LRR Hood

by Cassandra Johnson

  “No, it’s true. One day I will die, and I need to know that you will be taken care of. I will you my safe place.”

  ~

  Why the memory came to him he couldn’t have said, but he remembered the night his father died as vividly as if it had happened only a few short hours ago, it was summer, the windows cracked open, allowing the curtains to flow in the breeze naturally as a ceiling fan kept the unbearable heat in the room from suffocating the elderly man in his bed sheets. The packs weren’t always run by a Council. When Lucian was a young man he had been the Alpha of this pack, there wasn’t a majority rule. There was only the command of the Alpha, and that was the law. But something happened that completely changed everything, their entire way of life.

  Gallen stood at the foot of the bed, he was a strong buck of a wolf, all broad shoulders and chest hair. A man with two sons. As a boy, he had watched the world change around him and had, like nature, adapted to survive. It was what wolves did best.

  Coming to the man’s side, he smiled as he looked down on him, sleeping peacefully for the first time in a while. An old journal sat on the bedside table under the soft glow of the lamp. Picking it up, he ran his fingers over the initials in the leather. There was no telling how old it was, nearly as old as Gallen was probably. His father was a quiet man whose thoughts ran deep. He’d been a good Alpha in his day. Gallen would have been proud to be only half the man that his father was. Turning the cover over, he read a young man’s handwriting. October 1964 that was when the journal began, the year that Gallen’s older brother was killed in a fight between the packs. He remembered being around seven years old when he found his mother crying over a single shred of material. Gallen instantly recognized it as one of his brother’s shirts. Apparently, that was all that had been left of him. His thoughts were interrupted by the whining of fluid in his father’s lungs. Placing the journal back down he considered a pair of eyes that mirrored his own, though they were clouded with yellow. He smiled into them.

  “Be strong my son. Be strong for us all and our generations to come.” Lucian spoke holding his hand out to his son.

  “Always.”

  Their skin prickled with electricity when they met for the last time. Lucian Chaliceman’s last breath leaving his body as a much younger soul than the shell it resided in leapt with joy to join the spirits of those who had gone before him.

  ~

  His foot depressed down on the gas pedal, but his conscious was eating him alive. Running felt wrong, but what was he supposed to do? What his Alpha commanded him to do and what his heart told him to do were two completely different things, by running he felt like he was somehow breaking a promise, but if he was going to live to fight this, Gaerik had to do what he was told.

  The corners of his lips pulled down into a grimace as he thought of the night that his grandfather died, the chorus of wolves that howled his farewell from one world into the next still sang a bitter sweet song in his mind and the thought forced him to sober himself up as he drove through the raging snow storm. Where Gaerik was headed, he was searching for answers that would help him plead his case to his brother before he was beheaded in front of a Council of pompous wolves who thought that they knew all, completely forgetting the old ways.

  What no one knew was that Lucian Chaliceman had entrusted Gaerik with a secret that not even a Council of wolves could torture out of him.

  He was going to Arkansas to the woman that knew more about his family and their kind than any member of the Council. Lucian had told him her name a long time ago only months before the old Alpha had passed into the beyond. He’d told him they were witches of some kind able to heal those of their kind. Some with the gift of second sight and able to foresee the future or at least the different paths one had to walk down in their many travels. Gaerik hoped that when he reached this woman that she would be able to tell him who was doing this.

  The man knew that it was probably a long shot going all the way to Arkansas to find this woman that his grandfather spoke of, he never told him an address; only that he would know when he got there, and woman would know who he was. Considering that Gaerik had just been dropped on his ass with a whole lot of time to fill, not to mention his primary mission, staying alive. He was placing all of his trust on finding the house and a woman who was as his grandfather had once told him would be the key to his future. Gaerik hadn’t understood it at the time, but he had to wonder now if perhaps Lucian had known this was going to happen in one way or another, maybe she was a seer as well, and she told him of the different circumstances that could possibly happen to his family in the future?

  Gaerik knew by now he was going to have to ditch his mode of transportation at some point and hop a plane the rest of the way, each mile he drove was too slow no matter what the gauge on the speedometer on the dashboard told him. Once he felt he was a safe enough distance from Connecticut, he would catch the next flight to Memphis and rent a car from there. While he easily forgot other things the explicit instructions his grandfather had given him were almost branded in his memory.

  Chapter Ten

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” Whining Elle turned away from the door, leaving Marik to stand there as she limped into the kitchen grabbing an oven mitten as she jerked the oven door open. The cookies weren’t destroyed the way she had imagined that they were. In fact, what she had pictured in her head looked like lumps of coal for naughty children on Christmas morning. Instead, the bottoms were just slightly browner than she usually liked them. Sighing, she kept checking beneath them with a spatula before turning the oven off.

  “You’re limping. Did I hurt you?” Marik asked as he stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “No, your damn brother did. I slipped on his stupid phone remember?”

  She was still feeling a little hostile but given the situation who wouldn’t? Ripping the oven mitt off of her hand. She laid it down on the counter as she turned to him before her nose wrinkled up.

  “You’re dripping blood on the floor.”

  This was more offensive to her than Gregory’s bloody paw prints. Shaking her head. She then motioned him over to the sink.

  “Wash your hands, and I will see what I can do about the bleeding.”

  A hiss of air whistled between his teeth as he turned the faucet on and began to rinse his hands free of the blood. The bleeding had slowed down considerably from what it had been, mostly due to the fact that his blood had slowed in his veins in the cold but the bite wound would take some time to heal. Normally the marks would have been gone within minutes of being created, but this was the bite of a guardian, different from that of a normal animal.

  Turning his head slightly as he applied soap into his hands rubbing them together while a low growl made his vocal cords vibrate as he heard the familiar click of nails across the hardwood floor. Gregory, the guardian, had entered the kitchen, eyeing him speculatively before he stood sniffing the air near the stove.

  Returning from the bathroom, she held a red mesh bag in her hands with the symbol for first aid in white across the front. Plunking it down on the table, she returned to the cookie’s cooling on the stove.

  “I’ll get to you in a minute, right now I have a brave hero who deserves a reward.”

  Testing the surface of one of the cookies she picked it up, pulling it apart while she blew on it gently before offering it to the collie. Smiling, as he chomped down on the cookie and not her fingers, giving the collie other half before turning her wary eyes onto Marik.

  “OK. I think I am as prepared for this story as I am going to be. Why don’t you sit down and tell me everything?” Elle told him. She washed her hands free of any cookie crumbs and took the first aid bag from the counter, pulling his hand out for her to look at closely.

  “I can only tell you as much as I know up to this point,” Marik said, inhaling the scent of warm cookies through his nostrils.

  “Alright.” She replied stoically.

  Elle mused for a moment pushing the sl
eeve of his jacket up to his elbow, inspecting the bite marks and tears in the skin. He was going to need stitches on some of them, luckily something that she’d watched her grandmother do probably a million times throughout her childhood. Cleaning the wound up she sprayed some numbz-it on the cuts, knowing it wasn’t going to do much good as Gregory came to lay his muzzle against her thigh much like he had always done with her grandmother.

  “My brother is in trouble, and I am trying to keep him from doing anything else stupid. I went to his house to find him, but he wasn’t there, that’s when I found the file on you in his apartment. You know about our phone calls so I can omit that part of the story.” Marik said grinding his teeth together as she began to stitch him up.

  “What did he do to this woman you spoke of?” Raising her brows somewhat she looked at the man for a moment.

  “She’s dead. Her body washed up at Lighthouse Point.” Marik confessed, looking away from Elle and down at the guardian at her feet.

  “You mean… he killed her?” She paused, stopping everything that she was doing.

  “It’s the general census on the matter, yes.”

  “Why haven’t you called the police if you think your brother is a murderer?”

  “That’s not the way it works.”

  “Um, yes, it is.” Elle looked at him like he was an alien from another planet finishing his stitches.

  “It isn’t. You know that.”

  Her brows gently screwed up. What was he talking about, it was like she was part of a conversation where she was supposed to know what they were talking about but she had zoned out about half way through and had only just tuned back in again to find herself completely confused and out of the loop.

  “You have a guardian,” Marik said by way of pointing at Gregory.

  “Lots of women have guard dogs. It’s not uncommon. My grandmother and I had a slew of dogs in Arkansas. We were constantly feeding strays that just wandered up. Some of them stayed like Gregory here, and others were gone as quickly as they came.”

  Taking a bandage from the first aid kit, she fixed it over the stitches on his arm before wrapping his hand gently and taping it up.

  The way she kept calling the guardian a dog, her complete confusion as to why the authorities hadn’t been involved in his brothers capture made Marik looked at her more curiously now as he flexed his hand within its wrappings. She really had no idea, then why was his brother so interested in her? He obviously hadn’t had any contact with her prior to the beginning of his stalking her because she didn’t know who he was talking about. Holding up his hand slowly he took his cell phone out of his pocket and went through the photo gallery.

  “Have you ever seen this man before?” Marik asked, holding the phone up for her to see.

  Tilting her head gently she looked at the man. He and Marik had the same eyes, she could only assume right now that this was Gaerik, they looked a lot alike, and she could tell that they were brothers.

  “No.” She shook her head softly as her lips somewhat pursed out for a moment.

  A deep growl like a sigh came from him as he reached up and scrubbed his one hand through his hair.

  “This is much more complicated than I originally thought.” He said, thinking out loud as he put his phone away once more.

  “You said he had read my books, right?” Elle asked.

  “Yes, there were a few at his apartment.”

  “With a file, all about me?” She confirmed as she slowly got up from her seat and went into her bedroom, taking a book from the shelf. Yes, she had a few copies of her own books, what writer didn’t? Elle kept them as a source of pride that she had set out to do something and accomplished it. Bringing it back into the kitchen, she set it down in front of Marik. “These books? LRR Hood?” As much as she wanted to believe that this was some kind of huge misunderstanding, there was a rock in the pit of her stomach that told her she was in the middle of something that was far beyond her grasp of understanding.

  “Yes. They were all about a werewolf hunter.” Marik said, taking the book in hand and beginning to flip through a few pages, reading.

  “All of my books are about werewolves. They’re a kind of an obsession of mine. My grandmother told me stories about werewolves to get me to sleep at night. They helped keep the bad dreams away.” Turning away at that, she had no idea why she just gave him that information. It made her sound like a complete freak. Yeah, that wasn’t the type of thing a normal, well-adjusted girl confessed to, even if it was true.

  Filling a plate with cookies she came and sat back down at the table, cramming one into her mouth to keep herself from saying anything else stupid. This was exactly why she didn’t have and couldn’t keep a boyfriend. She always said something stupid that made them look at her like she was a few French fries short of a happy meal.

  Handing over another cookie to Gregory the silence was filled by his smacking lips as she watched Marik across the table from her reading her book. She felt like a teenager again on the edge of her seat as she noticed his eyes sliding back and forth over the written word, then a page turned, and another after that. It was like printing out a short story for her grandmother and avidly waiting for her to tell her if good or not. Elle always had a need to please others, to be held in high esteem in their eyes, even strangers. Perhaps it stemmed from the fact that her parents died when she was very young and she was raised by her grandmother. Elle needed to make someone proud even if their opinion shouldn’t have mattered to her.

  “You certainly seem to know a lot about werewolves,” Marik commented as he looked up at her sliding the book closed.

  “It’s my grandmother’s fault. From the time I was old enough to listen she told me stories, and obviously, they had a morbid effect on me.” Elle laughed nervously, pushing another cookie into her mouth. She didn’t know if he was complimenting her or not, but she was squirming in her seat with delight. Running her tongue over her lips to free them of cookie crumbs she went to the sink and wetted a napkin and passed it over to him.

  “You still have a little blood on your face.”

  Blood that she’d put there. Why that made her so extremely proud of herself was amazing considering she never thought of herself as a violent person. It wasn’t very lady like to beat a man to a pulp in your front yard.

  Taking the offered napkin, Marik wiped his mouth and then his nose getting most of the blood off before he balled the napkin up in his hand and stared at this woman in utter amazement. No wonder his brother was so obsessed with her. She knew a lot about werewolves, not fiction knowledge, but the real deal and Elle didn’t even know that her grandmother wasn’t just making things up.

  “Where is your grandmother now?” He asked, sniffing some. His nostrils were full of bloody boogers now, but there was very little he could do about it. He wasn’t even comfortable picking his nose when he was alone, much less dragging bloody crust from his nose in front of someone else. She wasn’t unattractive either, a little on the short side but obviously, her genes were to blame for that. A little rounded in places like her hips and breasts. If her hair was clean, it would look amazing, but even now still somewhat damp and falling down her shoulder in strings the golden tresses were like rays of sunshine framing her face.

  “She passed away three years ago, she was in her eighties,” Elle said as she lowered herself into her seat again. Looking across at Marik quizzically. “Why can’t you call the police?”

  The conversation had turned back to why Marik was here, and he found himself unsure as to what to tell her. She knew about werewolves, but she thought it was all fiction, if he told her that he was a werewolf, and so was his brother, then she might tell her guardian to kill him and then with an idea of how her mind worked she might come up with some wickedly inventive way to dispose of his body.

  “He’s sick,” Marik said, his mind working fast. “Since we were boys he has had some functional problems, and he needs help, but I need to find him before the cops do. If the
cops get to him first, he might do something completely irrational and end up killing someone or getting himself killed in the process.” The story seemed feasible. A mentally disturbed brother, one concerned and in need to find him before he brought anymore harm to those around him or himself.

  Elle’s face fell, softening now. She was reaching for a cookie, but her hand paused as her brows scrunched together looking at Marik. “So maybe he didn’t really mean to kill anyone? It was just an accident?” Her voice soft, hopeful and laden with pity on a man she didn’t know, but now, thanks to his brother, thought was mentally unstable and unable to control his actions. Like a puppy that was still being trained.

  “Yes, exactly that.” Think whatever she wanted if he could get out of this situation without revealing their nature. Marik was willing to let her believe that his brother liked to dress up in a pink tutu and call himself the Tooth Fairy.

  “That still doesn’t explain why he has been stalking me,” Elle said beginning to rub her chin gently and now looking to Marik for answers.

  “Like you, he is obsessed with werewolves.” Marik laughed. “He sees them as strong, legendary creatures that are more in control of themselves than he is.” He leaned back in the kitchen chair, draping an arm around the back as his chest flexed somewhat a smug expression falling over his face feeling very proud of himself right now.

  “Poor thing.” Elle sighed softly, her eyes scanning over the kitchen while she was lost in her own thoughts. This guy wasn’t a bad person at all he was just kind of lost and needed help but didn’t know who to turn to.

  “Perhaps he thought you could help him since you have such a… a firm grasp on wild beasts.”

  “But it’s all just fiction. Werewolves don’t really exist, and if they did, I probably wouldn’t stand a chance against one.”

  She had no idea the amount of blood there was in his mouth from biting his tongue not to laugh at her. Elle, the poor girl, had no idea she’d taken a werewolf down in her front yard and kicked his ass. Granted, he hadn’t truly fought her, only the guardian and he wasn’t even trying to kill the animal, but she’d beaten him well. The element of sheer surprise had been on her side.