by Hettie Ivers
“Of course. It’s over there, on the other side of the creamer station. You don’t need a key.” I got up and started clearing the table.
As Milena disappeared into the bathroom, Alex commented, “My wife makes quite the wingman.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, you know”—he waved his hand about—“talking up her girlfriend Kai to you the way she did. It’s sweet, really, how she’s forever trying to get him ‘back in the game,’ so to speak.”
I was already at a complete loss for words when he frowned and asked, “She did mention his condition, though, right?”
“The fact that he’s a widower? Not sure I’d call that a condition.”
“No, no. His ED.” He stressed the last in a whisper. “His impotence—the real reason he’s still single.”
“Uhm …” Memories of Kai holding me up against my front door, grinding his huge erection between my thighs as his hands bruised my ass, hit me. Why would Kai’s colleague Alex try to discourage me with such a lie?
“Oh, my,” Alex cough-laughed into his fist. “This is an interesting development.” His eyes swept me up and down, as if he was just considering my appearance and taking note of what I looked like for the very first time. “Fascinating.”
I was illogically saddened to see Milena leave. Even more so when she was unable to give me any indication of when, or if, she or Kai would be back through town for work again in the future. She gave me her email and phone number, though, and said she’d love it if I kept in touch.
DDTTB gossiped excitedly about Milena after she’d departed—again, referring to her as the “vessel.” They assured me that she would be back to save me from death in this very coffee shop—which they were all three terribly excited about, the psychos.
The most vocal of the Weird Sisters—whom I’d nicknamed Hecate, of course—said to the others, “I’ve never seen the vessel kill anyone before. Have you? I hear she’s quite efficient about it.”
“Oh, I can’t wait!” Hag #2 chimed in, and they all went on about what a grand show they hoped it’d be.
Mike and I had texted earlier that morning, and he’d said that he would be by the shop just before lunchtime to hang out with me before my afternoon class. I got off work early on Mondays and had a few hours to kill. But he never showed. Neither had he texted me back when I’d asked if he was still coming. Every time I checked my phone, all I had were missed calls from the same stupid unknown number that I’d been getting calls from for the past two days. The unknown caller never left a message, which meant it was likely a telemarketer.
With no word from Mike, I went to the library to study before my afternoon class. Remembering the parcel from my mom that was in my backpack, I found a semi-private spot and tore into it. Based on my last conversation with Babs, I knew it was unlikely she’d have sent me Granny Nina’s journal already, but I still felt supremely deflated to find that she’d sent me random books on Norse mythology and Taoism, along with a bizarre set of hideous jewelry: defective, dime-store-quality yin and yang friendship necklaces. The two opposing halves of the yin-yang symbol on each necklace were meant to match up and create a perfect circle, but they didn’t—because the black half with the white dot inside of it was bigger than the white half with the black dot inside of it.
Gee thanks, Ma. With a shake of my head, I stuffed the items back into my bag. I could hardly claim it was the wackiest thing she’d ever sent me.
Because I was a fool with no self-discipline, I ended up spending half of my study time at the library obsessing over every word of my conversation with Milena about Kai. I spent the other half enduring new visions of the white wolf and trying not to break down crying in public.
Over the weekend, in addition to visions of the white wolf being mutilated, I’d begun seeing visions of him dragging injured and dying animals back to his cave. At first, I’d assumed they were animals he’d hunted down and intended to eat. But he hadn’t eaten them, and he’d made sad whimpering and whining noises after each animal had inevitably died inside his cave.
Odd as it seemed, my intuition was that the white wolf was somehow trying to save these animals—perhaps because he was just that lonely and desperate for contact and connection. And something about that was almost more distressing to watch than the visions of him being torn apart.
I was thoroughly depressed by the time I needed to head to class. I was in the vestibule area of the library pulling my coat on and preparing to brave the elements when the same unknown caller flashed across my phone screen for the third time that hour. I decided it couldn’t hurt to unleash some of my pent-up aggression on a telemarketer. Zipping my too-thin wool coat up, I put my earbuds in and answered with an irate, “What?”
“Lauren? Is that you?” my mom’s voice came across the line.
“Ma?”
“Who else would it be, Lauren?”
Lord, give me patience. “Just about anybody, actually. Where’ve you been? What’s this number you’re calling me from?”
“It’s mine. Obviously.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I could feel a migraine coming on. “Ma, what happened to your phone? I’ve been trying to reach you for days. You know, if you break your phone, they can transfer the number to a new—”
“It’s a burner phone. Don’t bother saving the number.”
Wow. A good daughter would’ve asked her nutty mother why she’d traded her phone for a burner. I really couldn’t be that daughter today. “Okay then. I won’t. Listen, there’s a hailstorm of biblical proportions brewing and I’ve got to head to class. Was there an actual reason for your call—from your new burner phone?”
“Did you get my package?”
In my distraction, I’d almost forgotten my annoyance with her over the package. “Yes. I did, thank you.” I jammed my fingers into my gloves. “Why the hell did you send it to Jeff, my manager at The Screamin’ Beans? Do you have any idea how weird and awkward that was for me? That little note you wrote to him—what on earth possessed you? Now he thinks I’ve been talking to my freakin’ mom about him! Why didn’t you just address it to me at the coffee shop?”
“Because you said Jeff was the manager there, and that he was average-looking.”
“What does that even—ugh, never mind. Ma, he’s a student, just like me. We both get packages from suppliers in our names at the shop. Look, just … please don’t ever do that again, okay? If you lose my dorm address, text me from your burner phone to get it.”
She huffed through the phone line. “I did not lose your dorm address.”
I waited a beat for her to elaborate as to why she’d sent my package to Jeff at the coffee shop. She didn’t. “Well, great. I guess that explains everything. I gotta go now—”
“Did you open it?”
“Yes. Thank you for the heirloom friendship necklaces. You know, you’re supposed to keep one half for yourself—that’s the way friendship necklaces work. But I’ll just wear both of them and tell people I’m my own best friend.” My own defective best friend.
“No, don’t wear them! Someone might see. Those necklaces were meant for your eyes only.”
Oh, boy. “Got it. Promise I’ll never wear them,” I told her truthfully.
“Good. Same thing with the books.”
“Sure. I won’t wear the books either.”
“No, I meant don’t let anybody see them. Read them in private.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “They belonged to your Granny Nina.”
“Really?” My pulse jumped with excitement. “Is there a secret code contained within them? Highlighted passages that give clues to the seer—”
“Of course not! Don’t be looney-beans, Lauren.”
I heaved a sigh, once more deflated. “I gotta go.”
“Wait!”
“What?”
“Honey, I need to know: have you seen any suspiciously good-looking men wandering around campus recently?”
My jaw unhinged—which to
ok a lot of crazy to prompt when talking to my mother. “Suspiciously good-looking? Babs, are you drinking? It’s not even three o’clock.”
“Don’t sass me; it’s a serious question.”
“I disagree. And I’m not humoring it. Goodbye.” I disconnected and powered my phone off before tucking it inside the inner pocket of my coat, along with my earbuds.
The hail started coming down like the devil moments after I cleared the library steps. Perfect timing. If not for my addlebrained mother delaying me with an absurd conversation from her burner phone, I’d have left five minutes ago and could be inside Alexander Hall by now, rather than facing a monstrous hailstorm wearing a skirt, the wrong winter coat, and by far the wrong boots. My only saving grace was that I’d left the house with my backpack rather than my satchel bag today.
Suspiciously good-looking! Of all the insane things for my mom to ask, that one somehow rattled me most. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because there had been a lot of unusually attractive men turning up around campus recently. Or maybe because I knew what she really meant by that question. While I was becoming more resigned to my fate as a seer with each passing day, I wasn’t quite ready for my mom to go back to accepting it. But I pushed thoughts of darker times aside and pressed forward through the storm.
I was less than thirty feet from Alexander Hall when I slipped on a patch of ice and started to fall forward. My gloved palm hit the sidewalk first, and I tried desperately to right myself to prevent ending up face down, sprawled across the sidewalk. I had one arm twisted behind me clutching my backpack—which had shifted too far to one side and was throwing my weight off—and I was balanced precariously on my tippy toes with my ass straight up in the air when a deep male voice with a Spanish accent announced in a jovial tone, “Whoa, I got you,” and grabbed onto my hips from behind.
Rationally, I knew he was probably a perfectly nice, innocent passerby coming to the aid of a klutzy coed slipping on ice. But the moment the stranger’s big hands latched onto my hips, every hair on my body stood on end, and suddenly visions of slain human bodies—of vacant-eyed bloody corpses—rushed at me too fast and too intensely to block them out.
My survival instincts flew into high gear, and I didn’t just politely struggle against the man’s attempts to help me gain my feet; I kicked my leg out behind me and struck his knee. I flailed my arm back and whacked blindly at his hands on my hips as we both swiftly lost our balance and crashed to the sidewalk—with him partially on top of me. Which was a thousand times worse than his hands on my hips had been.
That was the moment I completely lost my shit. Just … cracked.
It was all too much. I was exhausted from trying to deal with my recent nightmares and the dead spirits harassing me, and from foolishly mourning the loss of something I’d never had to begin with. I couldn’t handle being pinned to the frozen ground in a hailstorm by a man whose touch had evoked visions of bloody murdered corpses.
I screamed—so loudly and continuously that every student in every building in the whole quad probably heard me, even over the pelting sound of hail coming down.
Beyond the screaming in my ears, faintly, I heard an angry, accented male voice swearing at me, telling me to be quiet. Then a hand came over my mouth, and everything went black.
23
Kai
I awoke to the sound of my wolf’s mournful howls. My heart echoed his pain as I recalled the nightmare that had awakened us. The indelible image of Lauren’s unseeing, vacant eyes was forever burned into my memory.
This wasn’t the first time we’d had that nightmare.
In every erotic dream I had of Lauren, I would lose myself to the monster within the moment that I entered her. Every single time, I would convince myself that I could be gentle. I would promise myself that I wouldn’t irreparably harm her. Yet every time I would fail to retain my humanity, and Lauren would pay the ultimate price.
Because she was simply too fragile. Too breakable. Too human.
And God help me, my wolf wanted to break her. He was somehow convinced she needed it. He was sick.
Who was I kidding? I wanted to break her. Because she did need it. She was a goddess confined within a mortal’s body, and in my twisted mind, only I could free her. I just didn’t know how to accomplish it with her life intact.
I was out of my mind.
I got up and stretched my hind legs. The cave was dark. It was always dark. But I had the sense that it was daytime now outside of my jail cell. My days and nights here had melded into one long purgatory sentence.
Why had I come here? There were countless remote locations I could’ve chosen in my quest to get far away from Lauren. What had I been hoping to learn—to remember from my youth—by coming back here?
Through the darkness, my eyes settled on Lauren’s name clawed into the cave wall, and then to the pile of bones stacked to the left of it. I trotted over to the bones that lay preserved in one of the cave’s darkest, iciest corners. There were so many—representing far more broken and dying animals than I had recalled my wolf dragging here. Every single one of those animals had died in this cave.
I’d been so young at the time that I’d dragged them here. Once I’d gained control of the island—when I’d grown big and strong enough that not even large packs of common wolves attacking at once could best me—I’d no longer needed to retreat to the cave. I’d only sought solace in the cave when I’d desired to be alone.
Like Milena, Maribel had sensed the bones’ significance years ago when I’d brought her here.
I remembered the way that she had looked at them with such rapt fascination, and then at me as she’d said, “You preserved them, Kai. As a young werewolf pup, you knew to place them in the coldest parts of the cave to slow their decay. I think they’re more important than you realize.”
It was true that the bedrock cave contained ice year-round, and certain pockets remained colder than others. But in my vague memories, I knew I hadn’t brought the injured animals here to preserve them on ice. I’d brought them here to see if the cave could save them—if it would heal them as it had always healed me.
As a wolf pup, I had figured out that my limbs regenerated—that my body healed itself. At the time, not understanding that I was a werelock, I’d naively believe that it was related to the cave somehow—that my healing stemmed from the cave’s power rather than my own. What I couldn’t recall was why I had thought that. And while Maribel and Milena’s intuition had been correct that the bones were important to me, I couldn’t actually say why they were either.
I paced the cave in wolf form, replaying Milena’s words about Maribel not being able to love herself. It was nothing I hadn’t already known. But it was something I still struggled to forgive myself for. A better mate would’ve helped her to love and accept herself.
The irony was I’d always believed that I had issues with self-love. For the better portion of my life, I’d viewed myself as an outcast. As a defective species—a monster no one would ever embrace as a mate. And then fate had handed me Maribel—an exquisitely beautiful, talented creature whom everyone revered and adored.
As for Maribel, throughout her early life, seers had foretold that her fated mate would be special—uniquely gifted in a way no other werelock had been. Most werelocks and werewolves put stock in seers—some more so than others. Maribel had definitely fallen into the latter category. From the moment Maribel and I had met, she’d been fascinated by my unexplainable origin and the fact that I was the only surviving arctic werewolf.
All of werelock society (with the exception of Alcaeus) had considered me—the damaged, family-less, raised-in-reverse freak of nature—to be the lucky one in my mate pairing with Maribel. Yet Maribel had somehow persisted in viewing herself as the weak link unworthy of her mate bond with me.
While that had been difficult for me to reconcile, the manner in which Maribel had gone about placing the importance of my life and safety above her own had been even more troubling. Less
a had told Maribel what the old seer woman had said in 1619 about me not being suited for battle and needing to be shielded from violence and fighting as much as possible. To my eternal embarrassment, Maribel had taken this to heart and had never wanted me to be involved in dangerous missions.
But what I hadn’t realized until her death was that she had gone so far as to make every important, powerful werelock she knew—particularly every one of her exes—promise never to mortally injure me. It had seemed illogical to many, of course, given that I was her mate—and her life therefore tied to mine. No one who cared for Maribel would’ve been inclined to harm me. But that logic had not deterred her.
Over the course of our marriage, Maribel had consulted countless seers, hoping to gain insight into my origin as well as clarification on what the old seer woman had meant about the inherent danger of me being mortally wounded. I used to think up whatever plausible explanations I could for my origin in wolf form in an effort to appease her fixation and allay her concerns. But it had never been enough. Even in death she’d gone to extreme, unnatural measures to ensure that I’d lived—that I’d survived her death.
It wasn’t right.
It wasn’t normal.
It had never been what I’d wanted, and she had to have known that.
In my gut, I couldn’t accept that she had done it out of love for me, despite what she may have professed to Milena in the ether ten years ago.
There had been brief moments during our marriage when I’d wondered if Maribel truly loved me. Sometimes it had seemed as if she’d been more enamored with her mythical notion of the White King than the reality of me.
But it wasn’t until ten years ago when her desperate, despicable actions over the course of a century in the ether were brought to light that her true feelings were confirmed. She’d slaughtered thousands in her quest to sever our mate bond—to “free me” to live on and love on without her, as she’d claimed to Milena. “Don’t you see? She wanted you to be happy and live on without her.”