A Forest So Deadly (Pioneer Falls Book 2)

by Heather Davis

  Jonah took a step toward me. “We’ll see about that.”

  “Easy.” Nathaniel caught his brother’s sleeve, stopping his advance.

  Morgan’s diplomatic demeanor faded as he glared at Jonah. “Gentlemen,” he said, through gritted teeth.

  “You’ll be keeping your paws off me and my sisters,” I said.

  Jonah growled low and deep. “We’ll see about that.”

  “Like you saw to our Protector?” Dad said, pushing up out of his chair.

  Ezra leaned back in the booth, an amused smile quirking his lips. “We didn’t kill your precious canine breeder. I’m offended you’d make that claim.”

  “You expect me to believe you didn’t kill Ivan to try to get closer to my daughters?” Dad said, straightening.

  “Like I said, we had no beef with Ivan North.”

  “Liar.” Dad leaned across the table, inches from Ezra’s face. “You’ve upset the balance here. Every action you take affects the entire wolf population of this town. Maybe that’s not how it worked back wherever you came from, but that’s how it is in Pioneer Falls.”

  “Don’t tell me about this town.” Ezra’s tone was pure ice. “I know all about Pioneer Falls.”

  “Your blood pressure,” Gladys hissed at him, earning a frown.

  Morgan cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, can you at least agree to work together on the issue of the hunters? Rick Bowman may be rallying others to his mission.”

  “What’s your interest in this, McAllister?” Jonah said, his eyes narrowing. “You’re a foreigner. I’m sure you’re needed back at home.”

  “It’s always in my interest to keep other wolves out of the public eye,” Morgan said.

  “Ah…that’s why you’d take notice of a lone wolf gone missing,” Ezra said, his wrinkled lips curling to a smile. “Halfway around the world, no less.”

  “To return to the matter at hand,” Morgan said, brushing the comment aside, “what’s the course of action here? What can both sides agree to?”

  “No more killings.” Dad moved back into his seat, but his attention remained squarely on Ezra. “Hunt the hills if you plan to stay for any length of time.”

  “Again, friend–– we didn’t kill Ivan. And yes, we plan to stay.” Ezra made a gesture toward the lanes of the empty bowling alley.

  Gladys lifted her chin and said, “Perhaps you’ll join us for our moonlight bowl every Friday and Saturday night. That is—if you’re not busy running through the forest avoiding hunters on the full moon.”

  My hands balled into fists at my sides. “Those two lupine stones you have are ours.”

  “Not anymore,” Jonah said, patting his collarbone. “And we’ll be enjoying some of the local nightlife all month long with these babies.”

  “Damn it. If you only knew what I went through to get those.” Dad pushed out of his chair, knocking the tray of food from the table.

  My stomach dropped. A rush of emotion, that’d be all it would take for him to turn without a stone. “Please, calm down.”

  “Listen to your pup.” Ezra regarded Dad as if he were a stain on a white shirt. “Now that I think about it, if a wolf killed Ivan North—who’s to say it wasn’t one of you. Maybe we need to offer the sheriff an anonymous tip…”

  That was enough to send Dad flying across the table. Morgan pulled him back, making me doubly grateful he was with us. “Come on, Dad,” I whispered. “They aren’t worth it.”

  Ezra issued a high-pitched laugh and then chugged his beer. I got Dad away from the table, pulling him toward the exit. We could hear them chuckling as we left the building.

  Outside, Dad rested against the truck, breathing in the cool fall air. “Do you believe me now?”

  Morgan stuck his hands in his pockets. “He runs his pack with intimidation and fear.”

  “Like I said. They aren’t the kind of wolves you can work with.” Dad glared back at the entrance. “This was a bad idea. You two actually thought we’d all be friends and trot off into the sunset?”

  Morgan cleared his throat. “I know you’re angry. But dealing with these wolves is a necessary evil. Drive them out or make peace. Those are the options.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “We had to try! So they might be jerks, but what if they didn’t actually kill Ivan? We can’t let Cooper shoot them over that.”

  “Wolves lie like anyone else,” Dad said. “They’re not gonna admit to a crime just because you ask them.”

  “So if they did it, then arrest them for it.”

  “Lily!” Dad threw his arms up in a gesture of sheer frustration. “You want me to go into the sheriff’s office and tell her to lock up these four human-looking ‘people’ for gnawing a man to death?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. He was right. That wasn’t gonna fly.

  Dad waved at me to get into the truck with him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, giving Morgan a quick kiss good-bye. “He’ll cool off and I’ll smooth things over.”

  Morgan made no move to get into his SUV. I hoped he wasn’t going back inside, to try to broker something on his own now that our talk had gone off the rails. I shivered, thinking about the look in Ezra’s eyes. About how Jonah had joked about getting to me and my sisters. They hadn’t been able to take Dad out, but they were still hoping to command the territory. That didn’t bode well for any of us.

  Maybe Dad was right and I should let Cooper go after them. Then at least part of the nightmare would be over. But something still didn’t feel right about that.

  Chapter Five

  I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the fear of more nightmares featuring hunters, it was the thought that we weren’t safe as long as Ezra’s pack was around. And then, eventually, when Morgan took off, it’d be even more dangerous. I thought of Morgan in his apartment above Maggie’s garage a few streets over. I shut my eyes, wondering if he was awake as well, if he could hear my restless thoughts. I sent him a mental message to come to the house. Then, of course, I felt silly for even trying a telepathic trick that probably wasn’t even real.

  Dad had been on edge since we’d returned. He was mad that I’d defied him, that Morgan had facilitated the meeting. But I couldn’t say it wasn’t worth it. I was scared and angered by that vicious pack, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Ezra really was telling the truth. He was cruel and brash—so if he had killed Ivan, wouldn’t that have been something he’d boast about? The look in Ezra’s eyes as he’d denied they’d done it had seemed indignant. As if he’d been saying, even we have standards.

  I slipped out of bed and threw a robe on over my yoga pants and cami. Figuring that it wasn’t going to be easy to fall back asleep anyway, I headed downstairs with my copy of Wuthering Heights. I still had a few chapters to go before tackling the essay we’d been assigned. Though the book was set in Yorkshire, in the north of England, the descriptions of the windswept moors made me think of vast Scottish heaths, of Morgan. If I closed my eyes, I could almost see us darting through the heather, chasing rabbits. Hunting as a wolf so far had been kind of gross, to be honest, but the running was one of my favorite things.

  Down in the kitchen, I stirred some instant hot cocoa powder into water heated in the microwave. The mug warmed my fingers as I curled up in the oversized chair in Dad’s den. It’s funny that word, den. The room was a place Dad holed up in for hours, working at his desk or reading. Bookshelves lined one wall and the other featured various photos of Dad with the rock bands he’d toured with. The life of a roadie was probably a great cover for a young werewolf. Never in one place too long. Erratic hours. He’d chosen Pioneer Falls as a place to settle down in. A safe town in which to build a life you stuck around for.

  Mom hadn’t wanted that life—or us, it turned out—once she found out the truth about Dad’s bloodline. The curse he’d passed on to his three daughters. She was supposed to meet us here after a brief visit to a friend in Portland. When she never showed, searches had turned up nothing, and then, af
ter she’d been gone for many years, she was declared legally dead. I’d been about three the last time I’d seen her, barely old enough to remember her. The twins, well, they’d been infants and had no memories.

  I blew on the hot cocoa and took a sip before I got back into the saga of Heathcliff and Catherine. The house was quiet. The drizzle of rain hitting the window panes made a cozy soundtrack to the turning of pages. The only thing missing was a fire. My bathrobe wasn’t warm enough. As I grabbed a throw blanket from a basket near the desk, a manila folder protruding from Dad’s bag on the floor caught my attention. I was surprised he’d brought any work home, since he was out on medical leave for a few more days while his arm healed. A typed white label on the folder read “North, Ivan,” and was dated last week.

  I plucked it from the bag. When Ivan’s body had been found, the corpse was so badly mauled the sheriff hadn’t been able to rule out it wasn’t Dad. I shuddered with the memory of the shredded flesh, the iron smell of dried blood mixing with the cleaning product scents of the sterile, tiled room in the morgue. There’d been a moment that I hadn’t been sure, thought that it could be my father, that we were finally parentless. That feeling had been way worse than seeing a dead body.

  I flipped past the police reports and even faster through the awful photographs. I’d never seen an autopsy report before, and the graphic images made my stomach quake, especially knowing now that the body was Ivan’s. Finally, I found the pages of the medical examiner’s findings with clinical measurements and chemical analyses. I’d never been a science whiz but some of the terms looked familiar as I skimmed them. And then, on the last page, the examiner had made a few notes about time and probable cause of death.

  My throat went dry as I carefully re-read that section. The words possible postmortem animal activity leaped out at me. Postmortem meant after death. The examiner was saying animals might not have killed Ivan North—that maybe he’d been dead when they got to him. He noted internal trauma and a shattered pelvis, resulting from an impact as another possible cause of death.

  The examiner had listed probable time of death as somewhere between Tuesday and Wednesday nights. That meant someone had killed Ivan not long after Dad had gone missing that week. Ezra’s threat that maybe he’d tip the police that another person was to blame stuck in my mind. Dad had been unaccounted for the night Ivan died.

  Letting out the breath I’d been unconsciously holding, I closed the folder and slipped it carefully back into the bag.

  “What are you doing?” Dad said from the doorway.

  “I was getting a blanket,” I said, in what I hoped was an innocent tone.

  Dad came in and shoved the bag under the desk. “That’s official police paperwork. That’s not for civilian eyes.”

  “These civilian eyes have already seen the body,” I replied, settling back into the big armchair.

  He didn’t smile at my reply. “Lily…”

  “Sorry, I was curious. You must have been too, if you brought it home while you’re still on leave.” I pulled the blanket up over my feet.

  Dad took a seat on the edge of the desk and folded his arms. “Yes. I wanted to read the report for myself, but it’s work related. I’m returning the file to the station later this week when I check in with the sheriff about my return.”

  “So if you read the report, why did you accuse Ezra’s pack of killing Ivan? The report said the animal activity was after death.”

  “Possible. It said it was possible. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t beat him up or fatally wound him in their human forms.”

  “What about that part about impact, though?”

  “No!” Dad’s voice was sharp, loud. “This is not a chance for you to exonerate that pack.” He glanced toward the doorway, seeming to realize that we didn’t need to wake the twins.

  “I know you hate them. I hate them, too,” I whispered. “But you’re not considering the impact on Cooper. You want to make him into a murderer if he decides to take revenge?”

  Dad moved closer to me, keeping his voice low. “I didn’t say that, but this case is closed. Animal activity, end of story. We stick with the official determination. The minute the law starts poking around on this, the more risk to our safety. You want people questioning Cooper? Asking why Ivan really raised wolves?”

  My face felt hot, scratchy. I didn’t like Dad railing at me as if I didn’t have the right to ask questions. “So you don’t want us to find the truth.”

  “No, honey.” Dad pulled an ottoman from near the window and plunked down on it next to me in the chair. “You have to understand... we lived here for fourteen years with no trouble. No one gave us a second glance. Now, in the space of three weeks, we’ve got hunters, a rival pack, and a dead Protector. Laying low doesn’t even begin to describe what we have to do.” He let out a long breath and ruffled a hand through his graying brown hair, clearly frustrated. “It’s never easy to live outside the protection of a pack, nothing simple about being a lone wolf in the first place, but it’s been made incredibly harder.”

  “But if we could find out who killed Ivan, we could reassure Cooper and make sure he stays safe and on our side.”

  “I know you want to help your friend,” Dad said, his tone softening. “But our first priority has to be self-preservation.”

  “But that’s what—”

  “I don’t want to hear anything else about this report. Let’s leave Ivan to rest in peace.” Shaking his head, Dad got up and walked out. His heavy steps thudded on the staircase. How he could sleep after this interaction, I had no idea.

  “Ivan’s not going to rest in peace and neither will Cooper, until we know the truth,” I muttered to the empty room.

  I didn’t like the idea of going against Dad’s wishes, but I couldn’t let this go. There wasn’t going to be peace in Pioneer Falls until we knew what really happened to Ivan. There had to be more to the story. Someone who’d seen something.

  I couldn’t risk Ezra somehow pinning it on my father, but I didn’t want the pack to be blamed for it either. No wolf deserved to die for a murder they didn’t commit.

  ***

  The next day at school, I spent most of fifth period searching online articles about animal attacks in our area. I didn’t know anything about autopsy reports, but something was bothering me about what I’d read in Ivan’s file. The examiner seemed to suggest that Ivan might have already been dead when the animals got to them. Post-mortem animal activity, he’d written.

  It must not have looked like a fatal mauling to him. That made me question what other animal mauling victims looked like. The answer turned my stomach. People trying to play dead to throw off a provoked bear only to have their skulls crushed, or flesh torn with the swipe of a claw. I clicked through articles, not finding many mentions of wolves. Most of the recent stories were about black bear and cougars attacking hikers or campers in our area. The only confirmed kill I’d seen Ezra’s pack involved with had been a deer they’d killed behind the coffee shop, the night my father went missing. That’d been a deep neck wound, torn jugular.

  As the bell rang, I closed down the computer terminal and then turned to find Ms. Wilson standing behind me. “That didn’t look like Harvest Festival background,” she said, settling her willowy frame down on a nearby desk.

  The rest of the students in the journalism class were clearing out of the room. Alicia gave me a sympathetic look as she passed my desk, seeming to sense I was about to get lectured.

  “It wasn’t,” I said. “I’m a little distracted, sorry.”

  “Deadline’s next Tuesday morning for your article. Don’t wait to start gathering details.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I won’t wait,” I said, shoving my notebook in my bag.

  “May I ask why you’re so interested in animal attacks? Those pictures were graphic, disturbing—at least the ones I saw over your shoulder.”

  “I’m friends with the North family.”

  “Ah.” Ms. Wilson mov
ed off the desk. Her long, flowing skirt swished as she walked back to the front of the room. “I understand it was a horrible attack.”

  I shouldered my bag and followed her, trying to sense if she was humoring me or brushing me off. “I thought if I found another similar incident it might make more sense.”

  Ms. Wilson picked up an eraser and began cleaning the whiteboard. “Curiosity makes a good journalist,” she said, over her shoulder. “Ask the questions. That’s your job. But be careful about researching stuff like that in my class.” She stretched high to reach the far side of the board. Her red velvet jacket rose slightly, revealing a cream lace top and a gold belt breaking the darkness of her skirt. “I only have you for an hour each day, so I’d like you to be on task.”

  “Gotcha.” I glanced toward the clock, realizing I had to run to my next class.

  Ms. Wilson set the eraser down and wiped stray ink off her hands on a paper towel. “There’ll be plenty of times you’re asked to cover mundane things. Don’t let the allure of shiny objects distract you from those everyday assignments.”

  “Advice from journalism school?”

  The next class threaded between us, kids heading to their desks.

  “From working at the Tribune.” Ms. Wilson’s lips curved into a smile. “Get that story done. Hit Main Street for some interviews. It’s always good to start with some firsthand sources.”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, and about that attack on Mr. North. I know you’re worried about their family, but that’s not your purview.”

  “I’m not… I mean, I just want the truth.”

  “That’s all that any good journalist wants.” Ms. Wilson’s smile faded. “But you might not like what you find.” It felt like a chill had descended over the room.

  I shrugged off her strange comment and gave her my most pleasant smile. I’m sure she didn’t want me wasting class time on something like Ivan’s death, but to me it wasn’t just something I could walk away from. Not when it meant keeping Cooper on our side.