Goosebumps popped out all over his skin.
The door slammed behind him.
Holden jumped, letting out a little cry.
But then he realized it was the wind outside. The wind had blown the door shut.
And then a wave of pain seized his body. He grunted. Then stumbled forward, grabbing onto the railing of the stairwell for balance. “Carrie!” he called up the steps.
But there was no response, only the sound of the wind howling around the house outside.
If that howling was the wind. Maybe it was wolves.
“Carrie!” he shrieked.
His body convulsed. The thing inside him was moving and growing, trying to get out. Oh God, it wanted out. He couldn’t let this thing inside him out. He needed to stop it. But he had no idea how.
He gripped the railing and hurried up the steps.
Upstairs, it was dark as well. He pushed open the door to Carrie’s room. He could see her bed, the covers askew. Her closet door open, clothes spilling out of it. But no one was in there.
Across the hall, there was another room, its door standing wide open. It had a bed in it as well, but that one was made. There was a bag sitting on top of it, half open. He could see folded clothes inside. There was nothing else in the room.
“Carrie!” he yelled.
No answer.
Pain went through him again—like his whole body was ripping apart. He screamed, colliding with the wall, twitching against the pain there, like a bug pinned to a card.
Eventually, the wave passed.
He opened his eyes and found himself staring into the room where he’d made love to Carrie. It looked just the same. The wide, wide bed, the walk-in closet, the tasteful framed pictures on the wall.
He thought of what it had been like, lying there with Carrie, deep inside her, her body twined around his. The way it had felt—like liquid bliss.
And then more pain.
It felt like something was digging its claws into his brain. He gasped, slapping at the back of his head, trying to shake it off. But there was nothing there. Whatever it was was inside of him.
He let out a strangled cry. “What did you do to me, Carrie?”
No answer.
Holden threw open the rest of the doors upstairs, looking in the bathroom with its white, peaceful tile and its clawfoot bathtub. He even looked in the closet, but he only found stacks of fluffy towels.
There was no one upstairs.
He ran back downstairs. At the bottom of the steps, another wave of misery cut into him. It made him go tense and stiff, and he lost his balance, tumbling down the rest of the stairs to land face first at the landing.
When he tried to get up, he could only make it to his hands and knees before another wave hit him.
His spine was stretching.
His bones were moving.
He screamed.
But something in him drove him forward, and he dragged himself down the hallway. He headed for the kitchen, for that one ghostly light.
The pain was all over now. Everything hurt, even his fingernails. His whole body was changing shape, snapping into a new place, but he struggled to keep crawling, keep moving. He grunted and yelled.
“Carrie!” he called out one more time.
Only silence.
And it was getting harder to think, to focus. The pain was overtaking everything, blinding his mind and wiping him out. He was being erased.
The thing inside was coming.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mick stood at the edge of the forest with Carrie, who was being difficult.
“It’s just that I think it would be better if we ran by ourselves,” she said, a defiant gleam in her eye. “You said you didn’t want me to tempt you, and I don’t know what might happen if I take off my clothes.”
He glared at her. “It was not your fault, and I’m sorry that I blamed you. It won’t happen again.”
“What won’t happen again? You won’t kiss me? Or you won’t slap me?”
“Neither,” he said. At the moment, he was certain that it was true, as well. He’d never felt so horrible as he did after their interaction this afternoon, and he was never going to allow himself to feel that terrible ever again. No, he would keep himself in check from now on. He would stay in control. That was what an alpha needed to do, after all. He needed to stay in control.
“I’m not taking off my clothes in front of you.”
“Then do it behind me.” He turned his back.
There was a sound of shattering glass.
They both started, turning in the direction of the noise.
A wolf was leaping through the glass doors in the kitchen, breaking the glass. They watched as it touched down on the deck and then bounded over the edge of the deck and landed on the lawn beneath.
The wolf began to run for the both of them.
Mick looked at Carrie. “What did you do?”
“What are you talking about?” she said.
“Fuck,” Mick muttered. This was the last thing he needed. He sprinted across the lawn to intercept the wolf. As he ran, he tugged off his shirt. He jumped into the air pulling off his pants and shifting at the same time, letting his wolf overtake his body.
He landed directly in front of the other wolf, and he stared it down.
The wolf whimpered and lowered its head in submission. It could see that Mick was dominant.
Mick took the other wolf by the neck, gathering folds of its skin and fur into his teeth. He poured his force over the wolf, demanding that it submit completely to him.
There was no resistance in the wolf whatsoever. It surrendered to him immediately.
Mick released him.
And since he was now the wolf’s alpha, he forced the wolf to shift back into human form right away. Mick shifted himself.
Holden appeared in his human form, gasping on the grass, still on all fours.
“Holden?” called Carrie, running forward.
Mick dragged a hand over his face. “You idiot. Did you bite him?”
“No,” said Carrie. “I didn’t do anything like that.” Then she winced. “But we did sort of… do it without a condom.”
Mick squeezed his eyes shut. “Of course. Well, this is just great. Excellent, Carrie. Why don’t you go out, spread your legs for the entire senior class, and make werewolves of all of them?”
Holden was sputtering, looking down at his hands. “What…? What happened?”
Mick ignored him. “I’m not taking him with us, Carrie. I don’t care if I am his alpha, I’m not claiming responsibility for this mutt.”
“How are you his alpha?” said Carrie. “And how come he shifted back?” She looked up at the moon. “It’s still a full moon.”
“I just asserted my wolf over his wolf,” said Mick. “He surrendered, so now I’m his alpha. And alpha wolves can control the shifts of their betas.” He was frustrated, and he just blurted it out, because it was the truth.
Her eyes widened. “What?”
Shit. He’d forgotten he was keeping that from her. He wasn’t going to do it forever. Eventually, he was going to tell her the truth, but he was waiting until she trusted him a little bit better, until she could handle it.
“That means you can control my shifts?”
He sighed.
Carrie’s lip trembled. “Then you made me shift, didn’t you? You made me shift, and you made me kill my parents.”
“Carrie,” he said. “Listen, it was the only way to free you from them. And you have to admit that you’re glad that they’re gone.”
“I am not.” She was crying now.
“Wait,” said Holden. “You did kill your parents?”
Carrie slammed her palm into Mick’s chest. “It’s your fault. You did this.”
He forced her hand away. “You’re being stubborn about this, Carrie. You’re better off without your parents. You need to admit it to yourself.”
>
“I’m not better off.” She angrily wiped at her tears. “I loved them. I never wanted them dead.” She pointed at Mick. “You get away from me. You get away from me forever.” And then she stalked back up to the house.
Holden stood up. “Uh…”
Mick sneered at him. He turned and walked away too, leaving the naked boy alone in the moonlight.
* * *
Holden didn’t know what the hell was going on. He watched the big naked guy—Mick, right?—leave him alone out here, and he was completely confused. He had no memory of getting here. The last thing he remembered, he was in the house, all the bones in his body breaking painfully. The next thing, he was naked out here.
Naked. In front of everyone. And Mick had acted like it was no big deal.
If Holden looked at him, he’d still see Mick’s bare ass as he walked back to the house.
Not that Holden was looking.
Well, he glanced up occasionally to see how much progress Mick had made, but he wasn’t watching or anything. He didn’t want to check out Mick’s nude body. Seriously.
Holden wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He wanted to just get in his car and drive back home, but he didn’t have his keys anymore. His keys had been in the pocket of his jeans, and he didn’t know where the hell his jeans were. The last time he remembered wearing them was back in that house, so he guessed he was going to have to go back in there to try to find them.
He didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to. He would have much rather just run far, far away from this place.
What the hell had happened?
He didn’t want to face it, but he was pretty sure that he had, in fact, shifted into a werewolf. And that meant…
Fuck.
His life was over. He was going to get carted away to the SF place, and everyone was going to know that he was a werewolf. No one would ever trust him again. Girls wouldn’t fuck him, because they’d be afraid of catching the disease. People would stay clear of him, frightened that he’d wolf out and kill them.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Holden kicked the ground, but he only managed to stub his bare toe.
Shoulders slumping, he made his way back to the house.
On the porch, there was glass everywhere, and he was barefoot, so he had to gingerly maneuver around that. But he made it back into the kitchen. And he found his clothes. What was left of them.
His clothes had all been ripped to shreds, and they seemed to have exploded everywhere. There were strips of ripped fabric lying all over the kitchen like discarded confetti.
He didn’t see his keys anywhere, though.
If his clothes had exploded, the keys probably had too. They would have flown through the air, and they could have landed anywhere.
Holden began to search the kitchen, picking up all the scraps of fabric, looking in every corner and cranny.
Eventually, he found the keys.
They were lying in the sink, all splayed out next to the drain. He couldn’t believe they’d ended up all the way over here.
But now, with his keys in his hand, he wondered if he really could just drive home. Was it legal to drive naked? He imagined getting pulled over. He didn’t think it would go over well.
But he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like he had any other clothes. If he wanted to get home, he was just going to have to do it this way.
It was only that he was still so damned confused. What had happened? Why had it stopped? Was it going to happen again? What had that Mick guy done to him? Why had he said he was Holden’s alpha?
Holden squeezed his hand around the keys and let out a noise of frustration.
He needed some answers. It would be easier to get answers when he was dressed—this whole experience was like one of those terribly embarrassing dreams where he was trying to function normally without any clothes—but he didn’t have that luxury. Besides, it wasn’t as if Carrie hadn’t seen him naked already. He’d go talk to her.
For the second time that night, he ascended the stairs to the second level of the house.
This time, Carrie’s door was shut, and the light was on inside.
Holden banged on her door.
“Go away!” she yelled from inside. Her voice was thick with tears.
“I’m not going away,” he said. “I need some kind of fucking answers here, okay?”
“Holden?” The door opened, and Carrie peered out, red faced. “Oh God, Holden, I forgot about you.”
He glared at her. “Well, that’s great, Carrie.”
She looked him over. “Oh. Your clothes.”
“They’re, um, ripped up.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip, and then she pushed past him into the hallway.
He followed her back into the room where they’d made love the first time, and she darted into the large walk-in closet. She came back with a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.
“It was my dad’s,” she said. “It’ll probably fit you, though.”
He yanked on the clothes, happy to be covered. It made him feel human again. Civilized.
But once the biggest concern was out of the way, once he was dressed, he began to feel terror over the rest of everything that was wrong. Things were so screwed up, and he didn’t know what was going to happen. He clutched his forehead. “What the fuck, Carrie?”
She cringed. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” He sucked in a breath. “Well, that’s absolutely perfect. Fucking amazing. You’re sorry? That fixes everything.”
“I never meant…” She looked around at their surroundings, at the bed where they’d lain together. “Let’s go back to my room.”
He followed her again.
Once there, she sat down on the bed. She patted a space next to her.
He shook his head.
She looked disappointed.
“Am I a werewolf?” His voice cracked.
“Well… I guess so,” she said. “I didn’t even think about it, not when we, you know… did it. You have to understand that I was doing my best not to shift into a wolf and hurt you. I tried to channel it into something else. But I guess it didn’t really work.”
“You were trying to keep from shifting?” he said. “But it wasn’t a full moon.”
“I know,” she said. She looked troubled. “I don’t think that matters. But I don’t understand it, and Mick won’t tell me everything.”
“Who the hell is Mick?”
“He’s my alpha,” she said. “I guess he’s your alpha now too.”
“What?” Holden’s head was spinning. “You’re telling me that we’re like in a wolf pack? Like we’re animals?”
“You just shifted back from being an animal only a short time ago,” she said. “I saw it.”
Holden began to pace. “But you…” He took a deep breath. “Why are we here? Why aren’t you in the SF?”
“Mick says they’re bad. He won’t let me call them. And besides, I wanted to finish school. Things were going so well.” Her face fell.
Holden let out a harsh laugh. “Well, that’s just perfect. You wanted to live it up, so you just stayed here, and you passed your filthy werewolf disease on to me, and—”
“I didn’t mean it.” She shot up off the bed. “I never wanted to hurt you, Holden.”
He shook his head. “What am I going to do?”
She came over to him and grabbed both of his hands. “You’re going to come with me. We’re going to leave together, run away—far away. I have to get away from Mick.”
He pulled his hands away from hers. “I can’t leave. My sister is here. I have to finish school.”
She looked down at the floor. “Right. You hate me, don’t you?”
He opened his mouth to tell her that he did—that she’d ruined his life. But once he was looking at her, he found that he couldn’t say the words. They weren’t true anyway. This was Carrie, the girl who’d changed everything for him. He felt closer to her than anyone on earth. They were connected som
ehow. He looked at the floor too. “I don’t hate you, Carrie.”
“Really?”
He sighed. He ran a hand through his hair.
And from the bottom level, there was the sound of knocking.
Carrie furrowed her brow. “Someone’s at the door.” She looked confused. “Who would be here now? That doesn’t make any sense.” She opened the door to her bedroom and peered out into the hallway.
The knock came again.
Carrie turned to Holden. “You stay here.” She left the room.
He was alone again.
* * *
Carrie made her way down the steps. She didn’t think that anyone had knocked on her door since that first night with Mick. And he hadn’t knocked, had he?
No, she’d somehow known he was there. She’d been overtaken by the change, and she’d been driven to go to that door, to let Mick in.
Was it Mick at the door again?
No, Mick wouldn’t knock. He didn’t need to knock anymore. She’d already let him in, and now everything was falling to pieces. What was she going to do?
The knock came again.
Carrie was at the bottom of the steps. She swallowed, crossed the foyer, and then she opened the door.
A man stood there. He was in a uniform of sorts. It was black. It resembled a police uniform, but the man had no badge. There was also a woman behind him. She was also wearing the same uniform.
“Hello, ma’am,” said the man. “We’re here from the Sullivan Foundation. We want to ask you a few questions.”
Her stomach turned over. The SF? Here? How had they found them? She’d killed Mrs. Finch, and that was supposed to have stopped the problem. They couldn’t be here now, not after everything she’d done.
Her first instinct was to slam the door in their faces, run out the back, and try to get as far away as she possibly could. But she knew that would only make them more suspicious.
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