The Werewolf Academy Series Boxed Set

by Cheree Alsop

  Alex stared at the doctor. The admission made him seem younger. His smile was embarrassed as though he had been caught with his hand in a cookie jar. Alex decided he definitely liked this honest, open side of the man over his professionally reserved persona.

  “You’re probably wondering what this has to do with Jet,” Dr. Benjamin noted. “That takes us to the darker part of the story.” He took a steeling breath. “Judith didn’t come home one night. It was during the beginning of the genocide. Jaze’s team had been captured, some were saying he was dead, and werewolves were missing right and left. Needless to say, I was in a state of panic.”

  Tears showed in the doctor’s dark eyes. He wiped them away, but more took their place. “I knew I had lost her forever.” His voice shook. He leaned forward and held his eyes with one hand. “My wife, my Judith was gone, dead. I had no doubt. The things the General did to werewolves were unspeakable. I was beside myself thinking of her going through that.”

  He fell silent. It held in the small room, broken only by the quiet beeps next to Alex’s bed. The thought of the General sent a rush of anger through Alex so strong his heart skipped a beat and the machine beeped louder.

  “What happened?” Alex asked to keep the doctor from noticing the stutter.

  “She had been in the basement of the building where Jet died. He fought hundreds of Extremists to save the werewolves who hid below, and she ended up being one of them.” The doctor let out a shuddering breath. “Imagine my Judith being saved by the young man I sent out of here telling him that he had nothing to offer to other werewolves. I wronged him, and yet he gave me back the most precious thing in my life.”

  Alex knew werewolves at the Academy whose family members had been rescued by Jet; he and his sister owed Jet their lives. To know that before him sat a human who felt the very same thing made Alex’s heart stutter again. He rose quietly and walked to Dr. Benjamin’s side. The doctor froze, as if entirely unsure what Alex planned to do. Alex wondered if the man thought he would retaliate for his brother’s poor treatment. Instead, Alex set a hand on Dr. Benjamin’s shoulder. The man flinched slightly under his touch, then stilled.

  “I know Jet never held any grudges,” Alex said quietly. “You saved his life, and because of that, he was able to save your wife and so many others. It came full circle.”

  The doctor stood. They looked at each other for a few moments in silence, bound by a sudden camaraderie and warmth neither had thought to find that night.

  Dr. Benjamin finally nodded with a small smile. “Get some rest, Alex. You could use it, even if these machines drive you crazy.” He leaned over and pushed a button that turned down the volume of the beeping a bit. “Hopefully that’ll help. I’ll be by in the morning to check on the results.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Alex told him. He sat on the bed and smiled when the doctor waved farewell before heading back down the hall.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Are you planning to sleep all day?”

  Jaze’s voice broke through Alex’s dreams, jolting him awake in a rush of thoughts and emotions. It took him a moment to remember why he was in the hospital and why machines were hooked up to his chest. When the flood of memories tumbled over him, he sat up quickly.

  “Easy, now,” Dr. Benjamin said as he pulled the sticky pads from Alex’s chest. “You’re a bit jumpy today.”

  “Ready to get out of here,” Alex replied. At the doctor’s raised eyebrows, he hurriedly said, “Not that it’s a bad place, it’s just, a, a...”

  “Hospital?” the doctor supplied helpfully.

  “Alex has a way with words,” Jaze said, winking at the boy.

  Alex chuckled. “Just ready to be cleared, doc.”

  “Well, given these readings,” Dr. Benjamin said, scanning pages that had been placed in Alex’s file. “You definitely have atrial fibrillation.” At Alex’s blank look, the doctor explained, “Electrical impulses control your heart’s natural rhythm. When these lose coordination, giving you an irregular beat, it can increase the risk of irreversible damage to your heart.”

  “What options do we have?” Jaze asked.

  Dr. Benjamin gave Alex a searching look. “This condition can be serious. Our treatment goal would be to prevent circulatory instability and chance of a stroke. For a human, I would prescribe medication, but as far as I know, they’ve never been tested on a werewolf. We can also induce an electrical shock to restore a normal heart rhythm.”

  “That sounds pleasant,” Alex said quietly.

  Dr. Benjamin continued, “Another option is to use ablation to block the trigger points and create a barrier so the arrhythmia stops.”

  Alex’s stomach knotted. “Is that with surgery?” At Dr. Benjamin’s nod, he shook his head and stood up. “I’m done here. I need to get back to Cassie and the others.” He reached for the clothes Cassie had left for him that would be a definite step up from the hospital gown.

  Jaze caught his arm. “Hold on, Alex. I think we need to take care of this.”

  Alex shook his head. He felt like shouting and running away at the same time. He held still, forcing his muscles to stop twitching.

  “Alex, look at me.”

  The fatherly concern in Jaze’s voice left Alex no choice. He turned his head slowly and met the dean’s brown eyes.

  “I’ve gone through too many things that have almost taken me away from Cassie. I promised her I would be back. I need to be there for her,” Alex said quietly.

  Whatever Jaze saw in his expression made the dean give an understanding nod. He let Alex go and looked at the doctor. “We’ll consider our options another time. Is there any danger to waiting?”

  Dr. Benjamin hesitated. It was obvious by Alex’s rush to pull on his clothes that there was no choice in the matter. “If it gets worse, let me know,” the doctor conceded.

  “I will,” Alex said. He wondered if the dean and doctor believed him; he wasn’t sure he believed himself.

  He rushed out the door and hurried down the hall.

  “Where are you going?” Jaze called in surprise.

  “Just checking on Siale,” Alex said, pausing near the end of the corridor.

  Jaze shook his head. “She woke up a few hours ago. Chet and Dray took her to a safe house. Her father is heading there to pick her up.”

  Alex’s mouth went dry. He glanced around the corner where Siale’s room had been. He wanted to go there and verify for himself, but the scent that touched his nostrils confirmed the dean’s words. Siale’s sage and lavender scent lingered faintly from when they had walked by. He wondered how he had missed her. He missed her.

  Alex clenched and unclenched his hands. The thought was ridiculous. How could he miss a person he had only known for a few hours buried in a hole, and her clinging to the very edge of her life at that? Yet her gray eyes stayed in his mind, filled with pain and pleading for him to help her find relief. He wished he could have seen her awake. Perhaps that would have helped to fill the hole in his heart when he thought of her gone. Maybe he just needed to know for himself that she was okay.

  “Are you alright?”

  Jaze’s soft words brought him back to the present. Both the dean and Dr. Benjamin still waited outside Alex’s room. The exit was past them in the opposite direction Alex had gone. He finally breathed a sigh of regret and nodded.

  “I’m fine.”

  He followed the dean out the front doors into the bright light of day.

  ***

  To Alex’s surprise, Jaze drove the SUV and he was the only other occupant. He couldn’t recall ever seeing the dean drive. Alex had assumed they were on their way to the airport, but Jaze passed it and drove through the city studying the buildings as though he knew them.

  “Have you been here before?” Alex asked.

  Jaze nodded. He was quiet for a few minutes before saying, “I used to live here back before the genocide.”

  Alex saw the city in a new light. The buildings that brushed the sky had once de
corated the dean’s horizon. Jaze was taking him to the place he used to call home.

  “I was about your age when we moved here,” Jaze said, reaching the edge of the city and continuing south. “My dad was murdered and my whole life turned upside down. My mom hoped that by moving to a new city, we could hide from the past and start a different life.” He gave a humorless smile. “But as always seems to happen, the past caught up to us and I found myself at war with my uncle Mason, the General’s brother.”

  Alex knew exactly how it felt to realize the one who had destroyed your family and everything around you was, in fact, family. He kept his gaze focused on the rolling hills that lined the horizon, forcing his thoughts away from the dark path they wished to take.

  “Enough of that,” Jaze said, giving Alex a smile. “There were a lot of good times here, too.”

  He pulled the car up next to a small house on a quiet street. The dean’s gaze tightened slightly at the sight of police tape around the perimeter of the yard and the one next door. The tape was tattered and old. It had broken in several places and fluttered in the faint morning breeze.

  Jaze let out a slow breath and turned off the car. He got out and walked along the driveway. Alex followed quietly, unwilling to break the thick silence that fell around the dean’s shoulders like a cloak. Jaze stepped over the police tape that decorated the porch in yellow and black, and reached for the doorknob. It opened under his touch.

  Beneath the musty, unlived-in scent that drifted out was a tangle of other scents, more pleasant ones. Alex smelled whispers of pasta, fresh bread, and laundry detergent. When he stepped inside after Jaze, he had to stop. Beneath the other scents were those ingrained into the house as if a part of it. Jaze was there, along with Nikki. There was a feminine, flowery scent Alex assumed once belonged to Mrs. Carso, Jaze’s mom. And there, amid the others, was Jet.

  Alex closed his eyes. He could almost picture them at the house, friends whose lives were intertwined by the werewolves who were just starting to look to Jaze’s pack for safety. He swore he could hear the memories of laughter from the kitchen, and the joking of friends piled on the couch to watch movies. They had been a family as much as Alex, Cassie, and Meredith, and as much as the three of them with Jaze, Nikki, and baby William. Alex swallowed the lump in his throat at the thought of his first family, of Mom and Dad and playing games at the table with crackers and the cheese ball Mom always made.

  Jaze’s footsteps made Alex open his eyes. He knew the dean saw more than just imagined memories as he walked through the living room and into the kitchen. Alex followed him, seeing the home beneath the dust that coated the couch, the shelves, the paperback book left open upside-down as though the reader had planned to return minutes later. Nothing was touched or tampered with. The house was frozen in time, plates were still in the strainer by the sink, the clock near the refrigerator had stopped at seven fifty-three, and only a few tracks of mice through the dust disturbed the scene.

  Jaze paused by the backdoor. Alex glanced around him to see a lone black punching bag hanging from a tree in the backyard. The door slid open with a squeak of protest. Jaze stepped onto the brown lawn that crunched beneath his shoes. He crossed to the bag as if in a trance. Alex watched quietly as Jaze put his forehead against the bag. A stillness fell over the dean as though he was lost in his memories.

  “Are you okay?” Alex asked quietly.

  The chains rattled slightly, and a small smile chased the sorrow from the dean’s face. He stepped back. “Someday when things calm down, we’ll raise William here,” Jaze said. Alex didn’t know if the dean was speaking to him or just talking aloud, then Jaze turned with another smile. “It’s a good place to grow up. The schools are good; we could use Meg and Roger’s house for other werewolves.” His voice caught, but he pushed on, warming to the idea as he left the bag and walked to the fence. “Nikki would like that.”

  “She lived next door?” Alex asked, joining him at the fence.

  Jaze nodded. “We had the luck of moving in next to two Hunters.” He chuckled. “That made life exciting for a while.”

  “I can imagine,” Alex said, thinking of his own experiences with Extremists.

  He smiled. “It could have been far worse. We eventually worked things out.”

  “I’m glad,” Alex said. “Nikki’s wonderful and William may be the most amazing baby in the world. He’s named after Jet, after all.” He smiled at the thought of the name his mom and dad had given their baby before he had been kidnapped.

  Jaze grinned. “And you’re not biased.”

  “Neither are you,” Alex replied.

  Jaze laughed and ruffled his hair. “We’d better get you home. I don’t want to worry your sister any more than we already have. She’s probably waiting at the gates right now.”

  “You’re probably right,” Alex agreed.

  When they walked back through the house, Jaze held his head a bit higher as though imagining a future in the place helped alleviate the pain from seeing it in its current condition. He waited for Alex to pass, then shut the door almost reverently. Alex heard him whisper something that sounded like, “I can’t wait to bring them home,” before the dean stepped off the porch.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You’re back!” Cassie kept exclaiming as she set a piece of welcome home cake in front of her brother.

  The rest of Pack Jericho sat around the common room grinning and joking as though they couldn’t believe it, either.

  “Hospitals aren’t my favorite,” Alex said, careful to keep a smile plastered on his face.

  It felt strange to be back at the Academy and to know that classes began the next morning as if nothing had happened. He felt different, changed, as though spending the night in the hole of bodies had taken something from him. He hesitated, then admitted that it had given him something as well.

  Everywhere he looked, he kept seeing things that reminded him of Siale. The color of the dove’s feathers in the painting near the door was the exact shade of her eyes. The brush of Kalia’s hand against his reminded him of the softness of Siale’s cheek on the backs of his fingers.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” Kalia said, her blue eyes lit with joy. “You scared us so badly.”

  “Yeah,” little Caitlyn exclaimed, bouncing around on the couch and jostling everyone on it. “They said you were hurt, but you look okay to me.”

  “I am okay,” Alex reassured her.

  The little girl wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a tight squeeze before letting him go to bounce on the cushions again.

  Alex balanced his cake in an effort to keep it from spilling on the ground. Cassie and Kalia had somehow convinced Cook Jerald to let them attempt their hand at cooking; the uncertain odor wafting from the said object made Alex question whether the cook had made a wise decision.

  “At least Cook Jerald said we kept the kitchens clean,” Kalia explained.

  “Yeah,” Cassie put in. “She said she would hire us, then she tasted the cake and said we better put our skills to use in something unrelated to the culinary field.”

  Kalia shrugged her shoulders. “I think it tastes just fine.” Yet the cake on her plate had one bite taken out of the corner. Half of that bite still remained on the fork in her hand.

  A glance around confirmed that everyone had barely nibbled at the cake.

  “Cake good,” Amos declared.

  “You can have mine,” Marky said quickly.

  Amos stabbed the boy’s cake with his fork and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. He grinned around it. “Cake good,” he repeated.

  A chorus of pack mates willing to share with the giant werewolf rose. A hurt look crossed Cassie’s face. Alex took another bite of his cake and forced a smile.

  “It’s really not that bad,” he said, though a bitter powder coated his teeth and tongue, clinging like chalk that refused to go away.

  Cassie fought back a smile. “It’s horrible,” she admitted. She set down her
plate. There wasn’t even a bite taken out of her slice. “You’d think with the smell you wouldn’t have put it in your mouth. You should have a bit more self-respect than that.”

  Alex laughed and set his plate down beside hers. Amos had already eaten half of the pack’s pieces. “At least it’s not going to waste,” Alex told his sister.

  She sighed. “Oh well. At least we tried.”

  “It means a lot to me,” Alex told her.

  She smiled at him. “I’m just glad you’re back.”

  “All of us are,” Tennison put in, leaning over the back of the couch near Cassie. “It’s too boring around here without you.”

  “So I’d better come up with something interesting to do?” Alex asked.

  “Actually,” Cassie replied, her eyes sparkling. “There’s something you don’t know.”

  She and Kalia exchanged excited glances that made Alex wonder if he really wanted to know.

  Unable to stand it any long, Cassie blurted out, “We’re going to have a dance!”

  Alex stared from Cassie to Kalia to Jericho. “A dance?” he asked the Alpha uncertainly.

  Jericho shrug, his expression touched with sympathy. “That’s what Professor Nikki announced at breakfast this morning.”

  “When is it?” Alex asked; his voice might have squeaked slightly at the end. He swallowed past his dry throat.

  “For New Year’s Eve,” Kalia said. “Couples can ask each other to go. It’s going to be so much fun!” There was no doubt about the smile on her face and the way she hovered close to him. She expected him to ask her.

  A week ago, there would have been no question of Alex asking Kalia. He would have expected it, she no doubt would have, and apparently, by the smiles on the rest of the pack’s faces, so did they. But things had changed. Alex couldn’t explain it, and didn’t want to chase the joy from Kalia’s face, but the draw he had felt toward her was completely gone.