Eating a quick breakfast from the hotel's continental spread, he slid into his car and headed into the town.
It was a half-hour drive, and the forest loomed overhead for every inch of the trip. He peered through the trees for any glimpse of a wolf, but he saw none. They were smart enough to not shift so close to the road.
Not like Anthony.
He'd shifted right in front of a human.
Nerves struck him again, and he could feel his breakfast churning in his stomach. They wouldn't know about her, though. Not yet. He needed to build himself a spot in the community, and then he could come clean about her. It felt dirty to think about keeping her a secret, but he couldn't risk how they'd react if they knew.
As dark as his past was, dating a human would be far worse in the eyes of some packs.
It risked diluting the bloodlines further.
Risked more humans knowing and outing their world.
It was dangerous, and some shifter communities even considered it dating outside of the species, like sleeping with an animal.
He didn't see it that way, though.
Sierra was kind, clever, gorgeous. Something about her called to a part of him that he didn't know existed. He wanted to protect her, keep her by his side, and ensure that she was safe. He wanted to wake up every morning with her there. He knew it was crazy to be thinking this way so soon after meeting her, but he couldn't change how he felt.
It was real, regardless of how sudden it was.
Finally, the mountains opened up to the town.
He was surprised at how small it really was. Half of the town must have gone to the Casino every night. With how many people were there, he was sure that the town was larger. West Valley's buildings spiraled out from the center of the city, and he drove slowly to take it all in. He thought about how Sierra had lived there her whole life, and he loved it instantly. The occasional wolf statue and carving decorated shops and important buildings. He was surprised at how flamboyant the pack had been in their decorating.
Pulling up the GPS app on his phone, he tried to get a clear guide on where the police station was.
Within ten minutes more of driving, he was parked in front of it, taking a deep breath and calming himself.
It would be fine.
If they didn't want him there he'd move on. He'd…
This thought was cut off by thoughts of Sierra. If he couldn't stay there, he'd have to leave her behind.
He'd lose her.
This pressure mounted onto his nerves, and he took another moment to steady himself.
It would be fine. This would work out.
Getting out, he walked into the building. He couldn't tell if the first officer he came upon was a shifter or not, but he wasn't going to back down.
“How can I help you?” the officer asked. The name 'Keech' was emblazoned across the pocket on the left side of his chest.
“I was wondering if there was a committee to talk to about moving into the town,” Anthony explained. It was common terminology for shifters to ask, something safe enough that if a non-shifter heard it they wouldn't think about it much.
The officer's body language immediately changed, he breathed in a little deeper as if trying to gather a smell.
A shifter.
“Come with me,” Officer Keech said, walking briskly down a hall to the right. Anthony followed, keeping his eyes on the back of the officer, hoping that he was doing the right thing. “I need confirmation of what you're asking,” the officer said as he closed the door to the room they'd walked in.
“I want to know if the pack is accepting of others who want to join,” Anthony said flat out. Officer Keech nodded, setting down and motioning for Anthony to do the same.
“We are, but I need to run a couple questions by you before you can go to a pack meeting,” he explained. “I'm James, by the way,” he offered his hand out.
“Anthony,” Anthony responded, shaking his hand firmly.
“First of all, why are you not already with a pack?” James asked, not taking out anything to write it down. His complete attention was on Anthony.
“My pack was killed a couple months ago,” Anthony admitted. It felt horrible to say. The words were like poison as they fled his lips. “I was out of town, missed a pack meeting. When I came back that night, I went to the meeting point and everyone had been killed,” he explained. “A few members of a neighboring pack had been killed off in a similar way. They were under the assumption it was one of those Alpha killers,” Anthony recited it the way he'd always tried to explain it when he needed to make sense of it himself.
“You know that makes you look like an Alpha killer,” James said. There was a fire in his eyes that Anthony could only attribute to him being upset at the idea of someone doing something so wrong.
“I know,” he agreed. “I was cleared of it, though. They have a witness who saw me pay for gasoline on my way back into town,” he explained.
“All right, well, the current pack has had some trouble with keeping an Alpha, too, so I can't guarantee that they'll be willing,” James said. “The Alpha we have right now, Alex Wells, he's only 24. He's the last of his family. After him, we don't have anyone,” James explained. “The pack is going to be very protective of him, very guarded. I'm warning you now,” he said.
“That makes sense,” Anthony nodded.
“I'll get you set up to come to a meeting, but I need to be sure that you'll stay out of town until then. No offense, but we just can't risk anyone coming in and out of town who could be a danger to the pack,” he continued.
“I understand,” Anthony said.
“Good, now, tell me about yourself.”
Chapter Fourteen
She wasn't sure of much, but she knew that she'd had sex with a wolfman.
A werewolf.
It didn't matter that he called himself a shifter. He wasn't entirely human. He was something of horror fiction, and she'd slept with him. The idea gave her chills. When she got home at nearly three in the morning, her mother wasn't on the couch.
Sierra's heart stood still.
“Momma?” she called, rushing through the house. She wasn't in her bedroom, wasn't in the kitchen, wasn't in Sierra's room.
She wasn't in the apartment at all.
Sierra rushed out, hurrying next door to Miss Jean's apartment. She banged on the door loudly, not caring how late it was, not caring that she was probably waking up everyone in the building. Miss Jean answered the door after a couple minutes, obviously disgruntled.
“What is it?” she snapped. Sierra was starting to see why her mother didn't like her.
“Have you seen my mother?” she asked, praying that she'd just spent the night there.
“No,” Jean answered. “You need to just put her in a home already,” she grumbled, slamming the door. Sierra didn't know what to do. She wandered up and down the halls of the apartment building, searching for her. She wanted to call for her, but she didn't want the neighbors getting furious with her.
When she searched the entire building, she stepped outside, and there she was.
Her mother was standing, staring at the large wolf statue that stood in front of the building. It was carved out of wood and painted several shades of blue, with bright blue eyes.
“I love these statues,” her mother said without looking over at her.
“It's cold out. You should go in,” Sierra offered, not acknowledging what she said.
“Why? The statues don't go inside,” her mother sounded like a child.
“The statues can't get sick,” Sierra countered. It was going to be one of those nights. She felt guilty enough for leaving her mother alone as long as she did. She'd never wandered out like this before.
“No, they can't,” her mother agreed.
“Momma, let's get you to bed,” Sierra said gently, nudging her to guide her. Her mother grew still.
“Who are you?” she asked,
her voice wavering in fear.
“I'm your daughter, Sierra,” she explained. “You named me after the dark because I was born at midnight,” Sierra said, recalling the story her mother used to tell her growing up. She wrapped an arm around her mother to start walking her back to the building.
“My Sierra is only fifteen. Get off of me, you liar,” her mother exclaimed, pushing her off of her. Sierra turned to get a good view of her.
She was only sixty, they'd had Sierra in their late thirties, but she looked like she was going on eighty. She was wired and terrified, her green eyes wide and scared, her hands clutched to her chest.
“What are you wearing?” her mother asked, as if seeing her uniform for the first time. “Are you a stripper? I'm being robbed by a stripper!” She screamed the last part in terror, and Sierra shook her head, begging her to quiet down.
“Momma, momma, it's me, look at my face,” Sierra said gently, approaching her.
“You're not my daughter. Stop calling me that,” she was sobbing now. The terror was very visible.
Sierra's heart was aching, and she wanted to wrap her arms around her mother, but she knew better than that. The best thing to do was to give her space and help her the best she could.
“All right, let's go to bed,” Sierra said gently. “If you go to bed, I'll leave, I'm a friend of your daughter,” she lied, wanting it to be over.
“Why did you lie to me, girl?” her mother asked, her voice indignant. She was out of her mind, but she was convincingly sane.
“I'm sorry, ma'am. Let me get you to bed for your daughter. She's at a track meet tonight,” Sierra explained. That lie usually worked. She'd gone to a lot of track meets before her mother got into the accident when Sierra was seventeen. Since then, things had gone downhill.
“Okay, okay,” her mother replied, treating her like a nuisance. Like a stranger. She should have been used to it by then, but it just hurt more and more. “Where have you been tonight?” she asked as they made their way down the hall to the apartment.
“I had to work, and then I had a date,” Sierra admitted.
“Do you love him?” her mother asked. It was a random, strange question.
“Sorry?”
“You look like a girl in love. Are you?” she asked, eyeballing Sierra.
“I hardly know him,” Sierra answered.
“That's not what I asked.”
“I don't know,” she said, trying to be honest.
That wasn't the end of it.
Even after she'd settled her mother into bed, even after she'd cleaned up the apartment and settled into bed herself, the question plagued her.
Did she love him?
If she did, she need to be smarter about it. Her mother could have died. Could have walked into the street without realizing it and been hit by a car. It would have been Sierra's fault for leaving her without care.
She couldn't do that to her, not after all her mother had done to raise her on her own.
Sierra knew that she couldn't do that again, couldn't risk her mother's life.
She had to make a decision soon.
Chapter Fifteen
He stopped in a diner before heading back out to the Casino.
The food smelled incredible. There was a selection with more options than he could go through if he went for a month and got a different meal every day. The Casino had five choices.
Despite it being almost two in the afternoon, he ordered a breakfast platter and tried to relax. He'd be going to a pack meeting the next evening. Sierra would be safe, on shift, and he'd be able to plead his case.
The more he saw of West Valley, the more he wanted to stay.
Everyone was friendly. The town had an appeal to it that felt like a modernized scene from a 1950s magazine. Kids played outside without fear, the police station was quiet from the lack of crime, and there were enough restaurants and shops to keep people comfortably happy, as well as a small movie theater and a bowling rink. It was a small town, but it had enough in it that he could see himself settling in for the long haul.
With Sierra at this side.
He'd have to work that through with the pack, eventually, but for now, he just wanted to settle in and build a home.
His food made it to the table, and he was happy to eat and not have to deal with loud club music or drunk strangers. The diner was empty of customers besides himself. It felt like he was getting a completely private meal – so different from what he'd gotten at the Casino. When the door finally opened and someone else came through, he looked up to see who'd joined him.
He immediately wished the restaurant was still empty.
Or that he'd just stayed at the Casino.
Ivy looked exactly like her brother, Ricky. He'd been his best friend growing up. They had done everything together and were inseparable. He was dead now, like the rest of the pack. Ivy had only survived because she was on the other side of the country at college when it happened. She hadn't even been considered part of the pack by the time the pack was demolished.
Murdered.
Now she was standing in the diner, thousands of miles from the home they both grew up in, and the glare she had fixed on Anthony could have melted steel.
“Hey, Ivy,” he greeted her, taking another bite of his meal.
“Don't 'hey, Ivy,' me, you bastard,” she said stomping over to his table and sliding into the booth opposite him. “I don't want the bullshit. I want to talk to you finally.” She set her bag on the table.
“What is it?” Anthony asked.
He'd avoided her because he knew she'd have questions he couldn't answer.
She'd bring up things he'd fought so hard to put down.
She'd make it fresh.
She didn't care.
“I know you killed them,” she said. Her voice ground into him like sandpaper.
“What the fuck?” he asked, setting down his fork. “I didn't kill anyone,” he shook his head.
“Yeah fucking right,” she argued, brushing her black hair out of her face with her hand. “I found the pack's meeting minutes,” she said, pulling a heavy green book out of her bag. “They don't have any strong details, but they sure as fuck show that you'd been arguing with Matthew before the murders,” she explained. “What kind of asshole argues with his Alpha?” she continued, grimacing at him.
“He'd been trying to say when we could and couldn't shift. I had a problem with shifting being regulated,” he said honestly. He knew that it wasn't much of an argument, but it had him fired up when it happened. Looking back at it now, the argument seemed so silly compared to how he felt now.
“You killed them. You killed my brother,” she repeated. Her face was contorted into an expression of absolute fury. “If I ever see you shift again, if I ever hear that you'll be shifting, I will kill you. I will not hold back,” as she went on, her voice turned into a low hiss. “Nobody will care about wolf bones, not even the pack here. They don't know shit about you,” she explained.
“I didn't kill them,” he repeated. He hated that this was how she viewed him.
She obviously wasn't going to change her opinion.
“Consider yourself dead, Anthony,” she said flatly, slamming the book back into her bag and standing up. “Watch your fucking back,” she added, leaving.
He couldn't have killed the pack members even if someone had a gun to his head.
Anthony had been out of town interviewing for a job that would have pulled him away from the pack, but would have paid double what he got in their small town. He would have been closer to getting his own body shop. He would have been closer to living his life how he saw fit. The interview went well. They told him they'd get back to him, and that night he drove back to town.
The pack always gathered in Matthew's, the Alpha’s home.
Sometimes after meetings, the pack members without kids would stick around long after the meeting ended. They'd drink and eat and talk
about things that the meeting didn't need to involve.
So, once he got back in town and it was nearing ten in the evening, he headed straight for Matthew's house.
He hoped he'd get a chance to mention the job, mention that he'd have to be moving soon. He was sure his mother and sister would cry, but he needed to get a move on with his own life. It wasn't like he was an Alpha; he didn't have to stay and serve the pack that way.
He pulled up, and there were still cars lined around the lawn.
He wasn't too late.
After parking, he noticed how quiet the house was. He wondered if they'd gone for a run – shifted and went out into the woods – but he couldn't smell any wolves.
He could smell blood, though.
When he went in, they were dead, and he was alone.
He'd been trying to leave the pack, and now there they were all dead.
The police came by immediately after he called. He gave his statement, said where he was, and was taken into custody for further questioning.
He spent the first month afterward having to prove his innocence.
Some parts of the town, he was sure, still didn't believe him. He even had the clerk who'd accepted payment for the gasoline confirm that he'd been there a couple hours away from the house, but people made up excuses to keep the blame on him.
It wasn't him.
The police eventually let him go. They didn't have enough evidence to say it was him.
He immediately got on the road and left town.
The place he interviewed at didn't give him the job. It was just another blow on top of everything. He could have been there.
He should have been there.
There's no telling what he could have done to help. It might have just made him wind up dead as well, but it also meant there was a chance he could have saved at least one person's life if he'd been given the chance.
That idea haunted him.
Although he wasn't the one killing them off, he felt like they were dead because of him.
Searching for Home (Wolves of West Valley Book 2) Page 6