by H G Lynch
Chapter Nine
** Tilly **
I rolled over, raising a hand to block the sunlight streaming in through the window and prodding into my sensitive eyes. My limbs were achy, my stomach was twisted with hunger, and I had a monster headache. Groaning, I looked down at myself and found I was lying on top of the covers on my bed, dressed in dirty bloodstained clothes. Images flashed through my head, each one making me feel sicker by the second. The hunter pointing his gun at me and my wolf, and then him lying unconscious at the foot of a tree. My wolf thrashing on the ground in pain as blood seeped from a wound in its shoulder. The wolf shuddering violently after I pulled the bullet out, bones snapping and reforming, fur replaced by flesh, blood on bare skin, and rabid blue eyes staring at me…
Spencer. He was a…oh god. He was a werewolf. Oh God. My wolf wasn’t a wolf. Spencer was my wolf. He’d saved my life. In fact, he’d done it twice. He’d taken me to the camp when I was injured and unconscious, and he’d knocked me down when Olivia had tried to paralyse me with that blast of power. The annoying, mysterious, distant boy I’d sat by the stream with in the middle of the night was a goddamn werewolf, and he’d saved my life.
It really shouldn’t have freaked me out as much as it did. I’d always known werewolves existed—hello, I was a witch. I’d raised demons. I knew people who could see ghosts. Of course there were other supernatural creatures out there. It wasn’t really that weird…except that it was. It was incredibly weird, because I knew better than to assume Spencer was the only one. Werewolves stuck together, just like real wolves. They formed packs like real wolves. So the odds were, the slightly eccentric people I’d been living with for a week were all werewolves. It wasn’t a cult—it was a pack.
It explained a lot of things. Like Dominic’s advice about not looking Frank or Spencer in the eyes, Frank’s reluctance to let me stay with them, and the way they all seemed to move so fast sometimes. Hell, even why they ate so much meat. Why they lived out there in the woods. All the little things I’d been turning a blind eye to, because I was just grateful to have a place to stay away from the witches and amongst people who treated me as, well, a person, opposed to a tool or a slave. If I thought about those little things, it all made sense, and I wanted to kick myself for not seeing it sooner.
It’s amazing how ignorant a person can be when they don’t want to know something. I’d always thought normal humans were stupid that way, passing off strange occurrences like cold spots in empty hallways, strange sounds in the night, and things falling when nobody touched them. All of that stuff, passed off as coincidences or just random inexplicable events. None of them ever thought there could be something there, something happening, that was outside the realm of what science told them was possible. And I had become the one who’d been wilfully ignorant.
Another, totally inappropriate thought popped into my head. I kissed Dominic this morning. I kissed a werewolf. The thought made me giggle, not entirely sanely, either. It made my head hurt, and I flopped onto my back, pressing my hands over my eyes, trying to stop the giggles before they could turn into sobs.
I gasped, my stomach turning over and over as my breathing hitched ever closer to hyperventilation. Determined to control myself, I forced myself to let out a slow breath, letting in the gentle energy of the woods that was stroking at my aura. I took a few deep breaths, the energy working through me, soothing my headache and nausea, easing the shaking in my hands. I carefully lowered my hands from my eyes and stared at the beams of light striped across the ceiling.
“I’m okay,” I whispered to myself, “I’m okay. Everything is okay. Just keep breathing and you’ll be okay.” I took another deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it out again. My mouth was dry, and I really wanted a glass of water. Sitting up, I swung my legs over the side of the bed, thankful that I didn’t feel dizzy, and I stood up. I sat back down a second later.
Okay, actually, I kind of threw myself backward onto the bed, scrambling across it, gasping. My eyes were wide, and my heart had jammed into my throat, because there was someone else in the room with me, and I hadn’t noticed him until that moment.
Sitting on the floor with his back against the closed door, Spencer watched me with wide, startled eyes. He held up his hands, palms toward me, in a nonthreatening gesture. “Whoa! It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, not moving from where he sat. His hair was damp, and he was fully dressed again, obviously having showered to get the blood off him.
I got a quick image of him lying in the dirt, naked, and I blushed hotly. Swallowing, I looked away from him. My hands were shaking again. Spencer chuckled suddenly, a soft and slightly embarrassed sound. When I glanced at him, I saw he was tugging at the end of his t-shirt, the first nervous thing I’d ever seen him do. His eyes were on my shadow, cast across the floor by the sunlight slanting through the window.
Another first, I thought. Spencer couldn’t meet my gaze.
Before, I’d thought he just enjoyed making me uncomfortable by staring at me, but now of course I knew better. I’d looked him in the eye, and to a wolf, that was seen as a challenge. He’d just been trying to outstare me, to show he was dominant. No wonder everyone had freaked at dinner the first evening I was in camp, with the way I’d cavalierly stared back at Spencer.
I was surprised he hadn’t gone wolf and rolled me belly up a dozen times by that point, and that was a really bad way to put it. Belly-up. Combined with the image of Spencer naked, it put things into my head that absolutely didn’t belong there. Oh God. My face was on fire, and I knew he could see it. I cleared my throat and turned to face out the window, rolling up the glass to let the breeze in, pretending I needed fresh air. I just needed something to cool my face and the sudden, uncomfortable burning in my gut.
“It’s good to know what makes you more uncomfortable: Werewolves or nudity. Apparently, it’s nudity,” Spencer commented from across the room, snickering. There was a lilt of amusement in his voice.
I gritted my teeth, taking deep, deliberate breaths of the cool, fresh afternoon air. The smell of bluebells and oak leaves filled my lungs. “Technically,” I muttered, not turning my face away from the window, “it would be nude werewolves that make me particularly uncomfortable.”
Spencer snorted, and I could practically feel him rolling his eyes. “I’d apologise for making you uncomfortable, but, well, I’m not really sorry,” he said.
I finally turned to shoot him a glare. He grinned at me, and I was startled by how boyish it made him look.
“And I’m willing to bet you’re not sorry either.” He twitched his eyebrows meaningfully.
I counted to three to rein in my annoyance before asking, confused, “What?”
He tilted his head to the side, the same way my wolf had after I’d saved it from the hunter the first time, when it had stood there watching me as if trying to figure me out. Then I remembered my wolf and Spencer were one and the same, and I repressed a shudder. I didn’t want to think about that just yet. It was too horrifying.
There was something distinctly animalistic in his mischievous eyes as he asked, “Did you like what you saw?”
I counted all the way to ten, paused, and counted to twenty. I wanted so badly to glare at him, but my face was burning again. Knowing what he was, I didn’t dare taunt the wolf inside him, so I turned my head away, feeling embarrassment and anger sour on my tongue. He was toying with me, and I didn’t like it.
My fingers clenched on the window frame. “Why are you here?” I snapped.
He didn’t answer for a long moment, and I had to look over my shoulder to check he was even still in the room. I knew how freakishly quietly he could move—stealthy and silent like the predator he was. He was still sitting on the floor, but he’d lost his grin. All signs of amusement were wiped off his face, and I settled with my back against the wall, satisfied that he was done joking—for the moment. There was a line between his brows, which were drawn together pensively, and he scowled at
a spot on the floor hard enough that it should have spontaneously combusted under his glare.
“Dominic thought it would be better if I talked to you when you woke up. He said it might be easier for you to handle the whole werewolf thing if I explained it, rather than if he did. I guess his logic was that it’d be easier to hear it from someone you disliked, than to hear it from a friend you’d trusted.”
I almost thought there was something bitter in his voice, but it could have just been resentment that he’d been nominated to give me The Werewolf Talk. The breeze from the window behind me blew my hair forward, and I tucked it back impatiently, huffing in irritation. I really needed a hair bobble, or a ribbon, or something. Spencer’s mouth twitched as the breeze blew my hair forward again, and I grabbed it in my fist, twisting it into a rope over my shoulder.
“Bloody hell, it’s hard to have a serious conversation about supernatural creatures while my hair is in my face,” I grumbled.
Spencer looked at me as if I was crazy, with his eyebrows raised into the mess of his black hair. “You know, most people would be quite terrified to be in the same room as a werewolf,” he observed, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully.
He did that tilting his head thing again, and I shrank away from his knowing gaze. “Yeah, well,” I mumbled, absently braiding my hair. “I’m not most people.”
Spencer smiled wryly at that. “Yes, I know.” He rolled to his feet smoothly, and opened the bedroom door a crack, indicating, with a jerk of his head, that I should follow him. “Let’s go for a walk and we can talk properly.”
My fingers paused halfway through my braid, and I bit my lip, pressing myself into the wall at my back anxiously. It wasn’t that I was scared of him. I knew perfectly well that he wouldn’t hurt me. He was my wolf, after all. I cringed when I thought that. Spencer was not my wolf. I got the feeling Spencer didn’t belong to anyone, maybe not even the pack.
He’d unnerved me before, and that feeling of unease around him hadn’t been reduced any by my newest discovery. What if I pissed him off and he wolfed out and tried to eat me? What if the pack had decided I was a liability and Spencer had been sent to lure me into the woods and leave me there? Or worse, to kill me?
I understood why Frank had said I was dangerous. My knowing about them meant I could—probably should—go screaming ‘werewolf’ through the town. That could only end badly for them, even if nobody believed me. Someone would still have to investigate the woods if I started claiming I’d been taken in by crazy people who turned into wolves. They’d no doubt think I’d been abducted by strange woodland people, and that there were wolves running wild where there shouldn’t be.
Yes, I’d definitely be a liability…if I weren’t a witch, unlikely to go yelling wolf when my kind had been burned at the stake because some punk ass kid went yelling witch to the townsfolk.
“Or,” Spencer said, pulling me from my thoughts. He was watching me with a half-concerned, half-amused expression. “Or we can go out the window if you’d like?” He lifted his hand off the door handle and gestured to the open window, which I happened to be practically pushing myself out of backwards with how hard I was digging myself into the wall.
I blinked and shook my head. “I think I’ll stick with the door,” I muttered, sliding off the bed and walking toward him with some effort. My instinct wanted me to stay as far away from the wolf as possible, even though he was in human form, even though I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, and even though I hadn’t been that afraid of the wolf since I’d saved its—his—life from that hunter the first time.
Something inside me was finally realising how much danger I could have been in before. I’d been inches away from a wolf with huge teeth and claws, I’d put my back to it, I’d had my arms around its neck when Olivia had tried to put a spell on it. On him. I was having trouble accepting that my wolf and Spencer were the same bloody thing, because that meant I’d saved Spencer’s life.
I remembered something he’d said the night after I’d saved the wolf. “Why did you save that wolf today?” I had thought, then, that it was weird he knew I’d saved a wolf, when the others had all been furiously denying they’d even seen one, but I hadn’t wanted to ask how he knew. Now I knew how, and I also knew why he’d asked. He’d wanted to know why I’d saved him.
I paused at the door, eyeing Spencer, and then motioned for him to go first. It was funny how I’d trusted him at my back in wolf form, but as a boy, I didn’t like having him where I couldn’t see him. That had nothing to do with his being a werewolf, so much as having to do with the fact that I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t checking out my ass. After all, he was still a teenage boy, and that was something I couldn’t forget.
“Also,” Spencer added, “you might want to get changed first.” He gestured to my bloody clothes, and I grimaced.
“Right.”
Unsurprisingly, after I’d changed into clean clothes and washed the blood off my hands, Spencer led me to the stream. Walking through the trees, I hadn’t seen anyone else, and I suspected they may have been avoiding me until Spencer had had a chance to explain everything. I was a little stung by Dominic’s assumption that I’d be less freaked out having Spencer explaining it to me than himself. Did he think I’d be scared of him? Resent him for misleading me?
Really, I just wanted to hear him tell me himself that he was a werewolf. If he could have the guts to tell me to my face that he’d lied to me, I could forgive him for making me think he was a normal human boy. But then, I was being hypocritical. Dominic didn’t know I was a witch, only Spencer knew that, because he’d seen me use my powers. That thought freaked me out. Nobody except the witches had ever known about my powers before.
Spencer and I sat on the mossy bank of the stream, under shafts of warm afternoon sunlight that sparkled and swam on the crystal clear water. Trees shook their leaves at us, like scolding parents shaking their fingers, as if what we were talking about was not allowed to be discussed. I couldn’t help but feel that it probably wasn’t, and wondered if Spencer had permission from his father to tell me all about their little secret, or if he’d just used Dominic as an excuse to be the one to tell me. From what I’d seen of their relationship so far, I got the impression Spencer would do anything to piss off his father. The guy had daddy issues. I didn’t judge. I had parent issues too, if you could classify my legal guardians as any form of parents.
“It’s not as painful as it looks. The first few times you Change, it’s agony, but once you learn to block out the pain, it’s not so bad,” Spencer explained, twirling a leaf by its stem between his fingers. He was stretched out on the grass on his side, propping his head in his hand. His t-shirt rode up a couple of centimetres, flashing a line of fair, smooth skin, but I determinedly kept my eyes either on his face or on the stream. We were having a serious conversation, it wouldn’t do for me to get distracted, but damn it was hard to concentrate. Werewolf or not, he was stupidly good looking.
I nodded thoughtfully at his answer, watching a sparrow hop along the ground on the other side of the stream, amongst a patch of foxgloves and buttercups. “Okay. Well, obviously you don’t just Change on a full moon. Can you Change any time you want, or just at night, or what?” I asked.
The full moon was in a few days. Would they all wolf out and try to eat me? No, no, of course not. Spencer had made it obvious that they had more self-restraint than that. He hadn’t eaten me when he had the chance, so I had to assume the others wouldn’t either. Hopefully.
Spencer shook his head. “We can Change whenever we like, but it’s easier nearer the full moon. Well, actually, it’s just harder to contain around the full moon, hence why Frank pulled us out of school. He didn’t want us wolfing out on our classmates. There are things that can trigger the Change, like anger, or if we feel threatened. Bullies were a big problem at school. I think if Frank hadn’t pulled us out, I probably would have gotten kicked out for fighting. I don’t take kindly to people beating on my friends.” He palmed the lea
f he was toying with and curled his fingers around it, crushing it. I felt sorry for whoever had thought to bully Spencer or his pack mates.
“Wow. Okay. Would it really offend you if I said I wasn’t surprised? Because you do have the whole, um, dark and dangerous bad boy vibe going on. It’s a little scary sometimes.” I leaned away from him, watching him clench and unclench his fist around the leaf, mashing it to a pulp. I actually got up and moved away when he grinned abruptly, showing unnaturally long and sharp teeth. “That right there is exactly what I’m talking about. Scary.”
He laughed, his fangs melting back into normal teeth. It was a surprisingly un-sarcastic laugh, and it startled me into grinning back. He finally gave up on pulverising the leaf and dropped it to the ground, a mangled mess of green bits, and used his leaf-blood-stained fingers to beckon me back over.
“Get back over here. It’s hard to have a conversation when you’re fifteen feet away from me.”
I scowled at him. “Maybe I’m just afraid you’ll bite me or something.”
His grin turned mischievous. “Trust me, if I was going to bite you, you’d know it.”
I blushed, but slowly made my way back over to him. I sat down a few feet away from him, and he snapped his teeth at me playfully. I flinched, and then I felt stupid for flinching, so I leaned over and punched him in the arm.
“Have I mentioned that I don’t like you?” I muttered, glaring at him.
He shrugged. “I know. Most people don’t like me. I’m not exactly a people person,” he admitted it unapologetically, as if he really didn’t care what I thought of him. He probably didn’t. I was just an outsider, after all, an invader into his pack.
“You’re an animal person then, I’m guessing?” I said.
He rolled his eyes at the bad joke, but his expression grew serious. He looked at me, eyes locking on mine, and I couldn’t look away, even though I knew I should. His eyes were just so blue, so intense. It was like looking into the heart of a storm, trying to see the stars through the clouds and rain and flashes of lightning.