A Place to Run (Trials of the Blood Book 1)

by Becca Lynn Mathis

  “Accidents happen, hun,” Kaylah said, kissing Jamie lightly on top of his head. “Don’t you worry ‘bout it none.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head, swallowing the last bite of my second sandwich. “It’s fine, Kaylah.” I nudged Jonathan with my shoulder. “It’s not like Jamie didn’t already know.”

  Jamie squinted his eyes shut. “But I don’t need the details!”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Jamie, you’re only a handful of years younger than Jonathan, right?”

  Jamie’s pale green eyes met mine, his expression quizzical.

  “Two actually,” he said, “just two. Why?”

  “Well,” I said. “If you’re only a couple of years younger than Jonathan, then you’re also old enough to be my grandfather, so why does it gross you out that your brother slept with anyone?”

  Jamie’s head fell back and his arms fell to his side. “Because he’s my brother, Lynn!” He looked back at me. “Do you want to hear about your brother’s sexual exploits? Why do you think our apartment has the rooms separated by the living room like it does? You think I wanna hear any of that?”

  “Ew,” Ian said, taking a bite of his last sandwich.

  “I don’t have any siblings,” I replied. “But I suppose that’s fair.”

  But wait. Ian was the youngest in the pack, according to what Jonathan had said back at my place. All of the pack members used to be human except for Sheppard. And, aside from Ian, they were all multiple generations older than me. “So where are the kids?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “WHAT?” CHASTITY ASKED.

  Sheppard’s warm scent had a tingle of electricity to it. I was beginning to wish I had a better understanding of how these scents worked.

  I spoke slowly, my eyes on Sheppard. “If practically all of you are multiple generations older than me, where are the kids?”

  Matt sat back in his chair with folded arms. Chastity’s gaze fell to her lap.

  Kaylah pursed her lips and took a slow breath before she spoke. “I hope you din’t have many planned, hun.”

  Was she saying that werewolves can’t have kids? But Sheppard was born a werewolf, so that couldn’t be right. I mean, I hadn’t ever given a thought to whether I wanted kids or not. I always figured that part would sort itself out when I found the right partner.

  “While it’s certainly not impossible,” Sheppard said, “werewolves who were made later in life have a hard time bearing children. Born werewolves don’t suffer the same difficulty.”

  “So then, what’s the point of having a mate, if you were changed?” I asked.

  “Turned,” Matt corrected. He blinked at me, his clouded eye going through the same motions as his clear one. “And I guess there isn’t one.”

  Chastity looked up from her lap. Her hazel eyes blazed at me for a moment before she turned them on Matt. “Just what do you mean by that?” Her vanilla scent was so sharp and electric it stung my nose.

  Wow. I did not want to tangle with her.

  Ian rolled his eyes and took a gulp of water from his water bottle.

  “Chas,” Matt said, wrapping an arm around her. “You’re mine. I don’t want anyone else to have you. So, you’re my mate. It’s just that simple.”

  Chastity relaxed against him, but crossed her arms and pressed her lips into a line.

  “And mates are for life,” I said. “Right? It’s like getting married?”

  “Usually,” Sheppard replied. “Though there have been cases of mates separating. It usually happens if a mated pair lose a child, or if there’s a heavy shift in the leadership and direction of the pack.”

  “Sometimes,” Kaylah added, “a pack gets ‘em a new alpha who’s got differin’ ideas from the alpha afore him. Sometimes certain members of the pack disagree with the new alpha ‘n need to find a new pack. Stands to reason, then, that doin’ so might break up a mated set a wolves.”

  “But most of the time,” Daniel said, gripping Kaylah’s hand in his own, “mates are for life.” He kissed her knuckles.

  “Long as that may be,” Kaylah replied.

  “Most mates never bother with getting married,” Sheppard added. “There’s no need. Packs know mates, and pack is what matters.”

  “Well okay.” I took a breath. “But if you don’t have a mate, don’t you—” I made a vague gesture toward my gut with my hands. “I mean—people have urges—don’t you guys?”

  I have no idea how Matt managed to have such a flat look on his face with half of it scarred all to hell like it was, but he managed it. “Are you seriously asking if we want to fuck like everyone else does?”

  Jonathan chuckled quietly at my side, his arm draped over the back of my chair. My cheeks were burning again.

  “I guess when you put it like that,” I said, dropping my gaze to my lap.

  “It’s not like it’s hard to find someone for the night,” Ian said, laughter in his voice.

  It made me look up. He was putting together another sandwich from what remained of the lunchmeat.

  “So, you just rely on one night stands?” I met his eyes. “Or short-term flings?”

  Chastity speared me with a look. “When was the last time you had a meaningful relationship?”

  Ouch. She had a point. My last ‘relationship,’ if you could call it that, had apparently been with a vampire who was simply using me for my blood. Before that, there was the cowboy from the club with all the country music. He had wanted me to move out to Montana with him after only a couple months of dating. Except he hadn’t so much as left a toothbrush at my place by then.

  Kaylah gently placed a hand on Chastity’s arm—an absentminded gesture of comfort.

  “It’s not like we can tell anyone what we are, Lynn,” Jamie said, reaching for some of the remaining slices of bread.

  “Even if they believed us,” Daniel added with a shrug, “it would put us at risk.”

  “I’d question the sanity of anyone who believed us right off the bat,” Jonathan said.

  “And even my friends don’t really know anything at all about what I really am,” Ian said. “I certainly couldn’t keep a relationship going with that kind of secret.”

  Empathy stabbed at my heart. My voice was quiet. “Isn’t that lonely?”

  Ian’s sapphire eyes met mine, and a smile lit his face. “Not at all. I have pack. And they know the real me. My friends are just a fun change of pace. I love spending time with them, and I’m pretty sure I usually spend more time with them than I do with pack, but my heart is here with pack.”

  Matt still watched me, his expression unchanged. “What do you think people would do about us if they knew the truth?”

  “Go nuclear.”

  The answer was out of my mouth almost before I had even thought of it. But it was true. I knew people were prone to panicking and a ‘kill it with fire’ mentality for anything that isn’t them. We even tried it in Salem back in the day. Which made me sit up.

  “Witches,” I said.

  Matt just stared flatly at me. I looked around the table, and pretty much everyone had some level of confusion on their face—except Sheppard.

  “What?” Jamie asked.

  “Witches,” I repeated, watching Sheppard. “You mentioned before that you’re pretty sure some members of occult circles have werewolves figured out, so what about witches?”

  “What about them?” Kaylah asked, still clearly confused.

  I met her eyes. “Are they real?”

  Kaylah’s face scrunched up as she shook her head. “Naw. Hist’ry jus’ don’ like progressive women.”

  Sheppard’s gentle smile appeared, and his warm hand fell to my shoulder. “There are some who can do things that only faith can explain. Faith in something different than Christians, perhaps, but faith all the same.” He released my shoulder.

  “So they’re real too, then,” I said, trying to gain some clarity.

  “Yes and no. Most people who adopt the moniker of witch have a faith of s
ome sort and try to influence the world through that faith in some manner or another.” He shrugged. “But it’s not really any different than what the church did when they created werewolves.”

  “So really,” I said, working through the thoughts aloud, “witch is just a name like priest or secretary. The more accurate question would be, ‘is magic real?’”

  Sheppard’s smile widened. “That’s an apt question. And it’s one you already know the answer to.” There was fatherly approval in his tone.

  “Of course magic is real,” I said slowly. “Some sort of ritualistic, faith-based magic is what created werewolves in the first place—since the church used the nails and the cross and whatever blood they could pull from it at the time.”

  Sheppard nodded.

  “And don’t forget that what science can do today is something people in ancient times would call magic,” Chastity said.

  “Chastity is a bit of a scholar,” Jonathan said. “She tends to pick subjects and obsessively learn about them, though her choices are pretty random.”

  “Just because you can’t follow the logic doesn’t make them random,” Chastity replied. “Everything is connected to everything. It’s just not always obvious how.”

  “To get back to what I think the crux of your question was before, Lynn,” Sheppard said. “It’s not easy to balance a normal human life with being a werewolf.” His voice was patient and measured.

  “But it can be done,” Ian added.

  Sheppard nodded. “It can. And there have been instances of wolf-human mates. Though those are uncommon, and mostly within the military packs. We focus on making sure the rest of the world doesn’t know. It helps that people don’t like to believe in the scary things that go bump in the night. They like to think they’re just scary movies and old folktales. Most never consider where those stories came from.”

  “Speaking of stories,” Jamie said, looking at me. “What’s with the four books you have turned backwards on your bookshelf?” There mischief in his expression that reminded me of Jonathan’s smirk.

  Shit.

  I sat back in my chair and wiped at the side of my face, my other hand falling to Jonathan’s leg. His fingers danced along the back of my hand, brushing across the knuckles with an almost distracting gentleness.

  Jamie meant those books with the sparkly vampires. I hadn’t completely disliked them, but they definitely weren’t among my favorites. So, I kept them with their spines to the back of my shelf so I could just kind of forget they were there. And so that they weren’t easily identified by anyone who just stopped by my apartment. But I guess maybe turning them backwards on the shelf like that only made them stand out more.

  I pressed my lips into a line and rolled my eyes. “I got them because they were popular. I finished the series because I kept hoping it would get better. I kept them because I didn’t want to throw them away. I didn’t dislike them that much. They just weren’t my favorites.”

  Looking for an escape, I saw Matt’s trail map peeking out from under loaves of bread and condiment bottles and thought about the plan the pack had for tomorrow morning.

  I wasn’t sure I could kill a vampire. I mean, Matt sure seemed to think it was possible—Jonathan too, judging by his words at my apartment earlier today. But the violence of it all, I wasn’t sure it was for me.

  And then, I was sure that it was. I squinted my eyes closed and shook my head at the conflict in thoughts. This must have been what Sheppard meant about two sides of the same coin. My wolf and I seemed to be whole, for sure. But she nudged at my instincts, guiding me when I might otherwise hesitate. Rolling a shoulder, I realized that I was looking forward to the morning. I was looking forward to fighting whatever vampires were in that cave.

  I looked to Sheppard again. “Is it always like this?” I leaned forward, gesturing to Matt’s trail map. “When you go kill vampires, I mean.”

  “A hunt,” Matt corrected, “when we go on a hunt.”

  I nodded. “A hunt then.”

  “Not usually,” Sheppard said. “We tend to prefer to hunt them in small groups at a time. We can take down a brood of twenty vamps pretty easily.” His chest puffed with pride.

  “It’s safer for the pack that way,” Jonathan said.

  “Yea,” Kayla said, “but we go through a helluva lot more bandages.”

  Daniel squeezed her hand.

  “But I suppose that’s better ‘n losin’ someone,” she added.

  “There’s a hell of a lot more than just twenty or so bloodsuckers in the dens under the Chateau,” Matt added.

  “Which is why we can’t move on it yet,” Sheppard said. “We have to figure out a way to separate them.”

  “Divide and conquer,” Chastity said.

  “But you’re always hunting vampires,” I said. “Never any peace?”

  Sheppard looked at me again, and I was beginning to wonder if he had any mode other than paternal. “That’s why we exist, Lynn,” he said in a patient tone.

  I guess maybe mine would be too if I was over 500 years old.

  “Now that you’re a werewolf,” Matt said, “When you finally come across a vamp, you’ll see. It’s impossible to ignore.”

  Chastity nodded. “There’s no point in denying it.”

  “Vampires kill people,” Sheppard said, a hardness creeping into his tone. “We stop them.”

  Jonathan touched my shoulder, making me turn to face him. “We’re stopping known murderers. It’s a good fight.”

  It was a different tone than I was used to hearing from him.

  “And there’s never any saving them?” I couldn’t help but be hopeful. I mean, vampires used to be human, right? So there had to still be a shred of humanity left to them, right?

  Matt’s voice was sharp and steely. “We save the sheep by killing the vamp that was feeding on them and get them help afterward. That’s all we can do.”

  Sheppard put a hand up, stopping the conversation. He took a deep breath and looked at me, warmth radiating from him. I could feel it wind through the pack.

  “You’re still working into who and what you are now,” he said. “Just give it time—you have plenty of it. You haven’t seen a person in trouble, yet. It will all lock into place when you do. Trust me. You will understand it in time.”

  I sat back in my seat and Jonathan’s hand fell to my thigh. I suppose Sheppard was right. If werewolves could live as long as they all said, I clearly had at least another few hundred years to see for myself whether there was anything worth saving in vampires. But I could already feel the truth of the matter: vampires had to be stopped, and the only way to stop them was to kill them. I wiped at my face with my hands.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I LOOKED AROUND THE table—everyone’s plate held only crumbs and drips of condiment. Kaylah stacked her plate on top of Daniel’s and stood, clearing the table of everyone’s plates as she stepped into the kitchen. Chastity grabbed the leftover bread and what little was left of the lunchmeat and packed everything away, while Kaylah loaded the dishwasher.

  “What do you guys do then when you have time to kill between hunts?”

  Jonathan looked at me, hunger in his eyes as he winked. It made my gut jump, but I felt my face getting warm again. Sheppard had to have seen that, likely Matt had too.

  “I mean other than play ball and eat,” I said.

  “Woofball,” Jonathan said.

  “What?” I turned to face him more directly.

  “Woofball,” he repeated.

  “Oh not this again,” Matt said, throwing his head back.

  “That’s what he calls it,” Daniel supplied for me. He looked at Jonathan. “But the rest of us just call it ball.”

  I laughed. “But it’s so appropriate!”

  “Exactly!” Jonathan lauged too. “We are all wolves after all. You’ve heard the noises we all make when we’re trying to communicate while we’re all wolfed out. We may be playing the game on two legs, but it is decidedly a dog’s g
ame.”

  Ian and Jamie joined in on the laughter.

  “I am never going to call it that,” Matt said, crossing his arms and sitting back in his chair. There was a smile pulling at his mouth, though.

  “That’s fine,” Jamie said through his laughter, “but I will!”

  Sheppard’s laugh was a warm rumble throughout the house. I could almost see it in the air. Something sparkled in his golden-brown eyes as he clapped Matt on the shoulder. “Let the pups have their fun. It is a fitting name to the game, after all.”

  “I’m with you, Matt,” Daniel said. “It’s silly. And there’s nothing wrong with calling it ball anyway.”

  “Don’t fix what ain’t broken,” Kaylah added from the kitchen.

  I eyed Matt and Daniel, glanced at Sheppard, and then met Jonathan’s eyes. God I could get lost there.

  Shit. I took a breath.

  “Well, I will totally call it that,” I said softly, pushing my shoulder into Jonathan's.

  Jonathan’s hand fell to my knee and he rubbed up my thigh, the laughter still in his eyes, though I could see the mischief creeping into his gaze.

  “Aw man, it’s getting mushy in here,” Jamie complained.

  “Come on, Jamie,” Ian said, “I grabbed my system while I was at my place. We’ll have to log in on your account and re-download the game, but we might not have lost any progress.”

  “Why don’t we watch a movie instead?” Sheppard said, standing. “I believe it’s Jamie’s turn to pick a movie anyway.” He started for the living room.

  Jamie looked to me. “Let Lynn pick, he said. “She’s new.”

  I waved my hands. “Nah, I need a shower. You pick this one, I’ll pick the next one.” I stood up and pushed my chair back under the table. I brushed my fingertips along Jonathan’s shoulder as I passed behind him on my way to the front door.

  Sheppard nodded and grabbed the remote from the TV stand in the living room. He handed it to Jamie.

  I stepped outside to grab my backpack from the Jeep and returned to the house. Jamie was scrolling through the movie options on the huge television. Upstairs, I started the water in the shower and found a towel under the sink.