But the human part of him shrank from the thought. There was something horrible about forcing her when she was afraid, even if he knew that he meant her no harm. No, he had to convince her somehow. And he didn’t know how he’d do that without touching her. He was better at communicating with his hands than his voice, it seemed.
“Fine,” she said primly. “I’ll leave.” She unzipped the tent and began to crawl.
“You don’t have any… any bottoms,” he said.
“Well, whose fault is that?” And she flounced out.
* * *
Outside the tent it was colder than Calla had expected. She shivered. Her top was long enough that it covered her butt and the tops of her thighs, but her legs were still bare, and she had nothing on her feet. Jesus, he’d ripped her leggings. She didn’t have anything to wear now. This was insane.
Maybe she should go back into the tent.
But then she thought about how smug he’d been, trying to tell her it was “important” that she get it on with him. Who did he think he was? Next he’d be telling her that his balls hurt because she hadn’t allowed him to get off, and trying to guilt her into it like she was a teenage girl. He might not be a dog, but he was juvenile like one.
She stalked off in the direction of the freight container. It wasn’t exactly comfortable in there, but it would be warmer. She’d close the door and be away from him. She only wished that she’d brought herself a blanket.
In the morning, when she saw him, she wasn’t going to take anymore of this crap where he pretended to be a wolf. It was obviously all an act. She’d heard him talk, and they’d carried on an actual conversation. She wasn’t sure that her accusation of his pretending to be an animal to get in her pants actually made any sense, so maybe that wasn’t his motive. But that almost made the situation worse, because it proved that he probably had bad mental problems. Why else would someone act like a dog and refuse to act like a person?
But as she made her way across the campsite, there was a nagging thought in the back of her brain that her analysis didn’t feel right. After all, last night, she’d seen him when he had reverted back to the beast, and it had seemed as if something had gone dull in his eyes. Maybe something else was happening with him, and he was switching back and forth between wolf and man.
Oh, but how would that even work? That made positively no sense. It was out of the realm of possibility.
Still, she supposed she didn’t know much about werewolves.
Werewolves.
A flash of the red balloon, and goosebumps burst out all over her bare skin, only partly because of the cold. She shivered, and she stopped. Hugging herself, she turned in a circle. She’d just gotten the distinct feeling that something was following her. She knew it was ridiculous. She got scared like that all the time, especially after her zombie movie marathons. But she needed to reassure herself, so she’d just look around and make sure no one was there.
See, there was the tent. Its blue color was difficult to make out in the darkness, so it just looked like a big, dark shape there, but she could see that it was only a tent. Nothing else was there.
And there was the fire pit, the chairs all around it.
No one’s here, she thought. I’m fine.
There was the cooler, sitting in a tuft of grass by the tent. The ice inside was probably melting, but it hardly mattered, because they’d eaten most of the food and Jasper would be back in the morning.
Everything was fine. There was nothing to be afraid o—
Strong arms grabbed her from behind.
Calla screamed.
A voice at her ear, hot breath tickling her skin. “That’s it, button. Let him hear you.”
Oh God, that wasn’t Ryder’s voice. It wasn’t Ryder who had her. It was some stranger. She felt the cold metal of a gun’s muzzle poke her cheek, and she screamed again.
He chuckled. “Oh, yeah, button. I could tell you had some lungs on you. Dig the look, incidentally. What happened to your pants?”
It was Leroy. He recognized her, and he had a gun, and that meant it was Leroy. “Ryder!” she yelled. She wasn’t sure if she wanted his help, or if she wanted to warn him. “He’s got a gun!”
Leroy couldn’t stop laughing. “That’s right. Very, very good. I want him to come for you.”
Oh. She cringed. Maybe she should keep her mouth shut?
But Ryder was already bursting out of the tent, eyes flashing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ryder was inside the tent, struggling to hold onto words, when he heard her scream. He started for her right away, but he got tangled up in blankets and the tent. His human side knew how to navigate it, but his human side was already muted, and he was losing more and more of it with every passing moment.
By the time he got free of the tent, he no longer remembered what it was called.
All he knew was that there was a man outside, and the man was hurting the soft woman. He had one of the loud sticks—the ones that made loud cracks, the ones that the men used to kill deer in the woods.
Ryder was afraid of the loud stick. He knew better than to tangle with a man who had one.
But the man had the soft woman, and Ryder knew he couldn’t let anything happen to her either. She might not have let him mate with her, but he still had to help her. He had to stop the man.
He could still run on his hind legs—still had that much of a man left in him, even if he no longer had many words. He rushed at the man, growling, raising his front paws and turning his man-hands into claws. He tried to look as formidable as he could. He was afraid of the loud stick, but maybe the man would be afraid of him.
The man didn’t look afraid, only confused. He said a string of words, and of them, Ryder could only make out his own name. Ryder.
The man knew him.
Ryder wanted to tell the man to let the soft woman go. He wanted to tell the man that if he hurt the soft woman, Ryder would hurt him. But he didn’t have any words, so he tried to put all of that into his growl, into the way that he advanced on the man.
The man was looking confused. He furrowed his brow as he looked at Ryder, and he continued to speak, but his voice had taken on a bewildered quality, as if he couldn’t understand what was happening.
Ryder didn’t much understand what was happening either. He only knew that he’d crossed a certain line, and that he couldn’t back down now. The time to retreat was over. Now he was too close, and he was committed. He was going to lunge onto the man, loud stick or not. He couldn’t halt his momentum.
At the last second, the man pushed away the soft woman, and he held up both his hands, shaking his head, and speaking in a rapid, frantic voice.
But Ryder couldn’t stop, not now, and so he tackled the man.
They both went down, the man beneath Ryder, and the loud stick went off.
Ryder whined. He didn’t like the noise. But he didn’t back off. He pinned the man down, and he swiped him across the face with one of his claws—except he was in his man shape, and he didn’t have claws.
Still, he was pleased to see that the swipe had drawn a bit of blood.
The man was astonished, and there was fear in his eyes, and Ryder could smell the fear.
The fear drove Ryder to a frenzy, and the wolf inside him reared up. The wolf wanted blood. The fear made the man smell like prey, and Ryder wanted to feed.
But he had no teeth. He wasn’t a wolf.
He flailed at the man, limbs and fingernails and knees and teeth and everything he had in his arsenal. He growled, he howled, and he lost himself in it. He wanted to annihilate this man. He wanted to rip him and shred him until he didn’t exist.
And so he went at him until the soft woman was pulling him off, yelling at him with words he didn’t understand.
The man was still. He wasn’t moving.
Ryder looked up at the soft woman, who was still yelling. He slunk away to lick the blood from his man-paws.
* * *
Calla was
horrified.
She was grateful that Ryder had somehow stopped Leroy, but the way he had gone about it… He’d been like an animal, and it had reminded her so much of that night, the red balloon floating into the air, terror coursing through her tiny body.
It upset her so badly that for some time, she was frozen, just watching as Ryder went viciously insane on Leroy.
And then she seemed to snap out of it, and she grabbed Ryder and pulled him off. She didn’t have any sympathy for Leroy, not really, but she didn’t want to watch him kill another man.
And to think… to think…
She’d been so close to letting Ryder make love to her earlier that night. Thank God that hadn’t happened. Thank God she’d stopped him. She didn’t know what Ryder was, but there was something in him that was dangerously violent, and she was repelled by it.
Leroy wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t moving either. Calla used that to her advantage. She found her leggings in the tent, and she used them to make strips. She tied Leroy to one of the chairs next to the fire pit, tying his legs to each of the chair legs and securing his arms to the back. She made the knots as tight and as strong as she could make them, but she didn’t really trust her ability to tie up the man, so she sat up all night with the gun, watching him.
When she started to fall asleep, she simply reminded herself of what she’d seen Ryder do, and she was filled with fresh horror. It kept her awake.
As for Ryder himself, he wasn’t talking anymore, and she wasn’t sure why that was. Admittedly, she hadn’t tried to engage him in conversation. She could hardly look at him, let alone speak to him. Every time she thought about his hands on her body, his lips on her lips, she felt as if her skin was crawling.
Ryder had shown his true colors. He was dangerous, and she was afraid of him.
Of course, he’d also saved her life. Maybe she was being too hard on him.
It was only the way he’d done it, the way he’d gone after Leroy. It had seemed as if Ryder enjoyed what he was doing. He was delighting in it, and that made her sick to her stomach.
Before Calla was a teacher, she’d had very naive and optimistic opinions of the human race. She’d thought that most people were good deep down, and that they didn’t really want to hurt other people. If they did, she believed that she could kill them with kindness.
One year as a teacher was enough to disabuse her of the notion, and it brought out a bitter streak within her that she wished she’d never developed. She had liked her fluffy version of the world. But she knew now that it wasn’t true. People were often cruel.
Her students were self-absorbed. They were disobedient. She still remembered how she had set out a stack of paper on the shelf for students who forgot to bring theirs to class, only to be drowning in paper airplanes by the end of class. She remembered the days that she’d be tired and beg the students to cut her a break that day. And they would seem to take this as a sign to push harder because they knew they’d really get to her today.
But as far as that went, she supposed it was normal. She couldn’t fault students for disliking her. She was the authority figure. Of course they weren’t going to see her as a fellow human being. In fact, she almost had to make sure they didn’t think that, because it was the only piece of power that she had over them, the idea that she was somehow separate and removed. That was the only reason that they obeyed her at all.
So, even though it made it difficult to want to go back to work, knowing that the people she worked with were working at cross purposes to her every moment, she supposed that was the nature of the beast.
The cruelty that always bothered her the most, however, was the way they treated each other. It was callous, and it was always overkill. Twenty against one, much of the time.
One year, she’d had a girl in her class. The girl was a little bit annoying, Calla had to admit. She was a know-it-all. She wore glasses, and she always lugged around thick novels. Her hair was a mousy blond, and it never seemed quite combed. Still, Calla had found the girl a little bit charming. Maybe she was socially awkward, but she did have some very interesting things to say.
However, she could see why her peers might not have loved her. And they didn’t. They despised the girl.
Calla was struck by how pervasive it was, how impossible to control. They tormented the girl, sending her out in tears more than once. They threw things at her, stuffed things in her backpack, called her names, and—probably worst of all—forcibly ostracized the girl.
And Calla could do nothing about it. No punishments stopped it, though she enforced them with regularity. In fact, the more attention Calla called to it, the worse it seemed to get. When Calla tried to shame the students, appealing to their inborn sense of empathy, it seemed to backfire, everything getting even worse in her classroom.
It went on all year, and it never stopped, no matter what Calla tried.
Since that year, she’d seen similar things happen over and over again. There was a girl who smelled like cat litter, and no one in the class would sit next to her or speak to her. There was a boy who got so angry at another boy for mocking where he had grown up that he jumped out of his seat and began punching the other boy. Blood spattered all over the room, and Calla screamed at the boys to stop. All the students in the class seemed to be caught up in it. They whooped and yelled, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” taking deep pleasure in the violence.
So, now Calla knew what humans were really like, and she was no longer under any illusions that things would ever be much different than they were. The nature of education itself was a broken system—glorified babysitting in order to keep teens away as workforce competition. She was disgusted with the lot of it. But she was even more disgusted with herself, because she wasn’t any better anymore. She was bitter and angry now, and she wasn’t above the base nature of humanity.
When she’d watched Ryder go at Leroy, she’d been slightly delighted. She was no better than the kids in the class who’d cheered on the fight. She was caught up in the violence.
Even though she’d seen violence like it before. Even though she’d let go of the red balloon…
She waited, but Leroy didn’t wake up all night. He sat slumped in the chair, unconscious, until the sun came up. Calla was exhausted, but she didn’t let herself fall asleep.
Jasper pulled up to the campsite soon after dawn.
She got out of her chair and ran to meet him. “I have him tied up.”
Jasper was getting fast food bags out of his car. He’d brought them more breakfast sandwiches, apparently. “Who?”
“The man with the gun. Leroy. I told you about him.”
Jasper furrowed his brow, shoved the bags into Calla’s arms, and hurried over to the campsite.
She went after him, bringing the food.
Jasper was staring at the man, shaking his head. “What happened to him?”
Calla set down the fast food bags on one of the chairs. “Ryder did it.”
“Ryder?” Jasper turned to look at her. “Did he shift? Did he turn into a wolf?”
“No.” She shook her head. “He just did it in his regular form.”
“Man.” Jasper let out breath in a low whistle. “He did a number on this guy. What happened?”
“Well, Leroy grabbed me. He put the gun against my face.” She touched her cheek.
Jasper looked her over. “Is that what happened to your pants?”
She blushed. “No, I just didn’t have anything else to tie him up with.” She wasn’t about to tell him that Ryder had ripped them taking them off her.
Jasper examined the knots. “You did a good job. He’s in there tight. He won’t be able to get away. Which is good, because I won’t be able to do anything about him until later tonight.”
“What?” said Calla. “You can’t leave me here with that man tied to the chair.”
“I don’t have any other options, do I?” said Jasper.
“You could load Ryder and me up in that car and get us out of her
e,” she said. “Obviously, whatever your little experiment is that you’re doing here, it isn’t working.”
“On the contrary,” said Jasper. “It seems to be working great. Ryder’s protecting you.”
“He still thinks he’s a wolf.” She rubbed her face. She wasn’t even going to bother telling Jasper that Ryder had been talking again last night. Ryder wasn’t talking anymore. It didn’t make any difference.
“I don’t know about that,” said Jasper. “He’s connected to you somehow, and it’s not a wolf connection. You’re doing something with him. You’re making progress.”
She was beyond frustrated. “I can’t believe you’re leaving us here.”
“Eat your breakfast.” Jasper knelt down in front of Leroy. He slapped the man on both cheeks. “Hey, wake up!” he said in a rough voice.
Alarmed, Calla backed away. “What are you doing?”
“I said to eat your breakfast, didn’t I?” he threw over his shoulder. He turned back to Leroy and slapped his face again.
This time Leroy’s eyes fluttered open.
“Hey there,” said Jasper.
Leroy tried to move and realized he was tied to the chair.
Jasper got to his feet. “You thirsty?”
Leroy looked from Jasper to Calla. He didn’t say anything.
Jasper went and got a take-out cup with a straw from inside one of the fast food bags. He brought that back to Leroy and waved it in front of his face. “I’ll give you a drink if you answer a few questions, okay?”
“You’re his brother,” said Leroy. “The brother who sided with his father. Against the cause.”
Jasper narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
Calla was confused too.
Leroy drew himself up, straining against his bonds. “You’re a coward, that’s what he said.”
“Who said?”
“Ryder.” Leroy smiled.
Jasper looked at Ryder, who was sleeping on the other side of the campsite, still covered in blood from beating Leroy up.
“Hey, what’s up with him, anyway?” said Leroy. “It’s like he lost his mind.”
Midnight Moonlight Page 11