Cry Wolf

by Romy Lockhart

  I break his grip to get up, feeling a little stiff in the odd sitting position.

  He tries to grab my hand when I decide to go clean up instead of sitting back down. I’m naked still, a second load of clothes lost to a sudden shift to wolf and back. If this keeps up I’ll be desperate for the year to pass so I have the money for new clothes.

  “I’m going to clean up,” I tell Lukas.

  He lets go after a moment his gaze softening. “Sorry. I just can barely believe this is happening.”

  “Neither can I,” I tell him. Before I met my mates, if anyone had asked me when I was going to settle down and have kids I’d have laughed in their face. Now? I’m in a committed relationship with three wolves with a fourth guy potentially coming into this and a baby on the way. It seems insane, but thinking about it only makes me smile.

  I head upstairs to get cleaned up and dressed. I get the feeling we’re in for a long night.

  I creep into the bedroom in a towel, and find Sebastian in wolf form on the bed beside Fergus. His furry head moves up when I enter, and he looks at me for a moment before he sets his head back down on the bed. I throw on an oversized T-shirt and leggings, and move over to the bed.

  Fergus looks like he’s sleeping soundly, his face marginally less banged up than it was before I bit him and turned him into a shifter. He’s healing, but it looks like it’s going to be a slow process.

  I reach out to stroke Sebastian’s head and he makes little pleased breathy noises as I do so.

  “Thank you for looking after him,” I whisper, my heart swelling that he’s treating Fergus like a brother. I know instinctively that this is what wolves do in pack situations. They stay with their wounded until they’re strong. I don’t know how many wolves make a pack, but I feel like that’s what we’re becoming. They’re not just my mates. They’re my everything.

  I know this development can’t be easy for Sebastian or Lukas. I didn’t think Theo would take it this badly, but I don’t really blame any of them if they don’t like it. We were in an odd enough situation before fate threw another mate into my lap.

  I lean forward and kiss Sebastian’s head. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I leave the room before the temptation to shift and lay beside Sebastian and Fergus becomes too hard to ignore.

  Lukas is in the hall when I come down the stairs. I raise an eyebrow at him.

  “Did you read my mind?” I ask, as I look for shoes and wish I hadn’t worn my comfiest ones already. The old clothes I didn’t care about losing. The comfy boots, I kind of did.

  “I need to go look for Theo,” he tells me.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” I agree, sticking a pair of trainers on that I haven’t worn in forever. I think I just brought them in case I felt like doing some gardening or going for a walk in the fields.

  “You need to stay here with Sebastian,” Lukas says. “The banshee seems to have her sights set on you, Maggie. It’s not safe for you out there.”

  “She hid in the toilets at my pub,” I tell him, wondering if there’s a way inside that I didn’t know about, or if Fergus actually crept in when I wasn’t looking. Seems unlikely that the punters wouldn’t have seen him and said something. I shake it off. I have a point to make to a protective baby-daddy. “So, I’m pretty sure she could break into my house if she really wanted me that badly.”

  His semi-permanent frown deepens. He knows I’m right. I don’t know if I should be relieved about that. That bitch could have killed me. If I’d still been human, she probably would have.

  I shiver a little. Lukas gazes past me, as if he’s lost in thought.

  “You should be here when Fergus wakes up,” he tells me, his gold eyes meeting mine.

  “He’s not waking up tonight,” I tell him, knowing I’m right. His physical injuries were close to fatal, and there’s no telling what mental or emotional damage being possessed by his psycho-bitch mother might have done. “And I need to speak to Theo.”

  He sighs, but he nods. “We should go now. I can still pick up his trail.”

  “His trail?” I ask, wondering if it’s a scent-based ability and if I can learn it.

  He takes my hand. “I’ll show you.”

  Apparently trailing other wolves is a magic thing, though there’s a scent component to it that kicks in once we get closer to the wolf we’re looking for. Lukas’ eyes glow as he thinks about Theo and looks for the trail his aura has left in the air around us. I attempt to mirror what he’s doing. It doesn’t seem to work, but it’s my first try so I’m not going to beat myself up about it.

  “He went this way,” Lukas points out, to the trail that leads up the hill. Toward the field I watched the banshee die in.

  “You can see something?” I ask, as we start to walk.

  “It’s a thin sparkle of emerald,” he says. “Kind of like a reflection of the stars in the sky, but with a flash of colour.”

  “Sounds pretty.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “Your eyes are glowing,” I tell him, kind of mesmerised when I look at them. There’s a pure golden hue over the hazel/caramel gold colour right now.

  “Whenever we do something that connects to the magic inside our eyes glow.”

  “Oh, cool,” I say. “I’m guessing mine aren’t glowing right now.”

  He shakes his head. “We’ll show you how to do this kind of stuff when we’ve dealt with the banshee. It’s not hard, but it can take a while to get used to everything. I was kind of surprised when Theo told me you’d shifted already. It’s usually a slower process with bitten wolves.”

  We walk up the hill to a cliff that looks out over the sea. It’s a dead end, so I’m a little concerned that he’s following Theo’s trail to the edge right now. I pull him back before he gets right to the lip.

  The sea is crashing against the base of the cliff, where rocks jut out in jagged patterns.

  “Tell me he didn’t jump into the sea,” I demand, starting to freak out just a little bit.

  “He didn’t,” Lukas says. “He came up here and sat for a while, I think. Then, he went this way.”

  He takes me back down from the cliff-top and we walk toward the winding path that leads down to the beach. I feel a little weird coming down this way. My parents died on this beach. In this water. They didn’t even like the beach.

  Lukas stops and looks at me. “Are you okay, Maggie?”

  I nod, but stop myself and shake my head vehemently. A lump rises in my throat. I feel my vision blur as he gazes at me with those mesmerising, glowy eyes.

  “My parents died on the beach,” I tell him, my voice cracking.

  He wraps his arms around me and I crumble in his hold, tears starting to stream down my cheeks. I hadn’t seen them in years, and we were never the closest of families, but I still loved them. They were still my mam and da.

  “I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye,” I murmur. “They were out here when the weather turned bad and they drowned in the water.”

  “I’m so sorry, Maggie,” Lukas tells me.

  I cry on his shoulder for a while, unable to stop once the floodgates are open. I don’t know if it’s the hormones or if the numbness that enveloped me ever since I found out they died has finally faded and now I’m going to feel everything and it’s going to damn well hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, when I step back a little bit later and wipe at my eyes. We have to find Theo. We have a dangerous supernatural creature to destroy and I don’t know how much time we have left.

  “It’s okay,” he tells me. “We can go back to the house...”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “I want to find Theo. I need to speak to him.”

  Lukas doesn’t look sure. He frowns at me, his eyes searching my face. He’s worried I’m too upset to be out here. I need to pull myself back together.

  “Lead the way,” I tell him softly, taking his hand once more.

  He nods after a long pause, and we continue toward the
beach.

  I loved the beach when I was a kid. It’s a fairly small one, so there was no real reason to travel to it from other places. That meant only the kids around town played on it, and most of the time I could come here alone to sit in the sand or pick up shells for craft projects, or just dip my toes in the water to check how cold it was.

  I was never out here after dark. The path was too shaded to get down here and back. Stranger danger wasn’t really a thing in Widow’s Walk, but even so, none of the neighbourhood kids stayed on the beach after dark. There was something too spooky about it.

  It’s pretty dark now, though Lukas’ eyes are providing a little light, and I’ll be honest, I feel like my night vision has changed since I became a shifter. Nothing’s quite pitch dark. I don’t need to worry about stumbling, I can see the path under my feet perfectly fine.

  “Are we getting closer?” I ask, hoping Theo hasn’t marched all the way out of town in the hour or so that he’s been gone. I finger the rings he put on me, remembering how mad it drove me that they wouldn’t come off. Now I’m only worried he might leave.

  I want the chance to talk to him, to reassure him that nothing has really changed.

  “I think we’re almost there,” Lukas says, squeezing my hand lightly.

  I let out a relieved sigh. Then I hear it.

  There’s a ‘shish’ noise up ahead, and a little bit of clanging. I stop walking, causing Lukas to do the same. He gives me a questioning glance, but I hold my finger to my lips and nod towards the direction of the sounds.

  His eyes widen a little before he lets my hand go and he moves forward at a quickening pace.

  I rush after him, and we get to the end of the path. The dead end road is empty ahead. The one streetlamp a few feet away illuminates the turn that brings traffic into this section. I’ve never seen a car down here, and there isn’t one now.

  There’s just a man on the beach, spade in his hand as he curses under his breath and tosses sand back over his shoulder. There’s the ‘shishing’ noise right there. Theo is so absorbed in what he’s doing that he doesn’t even turn when Lukas calls out his name.

  “Theo?” Lukas calls out, concern in his tone as he approaches the beach. He stops on the pavement above the beach, looking down.

  I follow, but I jump down, making Theo stop with his spade in the sand in front of me, his eyes wild and his expression hard to read.

  “Theo, please come back home,” I ask, as Lukas drops onto the sand beside me.

  “Home?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know what I’m saying.

  What the hell is he doing, anyway? My skin starts to crawl. Something’s seriously wrong here.

  “What are you doing out here?” I ask, understanding why he ran but not what we’ve found him doing.

  “Come see,” he says, pushing the spade into the sand and holding a hand out to me.

  “Don’t,” Lukas warns, stepping in front of me. “This isn’t Theo.”

  “Um, what?”

  Theo laughs sharply, and the sound jars a memory in me. Fergus, laughing as he crushed my hand with the inhuman grip of his banshee mother.

  “Holy shit,” I murmur. She had me in her grasp once already. She could have killed me then. I passed out, and I woke up on the couch at home. This is her. She’s in Theo now. How the hell did that happen?

  Lukas shifts in front of me and attacks Theo, knocking him to the ground. I’m frozen in shock, until I realize what she was doing here. I see the bin bag in the sand beside the hole Theo was digging. She was burying her bones. Hiding them from us because she knows if we destroy them, we destroy her chance at resurrection.

  I yank the spade out of the sand while Lukas keeps Theo pinned to the ground. I raise it up and slam it down on the bag, again and again while inhuman shrieking spills from Theo’s mouth.

  I don’t stop until my bones are aching and he’s silent. Lukas shifts back to human as I open the bag to confirm my suspicions. The bones aren’t as broken as I’d have hoped from my efforts, but the ribs have shattered, and the skull is cracked.

  “Tell me it’s enough,” I ask Lukas.

  He nods. “If it forced her from possession it was enough.”

  “Oh thank Christ.” I drop the spade and roll my shoulders.

  Lukas is naked now, but he seems to have a plan for getting back to the house. He’s undressing Theo and putting his clothes on. I suppose that makes sense considering he’s going to have to carry him. He can’t just walk back as a wolf. We can’t leave Theo out here.

  “What do we do with the bones?” I ask him, crossing my arms under my chest. It’s not cold, but I feel chilled down to my core right now. That bitch possessed another one of my mates. Smashing up her bones doesn’t feel like revenge enough for all the harm she’s done.

  “I don’t think we should take them back to the house,” he says, confirming my own gut reaction. “Put them in the hole and I’ll cover it over when I’m done.”

  He’s already got Theo’s T-shirt on. It’s a little looser on him. He’s slightly shorter and slimmer built.

  “I’ll get right on that,” I murmur, watching him unbutton Theo’s jeans and letting my mind wander a little before I remember this bitch needs buried before she can cause any more havoc.

  I throw the bag into the hole and pick the spade back up as Lukas removes Theo’s jeans and cowboy boots. I turn away to start piling the sand on top of the bag.

  Lukas takes the spade from me a few seconds later, looking a little strange in Theo’s clothes. The combined scents of two of my mates in one does something seriously potent to my libido. I feel my face flush red as my heart starts to race a little.

  “What?” Lukas asks.

  I shrug. “It’s just strange smelling him on you.”

  He winces. “I’m stripping off when we get back.”

  “I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

  He shakes his head at me as he shovels the sand on top of the bag. He manages to cover it and smooth out the sand much faster than I would have been able to.

  “Do we need to remember where we did this?” I ask.

  His pout seems to deepen. Then he looks around and takes off one of Theo’s socks. Puts it on the ground and pats some sand over it, leaving only the toe part exposed.

  “We probably won’t need to move it, but you’re right. We should mark the spot in case we need to remember.”

  He passes me the spade. “I’ll carry him. We need to get back to the house before anyone sees us.”

  “No-one’s ever around here,” I tell him, wishing I hadn’t spoken the moment the words leave my lips.

  The sound of footsteps from the path make me drop the spade and kick it into the shadows by the wall that we jumped down from to get onto the beach. It clangs lightly but not enough to worry me.

  I shoot Lukas a glance and his eyes glow before Theo turns into his wolf form, still unconscious, in his arms. I guess that way he can be explained away as a big dog. The glow fades as a familiar figure steps into the light.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t little Maggie Pants On Fire,” Kev teases with a sneer.

  He has a six pack of beer dangling from one hand, with a missing can that’s open in his other. I don’t think this is his first six pack of the night. He already sounds pretty loaded.

  “What the feck do you think you’re doing out here, Kev?” I ask, realizing pretty quickly that he’s alone. That’s a relief at least. Last thing we need right now’s a bunch of drunken tossers littering the spot where we just buried a banshee’s bones. Damn. We can’t leave the spade here. It looks suspicious if nothing else.

  He burps loudly. “None of your business, unless you want to make it my business, if you know what I mean?” He raises an eyebrow and wiggles it before he tosses his can on the side of the road and picks another from his pack.

  “Pass,” I say.

  “Don’t bother battering me,” Kev mutters, narrowing his eyes at Lukas. “You know as well as I do she’s g
ot an insatiable fanny. I saw that other guy she was rubbing her arse against down the pub, and wee Fergus is definitely right in there an all.”

  “Feck off into the sea and drown yourself,” I snap, wanting to push him in there now and feed him to sharks.

  He just laughs. Lukas is glaring at him. Like if he didn’t have Theo in his arms right now he’d kill Kev himself. Kev comes over as if he doesn’t notice this. He sits down on the pavement, and offers me a can. I have half a mind to take it to bean his stupid head with it, but I just scowl at him instead.

  Lukas moves closer, and I see his eyes glow. He’s going to do something magic related. I watch as he draws Kev’s gaze and keeps it, as if he’s hypnotising this stupid bastard.

  Kev’s jaw goes slack and he dribbles the mouthful of beer he just took down his shirt.

  “Listen carefully,” Lukas tells him. “You’re going to fuck off up that path you just came down and go straight home to your empty bed to wank yourself to sleep bawling your eyes out over your sad little excuse for a life. Right this fucking instant, before I decide leaving you as an ugly smear on the pavement is a better idea.”

  Lukas blinks and the glow is gone when he opens his eyes again.

  Kev trips over himself a bunch of times as he gathers himself up and scarpers, dropping the beer in his haste to do as ordered.

  “Wow,” I say as I pick the spade back up.

  “Compulsion,” Lukas tells me. “Only works when you’re using it on someone less dominant. The guy’s a bitter little sad sack, but it still pissed me off not to smack his face off the pavement for what he said.”

  “You’re a better man than me,” I tell him. “I would have told him to walk into the sea and wank himself to sleep.”

  He laughs. “That does sound like a better idea.”

  I shrug, smiling. “There are steps up to the pavement over here.”

  I walk around and discover he’s gotten up and is waiting for me already.

  “How did you do that?” I ask.

  “Shifters can jump,” he says.