“She’s fine,” Dustin answered. “She just needs to rest.”
“Do you realize how selfish you were to push her like that?”
“Why couldn’t you just accept her the way she was?”
“There was nothing wrong with the way she was,” Logan implored, looking back up to his vehement alpha and grandfather.
“Then why change her just to be with her?” Darren couldn’t comprehend anything the boy had done. He remembered being in love, but never this irrational.
Upstairs, Ben succeeded in taking Katey to the upstairs hall. As they passed the bathroom, Katey tore away from him again and stumbled to the sink. She flicked on the lights and gasped at what she saw staring back at her. In the background, she could hear their conversation as clearly as if they were in the same room with her.
“You both have told me stories,” she heard Logan explain, “of how our kind mate with a human and have to watch them age and die. You’ve told me how it’s the worst pain in the world... I didn’t want that to happen to Katey and I...” His voice trailed off.
Katey was met by a pair of bright green eyes staring back at her in the mirror. She leaned forward over the counter and touched just below her eyelid. Examining them closely, she saw bits of gold flecks around the irises and ringed by an even darker shade of green just around the outer edges. They were stunning and mystical, and certainly different from her human eyes.
“Yes, we’ve told you how horrible it is,” she heard Darren say, “but we should have been there at least.”
“I had it under control.” Logan’s voice grew more aggressive.
She leaned back from the mirror and ran her fingers through her hair. Each strand was as soft and thick as before, but she could see the subtle highlights of blonde streaked through the dark brown base. The contrast between her eyes and hair were striking and almost exotic.
“She was bleeding all over my classroom floor, Logan! That’s going to take hours of hard scrubbing to get out!”
Katey heard Logan jump to his feet. “Then I’ll do the scrubbing if it’ll make you happy!”
Katey lifted her hoodie up. Her hand flew to her mouth in shock at what she saw. Underneath the ribbons of dried blood along one side of her torso, she could see only a flat stomach and the faint subtle edges of hard muscle. She couldn’t help but let out a strained laugh. Never had she looked so trim and fit. Turning in the mirror, she inspected every part of her body, finding that everything had changed in the same way. She had the body of an athlete. No, she had the body of a loup-garou.
Dustin broke through her probing with his vicious words. “What would make me happy is if you stop playing this ‘oh, pity me, I’m a monster and all alone in the world’ act and get it together. You’re about to be one hundred and twenty-six years old and you haven’t gotten over it yet! You’re not alone. You have a pack and now you have your precious girlfriend. Are you going to grow up or keep acting like a human brat?”
Logan shoved Dustin and Katey heard the beta stagger backwards with the force. “I’d rather be human than a beast!”
“And I presume you’re going to start blaming me for that now?”
Logan laughed. “Of course! If you had just kept it in your pants, I’d have lived a normal life instead of this nightmare!”
“If you didn’t change, you’d still be living with that dead-beat father instead of us!”
Katey leaned against the counter, feeling their negative and hateful words parade through her head like screaming ghouls. The pack bond they shared intensified her sympathetic nature and it made her body tense and edgy.
“If I had known what being a loup-garou really meant, I would have gladly killed myself before I changed.”
Logan and Dustin’s eyes glowered gold at one another as they raged.
“How do you think Katey’s going to feel in a couple hundred years?”
Darren covered his eyes in frustration. “Are we forgetting that Katey can hear every word you two idiots are saying?”
Logan sighed and sat back down on the couch, rubbing his forehead, his temper refusing to ease back. “I don’t think she’ll hate it,” he mumbled after a few beats of silence.
“Why?” Dustin asked. “I didn’t think you’d hate it so much, but I was wrong. Now you won’t stop moping about it!” He resumed his pacing around the sitting room.
“Katey’s the only person in the world that helps me tolerate life,” Logan admitted, his blood boiling to the point he could barely contain it anymore.
“And you could have killed her very easily. Is that what you wanted?”
Logan roared with fury and rushed past them as he sped through the living room and out the sliding glass door.
The four left in the house cringed as they heard him slam the door shut with a resounding crack. Katey found her strength and flew past Ben and down the stairs. Darren and Dustin entered the living room, both with a look of total disappointment.
The glass in the sliding door panes had spider-webbed from the force of Logan’s fury.
“That’s got to be the twentieth time he’s broken that door,” Darren mused with a shake of his head.
“I told you that you should have made it bullet proof,” Dustin remarked as he sat himself down heavily on the couch and rubbed at his eyes with his fingers until the gold faded away.
“Logan went outside?” Katey asked.
The teachers looked up to her.
“No, he’s in the basement that we don’t have,” Dustin wisecracked. “Of course, he went outside. Follow the path of destruction and you’ll find him.”
Katey hurried across the room toward the doors, but Darren moved to block her way, holding her back by her shoulders. “You had better give him some time before talking to him.”
His stern gaze would have normally convinced her, but she felt a new part of her that defied him. “I can’t just let him go on thinking that this is all his fault.”
“It is his fault,” Dustin grumbled from behind them.
Darren glanced to Dustin with a commanding look. “You simmer down, too, Dustin.”
He looked back to Katey and saw the desperate light in her eyes. He heaved a heavy sigh, and then stepped out of her way. She gave him a grateful smile and dashed out the sliding glass door, being careful not to make the cracks deepen.
Ben stepped down from the stairs and leaned against the framed opening. “You think this is gonna end well?” he asked.
The alpha shook his head and lowered himself into his chair, reaching out with his senses to monitor their progress outside. “Not really.”
Dustin leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and held his face in his hands. “I hope that girl is worth it to Logan.”
Darren cracked a smile, the first he had given to anyone since that afternoon. “You forget what it’s like to be in love?”
Dustin uncovered his face and rested his chin in his palm. “I remember. But I don’t remember ever having sense to know what to do about it.”
Ben’s lips curled into a painful smile. “I do.”
“I’m not saying that Logan did right, but I’ll give him credit for doing what none of us could have ever done.”
The three exchanged knowing glances. Katey was the first female of their kind and Logan, despite his handicap, had changed her. The world would never be the same.
Katey walked along the path to the gazebo, bracing herself against the cold, biting wind. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for her eyes to adjust in the pitch-black darkness of the night. The air was thick with the muggy scent of the rain that had passed through the area hours before.
The nocturnal sounds of the forest called out to her, but she couldn’t be bothered by them now. Not when there was so much to set to right.
She stepped cautiously toward Logan, who was sitting on the bench inside the gazebo, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. She sensed a whirlwind of emotion that she couldn’t begin to fathom. Anger, gui
lt, sorrow, it all warred for dominance within him, but Katey could tell he was battling it. He didn’t want to be under their possessive sway and neither did she.
She took the submissive position with her knees bent and her head lowered as she approached Logan. This time, it wasn’t forced, but came naturally as if some instinct within her required it.
“Logan?” she whispered. He didn’t look up, but she knew he could hear her. He would have heard and smelled her approach as soon as she opened the sliding glass door.
Katey lowered herself to the ground and crouched before him, looking up with a pitiful gaze. He didn’t move. She placed a gentle hand upon his arm but he jerked away from her touch. She withdrew her hand and heard a high-pitched whining noise rise in her throat that sounded shrill and breathless, like a puppy being scolded for wetting on the carpet.
“Logan, please be okay?” she whimpered.
Logan stirred a little, and then took his hands away from his face. She could see his beautiful blue eyes even in the darkness, but she could also see the battle in them.
They looked to one another as equals for the first time. Now, he couldn’t say that race separated them. Nothing could stop them from being together, so why didn’t he look overjoyed? This was what he wanted, wasn’t it?
She reached out to touch his face, but he seized her fingers before she could. He squeezed until her joints popped.
“Logan, it’s okay,” she said, her voice laced with tenderness. “I’m all right and you’re all right, so everything’s going to be fine now.”
“No, it’s not,” he growled, his eyes turning gold.
Something inside her reacted to the emergence of his wolf, as if to acknowledge him as well. But, it was just as weak as she was and Katey couldn’t articulate what it wanted from him.
“How can you say that? Look at me,” she insisted, sitting back to let him take in her new body, though it was still veiled by her baggy hoodie.
His wolfish eyes roamed over her from ankle to eyes, but there wasn’t a flicker of love or hope as she had expected. Doubt crowded in and she leaned forward again to take his hands in hers.
She had to make him understand, to make him see past the hurt and regret that consumed him, that they had survived the trials. Now, they could rebuild their lives.
But Logan didn’t see it that way. He exploded from the bench before she had a chance to touch him again.
Katey was thrown onto her back as he loomed over her, growling at her as dominance exuded from him. Even as a human, she had felt his loup-garou power. As a loup-garou herself, the dominance intensified in such a way that she wouldn’t dare move against him.
Katey’s whine grew louder, more terrified. Logan balled his fists at his side and she could see silent tears stream down his cheeks. Her nails scratched at the wooden boards beneath her, trying to grip onto anything to help her crawl away, but Logan’s feet straddled on either side of her and she was trapped.
“Don’t you see? It’s my fault. I should have never forced you to consent. I was selfish and inconsiderate.” His voice was drowned in a harsh whisper as her body quivered.
“No, you weren’t. I wanted this.”
“The only reason I even brought up the idea of changing you was for my own selfish desires... I wanted to be with you... Not as friends, but as something more... I never even considered the fact that you may not have wanted the same thing for us,” Logan spoke diligently with grief dripping from every word. Katey tilted her head and earnestly gazed at him. “I ruined your life and there is no cure for this.”
“But, it’s okay, Logan,” she pushed a little more urgently.
“No, it’s not!” he bellowed and stormed back toward the house to disappear upstairs.
Katey sat hopelessly for a moment, watching him leave, feeling her chest constrict around her lungs and heart. Such complete and utter rejection was more than she could bear. As if unreciprocated love wasn’t hard enough, Katey now felt the agonizing pain that the one she loved hated the very sight of her.
What did Logan see in her now that repulsed him so strongly? Did he hate what she had become because it was what he hated about himself? Or was shame a factor in this that she couldn’t ignore?
After all the pain she endured, Logan behaved like he didn’t even want her anymore. What was it all for? The total futility of her decision to become a loup-garou came crashing down around her and Katey was content to sit in that spot on the gazebo floor until the world turned to rot.
But there was a stirring inside of her soul that kept her from feeling the complete oblivion that closed in on all sides. The sounds of nature pressed in on her senses and she turned to the dark forest beyond the gazebo. The world was carrying on, despite the storm that beat against her soul. As if for the first time, Katey realized that the earth was alive with a heartbeat of its own.
She pushed herself to her feet, feeling the strength in her new legs. Logan had left her in a void, but it slowly filled with the inexplicable oneness with what surrounded her.
A gentle prodding drove her to step to the edge of the gazebo steps, facing away from the house and turning her back on the pack that awaited her inside. Everything faded away as she listened to the wind rustle the trees and its branches. It was a beckoning whisper for her to come and find relief. The memory of Logan’s harsh words and the unknown future that awaited her didn’t matter as the forest sang to her in its own unique way.
The pull frightened her at first, but then it became as natural as breathing. She descended the steps and felt the soft earth beneath her shoes.
“Katey!” Darren barked from the house. “Come inside.”
Katey chaffed under the command and looked over her shoulder to see her new alpha standing just outside the sliding glass doors with a look of warning. The tug of the forest rivaled the refined dominance of her alpha. In the end, Darren won and she made her way back down the path through the garden to return to the world that seemed to be crumbling through her fingers like parched earth.
2
Katey could feel all eyes upon her as she stepped over the threshold. Darren was close by her side, but she did not acknowledge him as he slid the cracked door closed behind her. Though, she could still hear the crickets and rustling wind behind her, the draw of the woods had died away when she came back to civilization.
She took a few steps forward, her gaze devoid of feeling. Her hands mechanically touched the back frame of the sofa and she stopped before her knees hit the loose upholstery. Dustin was still sitting on the couch while Ben stood by the foot of the stairs, both watching her with wonder and a hint of nervousness.
A tense silence fell over the living room as Katey took the moment to truly feel her new body. Her heart thrummed in her chest, beating strong to pump Katey’s loup-garou blood through her veins. It was in her blood that she felt the difference. Her physical body might have changed, but there was a fresh vitality that fascinated her.
She straightened her posture and didn’t feel the usual ache of her back muscles as she did when she was human. And the longer she stood, she realized that her joints didn’t protest under her weight. In fact, there was no pain, only an energy that expelled every bit of human weakness.
But there was something that lurked deep within her, in an unnamable place. Now that she was still, its presence became more real and evident. It was what gave her the gentle push to submit to Logan and allow herself to be pulled to the forest. Innately, Katey knew that it wasn’t quite matured yet. But with each passing moment, it unfurled itself and took its final residence within her soul, fusing and becoming one.
She was the first female loup-garou. For once in her life, she was truly one of a kind and she had Logan to thank for it. Thinking of him brought their conversation back to the forefront of her mind. The residual anger bombarded her again and she winced at the memory. How would they get past this?
“You need to eat something,” Ben stated, throwing her out of herself and back
into the living room where the others were still watching her. He moved toward the kitchen to prepare a meal.
“I’m not hungry,” she mumbled and moved around the couch. With each step, she made an effort to experience the flow of her movements and how her muscles bunched and contracted around her bones. There was a new gracefulness to her stride that hadn’t been there before.
Darren followed behind her, following her path as she tried to make her way to the stairs.
“You think you’re the first one to play that game with us?” Dustin said, his accent now faded.
“But I’m really not hungry,” she pleaded.
Darren wasn’t going to let her off that easy. Before she could make it past the kitchen entryway, he took her firmly by the arms and pulled her toward the kitchen.
Dustin stood to join them, staying close to the stairs as if he were guarding them. Ben pushed a big mixing bowl of tepid raw meat at Katey. Her first instinct was to be disgusted, but the longer she stared at it, drinking in its oddly enticing fragrance, the more appetizing it appeared. She felt the beginnings of hunger prick at her skull and down her spine.
She swallowed the mouthful of saliva and turned her face away from it, rejecting the craving. Her stomach roared in objection, begging her to eat it. The other entity within her did the same, but a bit of her human mind still remained and she couldn’t justify eating a bowl of uncooked meat.
The others saw her battling the urge and closed in. Panic at their nearness made her body tense for flight.
“Katey, if you don’t eat, you’re going to regret it later,” Darren said softly. “This is how you take care of yourself now.”
She didn’t want to take care of herself. Like a stubborn child, she bucked at the nutrition her new body needed.
Katey shook her head violently and tore herself from her alpha’s slack grasp. With a speed that surprised herself, she bolted up the stairs, down the hall, and to her room. Katey slammed the door and locked it behind her before sliding down to the floor, trying to calm her nerves with deep breaths, hearing her heart pound in her ears.
Becoming the Enigma (The Loup-Garou Series Book 2) Page 2