Walking Wolf Road (Wolf Road Chronicles Book 1)

by Brandon M. Herbert

  “Why are your walls so bare?”

  “Mom doesn’t want me ruining the walls, with my ‘junk’.” he grumbled.

  I looked around his room, “Still, for as many times as I’ve ‘slept over’ here, it’s sorta cool to finally see the place.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. So uh… I need to talk to you about something…” Guilt swam through the room as he looked down and away from me.

  Finally…

  “Well, not so much as talk to but… tell you… um…” His eyes darted around, looking at everything except my eyes. In that moment, he kind of reminded me of Corwin.

  “Go on, you can tell me anything.” I tried to reassure him while I struggled to mask my own unease.

  “Well, we’re uh…” He set his jaw and took a deep breath, “my family is leaving.”

  “What?” I fought to keep myself calm as cold splashed down my spine. “Wait, when? Where? Talk to me Geri, what’s going on?”

  “Next week… Dad got a job offer out in Michigan; and after what happened to Fen…” Geri faltered and shuffled his feet, “They thought it would be best…”

  “Best to uproot you in the middle of a school year? Best to take you away from your friends? Your Pack? Box you up and shuttle you away like a piece of furniture? Didn’t you ask them not to go?”

  I stood and paced, but he didn’t answer or meet my eyes. I stopped and looked at him. Geri hunched his shoulders as though bracing for me to hit him.

  “You didn’t… did you?”

  “I’m sick of pretending, Jimmy! Sick of trying to be something I’m not just so I wouldn’t be alone. My so-called ‘friends’ pretended to like me just so they could have an Omega to pick on.”

  “What do you mean? We’ve never ‘pretended’ to be your friends, we are your friends!”

  “Can you say that for Fen? For Loki? How can you be so sure about how they treated me before you came along?” His eyes blazed with long-bottled bitterness when he finally met my gaze and it brought me up short.

  “I guess I can’t… But I’m not them; and I do consider you my friend. You’re not my scapegoat, you’re my pack-brother…”

  “We’re not a Pack! Don’t you get it? We’re not werewolves! We don’t transform under the full moon, we don’t have special powers, and it sure as hell didn’t take a silver bullet to kill Fen.” I flinched but he kept rolling, “It’s all in your fucking heads and I’m so sick of this game. I just played along so I wouldn’t be alone anymore!

  “When we moved here, I didn’t make a single friend. Not one. I was fair game; everybody picked on me. So I jumped at Fen’s invitation, but when he ‘bit’ me nothing changed. I’m sick of crawling on my belly, playing into their delusions just so they wouldn’t look too close and see that I was lying to them every day.”

  I stared at him, silent, while he caught his breath. “I never wanted you to crawl.”

  Geri smiled ruefully at me, “Notice how you’re the one I’m saying goodbye to.” He took his head in his hands and sighed. He seemed exhausted after his outburst and we lingered in uneasy silence while he collected his thoughts.

  “There’s another thing too,” he started, uneasy. “Um… Dad doesn’t want to pay for moving my car. I know you don’t have one so I’ll sell it to you if you want.”

  I stared at him. “So basically, you called me over to tell me none of us were ever your friends, but you want me to buy your car?”

  “Uh… yeah, I guess.”

  “Dude, that’s a shitty move.”

  “Yeah, I guess…” he said again, uncomfortable.

  I sighed and pressed my fingers into my eyes. I knew better than to think John would ever help me buy a car. Unlike Chicago, this town didn’t seem to even know the meaning of ‘mass transit’, and I knew I’d need one. “How much?”

  “How much can you afford?”

  I ran some quick numbers in my head. “Not much dude, um, five-hundred bucks at best.”

  “That’s fine,” he answered quickly, “let’s do four-hundred and just be done with it. I have too many memories associated with it.”

  I reached out and pulled him into a hug, surprising us both. I just held him while all the things I wanted to say spun through my head. In the end though, I said nothing.

  He offered to let me use his phone to call for a ride, but I declined and he walked me to his front door.

  “I’d like it if you’d email me when you get there. I still consider you my friend, and I don’t want to lose you too.”

  “Sure…” He stuffed his hands in his hands in his pockets and looked down.

  I sighed and zipped up my jacket. “You really don’t think you’re a wolf?”

  “I know it.”

  “Well, I guess that’s your thing.” I stepped down a couple steps toward the sidewalk. “But I remember how you ran. I remember your eyes. Even if you don’t believe in yourself, I do.”

  He blinked, taken aback, and I smiled sadly as I turned and walked away, catching one last glimpse of his father’s rifles. He stood there a moment as if about to say something, but then he turned and closed the door.

  I was a block down the street before I sat down on the curb, covered my face with my hands, and started to cry.

  I miss you Fen…

  Fen’s Pack, his legacy; was crumbling through my fingers. I just wasn’t strong enough to hold it together. Loki tried as hard as she could to convince me that it wasn’t my fault, but it was all I could think of. And while spring stirred to life around me, I was dying inside.

  I failed him…

  What small healing I’d accomplished was ripped raw again as I watched the Mayflower truck pull away from Geri’s house; a red and blue realtors’ sign stuck in the gravel of the front yard and a signed title to Geri’s car in my hand. My car now. It was a beautiful spring day, but no matter what anyone said, I felt like I’d betrayed Fen as I watched Geri drive away.

  Was it all just in my head?

  A cold numb settled into me. Sound dulled, everything slipped out of focus, and I felt… nothing…

  My wolf stopped responding, and as the days passed my phantom limbs disappeared. The worst affirmation to my fears came a week later when I watched the full moon rise over the mountains and felt nothing. No shudders. No surge of energy. No reaction at all. Even my wolf had abandoned me…

  But had it ever really been there to begin with?

  Maybe it was just a matter of faith, and mine was spent. Doubt ate me alive, and left me broken like a discarded toy. What pathetic hubris to imagine I was anything more than I was born; so desperate to feel wanted and accepted that I’d hypnotized myself into Fen’s delusion wholesale.

  Was it all a lie?

  Loki sensed something was wrong, I saw it in her eyes. I wanted more than anything to bare my soul to her, but Fen’s memory haunted me; I hadn’t survived his rejection intact. Better to well the venom inside; when you’ve lost everything else, you covet your last hopeful illusions above all else.

  I’d reached my breaking point, and I knew I couldn’t survive losing Loki too.

  At home, Mom and John tiptoed around me. I came home a couple times to find them deep in some angry hushed conversation, or John would hurriedly wrap up a phone call as soon as I came near the door. Suspicion festered inside me, and I wondered if John was messing around on my mom.

  I came home one day and heard Mom and John arguing in his office with the door closed. I crept close and listened from the other side of the door.

  “—the hell can we believe anything he says? He lied to us! God only knows what he was doing over at that girl’s house at six in the morning, and did you see the way he kissed that boy’s face at the funeral? It made my skin crawl…”

  “But those aren’t what upset you John, I know you better than that. You’re the one who’s talked me back from the ledge a bunch of times with him.”

  John was silent. After a minute, he sighed and said. “Jimmy never saw me as a dad. He never
will. He made his mind up about that years ago.”

  “Honey, you have to remember that Jimmy wasn’t just an only child; I was his only parent. Emotionally, I was everything to him. When you came along Jimmy got jealous; he’d never had competition for my attention before. Besides, there’s so much he doesn’t know about you. There’s so much you haven’t told him.”

  “What am I supposed to tell him? That I have no clue how to be a father? That my old man spent his life working, golfing, and cheating on my mother; so he was never there for his own boy?”

  “John, I don’t know what you expected. Jimmy looks up to you, I can tell—”

  “Does he? Really? ‘Cause he sure as hell doesn’t show it! When I married you, I swore I’d try to be the best dad I could for him,” John said, and I swallowed a lump in my throat, “but he resents me for trying to teach him how to be strong; how to be a good man, how to figure shit out on his own! And god-forbid I ever try to show him that I love him… I just don’t know what to do with him; I can’t stand his attitude and I’m sick and tired of being his goddamned punching bag!”

  “Look,” Mom snapped, “You think your situation’s rough? I’ve been dealing with Jimmy for eighteen years. Literally half my life John, with zero breaks! I never got to be young, I never got to go out and live! I don’t resent him, it was my decision, but I’m exhaustted! I can’t tell if Jimmy can’t see the toll he takes on us, or if he just doesn’t care!”

  The room went silent and I wiped my eyes. The feeling of betrayal ran even deeper that the hurt and shock.

  John’s sigh was audible even through the door, “So what am I supposed to do about the church? How am I supposed to teach the boys to be good men if I don’t follow my own morals?”

  “Look honey, I understand why you want to drop the job. But be realistic; we need that money to pay the mortgage, we can’t keep living out of savings like we have.” Mom muttered, insistent.

  “It’s bad enough that the pastor’s son assaulted our boys,” I blinked; I hadn’t realized the church John was designing was for Jack’s dad, “there’s something about that pastor that reminds me of my old man. There’s a serpent behind that smile, mark my words…”

  I heard them move and slipped away before they opened the door. I retreated downstairs and leaned against my bookcase while I waited for the tears to stop.

  With mounting desperation, I launched myself into anything I could devise to distract myself from my dissolving home life or try and rouse my wolf. The amount of time I spent alone in my Dungeon quadrupled as I devoured the small library I’d inherited from Fen, and checked out every book I could find on wolves from both libraries.

  The more I read of Fen’s books, the more I realized that almost all the things he’d talked about with such conviction were nothing more than adaptations of things he’d read. I’d built my entire identity around Fen’s amalgamated lies. It was all there in the books; shifting energy, astral planes, turquoise… Defeated, I stared into the eyes of wolf pictures, hoping to trigger some kind of response, but all I got were dry eyes.

  I turned eighteen in April, and surprised myself with how little I gave a crap. Eighteen. Woo hoo. Mom and John gave me a cell phone, which was ironic considering I could count on one hand the number of people I would actually call with it. “Oh, cool, thanks guys. Now you can track me down whenever you want.”

  I guess that reaction wasn’t quite what they had in mind.

  “Don’t you like it?” Mom asked, “Was there something else you would have rather had?”

  Anything I would have rather had? Bring my wolf back? Raise Fen from the dead? Bring Geri home, ruing the error of his ways? Loki’s confession of eternal love? “Nope, it’s great,” I lied.

  Clouds lingered for weeks until the slushy snow and hail finally relented to the lengthening spring days and turned to a cold punishing rain, like the weather mirrored my mood. I stared out the library window while Bo and I researched for our American Government final in the Library before Spring Break. “Still overboard about wolves?” Bo snapped me out of my reverie as he leaned over and looked at the screen of my computer.

  “Huh? Oh…” I was pulling double duty; on one screen I was doing research on Teddy Roosevelt, on the other I was reading about pack hunting techniques. Like a genius, I’d left the wrong screen open when I spaced out. I was just glad it was Bo instead of Mr. Carter. I clicked back to my other window right away.

  “Hey, I was reading that!” Bo pouted.

  “Down boy, stop whining.”

  “Fuck you.” he leaned back and stretched his thick arms over his head. “You know, I’ve always loved the idea of hunting in a pack… Everybody running together with a single purpose and flawless teamwork. I guess that’s why I loved sports so much…”

  My eyes closed as I remembered my first full moon; and everything from that memory that fate had stolen from me… I remembered the way the wind flowed around me as Fen and I chased Geri in a world long lost—the way Loki danced in the snow when she thought no one was watching—I’d give anything to have that back…

  “Oh really?” Bo asked and my eyes snapped open as I realized I’d said that last part out loud.

  “Oh, nothing, never mind…” I mumbled as I focused back on my computer.

  “Damnit Jimmy, when are you going to tell me the truth?” he looked hurt and pissed. “I know you’re hiding, well, everything from me. You can trust me—” Could I really? “—so when are you going to stop lying to me all the time?”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. Did he deserve the leap of faith he was asking for? Did I have any right to talk anymore? My wolf was gone—if he’d ever existed in the first place—and I was just as human as Bo. And just as easy to kill as Fen…

  “Bo, I’m sorry, but my best friend is dead, and I don’t exactly feel like I can trust anybody, ya know?”

  He grimaced and sighed, but I saw the anger in his eyes relent. “Yeah,” he looked down, “I guess I can understand that. I’m sorry; I can’t even imagine what that must have been like for you.”

  “I was there Bo. I was the one holding his hand when his heart stopped. Some paramedic had to scrub his blood off my face… off my hands…” I paused as my throat grew tight, and swallowed hard.

  “Jesus…” I couldn’t tell if Bo was more disturbed by the raw emotion on my face, or the gruesome details that only Loki and I knew.

  “You can’t imagine what it’s like?” my voice broke as I struggled to keep my volume down. “The classrooms we shared, the halls we walked down together. Every second in this place is like a cheese grater carving out pieces of my soul. Not enough to kill me, but more than enough to make me wish for death. Sometimes I wake up and I’ve forgotten, only to relive the loss, all over again, every… single… fucking… day…

  “Every time I look down the street and see those goddamned potheads living in the house he grew up in. Every time I walk into Art and see that empty seat. It all crashes over me again and—and I failed him… I fucking failed him…” I heard the cloth of Bo’s shirt move as he reached out and set a hand on my shoulder.

  “Geri left. As Fen died, I promised him I would look after the others, take care of them, but I failed… I couldn’t lead a goddamn lemming off a cliff…”

  “I don’t know what it’s worth, but… I would follow you.”

  “How can you say that? Bo, I don’t even know who I am anymore!” I moaned, “I’ve lost more than I can bear, and my toes are hanging over the edge. I feel like a boat adrift at sea, lost in a storm with a broken rudder, just waiting to drown. It’s like my identity—my very soul—has been stripped away…”

  Bo just offered me a kind smile, his dark skin creased at the corners of his bright eyes, “You’re Jimmy Walker, a good guy who’s had enough shit dumped on him to crush a man twice his age. This sort of thing is called ‘the dark night of the soul’, and like any other night, it passes. And if you were my Alpha,” he nodded at my screen, “I’d follow y
ou.” He smiled again and squeezed my shoulder and then went back to work. I watched him for just a moment longer before I turned back to my own screen and went through the motions while my mind wandered…

  Everything starts over…

  The rain passed, though the dark clouds lingered overhead. After school, I stopped by Jacob’s school and waited for a few minutes before I figured Mom must’ve picked him up. I got home and dropped my bag on the couch. I sighed and pressed my fingers into my eyes when I heard Mom call me into the kitchen. God, what’d I do wrong now…?

  John wasn’t there, but mom sat at the kitchen table looking terrible. It was obvious she’d been crying. I ground my teeth against the anger and suspicion that boiled up inside me as I sat down. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “This came in the mail today, must have been misdelivered.” she said and slid a large manila envelope across the table to me. “I couldn’t decide whether to throw it away or open it…” Her voice trailed off when she saw the look on my face.

  The envelope was addressed to James Kendle, with the Colorado State University seal stamped on the corner. Ringing filled my ears as my shaking hands opened the letter before my brain could decide if I really wanted to see what was inside or not. It was hard to breathe as I skimmed the papers.

  Fen had been admitted to the College of Natural Sciences with a full ride scholarship about month after he died.

  “Jimmy? Are you alr—”

  “It’s not fair Mom,” I interrupted her, “it’s not fucking fair!” I screamed as I threw the papers across the kitchen and grabbed my head. “Why? Why did Fen have to die? He deserved to live; he had so much to live for! Why! Why him and not me, it should have been me!”

  “Jimmy, don’t say that! Don’t ever say that!” Mom said as she reached out for me, but I recoiled from her. Jacob came downstairs and grabbed onto Mom’s leg. I didn’t care about how hurt they looked, how scared. The house loomed around me, pressing in, it choked me. The world narrowed. I had to run. Had to get out…