to reality, and the fun I was having before has vanished. This world of Cam’s is dangerous; I have to remember that. The laws aren’t like ours, and there isn’t any easy way for me to understand any of it. I’m a total fish out of water. I could do things that I don’t even realise are wrong and he could be punished for them.
I could get him hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, guilt filling me when I notice his worried expression. “I wasn’t thinking . . . I-I would never try to hurt—”
“I know,” he interrupts, his eyes erratically glancing around. “Just . . . you can’t mention this stuff in school. You don’t know who’s around.”
By his last words, my whole body is on edge. I notice the real fear in his voice, but I don’t think it’s fear for himself; I think it’s fear for me.
“Are there people here who—”
“Elle.”
The words die in my mouth at the look in his eyes. I swallow my questions, my body shrinking down to the smallest size it possibly can. I don’t fear Cam, but he clearly fears something.
“I’m going to go and get my things from my locker,” I tell him quietly.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s okay,” I wave him off and move past him. “I’ll see you later.”
He shouts after me, but I just shoot him a smile and leave him standing. I weave through the pushing students until I get to my locker and open it, the emptiness inside giving me a moment to myself.
There are people in this school who I don’t know as well as I thought, and he is just protecting me.
That doesn’t mean that I didn’t flinch out of instinct when he raised his voice at me, or that my body didn’t automatically begin to fold in on itself to try and avoid his gaze. It isn’t Cam that has hurt me, but it’s going to take some time before I can understand that fully.
A shadow appears behind me, and I close my eyes and sigh.
“Look, I’m sorry, Cam. I know you weren’t going to hurt me. I just—”
My heart starts to beat loudly, and a shiver goes up my spine as if someone is blowing on the back of my neck, causing my words to freeze as my breath hitches.
It isn’t Cam.
I don’t know how my body didn’t feel it before, but by the way a warmth begins to pool throughout me, I know exactly who it is waiting for me to turn around. It takes me a moment to finally have the nerve to do it, but when I do, he’s a lot closer than I expect. I fall back slightly into the metal of the locker next to me.
“Trent.”
His eyes are stormy as he looks down, his gaze sweeping over my figure and narrowing at the covered skin and the way my hand is resting on my side. I can barely breathe as he watches me, looking for something.
“Elle,” he breathes. The tension in my body melts at the singular word, like a blanket has wrapped itself around me. The excitement I feel at seeing him rises in me without warning, and I tuck my hair behind my ear, hoping he can’t tell.
“Why did you think Cameron was going to hurt you?”
They’re not the words that I expect to come out of his mouth. I stumble with my answer, a blank bubble forming in the place that there should be an explanation.
“Oh no, I didn’t at all,” I rush out. “I-I was just—”
“Where have you been for days?” he tries again. My heartbeat throbs in my ears, getting louder by each passing second. It’s as if I’m trapped in his gaze, unable to break away and unable to lie.
“I was ill.”
Even to my own ears, it sounds like a pathetic excuse. I cringe at my answer, his knowing stare not letting me for a seco
nd think that he believes me.
It has been mostly the weekend. Is it really that noticeable?
My hand goes to reach for the pendant around my neck, but all it finds is skin, and I remember that I abandoned it days ago.
Trent notices it too, and his expression turns almost sad, confusion sweeping across him.
“Where is your necklace?” he asks. I swallow the golf ball in my throat.
Does he notice everything about me?
“I left it at home. It’s a bit heavy sometimes.” I say the words almost apologetically, as if I’m offending him by not wearing the pendant, but that’s crazy. It’s not as if he knows anything about the necklace. I found it.
“Kristie has been worried about you. She’s not been herself the last few days,” Trent tells me softly, his eyes zoning in on the high neck of the top I’m wearing and then drifting over to my bruised eye.
I chuckle a little and roll my eyes, straightening up slightly as I shrug.
“She came and visited me. She’s just a bit of a drama queen.”
Trent slowly lifts up his hand and pushes aside the hair covering my cheekbone and my cut, his fingers barely touching it as he seems to trace it, the butterflies in my stomach starting but not out of fear.
“Perhaps it wasn’t Kristie who was worried about you then,” he whispers, his touch like licks of fire. At his words, my chest tightens.
“Apparently, mi reina, I am not quite myself without you.”
It’s like I lose myself in his words, the meaning behind them spinning around my head as I lean into his hand. His palm caresses my face, and the comfort it provides is immediate.
“What happened to you, Elle?”
My hand rests on his chest and I can feel his heart beating underneath it—so strong and powerful that it seems to fill my bones with strength. I stop feeling as though I’m underwater and my head breaks the surface, letting me breathe.
“My father . . . he—” My lips quiver. I have to close my eyes and breathe for a second, the images of his furious gaze and the words he screamed at me so vivid in my head that it’s as if I’m experiencing it all over again.
