by Mia Rose
He reached over to her and ran his hand along the raised skin on her back. The gash was hot, and his fingertips reddened upon touching it.
“What the hell?” Declan said, and gingerly angled her so that he could examine her wound.
He leaned into it and narrowed his eyes, is that silver? He pressed his finger to it but Cassidy jerked away from him.
He raised his finger in front of his face and examined it. His skin had already begun to peel, revealing the raw layer of skin underneath. Declan jumped out of bed and sprinted into the bathroom. He flicked his wrist against the sink handle and let the water pour out, over his hand. The burning in his fingertip subsided and he turned off the faucet.
Declan held his fingertip up to the mirror and while the skin looked raw and abused, running it under the water definitely ceased whatever process had begun. He looked over to the shower and stepped across the tile. He turned on the shower and peeled off his boxer briefs. Declan’s skin was still sticky from the day before. He stepped inside the shower, and raised his hand closer to the shower head.
How could you do that? What about Cassidy?
He grunted, and resisted the urge to bang his head against the cheap tile on the shower wall.
It’s like it wasn’t even me. It was like my wolf made the decision for me. How could he tell Cassidy that? Or anyone?
Gabriel would hold it over his head if he ever found out, and he would finally have an opportunity to prove to the rest of the pack that Declan was an unfit alpha. He growled, no one would be taking control of his pack. He found the other wolves, and he decided to use the apartment building to shelter all of them.
As the water ran over his body, washing away yesterday’s mistakes, he concluded that he wouldn’t tell anyone in the pack about his treat from Noelle the day before.
I don’t even know if she actually wants the apartment. What kind of alpha sinks so low for a human woman?
He stepped out of the shower and reminded himself. While Noelle was a human, she was obviously not normal. Human women had thrown themselves at him for years, and it never phased him. Most of them had been traditionally beautiful women at that; tall and thin, with silky hair and big eyes. They were the kind of women that Declan would have killed to be with before he turned. After his transformation, the only human woman that could ensnare him had been Cassidy, just moments before she turned herself.
It was a shame that when you were a mentor in something like this, you had no one to teach you the most minute details about it. If the person that turned Declan hadn’t been such a coward, he would know what to do about Cassidy’s injury. He would know why he acted so recklessly with that Noelle girl that had been hanging around.
Why would she spend so much time next door if she just wanted to get an idea of the apartments?
Declan shook his head and wrapped a towel around his midsection. He grabbed his phone from where it sat on the bedside table, and tried to tune out Cassidy’s painful groans. He dialed Gabriel’s number and rifled through his drawers while he waited for him to pick up.
When he finally answered, Declan said, “Gabriel, I need you to find out everything that you can about werewolves and silver.”
Gabriel scoffed into the receiver and replied, “I thought you knew everything about werewolves and silver? They don’t mix!”
“Thanks for the help, smartass. Just look into it. We have to get Cassidy some help.”
He hung up and looked over his shoulder, Cassidy’s eyes were opening, and her face was contorted in pain.
“Declan, I don’t feel very good.”
Declan sat on the edge of the bed and offered her his hand. She grasped it, and the muscles in her biceps bulged as she gripped his hand through an intense wave of pain.
“Declan, am I going to die?”
Declan took a deep breath and replied, “No. Don’t even think about that. Don’t even say it.”
Three floors down, Gabriel moved throughout the halls of the apartment building. He clutched his phone in his hands, and the screen hadn’t gone into power save mode yet; it was still glowing from the article that he just looked up on his phone.
Although he had his opinions on the assignment that Declan had given him, it was still an assignment given to him by his alpha. Gabriel ground his teeth together. While he generally didn’t have a problem with being a beta to Declan, his life before his turning couldn’t have been more opposite.
He came from a family of alpha males; his father and mother were stern leaders that immigrated from Italy. Gabriel had been raised to never play second fiddle to anyone, and he powered through high school and the first year of college with an alpha-male mindset. He dominated his college’s lacrosse team until the night that the entire team decided to go camping.
Gabriel would never admit it to anyone, but he still woke up two nights a week. He’d been drenched in sweat and convulsing because of his nightmares. The night that he was turned was on constant repeat in his head, no matter how much time passed. The lacrosse team at his university had taken a camping trip to celebrate their big win against one of the biggest colleges in Michigan.
Gabriel had been the only person that had volunteered to get firewood. And while everyone else set up the tents and unpacked all of their food, it happened. He stepped over winding tree roots and collected fallen branches from the mud. He grabbed a handful of leaves for kindling and headed back to the camp site.
Upon returning, he heard his co-captain say, “I’ve been talking to Coach Phillips, and he might actually hear us out for next season.”
No one mentioned anything about next season to me.
Gabriel had braced himself against the base of a tree, tucked away from his teammate’s line of sight.
“He might turn Gabe away next season. He agreed with me, and he’s tired of Gabriel playing assistant coach instead of team captain. We could have a Gabe-free season!”
Jeers rose up from in between the trees and one teammate shouted, “I can drink to that!”
“Ssh! He’ll be back any second.”
The anger that Gabe felt was unbearable, and a cloud of fury expanded in his chest and he took off in the opposite direction. His athletic legs pounded against the ground until he couldn’t run anymore. He bent over in a clearing to catch his breath, and envisioned ways of making Coach Phillips and his co-captain pay. Both for thinking that they could remove him from the team.
“I don’t care,” he mumbled, “I’ll go play for Michigan and I’ll pound them.”
Behind him, a few bushes rustled and Gabriel whipped his head around.
“What the hell do you want?!” he roared.
His eyes searched the trees and bushes and he waited for Lee, the co-captain, to appear and share fake camaraderie with him.
“Lee, what the hell do you want?!”
The bushes were parted by the gargantuan body of a wolf.
Gabriel pressed his thighs together and held his arms out in front of him, “Shit!”
The wolf exhaled, blowing leaves away from it. It didn’t look like any wolf that Gabriel had ever seen on TV, or while traveling in the mountains with his family. Those wolves were bony, and undernourished. Their ribs would usually be visible through their thin skin. This wolf was covered from head to toe in bright silver fur; its blue eyes were otherworldly and it stepped forward toward Gabriel.
This wolf did have one thing in common with the other wolves. It was hungry. That much was apparent by the way it snapped and clicked its jaws together. And it moved closer and closer the longer that Gabriel stood frozen in place.
A terrified scream escaped him and he scrambled to run from the beast. His already bruised and aching muscles wouldn’t cooperate to propel him further away from the wolf’s jaws.
“Help! Lee, anybody! Darren, Andrew!” Tears welled up in his eyes as he realized that this was it. This was how he would die.
Thoughts of his mother and father spurred him further, until muscles gave out. To h
is displeasure, the wolf enjoyed their game of chase. It circled around him as he curled into a ball, his last line of defense.
He shut his eyes tight as the wolf tore into him, it ripped apart the flesh on his arms and legs and Gabriel’s screams rose up toward the sky. Gabriel tolerated as much as he could, trying to rely on hours of unforgiving training of lacrosse to give him a boost in pain tolerance. It wasn’t much help. He blacked out from the pain. However, when he woke, his arms were healed and miraculously, he’d lived through the attack.
Confident that some sort of magic was at work, he tried to escape the woods as soon as possible. However, his wild chase with the wolf had left him in a part of the woods that he couldn’t navigate. He ended up resting under a tree; coming to the conclusion that if the biggest, wildest wolf that he’d ever seen hadn’t killed him, that there probably wasn’t anything else in the forest that could. When the sun had completely disappeared, and the full moon hung high overhead, Gabriel’s skin ripped and tore once more, and the wolf that had been tucked away reemerged.
Gabriel shook his head. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Someone or something got away with wounding one of our own the other night, and they were able to take down a female alpha.
Gabriel knitted his brows together and clenched his phone as he headed toward the front doors of the building. He stepped outside as the sun was working its way up in the sky. He squinted against the rays that bounced off of the glass windows of buildings near the Clifton Towers.
The Arden Cafe was bustling, men in suits and women in pencil skirts hustled in and out of the front doors. In the window, a woman dressed in a purple sun dress craned her neck to peer past the glass. She narrowed her eyes as Gabriel came into view, and he redirected his attention to one of the arm chairs that was positioned across from her.
Gabriel never cared for coffee the way that Declan did, drinking black sludge each morning just to get a little bit of work done felt too similar. It was like having to take a medication each morning. Crimson-colored loose threads stuck out of the arm chair, Gabriel’s fingers toyed with them as he opened up a new website on his phone. The internet had always been a hit or miss-source of info for the pack. Because most websites that seriously discussed werewolves usually referred to myths. Gabriel rolled his eyes as he scrolled past a series of dense paragraphs that detailed the dangers of the ‘Crazed Wolf Man.’
Humans think that we really don’t have anything better to do other than fantasize about ways to get pulpy pieces of their flesh in between our teeth.
The well-dressed woman across from him swept her thick, dark curtain of hair over her shoulders. She lifted her fingers up to the band that wrapped around her head, readjusting the paisley cloth. Gabriel’s eyes flicked upward and met hers just as she tucked two, velvety smooth looking legs underneath her thighs.
She offered him a smile, her lips were plump and pink, “Good morning.”
“Morning,” Gabriel grunted, he held his phone closer to his face and his eyes flew across the screen.
The woman rolled her shoulders back and said, “Do you drink coffee? I thought that I might order a French press, but I’ll have plenty leftover.”
Gabriel lowered the text filled screen from his face and said, “No, I don’t. I’m just here to do a little reading before work.”
Her eyes lit up and Gabriel knew that any other man would stop what he was doing and offer this woman his time. It’s not that he wasn’t a fan of creamy skin, piercing blue eyes, and silky raven hair, but Gabriel had a history of wanting women that he couldn’t have.
She jerked her thumb at Clifton Towers, “Do you work next door? I’ve noticed a lot of people going in and out of there. I think the manager or super or something comes in here a lot,” she shrugged.
One of Declan’s groupies.
It wasn’t the first time that a smitten girl made it her mission to wrangle information about Declan from him.
“I work next door, for my manager and his… fiancé.”
Gabriel’s suspicions were affirmed when her features were clouded with a mixture of dejection and irritation.
“Oh, that’s cool. I was thinking about renting a place from you guys. Is it a pretty nice place to live?”
Gabriel sighed and said, “If you come by later either Declan or myself can give you a tour. I don’t mean to be rude,” Not that I care if I am, “but I’m not on the clock right now and I’m just trying to relax.”
She nodded and replied, “I’m sorry to bother you.”
She tugged the strap of her small purse onto her left shoulder and slid off of the loveseat that she’d been sitting on.
“I hope that you have a good day.”
Gabriel’s eyes followed her as she pushed open the front doors of the cafe. She had a lot of questions. He shrugged, and logged onto another ‘werewolf’ site.
“It was like my wolf made the decision for me.”
Chapter 8
Careful Now
“Am I looking for trouble where there isn’t any?”
“I’ve looked through everything, and something is not adding up. Everything I’ve read is leading us to a dead end.”
Gabriel slammed his hand on the wooden surface of Declan’s desk. Declan frowned and lifted his hands away from his keyboard. He twisted his body around and laid his eyes on Gabriel.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
Gabriel nodded and replied, “I’ve been at it for three days and none of her symptoms match up with anything that I’ve read.”
Declan leaned back in his chair and scratched at the stubble growing on his chin. He and Gabriel had been searching for a clue as to how they could treat Cassidy, for the last seventy-two hours. They had only gotten two hours of sleep between them and each of them were long overdue for a hunt.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Sometimes it looks like it's fading away into a nasty scar, and other times it just looks fresh. It looks like the tip of the blade just came out of her skin.” Declan wet his lips and said, “We’ll have to look deeper.”
An irritated groan slipped past Gabriel’s lips, “We can’t look any deeper, Declan.”
He straightened his back and stepped away from Declan’s desk. His eyes searched along the walls of the small office, and he twisted his features into an angry glower.
“Declan, this might be beyond us. I think that we’re screwed.”
“Thinking like that is why you’re not the alpha.” Declan said. “It’s not beyond us, we just need to look deeper, and think harder. We haven’t exhausted every possible outlet.”
Just outside of the door, a parade of footsteps sailed through the stairwell. Who is that? Declan turned his head and squinted his eyes, looking for the time on his computer screen. It was twelve fifty-four am.
“I could not have been more crystal clear, in saying that I didn’t want a single member of this pack leaving the building at night. That’s how Cassidy got into this mess.” Declan stood up, and Gabriel held a hand out to him.
“You’re thinking like an angry boss,” Gabriel smirked, “think of it on their level. They’re used to going out at night and spreading their legs. They’re also accustomed to nightly feedings. You know that human food doesn’t hold anyone over for longer than a day.”
Declan searched for a rebuttal but his sleep deprived brain came up short.
He sighed, and said, “They’re deliberately disobeying me.”
“It’s harder for them to disobey their own nature. If you want them to stay in the building, put someone trustworthy by the front doors at night. I think that there’s only a couple of rebels anyway.”
Declan snickered, “When did you become Mr. Understanding?”
“You don’t think rationally when it comes to Cassidy. You’ve got a one-track mind.”
You would too, if it was your mate.
Declan wished that he didn’t have to wrestle with his wandering thoughts about Noelle as well as Cassidy’s illness.
<
br /> I’ve brought this on myself.
If his mind wasn’t occupied with how he and the pack could work together to get Cassidy back on her feet… then he relived his afternoon with Noelle. His brain played their hot session on a continuous loop, he could see her sweaty, bare skin every time that he closed his eyes.
“If we have members of the pack that are still going to go outside after dark, then I want to put them to work.”
Gabriel crossed his arms and asked, “What did you have in mind?”
“Cassidy was injured in the woods, and she said that someone, maybe a hunter, cut her open with a blade. Maybe we can get a small group out in the woods to see if the hunter was sloppy enough to leave any clues behind.”
“We haven’t run into any humans that even believe in werewolves much less humans that hunt them. What if we’re just going down a road with another dead end?”
Declan bit down on the inside of his cheek. Cassidy was rolling around in bed, moaning in pain that he couldn’t relieve. The scar near his collarbone had been on fire all week, and he was confident that it was not a sign that things were getting better.
Declan swallowed the lump in his throat and said, “Gabriel, we can’t afford to cut corners. Assemble a group of the best fighters that we have and go out into the woods. If you don’t find anything, then fine. You’ve only lost a few hours.”
Declan brushed past Gabriel and opened the door, a gust of cold air crawled in front the hallway.
“I’m going to check on Cassidy. You’ll let me know what you’ve found when you get back?” Declan asked.
Gabriel blinked hard, trying to will the sleep out of his eyes, “I’ll report as soon as I get back. We’ll get going.”
Declan nodded, “Good.” He turned around and placed one foot on the first step of the staircase, “Be careful.” He turned on his heel and bounded up the steps.
Gabriel wiped his face clean of the brave face he presented to Declan.