by Angela Foxxe
His eyes began to focus on the world around him, and he found that he was able to sit up slightly as his body started to heal itself. It was going much slower than normal, but it was improving greatly.
Keith was lying a few feet away, slumped on the ground. He had a huge hole in his stomach. He was grasping at it struggling to breathe. His eyes were full of pain and fear. Real, true fear was lingering there. Keith was dying.
John’s eyes focused on Heather standing in the corner of the room. She was holding the gun, pointing it still at Keith. Puffs of smoke were still emanating from the end of the barrel. It was Keith’s gun. She had shot him with a silver bullet.
Heather walked slowly over to John, her eyes and the gun never leaving their focus on Keith.
“Are you okay?” Heather asked.
John took a breath. The pain in his body was beginning to subside as he was finally starting to heal. He had been injured so badly he did not think this was even possible, but he was still learning so much about his abilities that he never knew before.
“Yeah, I think so.”
John staggered to his feet, feeling the nausea coming back slightly. It would still take him a few minutes to finish healing completely. The puncture marks on his chest were stinging viciously, almost refusing to heal. John looked down at them and shuddered at how close he’d come to almost being killed.
“I know it sounds weird,” John said. “But I hate the idea of him being in agony for several days.”
“Yeah,” Heather said. “I know what you mean.”
Suddenly, Heather fired the gun twice. One shot hit Keith in between the eyes, and the other hit him in the heart.
Within seconds, he was transformed back to being Keith.
“It’s best to put him out of his misery,” Heather said.
She sat the gun down on the counter and collapsed into John’s arms.
He knew she was right. As bad as Keith was, there was no need for them to make him suffer. Heather had figured out something Keith had failed to mention about the silver bullets. If it was delivered to the heart or the brain, then the death would be immediate.
“It’s over, baby. It’s all over,” John said. He closed his eyes as he finished shifting back to his normal self and held the love of his life in his arms.
*
“Now, this is just what the doctor ordered,” John said as he sat down with the margarita. He leaned back and let the sunshine wash over him as he stared out into the vast blue ocean in front of them. When Heather had suggested that they go to the Bahamas for their honeymoon, John was ecstatic. He had never really been much of a traveler, but there were a lot of places he wanted to see. The only thing stopping him before was that he never had the right company.
But now, he had the perfect companion for traveling. In fact, he had his perfect companion for life.
“You got that right!” Heather said, sipping from her own margarita glass.
John loved to see her so happy, so relaxed. They were without a care in the world, enjoying the beginning of their life together. John had never been happier. He realized that he’d only had a vague notion of what happiness was before. Heather was everything to him. He just hoped that he could be everything for her.
It had been a month since Keith’s attack that left him and four other men dead. John told the police what Keith had done and about his obsession with Heather. John had nothing to hide, and he told the cops everything. Well, almost everything.
He conveniently left out everything about Keith being a werewolf. He decided that was the one thing that would make his story seem entirely fictional. Luck, it turned out, was on his side. Keith had been a bit more disturbed than anyone even knew. He had kept a trophy from Michelle. He had taken a necklace that she’d been wearing and kept it in a jewelry box that he’d hidden in his closet. In fact, there were several pieces of jewelry in there. All of them had bloodstains on them. It turned out that Keith had been a busy boy. He was not content just to kill people; he liked to make a sport out of it and keep trophies of his crimes.
So all of that was behind them. They could now move on with their lives. There were still a few idiots who thought that John was a werewolf, but he wasn’t hiding from it. He had joked about it online and toyed with the idea somewhat.
John and Heather had decided that it was most practical for Heather and her dad to move out there. John and Heather had a guest house built on his property and moved her dad into it. He was a bit hesitant to move out of the only area he had ever lived in, but he realized that his daughter’s happiness was more important. John was glad that her dad had made that decision; he knew it wasn’t easy for him. He was pretty sure that Frank had said yes simply because he knew that Heather would have said no to moving and maybe the marriage if he had not. She would never leave her father. He was all she had left, and his health was not great.
The wedding had been spectacular. John had been happy to let Heather plan the wedding of her dreams and to do everything just the way she wanted. She’d routinely asked for his input, but he never really had much thought to give to it. He didn’t know a thing about weddings. So whatever Heather decided was okay was just fine with him.
She had been the most beautiful thing he’d ever laid eyes on when she was walking down that aisle. The dress, the makeup, the hair—it had all been amazing. She’d looked like an angel come to life on Earth. He truly felt that God had sent his most beautiful angel to earth to be his partner through life.
Now they were here in a tropical paradise, ready to begin the journey together. They never really talked much about what had happened with Keith that night. It was a painful memory that the both of them were willing to let go from their minds. But, of course, he knew that they would never truly forget. That wasn’t something that you could forget, no matter how much you tried.
But it was also not good to ever remind each other of the painful memory.
The first few weeks, Heather had trouble sleeping through the night. The nightmares were terrible, and he often woke to the sound of her screaming. He asked her about the nightmares, hoping that if she talked about them, they would eventually go away. She refused to talk about it at all for a few weeks. But finally, one night, she opened up to him after a particularly nasty dream.
“Please talk to me, babe. I can’t help unless you talk to me,” John said.
“I keep having the same dream over and over again,” Heather began, trying to hold back the tears. “When Keith is on top of you ripping at your heart, I shoot the gun, but it jams, and then he kills you.”
“Oh, honey. It’s just a dream; that is not what happened. We survived. You’re stronger than a dream.”
“After he kills you in my dream, he comes for me, and he makes me like him. It kind of ties into my other dreams where I am a werewolf and I attack some innocent person walking down the street at night. The blood, the screams—it all feels so real. And when I wake up, I want to bite something.”
“Wow, that’s pretty intense. But honey, you have to realize that your dreams can’t really hurt you. As soon as you stop fearing them, then you will cease giving them power.”
John had to marvel at his Dr. Phil moment. He was not sure where that had come from, but it sounded like good advice for both of them. He’d had plenty of his own dreams in the days afterward. All of them involved Heather’s death. He wasn’t strong enough, he wasn’t lucky enough, he wasn’t able to get to her in time to save her. It was horrible.
But he kept it to himself. With everything she was going through, he didn’t want to upset her further.
Heather’s biggest fears were of losing him and of becoming a werewolf. She’d accepted who he was so easily and with so few hang-ups or fears about it that it surprised him how much she feared becoming a werewolf herself. He’d wondered how she felt about the possibility before, even though he would never suggest such a thing or even dream of her becoming a shifter like him. He wouldn’t wish this on his worst enemy.
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If Heather were to ask him to bite her or change her, he would refuse emphatically. He’d always known that, even before he knew how she felt about it. That was something he was unwavering about. He was glad that he never had to have that conversation with her.
Although he did think about the fact that she would age much more rapidly than he would. She would grow old, and she would die. He would stay pretty much the same. He wasn’t sure if he would ever die of natural causes. There just did not seem to be enough information that he had been able to find about it all that said anything about it. Where the hell had Keith found so much information on it? He had been a shifter for a lot less time than John, yet there was so much that he could have learned from Keith.
That was another thing that he often dreamed about but didn’t share with Heather. He was going to have to watch her get old and die. There would be nothing he could do about it. Unless…That was usually where he woke up. It was always the same. He would be caring for her as an old sickly lady, and he would be at her funeral. But then he would have a dream within a dream where he turned her into a werewolf, and they shared the rest of time together.
But he could not bring himself to do this. Living this way had caused him far too much pain. And even worse, it had caused him to hate himself. He felt like a monster.
“What’s on your mind?” Heather asked.
John snapped out of his thoughts and smiled at her. “Nothing really. Everything is perfect,” John said.
Heather smiled at him.
And for that moment, that moment right there…
Everything really was.
THE END
Message From The Author:
Hiii
If you want to check out my other releases including those from my popular “Shifters Surrogates” series then just check out my Amazon page here!
Angela x
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