Shifters After Dark Box Set: (6-Book Bundle)

by SM Reine

  23. Astrid

  If I’m really being honest with myself…I do feel a little guilty about Sashi.

  The look on her face when she came into the garage after I mauled Will—that complex tangle of disbelief, horror, revulsion, and grief—I know I’ll never forget it. As I drive away from Noring’s house, another image suddenly comes into my mind: Sashi, the morning after I almost died, looking pale and weak, gently holding my broken hand.

  Shit.

  But isn’t my life more important than her romance? I argue with my conscience.

  Is your life really in danger anymore? my conscience replies.

  Well, no. But my potential happiness is.

  So you stole Sashi’s instead?

  I order myself to snap out of it. The plan hasn’t even come together yet. After Will and I kill Luke, I’ll have time to feel bad about what I did to Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Until then, I gotta keep my head in the game.

  My dress is actually okay, but there was blood all over me when I shifted back to human form, and a little of it has clung to my skin. I need to get cleaned up before I go back to Luke’s. I drive to a truck stop on the outskirts of Rochester, where no one I know is likely to see me, and take a shower with some cheap soap I buy at the attached gas station. There is no sign of Luke at the house—poker night often runs late—so I take another shower as soon as I get home. Now I smell like myself. I start a load of laundry with the sundress and panties, and stop to run through the day in my mind.

  I think I have covered my tracks.

  No pun intended.

  Luke comes home around two, though I do not stir as he climbs into bed. The next morning, Wednesday, I get up and go to work like nothing has happened. I am amazed that I seem to be getting away with breaking pack law. By the time I get back to Luke’s and start dinner, I am feeling pretty badass. Then he gets home.

  I can tell right away that something is off, because he sulks in the kitchen like he’s dying to pick a fight. “Hey,” I say, making sure my voice is just the right balance between cheerful and subdued. “How did your day go?”

  “Why? What did you hear?” he snaps.

  I blink, picking up a wooden spoon to stir the spaghetti noodles. That was quick on the trigger even for Luke. “I didn’t hear anything,” I say levelly. “It was an idle question. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  There is a heavy, tension-saturated pause, and then he sighs and climbs onto a kitchen stool. This keeps his head more or less level with me when I am standing, which makes us both more comfortable. “I’m sorry, Astrid. I’m just feeling really off today.”

  Huh. Werewolves don’t get sick, so it’s unusual for any of us to feel unwell, at least physically, so I ask, “Really? Is everything okay?” I am getting so goddamned good at this Stepford shit.

  “I don’t know, I just feel weird…like my magic is off.”

  It takes effort, but I do not pause. I do not react at all, except to say, “Hmm,” in a tone that suggests I’m willing to discuss it more, but I am not pressing him.

  Although my façade stays calm, my thoughts are a whirlwind. Is this connected to me creating a new werewolf? The timing seems too close for it to be a coincidence. But how could it be connected? I am in Luke’s pack, sure, but it’s not like he was the one who changed me. There’s no reason for his magic to be connected to what I did…is there?

  A heavy, dull fear settles into me. I am only now realizing how little I know about changing a werewolf for the first time. I know how it affects the individual in question, but I have no idea what new werewolves do to a pack. And I can’t exactly ask without giving myself away.

  No, what’s done is done. But I have to make sure Luke doesn’t connect what he’s feeling to me, or I will be forced into a fight with him that I can’t win by myself.

  The noodles are done, so I turn off the burner and go over to Luke, leaning my head on his shoulder in a gesture of submission. “Maybe we should go to bed early tonight,” I suggest. Sometimes I can’t believe that Luke thinks my voice really sounds like this. “You’ve been working so hard, maybe you’re just overtired.” Werewolves sure as hell do get tired. I know, because I didn’t get home until after midnight.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Luke replies, sounding unconvinced.

  Although I’m exhausted, I lie awake for a long time that night, staring at the ceiling. I want to go check on Will, make sure my new weapon in the war against Luke is coming along okay. But I know that this is when I need to be the most careful: no calls, no visits, nothing that could tip my hand. It’s hard enough to keep my hormone scents under control without adding the smell of Noring’s house to my skin. I am getting really nervous, though. I am at my most vulnerable: I have committed the crime, but the results are not yet ready.

  I do wonder how Will is faring. When I was changed, the process took exactly fifty-one hours, from the bite to the moment my fever broke and I woke up ready to kill and eat something. I remember very specifically, because I made a point of figuring it out. My understanding is that two days is about average. But if Luke catches on, there’s a big difference between forty-eight hours and fifty-one hours. And what if my change was on the shorter end of average? What if it’s closer to three days for Will?

  I’ve got to keep it together.

  On Thursday morning, Luke is moody at breakfast, and I ask him if he’s feeling any better.

  “Worse.”

  I don’t want to make him mad, but I need to maintain a normal amount of interest, so I add, “What does it feel like, honey?” I have learned that I can get away with a lot more when I use endearments.

  “It feels like…” He frowns, searching for words. “Sort of like my skin is stretching out, I guess. It’s not painful, exactly, but it’s uncomfortable.”

  Werewolves are always uncomfortable—the magic doesn’t fuse perfectly with our blood—so if he’s commenting on it, it must be really bad. “I’m sorry, babe,” I say, running my hand through his hair. “Maybe the moon is doing something weird right now, and it’s affecting the alphas.”

  His face clears a little. “Yeah, that’s probably it. I’ll check some astronomy websites if I get time at work.” He stands up, kisses my cheek, and grabs the lunch I have packed for him. “See you tonight.”

  I manage to go about my day normally once again: my shift at Target, some grocery shopping, cleaning. I keep an eye on the clock all day, willing time to move faster. I mauled Will just after eight p.m., so I need to wait until at least then before I do anything. My plan is to tell Luke I’d like to spend a night at the duplex getting the rest of my stuff packed. I replaced the door, but there’s a lot more cleaning to do before he can rent it out to someone else. When he gives the okay, I’ll go check on Will.

  I don’t think we’ll attack Luke tonight: Will needs some time to get used to his new human form, and it will probably be a few days before he’s ready to shift and practice running and fighting on four legs. I’ll give him the time to acclimate, and then we’ll ambush Luke somewhere. Probably at his house.

  Let him be the one to have all his stuff destroyed.

  If Will resists me, I’ll go with Plan B: telling Luke where he is. I’m pretty sure I can successfully lie to Luke and blame one of the other wolves for Will’s change. I just have to keep calm and collected, but if there’s one thing I’ve gotten good at since Luke beat me nearly to death, it’s not getting worked up about things. Until I came up with the plan to change Will, I didn’t particularly care if I lived or died anymore.

  Luke did that to me.

  I am just starting dinner when I hear Luke’s car in the driveway. I frown and check my watch. He’s early.

  A moment later the alpha storms into the kitchen. “Something’s wrong,” he announces. “Something’s wrong with the pack. Do you feel it?”

  I blink, taken aback. I consider lying to throw suspicion, but there’s not much point. “Um, I don’t really feel anything different… Maybe a little twitchier
than normal because the moon’s next week.”

  “There’s something off with the pack magic,” he insists. He is pacing back and forth in the kitchen now, looking agitated.

  I turn off the burner so I can give him my full attention. “I guess I don’t know that much about how pack magic works, honey. Can you walk me through it?”

  Luke stops pacing. For a second I think he’s angry with me, but he tilts his head quizzically, like he’s listening to something inside his own body. “I can feel all of you, in the pack,” he says slowly. “Not like where you are or anything, but I know that you’re all alive. It’s like you’re connected to me in my head, which makes me stronger. But I suddenly feel…lopsided. It’s like walking around wearing only one shoe.”

  “I wonder what could cause that,” I say, just to have something to say. I only need to keep him distracted for like four more hours, while Will’s still incapacitated.

  But Luke’s eyes widen suddenly, and his body goes rigid. “She didn’t,” he hisses.

  “What? Who?” I say, feigning ignorance.

  “The doctor,” he says, in a voice I know all too well. He’s going to kill someone today. “She got one of us to turn Will.”

  “It might not have been someone in our pack?” I venture, trying to keep a surprised look on my face. “She might have, um, outsourced?”

  Luke’s eyes narrow on me. “If she used another pack, I wouldn’t be feeling it.”

  Hard to argue with that. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to kill them all,” he says simply. He turns around and heads back toward the door, grabbing his keys off the counter.

  Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God. Keep it together, Astrid. To distract myself from the fear, I try to think of a way to throw him off, stall him, distract him. “What should I do?” I call after him, because it’s the first thing that pops into my head.

  “Stay here,” he growls.

  The door slams behind him.

  24. Sashi

  The next two days pass just as Astrid said they would.

  Will is running a 114-degree fever, which I only figure out after buying three different thermometers. Just the fact that he is still alive is proof that the werewolf magic is active in his blood now. He cries out often, and I fetch him icepacks that don’t seem to help and wipe off sweat that just reappears. I try to get him to drink water, so he can replace his fluids. Sometimes he can keep it down; other times, he vomits it right back up.

  I try listening to his body, but whenever I tune in there is only screaming.

  When I can’t think of any other way to help I just sit and hold his hand, talking to him. I tell him what’s happening over and over, hoping that it will get through, that he won’t be too afraid. Sometimes I just sit there and cry. Finally, I run out of tears. Numbness takes over.

  Late on Thursday afternoon I return from a shower and realize that something is different about him. I have always found Will so attractive, even when he was sick, but now I find myself not wanting to touch him. My body would prefer, in fact, that I not go near him. It’s such a bizarre, strange sensation that I have to test it. I put a hand on his wrist, and that’s fine. I try running a hand over his chest, and my skin crawls. The magic has gotten all the way into his blood now. Goodbye, leukemia. Hello, curse. He is a werewolf.

  I was wrong about running out of tears.

  I am ashamed to admit I’m repulsed, even though I understand the biology. I busy myself with cleaning, fetching him supplies, anything to distract myself from the fact that my future has fallen apart and I’ve lost the most important relationship in my life. I don’t know what will happen when Will finishes his transformation. How much of him will be changed by the magic? Will he still love me? Do I even want him to? It might be easier if he didn’t.

  No matter what, I know that we are done. But even if I accept that, there’s still the matter of Luke Brooks. Astrid wants Will to kill her alpha. And I know she’s right: Will is a good man; he will help her. Part of me kind of wants him to, if for no other reason than to make sure all of this isn’t for nothing.

  If this fight has become Will’s, I want to be part of it, too. Except that’s ridiculous, because I am just a thaumaturge witch. I have no offensive gifts—I can’t even manage the basic defensive spells that other witches can do. My magic is just too specialized.

  Astrid, Luke, and now Will: the three of them are literally super-powered, and I have been left behind.

  I am rinsing out washcloths at the kitchen sink, thinking through all of this, when I hear the ringing. For a second I honestly have no idea what it is. My cell phone has been dead for over a day, and there’s no way my mother would have left without her own phone. Then I remember that she still keeps a landline connected to the house, in case something happens. But who would call this number? I don’t even know it. Maybe the phone company?

  It rings and rings—Mum clearly hasn’t bothered with an answering machine or voicemail—and after awhile I give up and go looking, locating the phone in the living room, on a side table behind a decorative urn in the living room. “Hello?” My voice sounds strange from two days of disuse.

  “Why did you turn off your goddamned cell!” Astrid shouts.

  For a moment I am too bewildered to be angry with her. “What?” I say stupidly.

  “Luke is coming, Sashi! He figured out someone changed a new wolf, and he’s heading straight for your house! Get out of there!”

  I look back toward the garage. Will’s fever is raging hotter than ever, and I can’t pick him up. “I can’t leave him,” I say into the phone. “Are you coming?”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can, but I gotta stop at the duplex for my silver knife. If you can’t run, hide.”

  The line goes dead.

  I stare at the handset. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I have been so busy worrying about my love life that I haven’t stopped to consider what could happen if Luke put two and two together.

  I have no plan.

  Silver. What do we have in the house that’s silver? I already raided my mother’s jewelry box, but nothing in there is going to stop a furious Luke from killing Will. Mum doesn’t keep real silverware; she thinks it’s a waste of money, and we never entertain anyway. I think I have a silver baby rattle somewhere, but I have no idea where, and what good could that do against a big, angry werewolf?

  Shit. I’m just going to have to try to keep Will away from him until Astrid shows up with the knife. I run out to the garage, looking around wildly. Luke will know to look here for Will: he knows how much my mother hates bringing Old World business into the house. There’s nowhere to hide him out here; it’s just a big empty room with random supplies stacked around the edges. And even if I did hide him, Luke could smell him out in an instant.

  I’m running out of time.

  I dart over to the wall where Mum keeps my old rollerblade gear and grab my wrist guards. Mum always took safety very seriously, so these are made of heavy-duty black plastic that will keep my wrist and fingers from breaking if I have to hit something. It also means I can’t move my wrists much, so I only put on the right guard, adding my mother’s silver rings on top of it. I’m wearing jeans and a short-sleeved henley tee, so I run into the house and grab a black hoodie off the coat tree. The long sleeves cover most of the wrist guard.

  I pick up a heavy-duty screwdriver with my left hand, then run back to stand guard over Will, who is completely unconscious now. He has stopped twitching and crying out, but the silence is almost more terrifying.

  Luke’s not going to force his way through the main garage door: even he won’t risk cluing the humans in to our existence. That means he’ll have to come through the house or through the back door. I lock the exterior door and drag Will’s sleeping bag to the back corner of the garage, away from both doors. This way at least I can defend him better.

  I realize belatedly that Luke will probably park a ways away and walk to the house for maximum surprise
. Wolves are sneaky, which means he could be here now.

  I shiver with fear, listening as hard as I can. Will he show up as a wolf or a man? Does it matter? Either way he is exponentially stronger and faster than Olympic athletes. I don’t have a chance. I silently implore Astrid to hurry.

  I stand there for the longest time, and finally I hear the sound of a car turning into the driveway. Guess he’s decided not to bother with the element of surprise. I steel myself, going over to stand right next to the back door.

  I hear nothing as the werewolf walks around the house. Then, very slowly, I see the door knob turning. I hold my breath, screwdriver poised in the air—and I hear a female voice say, “Sashi?”

  Adrenaline races through me as I whoosh out the breath I was holding. Unlocking the door, I swing it open to reveal Astrid standing in the backyard, wearing black sweats and holding a short, wicked-looking silver blade. “Where is he?” she whispers.

  I shrug. “You tell me. He never showed.”

  Her brow furrows. “That doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t know which wolf betrayed him, but he knows your mom was involved. Logically, he’d come here first.” Then the look of confusion is replaced by sudden horror. “Unless he was waiting to see which—”

  Astrid is sucked backward into the darkness.

  25. Sashi

  I flick on the backyard spotlight and run out after them. Guarding Will might be the better play, but what are Astrid’s chances of surviving Luke without help? And if Luke kills Astrid, he’s coming for us next.

  The backyard is long and rectangular, protected by privacy hedges as tall as me, which will hopefully hide the brawling werewolves on my back lawn. I can make out two figures at the far end of the circle of light, wrestling on the ground. I start to cautiously edge toward them.

  “You!” Luke spits, pinning Astrid to the ground. He climbs on her chest and hits her with his open hand. “You did this? You should be grateful to me!”