From that day forward I never really cried. Occasionally I teared up, maybe even shed a few, but never really cried.
Not even when I buried my parents.
“Why do you even care?” I screamed. I knew my anger was inappropriately directed, but that knowledge did nothing to cage the rage inside of me. “You think I care about you? Let me explain something to you so you understand clearly. I’ve cared about two people in my life and they’re dead. What makes you think you’re so fucking special?”
I’d said it just to hurt him and I knew it. It wasn’t even true - close, but not really. I’d cared for four people in my life to be exact: two were dead, one betrayed me and one was going to have to kill me. Relationships 4, Ruby 0.
Cooper stopped and turned to look at me with genuinely wounded eyes. He pushed me too far without knowing it, and I lashed back so painfully that he felt the full brunt of it. I was instantly ashamed of myself for being so ruthless, but was too prideful to apologize. I stared back defiantly, remorselessly. He finally dropped his head and turned, picking up his pace. I figured he couldn’t wait to get away from me.
I couldn’t wait to get away from me either.
32
As we neared what appeared to be the end of the unending staircase, I saw another ominous door. I was getting really tired of finding out the hard way what was behind door number two. Cooper stopped before opening it and bent over slowly to whisper in my ear.
“This is the main house. This is where the poo could really start to hit the fan.”
Against every shred of will in my body, a smile squeezed out onto my face. The poo? Who says poo? He mirrored my response with a grin that even the most devilish of children would have been envious of. I took this to mean that things were cautiously comfortable between us for the time being, making up for the ten minutes of unaltered silence we just shared. With our uneasy bond renewed, I felt much more ready to face what lay behind the massive oak barrier. He explained briefly the immediate layout of where we’d enter into. Absorbing great verbal detail had never been my forte, and doing so under duress rendered me basically useless. I nodded when appropriate, and crossed my fingers for luck. The main thing I’d gotten from his instruction was which way not to run in case of emergency. That one stuck out soundly and I was determined not to screw that up if need be.
The plan was to get inside undetected, sneak through the major common areas undetected, and then out the main back door undetected. It was a lot of undetecteds for my liking. It was like standing on a brightly lit stage in the middle of Times Square hoping to go unnoticed - not promising by any means. We had no disguise for me so anyone who saw me would know who I was in a flash and would alarm the entire pack, which at Cooper’s best guess tallied at five hundred or more. I was never a gambler, but I knew shitty odds when I saw them.
Without time to ponder our imminent demise further, he opened the door and peeked around the corner.
“Ah…feeding time. Good thing for us the kitchen isn’t on the tour,” he said soberly. Feeding time. What in the hell is that?
“So…it’s lunch time?” I asked, trying to get a feel for what time of day it was.
“Nope. Smells like midnight snack to me.”
“What exactly is midnight snack?” I queried, not sure that I wanted to know the answer. He looked around, not acknowledging my question at all. I was once again pissed off with his lack of compliance and info hoarding, until I heard it too. Footsteps.
My inner “oh shit” alarm was screaming and my sympathetic nervous system was starting to have its way with me. Coop looked worried too and was trying to calmly figure a way out of our impending doom. There was a door to what appeared to be a TV den of some sort open in front of us. He dragged me in there so fast, I wasn’t sure all of me made the transition. In hindsight, making it into the room was the easy part. Where to hide was the complication. Closets were not an option because we’d be sniffed out for sure. The rest of the room was vast, open space with couches and chairs all turned to face the enormous projection screen hanging from the near wall. I thought maybe if we crouched down behind a sofa, and were super quiet, that they would just continue on past our room, no big deal.
My panic increased with the proximity of the footsteps, and I knew my fear was only making things worse. Cooper was kind enough to point that fact out to me. Just when I thought our collective gooses were cooked, Cooper made his move. He didn’t bother to take the time to fill me in on what he was doing; he just grabbed me. He seemed to think ad-libbing was the way to go in that situation.
Before I knew it, I was on my back lying across the couch that sat roughly in the center of the room. My first reaction was that hiding in plain sight probably wasn’t such a stellar plan with a house full of werewolves. Then I saw the blanket come flying over the back of the sofa to cover us. It didn’t seem to be much of an improvement, but it was a camouflage of sorts, so I went with it. At that point I was willing to take whatever cover I could get, or so I thought initially. When Cooper started climbing on top of me with the blanket draped over him, I rethought that idea.
I didn’t dare speak because the potential whistle blower was almost upon us, but I sure as hell wanted to know what his plan was. If he was hoping to go out with a bang, literally, he had another thing coming. When he finished draping the blanket so it covered everything but our feet and ankles, he whispered oh-so quietly in my ear.
“Just play along. It’s our best chance,” he said, as I lay perfectly still below him. “And make it believable.” Though I was uncomfortable with losing that much control, I didn’t see any other way. I nodded hesitantly.
I’d no sooner rested my head back down before his lips were all over mine. And they were busy. When I realized what the rest of him was doing, or at least pretending to do, things started to sort of click into place. If only we’d had a “do not disturb” sign. I was furious and horribly uncomfortable, but even in my hostile state I had to admit that it was the best idea he could have come up with.
While we moved awkwardly under the blanket, low moaning sounds rumbled through his throat and brought attention to the fact that I wasn’t playing along very well. The irony was that I didn’t know how to play along well. The only people I’d been with had not exactly been invited. Thank God for trashy TV and movies on demand. I wiggled around a bit and tried to channel my inner Angelina Jolie. If she wasn’t a role model for sexy, I didn’t know who was.
In my concerted effort to do the right things and make the right sounds I’d become oblivious to the fact that there was someone breathing heavily in the doorway. I fought my urge to freeze. Cooper pulled me closer to him, pressing his body against mine so tightly that breathing became laborious. Lack of oxygen, however, was not enough to distract me from exactly what was pressing against me.
“Well, well, well, what have we here?” the stranger asked mockingly, like he really needed the obvious pointed out to him.
“Fuck off, Jeran!” Cooper shouted.
“Cooper? Are you trying to keep a snack from the rest of us?” he asked. I could hear the finger-wagging in his tone. “You know how the Alpha feels about playing with our food.”
Cooper’s heart was racing, and I was crazy to think that it was because of what was going on under the blanket. He stuck his head out, being careful to keep me covered.
“This one is not for sharing.”
“Ooooooh, you found yourself a keeper, did you? Lemme see it.”
I heard him approaching and my skin started to itch all over. Cooper growled a warning like a cornered dog.
“She is here neither for your approval, nor your entertainment. Get out before I get tired of this shit,” Cooper warned in a tone that made me think he was possessed by someone of extreme and ultimate power. I was awestruck.
There were a couple of tense minutes where I wasn’t sure how the standoff was going to end.
There was no further conversation. Cooper’s anxiety was palpable to m
e and my empathic powers were nearly overwhelmed. I couldn’t feel Jeran’s because I was totally occupied by Cooper’s. My assumption was that they were sizing each other up. Cooper to intimidate Jeran, and Jeran to see if it was worth his while to fight Cooper to get to me. If only he knew. Had he known it was me under the blanket, I was certain that would have clouded his judgment.
I felt the floor vibrate as he took one more step closer. Cooper snarled and his body coiled, preparing to fight.
“All right, all right. Fuck, where did your sense of humor go? You’re becoming a real prick, you know that?” he said with distaste. Cooper gave no response.
The silence was broken by the sound of Jeran’s retreat into the hallway. We waited motionless for a couple of minutes to be very certain he was gone. Cooper turned to look down in my eyes making me painfully aware that he was still mounting me. I shoved him aside and sprang from the couch.
“Get me out of here, now,” I whispered angrily, contorting my face into all sorts of emphatic angles. He smiled on cue, as I knew only he could.
“My pleasure, miss.”
33
The rest of our journey through the house was completely uneventful. Really. We didn’t run into anything that elicited so much as a suction of breath. Of course, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop because if things kept up with the modus operandi du jour, something deadly had to be waiting around the next corner. With a chainsaw. And some dynamite. In a grenade launcher equipped with a heat-seeking feature. And my name on it.
Things went so well that Cooper and I were even able to procure some new clothing as we sneaked through the laundry room and out the back door. We didn’t have time to be picky so we snatched what was on top of the pile and did a quick size check. There were no pants in the basket, so I wound up with a cleaner version of what I already had on, white and all. Cooper scored a graphic t-shirt from Ed Hardy that fit like it was painted on him, and I wasn’t complaining. Staring at him without a shirt on was becoming a challenge, even in life-threatening situations. He was eye candy for sure.
Once outside, my attention snapped back to the fact that we had a long way to go before we were home-free. He’d said we had twelve miles before we reached the clearing, and that our getaway car was just beyond that. My feet were going to be in horrible shape by the end of the journey, but anything was better than the alternative and I chose to focus on that. We made a quick dash across the short span of open backyard and broke through the treeline.
As we ran in single file, Cooper continually flashed hand signals at me. I was sure they were a desperate attempt to communicate things of great importance, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. I couldn’t tell if he was attempting to warn me, direct me, or tell me I should swing at the next fastball. His random flailing did nothing to help me know what was going on. In my growing frustration I poured on some speed to put me at his side while we hurtled through the unbroken underbrush.
“I’m sure that your gestures are supposed to have some deep and purposeful meaning, but I’m at a complete loss. Care to share?” I asked between gasps of breath.
“Keep your voice down. The Watchers are everywhere. Try to let us get some ground between the pack and us before you come up on their radar,” he whispered just loudly enough for me to hear.
“Sorry,” I replied, trying to keep my voice low. “What do you want?”
“I was trying to tell you to keep pace with me, and fan out to the right a bit, but it’s apparent that you didn’t grow up in a military family.”
“Not exactly,” I said, stifling an inappropriate laugh. “They had some militant qualities, does that count?” His bitter laugh made me think that it did not.
“No, it doesn’t.”
I wasn’t anxious to keep up that line of conversation, so I tried to refocus on the task at hand.
“So how long will this take?”
“We’re running about a six-minute mile. Do the math.”
Um, seventy-two? It was hard to do math in my head while dodging branches in the dark.
“So it’s a bit over an hour to freedom. What’s the plan when we get to the car?”
He audibly sighed sounding a heavy combination of exhausted and frustrated.
“I have no idea. I was hoping maybe you’d have an idea. Is it safe to go back to your place?”
It was my turn to smile inappropriately, if only to myself. He couldn’t be serious. With Marcus and Eric sure to find out that their little sale went a bit south, and Sean likely to return with my death warrant in hand from the PC powers-that-be any time, I thought my place was a close second in the you’ll-be-sure-to-meet-your-maker contest. The situation we were in, of course, came in first.
“No, it’s not,” I responded, thinking that simplicity seemed the way to go, and besides, maybe I needed to hoard a little info myself. He didn’t need to know everything that I was running from. I didn’t ask for his life story.
After that brief dialog, neither of us said anything for an eternity. We ran in silence, with only the sound of the branches and leaves crunching under our feet. There was no sign of any Watcher, but from what I understood, that meant precious little to our safety.
“So what is a Watcher exactly?” I asked unable to stand my forced silence any longer. Without skipping a beat he shot back an answer I found impossible to swallow, which was ironic being that I was running from a pack of morally reprehensible werewolves who wanted to make me their secret weapon. That, however, was clearly digestible.
“They’re the ghosts of the woods. The eyes of the forest. They’re…,” he responded, but I interrupted him with a bout of hysterical laughter. “No laughing matter,” he said, finishing his thought. I could hear the annoyance in his voice, but I couldn’t help it. The church giggles were on in full effect and there was no stopping them. The more serious his tone, the more intense my laughter became.
“Sweet Jesus, how did I get stuck with you? Is this penance for past wrongs?” he asked rhetorically. I snorted a few times, as I tried to pull it together.
“I’m sorry, it’s just a little tough to swallow. There are ghosts patrolling the woods for your Alpha? Did you get drunk one night and somebody fed you that shit? They must have nearly peed their pants watching your face as you soaked it up.”
“Believe it or not. It’s of little consequence to me. You don’t have to believe in the Boogeyman for him to be real.”
My stress level was oddly lessened. I felt for once that something hanging over my head was removed and I could breathe a little easier, except for the running of course.
“OK, so we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on your woodland specter theory for now. I’ll keep my voice down though, just to be sure I don’t send your blood pressure through the roof.”
“Such a big concession from such a small mind.” He was by far the biggest button pusher I’d ever met. Luckily for me I was too elated by the lack of threat in the woods that I just wasn’t going to let him get to me. I let the comment hang in the air a bit before changing the tone of the conversation. I thought I’d go on a fishing expedition and try to extract a little background info on this character that I’d been so dubiously bound to.
“So your parents were in the military?”
“My father was a scout sniper in the Marines. He believed in three things: order, obedience, and omission.”
“Omission?”
“He was a big fan of only telling what needed to be told. I’m quite certain I never heard an entire story from him in my whole life,” he recounted in a distant and disappointed voice. “Of course, I never knew this growing up. I thought he was the epitome of what a father should be: role model, provider, disciplinarian, coach, and on rare occasion, a buddy. What I didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that he was such a great family man that he decided to have two of them. I found him out when I was nineteen. I went to visit a friend two towns over and we ran into him and his other family leaving the movie theater as w
e were going in. It took me two weeks to break the news to my mother. I think I was secretly hoping that he would man up and tell her himself, but the arrogant bastard figured I’d never have the balls to tell her. It’s probably the only time in his life that he underestimated his enemy.”
I paused before speaking, trying very carefully to choose my words. I was stunned by the historical bomb he’d just dropped and wanted to be sensitive with my further inquisitions.
“Your poor mother. How badly did she take it?”
“She didn’t take it at all,” he said, sounding dejected. “She refused to believe what I told her. She told me that she didn’t harbor liars in her house, then kicked me out.” My heart instantly dropped.
“Betrayal is something that cuts you in places that cannot be healed,” I said, knowing that fact all too well. “But to be cut there by your own mother…”
“I appreciate your sentiments, but it’s done. I don’t think about it much,” he stated in an attempt to console me. I was not the one in need of consoling.
“Not thinking about it much is not proof of healing, nor is the ability to speak about your painful event indifferently. The absence of one or presence of the other proves nothing.”
Caged Page 18