Aiden gave a slight nod.
Diesel yanked the quilt off Aiden and grabbed his hand. “What the hell are you wearing?” He shook his head, pulling the sock off Aiden’s hand. “Hey, touch your thumb to your pinky, like this.”
Aiden did what was asked of him.
“He’s fine,” Diesel said and walked over to the fire. He grabbed the poker and played with the logs.
Scarlet rolled her eyes at Diesel’s casualness. She looked at Aiden’s pale face, white hands, and his cracked, bleeding lips. He shivered unmercifully. That’s when she noticed she was pretty cold herself. She climbed on the couch beside Aiden, pulling the blanket over both of them.
“I think the worse of it will be chapped lips.” Diesel said as he turned around. After seeing them on the couch under the cover together, he cocked his head to the side and opened his mouth slightly.
Scarlet dropped her gaze to the blanket. Usually his jealousy gave her a rise, but this time it felt uneasy and eerie. “He’s freezing,” she whispered. “He needs to warm up fast.”
“Does he?” Diesel asked. “I’ll tell you what he needs; he needs someone to kick his ass.” Diesel held the poker and used it to point, closer than Scarlet felt comfortable with. “He crashed the sled, your only ride out of here…” His face lost the intensity for a second and his eyes went sad as he whispered, “… before dark.”
Scarlet felt a sudden warmth dance along her neck up to her face. “He must have gotten scared.”
“Like you said before, we’re all scared. I don’t know what we’re going to do now, but I do know if my cousin here pulls another stunt like that—”
“I won’t,” Aiden whispered. He licked his lips. “I… panicked. I’m sorry.”
“Panicked? That’s your excuse? We should have left your ass out there. Would have been one less worry. We can’t babysit you all the time.”
“I said I was sorry.” Aiden shifted and gave a low grunt.
“Your arm,” Scarlet said. She looked up at Diesel. “We should see about his arm. Diesel?”
“Not now,” he barked and stormed out of the living room to the foyer.
She didn’t say anything until she heard his bedroom door slam. “Probably just as well,” she said to Aiden. “Do you think you can take off your clothes?”
Aiden met her eyes with a puzzled look.
She shook her head. Boys! “I mean your coat and shirt so that you can see about that arm. I’m not a nurse, and I don’t think you want Diesel anywhere near anything vulnerable. You’re going to have to bandage it yourself.”
Aiden nodded.
“I don’t know what they’ll have around here to dress it, but I’ll look.”
She hadn’t found anything when she had looked for the first aid kit for Diesel earlier, but she remembered Diesel saying something about an ointment his mom had made. He had said it was in the pantry. Perhaps the bandages were in there, too.
When she left Aiden in the living room and went into the kitchen, she tried to push what Diesel had said to the back of her mind, but it wouldn’t stay there. Before dark.
She sat down at the kitchen table because of her sudden lightheadedness. Except for the moment when she had seen the bite mark on Diesel’s neck, she hadn’t allowed herself to be scared. She hadn’t allowed herself to believe. Not really… until now. His eye color and strength. Before dark. What if Diesel actually turned into a werewolf?
Aiden hadn’t even been able to defend himself against a feeble old lady werewolf. They wouldn’t have a chance against Diesel. She trembled. How would they defend themselves? The dart gun. Still, she had her doubts about her and Aiden’s ability to use it against Diesel in full werewolf mode.
She roused herself by shaking her head and stood up. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps Aiden had the right idea. Maybe the Texas boy couldn’t make the journey in the cold, but she was used to the snow. She could make it. No, that was a stupid idea. The truth was, she was still chilled and exhausted from earlier.
As she walked inside the pantry she had another idea: If I can’t get out of here, Diesel should leave. He was strong and knew how to protect himself from the cold. But how to approach that subject? He already thought she had the hots for Aiden. If she asked him to leave, he might get the wrong idea, and he wouldn’t need to turn into a werewolf to show his teeth.
She half-mindedly looked over the shelves of jelly jars, but as she examined them closer, she saw that they were full of different things like herbs and powders. She picked them up one by one and read the hand printed labels.
“Hmmm,” she said as she read one of the jars. “Perhaps there is more than one way to make Diesel leave.”
Chapter 13
The Wolf Appeased His Appetite
They all sat in the living room around the warm fire. Scarlet sat on the couch next to Aiden, and Diesel was in the recliner. They each had a wooden TV tray holding a plate of pasta topped with spicy tomato sauce, which Scarlet had prepared, and they drank warm red wine from tall, fat wine glasses. No one spoke a word.
Even though Aiden had taken a hot shower and put on dry clothes, he still hadn’t been able to lose the chill. His hand shook as he brought his fork up to his chapped lips. He tried to put the food into his mouth without touching his lips, but one little drip landed just right and burned like fire. Licking the sauce from his lips hurt just as much.
But the pain from his chapped lips and from his injured arm didn’t bother him as much as his embarrassment over the entire ordeal. Diesel had had to rescue him, carry him back home like a wounded puppy with his tail between his legs. He felt stupid for letting his fear get in the way of his judgment. He should have turned around and walked back to the house after he crashed the snowmobile. He knew nothing about cold weather, especially snow. He had put not only his own life at risk but theirs as well.
This forced him to think about what he had truly run from, what he had avoided thinking about. Werewolves. Because if they were planning on murdering him, they would have left him there to die; they wouldn’t have saved his life.
When he heard chewing noises over the crackle of the fire, he looked at Diesel. Aiden shivered. Diesel had red spaghetti sauce all over his lips, and some had even spread to his cheeks, making him look like some sort of wild animal pulling his head up from the warm insides of a fresh kill.
Stop it, he told himself, only to notice that Scarlet also stared at Diesel mid-chew. Slowly she turned to Aiden, her eyes wide with dismay, confirming she shared his thoughts. Aiden swallowed, forgetting to chew, and the tube of pasta felt like a brick going down his dry throat.
Scarlet slowly turned her head toward Diesel. He had been concentrating on his plate but suddenly shot them a look.
“What?” he asked with a mouth full of food. He rolled his eyes. “Really, guys?” He wiped his messy mouth on his sleeve and took another enormous bite. “I’m starving… I lugged 150 pounds through the snow for miles.”
Scarlet gave Aiden another quick glance and placed her fork on her plate. She pushed the tray away, stood up, and walked to the kitchen.
Aiden tried to focus his attention on getting his food past his lips and tried not to notice the noises Diesel made. But it proved difficult. Aiden wondered if Diesel normally made loud noises when he ate. Bad table manners? He didn’t seem the type. Diesel hummed as he ate, like it was the best meal of his life, like he hadn’t eaten a thing in weeks. Like at any moment he would start licking his plate.
Aiden no longer had an appetite, and as he put his fork down and picked up his napkin, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye.
From the kitchen, Scarlet motioned for him to come to her. He frowned and moved only his eyes to see if Diesel had noticed. It didn’t seem like it, so he picked up his still-full glass of wine with a shaky hand and forced it to stay up until he drank it down. He stood up, slowly, and made an off-handed comment about needing some more to drink. Diesel didn’t seem to notice or to
care. Aiden walked to the kitchen.
“Don’t eat the muffins,” Scarlet whispered as she put a couple of fresh-baked muffins on a plate.
“Okay,” he said, not planning on eating them, anyway.
“I put something in them that I hope will put Diesel to sleep,” she whispered.
“What?” he whispered, too.
“I found this powder stuff in the pantry labeled something like, ‘Kava-something and Valerian for Granny to sleep’.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“But what exactly is it? A sleeping potion?” Not exactly what he would have asked a few days before, but in this house, at this moment, it didn’t even seem like an odd question.
Her eyes danced nervously. “I don’t know, but that’s what I’m hoping.”
“How much did you use?”
“Well, I thought if it had been mixed for Granny, then Diesel would probably need a lot more of it. So I put a little in his drink and sprinkled it on his food and—”
“What’s going on in here?” Diesel said from the doorway.
They both flinched.
“You’re not making more moves on my girl now are you, Tex?”
“Huh, no? Look, I have a girlfriend… a very hot girlfriend.”
“Right,” Diesel said and walked into the kitchen and grabbed one of the muffins off of the plate. “Because, you know, I would kill you if I thought you were hitting on her.” He took a huge bite of the muffin, and Aiden took a huge gulp.
“Stop being such a jealous jerk,” Scarlet said.
Aiden thought the way she said it sounded strange, as if she had lost some of the edge she’d had when he first met her. They all stood in the quietness of the candle-lit kitchen. Diesel chewed, eyeing Scarlet and then Aiden.
Aiden felt nauseous. “I’m going to my room.”
Diesel said, “Hey, Aiden.”
Aiden stopped and looked back at Diesel.
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
Aiden shook his head and turned, hearing Diesel immediately say to Scarlet, “What was going on in here when I walked in? Was he hitting on you?”
As Aiden walked into the living room, dizziness set in. He walked slowly toward the foyer, the thought that he was the one who had actually been drugged entering his consciousness.
Then he remembered the wine. He wasn’t much of a drinker. The last party he and Summer had gone to, he had drunk to be social. Somehow he had ended up embarrassing both of them after just two drinks when he stumbled into Jessica Bickham, knocking her into some dude with a bowl of chips and an attitude. He hadn’t drunk since.
It felt cold and gloomy in the bedroom; the wind whistled through the window. Even though he could see his own breath, it wasn’t enough to make him want to go back in there with Diesel. Not even for the warmth of the fire.
Suddenly, he felt like a little boy, missing his home and his family. He thought about his dad and little brother and hoped they were over the flu. If they were, maybe his mom was just snowed in at the airport and would be there by morning.
And if not, perhaps the storm would have lessened, and he could get up bright and early and start shoveling snow from the driveway, wounded arm or not. He looked at his arm. It hadn’t started seeping out through the dishrag Scarlet had given him, so he figured it would be all right for now.
He yawned drearily as he stared at the bed, remembering the quilt was still on the couch. Didn’t matter. All he had to do was make it through the rest of the afternoon and then through the night. There were still hours before dark. Scarlet had drugged Diesel, and he had drunk a glass of wine. Surely Diesel would fall asleep soon, and hopefully he would be out for the night. Aiden crawled on the bed, under the sheet, curled up in a ball, and drifted off into an awkward sleep.
“Aiden… Aiden… Wake up… Aiden.”
He had been dreaming but forgot the dream immediately; it left faint images of trees and comfort, but as he opened his eyes to Scarlet and the darkened room, the reality of his situation invaded his mind. He sat up. “What’s going on? What time is it?”
Scarlet sat on the edge of the bed, her flashlight casting their shadow on the wall. “It’s almost five. He’s asleep… finally.” She shook her head and looked off, her voice giving way to a seemingly uncontrolled sob.
“Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
“I’m fine.” She shook her head. “It’s just that…”
“What?”
“I had to… you know, in order for him not to know anything was up. I had to act normal. I’m really scared. I can’t believe I’m scared of him. But I am… and I was.”
Aiden stood up and walked toward the window. “Oh. I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have left you in there by yourself.” He opened and closed his hands a couple of times trying to defrost them. This also allowed him to think about something other than the images she had just put in his head.
“The way he was acting, it’s probably best that you did leave. It’s strange. He always freaks out when he thinks another guy is checking me out. But it has always been like this joke between us. He knows I’m a flirt. Hell, he stole me from my last boyfriend. It’s just that earlier, that look in his eyes. No joke.” She exhaled and wiped tears from her cheeks, which Aiden couldn’t see in the dimness. “He’s changed. I know it. He’s different. He’s not himself anymore.”
Aiden knew she needed comforting, but he thought about the way Diesel had said, “I’ll kill you if you make a move on her,” and decided not to go near her. He opened the curtain, and the faint early evening light awoke the shadows in the room. He tried to remember what time he had gone up to Granny’s room the night before. What time had she turned into a werewolf?
“I can’t believe I actually want to go home,” Scarlet said. “That is the last place I usually ever want to go. But I’m stuck here in this house with… I just drugged my boyfriend because he might turn into a… a wild animal and kill me.” She sniffled and gave a low whimper. “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t take it anymore.” Scarlet put her hands to her face and cried.
Aiden didn’t feel as if he had a choice anymore. He walked over to her and sat down on the bed and before he could talk himself out of it, he wrapped his arm around her.
After a couple of minutes, she pulled away and wiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m being so childish.”
“No. No, you’re not.” He put his hands in his lap. “Where is he?”
She indicated with her head. “He’s asleep on the couch.”
“Are you sure he’s out?”
“He’s snoring. Loudly,” Scarlet said.
“All right.” He wiped his hands down his face. “What do we do now? Take shifts, and if he wakes up… I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should…”
“What?” Aiden asked.
“Find that dart gun.”
“Right. And that way if he does turn, we’ll be ready.”
She shook her head vigorously. “No. I don’t think we’ll be ready. Don’t you remember how strong and fast his old, crippled grandmother was? Can you imagine that power in someone as young and strong as Diesel?”
She took her ponytail holder out of her hair and ran her fingers through to muss it. “I’ve been thinking about this.” She turned to Aiden, her eyes wide, dark, and wild. “I think we should go ahead and shoot him.”
“What? NO!”
“We need to before he wakes up—before he changes!”
“I don’t think you know what you’re saying!”
“Aiden, do you think this is what I want to do? I’ve thought about this. How do we know this Silverweed stuff will even work on him? How can we be sure the animal that I know he is becoming will wait for the moon to come out? Believe me, he’s my boyfriend, and I love him, but I don’t want to get eaten by a werewolf. Can you imagine? Well, I have… I’ve thought about him devouring me like he did that food tonight.”
She sat so close he felt her words in a breeze on hi
s face when she whispered, “Can you imagine how scared I was for him to kiss me… to touch me?”
Aiden couldn’t think anymore. He jumped up and walked back to the window.
“It would solve another problem, too. Don’t you see? We can tell the cops that he shot Granny and came after us. That we had no choice… that he flipped out. We need to come up with a story as to how we ended up with the gun and used it in self defense. Then no one but us will ever have to know what happened here. We wouldn’t have to tell anyone about werewolves or superstitions. And we will be alive! Not dead and not food.”
His heart pounded in his chest. She didn’t want to just knock Diesel out. She wanted to kill him. Murder him in his sleep. Aiden’s entire body shook. Why was this even a topic of conversation?
And was he actually considering it?
“Aiden,” she pleaded. “Look at me. Look at me, please.”
He turned his body, but kept his head low. Maybe I’m still asleep. He studied the hardwood floor. Just a nightmare.
“I don’t know how long he’ll be asleep. You know as well as I do,” she whispered, “it’s either him… or us.”
He allowed himself to look at Scarlet sitting on the bed. He couldn’t make out her facial features, but the way she sat there hugging herself with her boots tucked up underneath her, he knew she was as petrified of the impending night as he was. She must have been really scared to confide in and lean on a perfect stranger. Not to mention that she had drugged her own boyfriend and was talking about murder. A sharp pang of guilt for leaving Scarlet alone with Diesel gnawed at his stomach.
He realized it wasn’t him against them anymore. Not only did he need to figure out how to save himself, but also Scarlet, and maybe even his cousin, as well.
Chapter 14
The Huntsman Saw The Wolf Lying In The Bed
“Where’s the gun?” Aiden asked.
Scarlet rewrapped her ponytail holder around her hair. “I think it’s upstairs in the room… with Granny.” She picked the flashlight up off the bed.
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