by DG Wood
Wyatt had been clever in making his way here with his clan. They’d spent a week traveling in the opposite direction, working their way around two mountains to double back to the town. If Buck ever picked up his scent, he would think his brother was merely passing through the fringes of his territory.
Wyatt’s spies had told him that his brother was a two-day hike from Wolf Woods. A lot of damage could be done in two days. He wouldn’t kill Trey. No, he’d recruit him and train him to kill the man who raised him. Only then would Wyatt kill his son.
Or maybe he’d wait until his other son, Roland, was old enough, and make Trey the boy’s first kill. A rite of passage. Then, hand him Victoria as the prize. Not as a wife, just a plaything. Wyatt had learned that his daughter was now married to his son, her half-brother. Wolf Woods under Buck’s leadership had become so desperate, they’d resorted to inbreeding.
“Wolf Woods,” Wyatt proclaimed to the wind, “your favorite son returns.”
“Are we going down there today, babe?” Wyatt’s wife, Angie, asked.
Angie had been Wyatt’s mate for the past fourteen years. She was just over half his age, and she’d given him Roland, who had just turned thirteen.
“Tomorrow. I want Buck to realize he was just a few hours too late. Until then, tell the rest we stay hidden. Tell Roland not to go wandering off.”
Wyatt looked at Angie’s clothes. She was wearing a tight-fitting outfit she’d taken from Serena’s RV. They were all wearing the cast’s clothes.
“Damn, Mama Wolf, you like fine!”
“I want to look my best when I meet your family.”
“Oh, they are going to love you.”
Serena had agreed, for Lily’s sake, to spend some time at her home. The actress had grown up in a home of nothing but loving, supportive people. Maybe it was hubris to think she could make a difference in Lily’s life with just a couple of days’ friendship, but she felt the need to try nonetheless.
She expected to find a home where Lily was the Cinderella doing all the chores for a big ogre who not only barely tolerated her, but blamed her for the death of his wife. What she found was completely the opposite.
Ed was a loving father. He doted on his daughter, and it was crystal clear she set the tone for the house. Whatever she wanted, that was how it happened. It was also evident that Lily loved her father very much and doted on him just as much as he her. She cooked many of his meals, and Ed loved to sit with his eyes closed and listen to his daughter read, proud in her ability to bring the characters on the page to life in an animated way.
The soup they had for lunch was made with vegetables Lily and Serena picked from Lily’s garden and venison Ed had brought down with his own claws. During grace, a practice that Serena’s own family observed, she allowed Ed to take her hand. Her hand was minuscule within Ed’s. She caught herself, while thanking God, wondering if Ed’s hands were an indication of the size of other parts of his anatomy.
After much pleading by Lily, Serena found herself agreeing to a sleepover. In Lily’s room, of course.
Marvin was a virgin. This fact had instilled in his mind feelings of inadequacy that had prevented him from pursuing to his fullest potential a healthy sex life with girls his own age or any age.
But, it was also a fact that he was now driving Marjorie up to the circus, where he had every intention of losing his virginity in one of the cast trailers that was not going to be put to a better use. And whereas he was under maximum security detail forty-eight hours previous, he was now free to roam wherever he liked with Marjorie.
So, after an obligatory stop to admire the beauty of the view, Marjorie pulled Marvin into Serena’s trailer. It was a mess. It looked ransacked, thought Marvin. But, then he suspected Serena was a hippy, what with all the pills he always saw her popping. Earth children were slobs.
Marjorie brushed away the articles of clothing strewn across the little couch, lay down, and slipped off her underwear. Marvin ripped off his pants as quickly as he could, hopping around on one foot trying to remove a stuck pant leg.
He barely made it inside Marjorie before exploding.
Marvin collapsed onto Marjorie, ashamed.
“I’m so sorry. It’s just that you’re so beautiful. I promise. I’ll be able to go again.”
Marjorie giggled and tisk-tisked.
“Of course you will, silly. It’s the writhing. You can’t help yourself.”
Marjorie devoured Marvin’s lips with her mouth.
In Christopher’s trailer, Jake was experiencing a very similar and equally embarrassing episode with Doreen.
“What’s ‘the writhing?’” Jake asked Doreen.
“When we’re ready to mate, non-weres can’t resist us.”
Doreen looked down, between their two bodies.
“See?” she asked with a smile.
In Lily’s bedroom, Lily showed Serena the watercolors she had painted and which now adorned her walls, as well as a black and white photo of her mother and father together when her mother was very pregnant with Lily.
“This is my favorite photo. It is the only photo of my mom, dad and me together,” Lily said without a hint of sadness. Lily’s mother reminded Serena of her own mother. She had kind, melancholic eyes, a slender, elegant build, and a pianist’s hands that wrapped across her extended belly in protective fashion.
Lily also showed Serena the tears in the Victorian fabric wallpaper, where her first turning had resulted in a redecoration of her room in what she liked to describe as abstract Lilly.
After a couple chapters of Nancy Drew over milk and a cookie split in two, it was lights out for the girls.
But Serena couldn’t sleep. She was sweating profusely. It felt like a hundred degrees inside the room, her heart was beating a mile a minute, and she couldn’t get the image of Ed’s hands out of her brain.
Serena looked over at Lily, who was fast asleep. She got up, tiptoed to the door, slipped out, and crossed the darkened hallway to Ed’s room. Serena wanted Ed to wrap himself around her and make her feel small.
Peter had no clue what had gotten into his colleagues. They had all lost their minds. Sitting around the supper table of a perfectly nice family earlier that evening had been the final straw for him.
“Do you want my daughter, lad?” The father had asked him.
The man was eager to get this show on the road.
“I’m sorry?”
“You can take her tonight. You have her mother’s and my blessing.”
Across from Peter, Cynthia was sipping her soup. His eye-line was continuously drawn to her breasts, which were very much apparent through the thin blouse and bra she was not wearing. He did think they were very well put together breasts, but no amount of her father prostituting his daughter was going to work on Peter.
Peter decided to just spill the beans. “I’m gay.”
“That’s good. Cynthia isn’t of a serious disposition herself,” chimed in Cynthia’s mother.
Peter finished his meal quickly on that point and informed Cynthia he would return tomorrow to seal the deal.
Peter was getting the hell out of this town tonight.
Shane had an even more surreal experience. The mousy girl wasn’t willing to wait. When her parents retired for the night, Zelda was prepared to take him right there on the dining room table. Shane was a meal she would top with salt and pepper. So, he decided the best way through the storm was not to avoid it.
Shane told Zelda he was modest, and she agreed to move the proceedings to her room. With the lights out, Shane was able to fumble with a condom he always kept in his wallet for emergencies. This was going to have to work at protecting him against the ultimate in sexually transmitted diseases.
When Peter and Shane met back up at the hotel, they were both of the same mind. They escaped through the back door of the hotel and d
ashed from clothes line to garden shed to beat-up car until within sprinting distance of the ford in the river.
Once across it, both looked back to check they weren’t being followed. Nothing. Twenty minutes later, they’d reached the circus and the vehicle that was their ticket out of here.
Shane hopped in Carter’s pick-up and starting shuffling through the glove compartment and under the seats for the keys, until Peter pointed out they were in the ignition.
They closed the doors to the pick-up as quietly as they could, and Shane started up the engine, hoping that it wasn’t going to be the eruption that the vehicle’s age and condition suggested.
It was even louder than the young men had anticipated. Was there a muffler on this thing? Shane threw the gear shift into drive and headed down the mountain.
“I figure we’ve got an hour till the next town. We’ll send back help from there. What’s the gas situation?” Peter asked.
Shane peered down at the pump icon and saw a quarter of a tank. “I think we’ll just get there or within walking distance at least.”
They worked their way down the mountain road they’d first used what seemed like an eternity ago, but was in fact less than a week ago.
Wyatt and his wolves had watched Shane and Peter return to the circus. He could have easily ended their lives at any point during their escape. But, he liked to play with his prey before the kill.
Wyatt watched the truck reach the base of the mountain and come up against the pile of logs that blocked access to the rural highway. The thick forest on either side of the logjam prevented Shane and Peter from going around.
The two men jumped out and spent the next half hour trying to shift the logs. But there were too many of them. They had dislodged one of the logs through prying and pushing, but couldn’t lift or roll it to one side.
“We could drag them out of the way,” Peter suggested.
He ran back to the pick-up and searched through the bed until he found a jumble of rope. He tied it to the front hitch of the truck while Shane dug a trough with his hands under the log.
Shane threaded the end of the rope through to the other side and wrapped it around the log several times. He tied it off and gave Peter the thumbs-up signal.
Peter hopped in the truck, shifted into reverse and put his foot on the gas. The truck complained, but the log moved. The truck dragged the log free of the pile.
It was when dragging the second log that the rope snapped. And after tying off at a shorter distance, the rope snapped again.
Worn out and leaning against what was still a substantial pile of logs, Shane stated the obvious.
“Pete, it would take us days to move all of these. We have to make a run for it on foot.”
“I know,” Peter replied. “Okay.”
Shane returned to the truck and grabbed a water bottle that had been rolling around on the floor, and the two men made it around the pile of logs to the entrance of the turn-off from the rural highway.
There, waiting for them, was Wyatt’s pack.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
At sun-up, Wyatt kicked a scrawny wolf off Peter’s mutilated body. The wolf whelped, leaping forward and transforming into human Roland.
“Don’t be a glutton, boy. Now, get dressed. We’re going into town today.”
Wyatt turned to one of his lieutenants and pointed at Peter and Shane’s corpses.
“Throw what’s left of them in the river.”
The second night in the wilderness for Darkly and Buck was an uneventful one. Buck had not run with the moon, and she slept soundly. There was a moment when Darkly woke for an instant and sensed something walking around the tent. But, she did not feel threatened and fell asleep almost as quickly as she awoke.
Buck told her they would leave the tent where it was and merely stamp out the fire. They were a twenty-minute hike from Catharine’s home. Depending on how long they stayed, they may need to camp here another night.
“Won’t we stay with her?” Darkly asked.
“No.” Buck was being cryptic.
Where they were situated, they were near the top of a stout mountain. The summit consisted of two craggy rock spires that resembled an old woman’s arthritic fingers. Between the two spires, a bowl had been shaped in the mountain from a spring that emptied out of the bowl into the stream, which then, in turn, joined the Moon River.
It was into the bowl, the source of the spring, that Buck guided Darkly.
The floor of the bowl was a rich carpet of ferns and moss. Before the spring’s water fell out of the bowl and began its long descent to the valley below, it first collected in a small pool. In the pool, there were carp. Their scales shimmered luminescent in the morning sun, and the red, orange, white, and purple colors popped against the rim of silver lichen that crowned the pool.
“I put those there for your mother. I thought it would give her something to watch.”
“They’re beautiful, Buck.”
Darkly looked around her.
“Where’s the house?”
Darkly didn’t know how anyone would get building materials up here, let alone fish, but her mother, if it really was her mother, had to live somewhere.
“Let’s climb up there,” Buck answered.
“Okay.”
Buck went first, and Darkly followed to a rock outcrop that jutted out from one of the spires. Buck sat down.
“Now what do we do?” asked Darkly.
“We wait.”
Carter woke up to the warmth of the sun on his face. It felt good, but nowhere near as good as last night. He looked down at the end of the hotel bed, where a tray from room service had been placed. Well, room service is being generous. Lewis had been bribed by Mary’s father with a jar of pickled onions to bring to Carter’s room a bottle of Glenfiddich single malt and loaf of spiced cake.
He turned over to watch Mary sleeping, her head resting on the pillow next to his. He wasn’t sure how she had captured his heart and body so quickly, and he didn’t care. The urge to make love to her again was overwhelming. He wanted so badly to wake her, but she looked so peaceful.
What happens next? How does it happen? When does it come? Will it take him by surprise? He thought he should be scared about the transformation about to be thrust upon him. He thought he should be anxious about not returning home to Miami. Why was he not running for the hills like Peter and Shane? He had seen them climbing the hill across the river last night. Carter and Mary had made love twice, and he went to sit alone by the window afterwards, more content than he had ever been, while she fell asleep. That was when he saw them. He wished them well and returned to bed.
Doc Ross opened the bottle of colloidal silver pills. He sniffed them and then dumped the whole bottle down the toilet. He pulled the chain next to the cistern above his head, and the little caplets were caught up in the resulting whirlpool and disappeared. He then went to wake up Lily and tell her the heartbreaking news. Her father was dead.
He had found Ed sprawled naked on his bed, his eyes open wide as his mouth, and an erection that remained prominent after Doc covered it with a blanket.
Serena was wrapped in a blanket, crouched on the floor, rocking back and forth. When Doc read the list of ingredients on the back of the bottle he found in Serena’s purse, it all became clear. Caught up in the writhing, Serena had mated with Ed. But, with her body pumped full of silver, love didn’t just hurt, it killed.
Doc slapped Serena across the face to snap her out of her stupor.
“Listen to me, sweetheart,” Doc lectured, “this was a simple heart attack.”
He showed Serena the now empty bottle of colloidal silver.
“I’ve gotten rid of these. Not that anyone will ask you such an unfathomable question, but if they do, you never ingested silver, and you don’t know what happened. You were both in the middle of it,
when he started gasping for air. You came and got me immediately.”
Doc stood up, shaking his head. He thought he’d seen it all. There really are surprises still to be had, even at his stage of life.
“There’s a little girl in the next room who’s crying her eyes out. She’s lost her mother and her father. You’re one of us now. I think you know what you need to do.”
Darkly pulled an apple from her pack. It was full of worm holes, such was the organic nature of a town that considered pesticide a fancy word for scarecrow. She thought back to her childhood. She was with other children at an apple farm. She helped pick the apples, then watched them being turned into apple sauce. Wait a minute. That memory was from well before William had opened the car door and helped her into the back seat, wiping her bloodied and bare feet with a tissue.
Buck touched Darkly’s arm, pulling her out of the daydream.
Below them, from a crevice in the bowl of the rock, the muzzle of a black wolf was emerging. It walked slowly onto the carpet of moss and crouched down at the carp pool, proceeding to lap up water. The wolf then settled down at the pool’s edge and appeared to watch the fish swimming around the pool. The fish did not avoid the side of the pool where the wolf lounged. They appeared quite used to the company.
Buck spoke quietly to Darkly.
“The cure drove a number of children mad. There was no cure for the madness. They became violent, turning on their families. The year after Catharine came to us, nineteen children were put down.”
Darkly recoiled.
“It was the only merciful option we had. To seek treatment in the outside world would have meant torture in a government lab. Your mother blamed herself, and she was right to do so. She came here, where she said goodbye to me and her infant son and swore to remain in wolf form until her death.”