Silence of the Wolves

by Hannah Pole

  ‘You OK?’ he growled.

  ‘Yup,’ she said through gritted teeth.

  He could see the exhaustion sweeping through her. ‘Do you mind if I grab a shower?’ He motioned to the dried blood still covering his arms and chest.

  ‘Sure. Go ahead,’ she mumbled, waving towards the bathroom.

  ‘Good. Try to sleep.’

  He was almost certain she would be out like a light before he’d even left the room, and maybe that was for the best.

  Chapter Five

  Tamriel was absolutely exhausted but, hell, she wasn’t going to let a silly thing like sleep stop her. Leyth excused himself and went to shower, which was possibly the best thing that could have happened. It gave her a few minutes of vital alone time that she really needed. Time to collect herself and process all that had just happened.

  As he left the room, she didn’t waste any time. Trying her hardest to sit up, she struggled against the sofa. Even that had tears streaming from her eyes and her body screaming in agony. Her mind was buzzing with unanswered questions; she was so confused and frustrated, it was a wonder she didn’t literally burst.

  Cursing under her breath, Tam reached an arm underneath her sofa and pulled out her computer. She hit the power button. She didn’t have long before her captor returned from the shower and she needed answers quickly. She Googled ‘Werewolves, Folkestone.’

  The page filled up with various websites claiming to be an ‘online hangout for genuine werewolves’. All fake gothic crap. Nothing of any interest.

  Tapping her fingers against the arm of the sofa, Tam blew out a frustrated breath before typing in ‘wolves’.

  This didn’t return very much of interest, only pictures of various wolves around the world, a Wikipedia description of the types of wolves around today, and your more generic wolf sites.

  She changed the search term to ‘Wolves in Kent.’

  The first thing that came up was the website for the Wildlife Park called ‘White Wolves Inc.’. It looked pretty normal, a description of the park itself and a bit about the wolves and other wildlife that was kept there.

  It struck her as odd, however, that the park was not open to the public. It was only available for private hire, and even that had to be applied for, scheduled and approved.

  There were no articles about the wildlife park, no reviews or advertisements. Only the low-key website. Tam clicked back through to the full list of searches.

  Port Lympne, the zoo, popped up in Google’s search results, but Tam didn’t bother looking at that. She knew all about the zoo and the Aspinall Foundation, following a story she did on them last year.

  Scrolling through the many results, Tam finally came across an article that hooked her interest. It was entitled ‘Real Werewolves in Kent’.

  Reading through the article, she found it was a detailed description of one researcher’s experience with ‘werewolves’. It didn’t say where in Kent he’d found them, but he did describe a huge man with an attractive accent. The article went on to describe how the researcher had cameras hidden in various areas of woodland around the Kent countryside, and one of these had picked up footage of a huge man walking out into the woodland stark naked. He had apparently then proceeded to drop onto all fours and literally turned into an enormous wolf. The article was incredibly descriptive about how the change happened, and the author, still obviously in shock from what he’d witnessed, then reeled off several of his many theories surrounding the experience.

  Tamriel then did a search on the researcher. His name was Tobias Daniels, and he’d written various books and articles on ‘supernatural happenings’ in the Kent area. Strangely, following that particular article, he’d promptly written a disclaimer telling the world that it was a prank played by some of the local college kids and that he had no reason to believe that werewolves actually exist. Interesting.

  Tam dug a little further. Tobias Daniels had apparently come into a lot of money recently, only weeks after that particular article in fact, and now ran a private research facility in Canterbury, although he refused to publish any of his findings.

  Tam chewed on this information for a little while, skimming through various articles that mentioned the researcher, and published works by the man himself. After a while, she absently typed ‘real werewolf’ into Google, which brought up all manner of websites, some a little ridiculous, others a little more serious.

  Tam snorted at the thought. Was she actually trying to believe this? But, following what she’d witnessed, how could she not?

  Tam rubbed her eyes. She herself was definitely not normal, was it really a stretch to believe she genuinely was supernatural? Probably not.

  Through the thin walls of her flat, she could hear the water running still. She had some time. God that man scared her yet, behind that hard exterior, she’d managed to see glimpses of compassion. She clicked on her email icon and pulled up a new message. Who the hell was she going to email? ‘Help, I’m trapped in my own house, held captive by a werewolf.’ Who on earth wasn’t going to think that was a prank?

  Tam finally decided that dropping her colleague at work an email was the best plan, keeping it short and simple, ‘At home, please send help.’

  As she hit send, she felt a pang of guilt; what if someone came over and Leyth killed or hurt them? The logical side of her pointed out that they were in a building full of people, in the middle of a town, so it would be difficult for her captor to do anything violent and it go unnoticed. Besides, he hadn’t done anything even remotely malicious yet. In fact, he’d only tried to help her; he’d carried her home after she’d injured herself and nursed her back to health. She would probably have died if it weren’t for him and, what’s more, he had brought her home. Plus he hadn’t once said she couldn’t leave; she was just too sore to move.

  As she was mulling on this, a message popped up in her inbox. Service delivery notification failure. The message she’d sent hadn’t been delivered. Frowning, and keeping her ear tuned in to the shower, she quickly typed the message out again, double-checked the address, and hit ‘send’ again. A few seconds later, the message notifying her that it hadn’t sent popped up again. Crap. She sent another message to a different colleague, and had the same response. Finally she blew out a frustrated breath and sent a message to her mother. The last thing she wanted to do was to get her mother involved in all this madness, but desperate times called for desperate measures. The message failed to send once more. What the hell?

  Clicking onto the web browser, she typed in ‘Facebook’ and hit enter. She could message someone on there, not that she had many friends to speak of. She sucked in a disbelieving breath as a message popped up on her browser: ‘access denied’.

  What the—?

  Her confusion was cut short as she heard the water in the shower come to a stop and the glass door open. Crap. She slammed her laptop shut and shoved it underneath the sofa, not wanting her ‘captor’ to know she had some, albeit limited, access to the Internet and, hopefully, if she could just work out how, a means of connecting to the outside world. Though even as she thought it, her heart sank. They’d obviously found a way of restricting her Internet so she couldn’t call for help, and she would put money on the fact that her captor had found a way of restricting her phone line as well.

  She was well and truly trapped, held hostage in her own home with no way of escape. Panic flooded her veins, yet even as it began to overwhelm her, it was rapidly chased away as Leyth, the apparent kidnapper holding her against her will, stepped into her living room. A fresh towel had been wrapped around his hips and his skin was gleaming with water from the shower. His shaggy hair was damp and hanging in ringlets around his harsh, chiselled face. He smelt clean, like soap and shampoo though, as she inhaled, she noted something else teasing her senses, something incredibly manly, something that made her jaw drop open and her heart race. He smelt of lust and sex.

  What the hell had he been doing in her shower?

  A
s those incredibly erotic scents hit her, she found herself aching in places she’d long forgotten about. His powerful body flexed in all the right places as he crossed the room towards the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’ he barked over his shoulder.

  ‘Sure.’ She bit the words out, though her voice was husky, harsh. She hated the way her voice sounded right now and, more than that, detested the way her body was reacting to that man. That smell. Every part of her was tingling with need, with unwanted lust. Her body was betraying her against all logic.

  She violently shoved those ridiculous thoughts aside, telling herself to get a damn grip. She’d heard of what they called ‘Stockholm syndrome’; when someone had been kidnapped and kept in close quarters with their captor for extended periods of time, they sometimes fell for them. It was an apparently natural reaction to being around someone; to being in such close proximity for an extended period of time, but hell. She hadn’t been kept here with him for long enough for that to happen. Had she?

  Leyth picked up the cup of coffee and walked it over to Tamriel, who was sat on the sofa, wide eyes tracking his every move. Putting the warm mug in her still shaking hand, he sat on the floor in front of her, shuffling the towel round to cover himself as he went; he didn’t want to flash her. Hell, she’d seen enough today.

  Briefly wishing he could go and grab his clothes, which were no doubt still outside from his shift yesterday, he muttered another apology.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ he asked.

  ‘OK, I think,’ she croaked. ‘Right,’ Tam visibly pulled herself together, taking a deep breath and eyeing Leyth, ‘tell me what’s going on.’

  She was so strong, so determined. He couldn’t help but respect her. Any other female, wolf or otherwise, would have fallen apart at the seams by now. Being pulled out of her life, going through the fever, being confronted by a wolf when you’re down and injured, being told you’re a werewolf… You just had to respect her; she was in a room with a male who dominated her in size and strength, and she was still on the ball.

  He ran a hand through his hair. Where to begin?

  How did he explain to this fragile-but-deadly female what was possibly going to happen to her? How much did he explain about the Council? How much could she handle?

  ‘Well. Do you remember the last five days?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK, that’s not surprising. You went through the “fever”, which is essentially a wolf’s version of puberty.’ She snorted at that, but waved her hand, urging him to go on. ‘You’re supposed to meet your wolf, accept her and then go through the change when the fever takes you.’

  ‘I’m guessing by your tone of voice that I didn’t go “through the change”?’

  ‘You didn’t complete your transition.’

  ‘Shit,’ she cursed, scrubbing a hand across her face in disbelief.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tamriel,’ he muttered. And he genuinely was; she deserved so much better than any of them had to offer. Tam looked at him, straight in the eye for the longest of moments, before laughing. Laughing long and hard.

  ‘What?’ He grinned at her, glad she’d found something funny about the situation.

  ‘I’ve always been different. My senses have always been second to none, and it made me a freak. My entire life, I’ve been a freak.’

  ‘You’re not a freak. Far from it, in fact.’ He tried to soothe her a little, though this sensitive crap didn’t exactly come to him easily.

  ‘I am! Now I’ve got a possible explanation for my excessively acute senses, my abnormal strength and speed. I’ve also finally found people who might just understand me. I then find out that I haven’t done it properly? I’m a freak of nature, in my world and yours.’

  ‘You’re really not a freak of nature, Tamri—’

  ‘How do you know that? How am I anything but a freak—’

  ‘Because.’ He cut her off, his mind racing, yet lost for words. He cleared his throat and just said, ‘Because you’re strong. You would make a good wolf.’

  She rolled her eyes at him, but at least it made her stop with the ‘freak’ thing.

  ‘Do you…’ he started, wishing he knew what to say to her. Right now he would just settle for a smoke. ‘Do you mind if I grab my clothes from outside?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I, uh, shifted, I think I lost my clothes on the way.’

  Shock hit her hard.

  She opened her mouth, closed it again. Opened it. Closed it.

  ‘So.’ She put her coffee down and rubbed her eyes. Took a breath. Then another.

  ‘You were sitting in my window,’ she finally finished.

  ‘Uh, yes I was.’ Crap. Crap. Crap. ‘I was, uh, making sure you were OK.’ He grimaced.

  ‘You fell—’

  ‘Yeah, I lost my balance.’ Tamriel’s eyes darted to the front door, which was currently being held closed with one of her chairs; the damn wood had splintered and broken when he’d forced his way into her apartment.

  ‘Would you mind if I—?’

  ‘Nah, go ahead. It’s not like I can get up right now and run away, is it?’ Though she said the words in a fairly light-hearted manner, they cut straight through him. Hell, the truth hurt. She was basically being held against her will in her own house, and though he wasn’t forcing her to stay, she couldn’t leave. And he couldn’t leave her. Damn, walking out of that door and not coming back would possibly be the best thing for the both of them. But he couldn’t leave her now; it wasn’t an option, not with her currently fragile physical state. What if the Council got their hands on her? God, he’d never forgive himself if she fell into the hands of a tuhrned.

  The tuhrned were supernaturals that went against the Council, and they did it in the wrong way. Rather than simply going rogue as Leyth himself had once been, they joined the Circle, a powerful group of supernaturals that used dark magic. The ritual sucked the life out of them, and left nothing in its wake; merely the shell of the person they had once been. The Circle could then control the body, using it as a vessel to do its dirty work.

  The tuhrned were nicknamed ‘tombs’ because they were like the walking dead. Hell of a way to go, from one controlling bunch of idiots, to another. Honestly, how on earth becoming zombified by a bunch of magis on a power trip was better than living by the strict rules of the Council was something he’d never understand. The only way to kill the bastards was to cut the head off, and that only worked because the eyes couldn’t see much if the head wasn’t attached, so the magi controlling the body usually gave up.

  Tamriel shot him a confused look. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what she must be feeling right now. Crap.

  ‘Just gonna grab my clothes then,’ he mumbled, bolting out of the door, down the stairs and out the building. He flew round the corner to find himself standing in the middle of the patch of grass. Looking around frantically, he found nothing. Then he heard a mischievous laugh. He looked up at Tamriel’s flat to see that she’d hauled herself over to a window and was leaning out, watching him with amusement. She pointed to the bush lining the edge of a wall. Leyth walked over, bent down and pulled a pair of trousers free. They must have fallen off as he shifted.

  ‘Nice.’ She grinned, eyeing him up. He actually blushed and covered himself, suddenly painfully aware that he was almost naked, wearing only a little pink towel outside in the middle of a town.

  Leyth cursed and shoved the combats on, wishing like hell that something could be easy for a change.

  A little further down the lawn, he pulled his leather jacket off the bush, and swiftly hightailed it back upstairs to Tam’s flat. As he neared her front door, he couldn’t help but notice the dance his stomach started doing. What the hell was all this crap? He just couldn’t understand it.

  As he shot into her living room and secured the door once more, she waved him over, reaching a hand out for his jacket. A little confused, he handed the thing over and watched as she raided the pockets; pulled out his wallet and unclipped his
knives before handing it back to him. Smart, not just a pretty face; she had brains on her as well.

  Pulling free his ID card, she read: Leyth Aera –White Wolves Inc.

  ‘Wow. Subtle!’ she chuckled, throwing the card at him.

  ‘Well, you know what they say, hide in plain sight,’ he muttered, shoving it back in his pocket and grabbing at his cigs. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Nah, go ahead,’ she said, absently fingering his knife set. ‘What happened to your T-shirt?’

  ‘Ah, they don’t tend to hold out particularly well through the change, probably shredded to pieces outside somewhere.’

  Shooting him a stern look, she bent down and rummaged under the sofa for something, finally coming up with a laptop.

  ‘You restricted my Internet access,’ she said, a statement not a question.

  ‘I didn’t—’ he started, but she shot him a stern look, making him re-think his words. Damn, he could still physically feel the fear radiating off her, but he could tell she was relaxing, if only slightly. ‘Dax did. You can go online, you just can’t send messages out.’

  ‘I know,’ she snapped. ‘Who’s Tobias Daniels?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him.’ She swung the screen around so he could see.

  ‘He had a video of one of our pack going through the change.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘Hell, no! His research was actually really good; we paid him a lot of money to keep researching what he loved, but the catch was that he couldn’t publish any of it. It cannot get out to the media, it’s too risky. We do not want to be exposed.’

  ‘I see.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment. She had positioned herself on the far side of the sofa, his own knives clipped to her belt.

  She moved around to put her laptop back where it had been, wincing as she bent down. Leyth could see her healing well; that wound would be gone by tomorrow morning, but he just hated how much pain she was in.

  She needed to be looked at by a professional; he was handy with first aid, but he didn’t want to take any risks when it came to her.