by L. C. Davis
I looked down at myself and fear seized me when I realized I was wearing a shirt identical to the one in my dream. It even fit me the same, coming to a stop in the middle of my thigh. Every detail was identical, from the logo printed on small mother-of-pearl buttons to the subtle sheen of the pinstripes.
Now that I seemed to be out of immediate danger, my fear of Victor returned. He may have saved me from the thing in the woods, but he was still a dangerous man. The way he spoke of the creature like it was a person was outright bizarre and the idea of him changing my clothes gave me chills.
“Well, I need to get back to the desk before Foster gives away another free membership.” She sighed heavily. “Send for me if he hasn't woken by dinnertime.”
“I will. Thanks again.”
I closed my eyes and did my best to look unconscious when he closed the door. My heart raced as his footsteps grew closer. It was all I could do not to flinch when he sat down on the edge of the bed.
When he touched my hair I jolted, but managed to cover it up as moving in my sleep. I tried desperately not to shiver as he stroke my hair tenderly and brushed it away from my ear. When he leaned in and I felt his face close to mine, I contemplated screaming for Clara.
“You're terrible at pretending to be asleep,” he whispered.
My eyes flew open and I pulled away from him, glaring. “That's not funny.”
My body immediately punished me for the sudden movement.
Victor pushed me back down and wedged an extra pillow behind my back so I could sit up slightly.
“You shouldn't move so fast. You sustained quite the head injury, on top of whatever else was wrong with you.”
It didn't sound like an insult. I kind of wished it was.
“What were you talking about?” I asked warily. “What's going to happen to me? What do you have to tell me before the harvest moon?”
He got up only to take a seat in the chair beside the bed. It had obviously been pulled over from his office. There was a book folded open on his nightstand along with a half-filled cup of tea and his glasses.
“One question at a time. Trust me, you're not gonna like the answers. Now, pick your first question,” he said, draping an arm over his chair.
I tried to sit up again but had to settle for turning to face him.
“Where is Sebastian? Is he alright?”
Disappointment flickered in his eyes for a moment before he raised the cup of tea to his lips. “That's two questions, and if I knew the answer to the first, he'd be having this conversation with you right now. As for the second, yes. Wherever he is, I'm sure he's fine.”
My relief was soon tempered by the realization that he hadn't gone off the radar for any good reason. He was just ignoring me.
“Perhaps you'd care to pose a question more pertinent to your current situation?”
“Okay,” I said, glancing at his nightstand. The sketchbook was conveniently missing. “Why are you drawing me?”
He chuckled. “I should have known that would be next. It's not important.”
“It determines whether I believe any of your answers to the other questions,” I said. “That's pretty important.”
He groaned halfheartedly. “I trust that my brother has told you of his dream encounter with you when he was younger?”
“He tried. I didn't really want to listen,” I admitted.
“Well, I've seen you before as well. Many times, in fact.”
I swallowed hard. As intimidating as he was, there was truth in his words. I didn't know how, but I could feel it.
I posed my next question carefully. The answer would fulfill a thousand more questions if I was right.
“Why did you draw my scars so precisely?”
He leaned in with a dangerously familiar half smile. “Because I vowed a long time ago to keep track so that one day I could make the one who gave them to you suffer for each and every one.”
A violent shiver ran down my back. His words were nearly identical to the Victor I had met in my dream.
“It was you.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I'm sorry for the way I behaved towards the end. Learning that my brother had already put his mark on you was too much to bear. It was not one of my finer moments.”
I tried not to get drawn in by the sincerity of his words, but I failed. If what he was saying was true, and Clara had just confirmed that at least much of it was, I had far bigger problems than him anyway.
“Everyone keeps saying I've been marked. What does it mean?”
He looked pointedly and I followed his gaze to my left hand. I had been clutching it unconsciously.
“I think part of you already knows. When a werewolf finds his soulmate, he marks him with the personal seal given to him at birth.”
“A werewolf?”
“Oh, right. You haven't asked that question yet. Your priorities are a bit askew.”
“Y-you're trying to tell me Sebastian is like one of those- those things I saw in the woods?”
He couldn't be. It was impossible. He was too sweet, too gentle, to... Sebastian to be anything else. Then there was the fact that such things didn't exist.
The glowing eyes etched in black every time I closed my eyes begged to differ.
My head throbbed.
His smile turned crooked. “Of course not.”
Before I could even breathe a sigh of relief, he pulled the rug out from under my feet. “Sebastian isn't one of those things you saw in the woods. He is the thing you saw In the woods.”
“No,” I cried sharply, willing myself into an upright position. The room was beginning to tilt on its side, but Victor seemed strangely unaffected. “That can't be true!”
I clutched my head in my hands and tried to stop the memories of the beast ripping the man's arm off his body like it was nothing.
A warm hand pressed down on my shoulder, steadying me through the wave of vertigo.
“I'm sorry to be blunt, but there's no easy way with this kind of thing. Unfortunately, even if there were, we don't have time for that thanks to my brother's recklessness.”
“That thing wasn't him,” I sobbed. “You're lying. H-he would never do that. He would never hurt me.”
“Hurt you, no. If he had wanted to hurt you the other night, you wouldn't be here. At least not in one piece. As for the 'man' you saw, he wanted to hurt you. I imagine Sebastian would have done it a hundred times over if he could.”
I shuddered. “He was chasing me.”
“No, that man was chasing you. Sebastian was chasing him.”
“But why?”
“Because the man was a vampire,” he said. “Not particularly dangerous to one of us, but to a human? You wouldn't have stood a chance.”
I leaned back against the headboard in an attempt to get some semblance of balance. I wasn't sure if it was the head injury or Victor's words that were making me so sick. The latter weren't helping at the very least.
Then it hit me. “Us?”
He smiled apologetically, rising from his chair. “I think this calls for something a bit stronger than tea. For me, anyway. You've got a concussion.”
He went out of view and returned a moment later with an almost depleted bottle of scotch and a glass. He poured one for himself and took a long drink.
“What do you mean 'us,' Victor?” I demanded.
He sighed. “We've been over all this before, yet somehow you've forgotten. Whoever put up that wall in there,” he said, tapping his own forehead. “Is a genius in the art of mindfucking.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” I muttered.
“Of course you don't. In fact, I'll bet the mere fact that we're talking about it is giving you a migraine?”
I stared at him in shock. “I split my head open,” I finally said.
“But it's not just today, is it? That always happens when you think about certain things just a little too much. Werewolves, maybe even the supernatural period.”
I cringed. “I don't believe
in the supernatural. Including psychic blocks or whatever you're talking about.”
He leaned back in his chair and tapped the wooden arm. “So, how's that working out for you?”
His words really were giving me a worse headache than the one I already had. I buried my face in my hands and came dangerously close to praying that it would stop. “Please. I can't handle this.”
“That's the walls inside your mind straining because you're dangerously close to breaking through,” he said earnestly. In an instant, he was out of his chair and kneeling beside the bed. He reached out and covered my hands with his, pulling them away from my head. “You have to fight through it. If you don't, this isn't going to work.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” I cried weakly.
“Because if I don't, you'll die.” The shift in his tone made it clear he wasn't joking. “I'm going to make this as easy as possible by telling you only what you need to know, but it's not going to work if you can't find a way to accept it. Can you try to do that for me?”
I nodded reluctantly.
“Sebastian is a werewolf,” he said slowly. “So am I. We all are. When a werewolf finds his soulmate, and they've been together long enough for the mate to come to terms with everything, he places a mark on his mate's body. His mark. Are you with me so far?”
I nodded again. The pain in my head and the sickness were growing sharper.
“The mark is a symbol to all other supernatural creatures that the mate belongs to him and no one else, that he's protected. Now this is where it gets complicated. Werewolves can only be mated to other werewolves.”
“B-but I'm not a werewolf,” I said. Here was a shred of hope.
“Not like Sebastian or myself, no. There are two kinds of werewolf strains. We're the dominant kind, the ones who could shift into our beast forms from early childhood. Then there are wolves with the recessive trait, whose werewolf traits aren't activated until their mate marks them.”
His words soaked into my mind like alcohol soaked into a fresh wound.
“He marked me,” I said finally. He was right. Something had shattered in my mind, but it didn't feel freeing. It felt like the front door had been breached and security was on the way.
“Yes.” Relief was evident in his voice. He squeezed my shoulders. “Good. That's it. Keep pushing through it.”
“I'm becoming a monster, too.” My voice trembled. I was still in pain, only it didn't seem to matter anymore. “I'm going to hurt people.”
His triumphant expression fell. He grabbed a throw from off the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders, gently guiding me back to a lying position.
“I think that's enough for one night. You need to rest. Clara said you should sleep as much as possible.”
I rolled over to stare at the wall. I heard Victor settle into the chair beside the bed again and the sound of pages turning. I finally closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but all I could see was a monster hunched savagely over a human corpse.
This time, the monster was me.
15
The net morning when I woke up, Victor was still in his chair reading a book. His presence made it impossible to have even a few moments of blissful ignorance about the horrible truths I had learned the night before. There was no escaping them.
I felt like I had been hit by a train and partly wished I had. But at least I could sit up.
“Easy,” he said, reaching to steady me.
“I'm fine.” It was a lie, but there was some truth to it. My entire body ached worse than ever, but my head was clearer than it had been in a long time. I wasn't sure if that was a blessing or a curse, but it did feel as if some kind of partition had been removed. It was a clarity that provided me the opportunity to look back at all the hints I had missed about Sebastian and his odd family and marvel at my own stupidity.
“You don't look fine. You were tossing and turning all night.”
“Bad dreams,” I muttered.
“I'm sure.” He watched me carefully. “Regular dreams, or-”
“I dreamed about Sebastian tearing that man apart, but I didn't talk to him, if that's what you're asking.”
He seemed visibly relieved. “At least you're acknowledging that Sebastian and the wolf are one in the same.”
“Whatever you did last night worked,” I admitted, pressing lightly on my bandaged forehead. It ached horribly, but my head didn't spin and my vision stayed clear. “I don't know if I can thank you for it, though.”
“No need. We're not finished,” he said. “But the first wall is always the hardest to break down. Perhaps save for the one protecting whoever it was that put them up in the first place.”
“I can't think about that now.” It came out as more of a plea than a statement.
“I know.” His voice was surprisingly soft.
I hesitated. “Is Sebastian-”
He shook his head and my heart fell. Among the other realizations, one stood out even more than all the others. I could acknowledge that Sebastian was the creature in the woods. I had no other choice since Victor had ripped away my defenses. But to acknowledge that he had abandoned me in my time of need? That resistance came from somewhere deep within and couldn't be blamed on any werewolf mental block.
“I'm sure he'll turn up soon,” he said doubtfully.
“He's your twin. If he was going to turn up, wouldn't you know?”
He held my gaze, I think only because he viewed looking away as a sign of weakness, and confirmed my theory without words.
“I'm sorry, Remus. I wish I could find him myself, but I'm the only one who can help with your unique problems up here,” he said, tapping his temple. “The others are out looking for him, though. Even the Alpha.”
“The Alpha?” I asked incredulously. “Why?”
He sighed. “I didn't want to tell you this last night, but the stakes are very high. After one of your kind is marked, they have only until the next harvest moon to transform for the first time. Transformation is something that can only be accomplished once you've fully accepted both your nature and your mate. Hence why it's so important that we find Sebastian and get you immersed in all this as soon as possible.”
I gulped. “When is the harvest moon?”
“In a little less than two weeks' My chest seized and taking even the smallest breath became a challenge. In less than two weeks' time, I was going to become one of those creatures? We hadn't even reached the first exam in class.
“What happens if I don't transform?” I asked against my better judgment.
His expression turned grave. “You die.”
It took a moment to process his words. I had been so close to death a few nights before. It seemed to unfair to be so close again, even in an unfair world.
“I'm not going to let that happen,” he said, interrupting my downward spiral. “If Sebastian hasn't returned within a week of the moon, I have another plan.”
“What is it?” I asked hopefully. The irony was not lost on me that my survival now rested in the hands of the man – the creature, really – I feared most.
He shook his head. “Not now. It's a contingency plan, and a controversial one at that. All you need to know is that I will never let any harm come to you again, Remus.”
I felt myself withering under the force of his gaze. He was just the same as he had been in the dream, albeit far less threatening. If he ever had told me a lie, this wasn't one of them.
“The other night,” I began, hoping to steer the conversation away from less unsettling topics, if possible. “When you found me in the woods. How did you know where I was?”
“I followed your scent,” he said simply. “The rest was instinct.”
“But how did you know I was even in the woods?”
“I didn't,” he admitted. “We got a report about a vampire stalking the campus and Sebastian went to check it out.”
“Alone?”
He shrugged. “One vampire isn't much of a threat to us. Especially not to hi
m.”
The severed arm and the screams of agony flashed in my mind's eye and I shivered. “No, especially not.”
“He's a ruthless killer when he needs to be, I won't deny that,” said Victor. “But the vampires are worse. Much worse. We kill out of necessity, they kill for the thrill of the hunt. I guarantee that the death my brother gave him was far more humane than whatever he had planned for you.”
I swallowed hard. “He said something about killing it- S-Sebastian,” I corrected myself. “And taking us both to the market.”
“Oh, I'm not surprised,” he said, tapping his fingertips together. “The Market is really a black market where all supernatural commodities are traded. Fur, organs, pelts. Sebastian is Vargr en Herse or second-in-command to the Alpha, his natural successor. His pelt would fetch quite a high price. A vargr domaz like you would have been sold as a slave to some sadistic vampire for at least half a million.”
“Varger doms?” I asked, bewildered. “What is that?”
“It means virgin wolf,” he smirked.
“But I'm not a virgin.” Not for a long time.
“Not in that sense, no. But you've never transformed. You'd be surprised how many vampires, among other things, take twisted delight in torturing a young wolf in every way imaginable before he's had the chance to turn. Sport for the rich sloths who can afford to hire goons like the one who was hunting you in the forest to have the real battles in their place.”
I shivered. I had been so consumed with the obvious monster pursuing me, I was only now starting to realize that he had taken out one far worse. It didn't ease the terror I now felt whenever Sebastian's name came up, but it did widen my perspective on the scope of danger I now faced. “The vampires sound awful.”
“You can't even begin to imagine. The one Sebastian killed was fairly powerful, but there are others far worse. In groups, they can be a real problem.”
“Are they all like that?”
“No,” he admitted reluctantly. “But so many are that the few exceptions aren't worth factoring in. When we're at our most deadly, we wear our monstrosity plainly. Theirs is hidden. Far more dangerous to humans, if you ask me.”
I wasn't sure about that, but I wasn't about to argue.