by Lola Gabriel
“Thanks, Mom.”
In the distance, the sound of a wolf howling echoed through the night, and Quinn glanced at the door before turning back to her mother. “Did you hear that?”
“That sounds awfully close to town,” her mother said, reaching for the phone. “I think I should call Sheriff Howler.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Quinn said with a nod. “I’ll be in my room.”
“Okay, honey,” her mother said as she placed the phone against her ear.
Quinn went upstairs and unpacked the contents of her backpack onto her desk. She glanced at the list of assignments Mr. Donovan had given them in class and sighed. It was a pretty long list, but luckily, she enjoyed his class, as well as the subject matter.
She glanced at her phone and saw a text from Carla, saying she wanted to talk. Quinn scoffed slightly and continued to pull out her things from her backpack. After Quinn had tried to call Carla when she hadn’t shown up at the restaurant, she’d sent her a rather nasty text, and the two had not spoken to one another since. Quinn refused to apologize to Carla. She wasn’t the one who had canceled their plans at the last minute, and she wasn’t the one who had stood up her friend with no explanation whatsoever. If anyone ought to apologize, it was Carla.
Quinn sat down at her desk, opening her textbook, and opened a new document on her laptop. She spent about an hour researching the topic of her first assignment, and as she stood up from her desk, she glanced at her phone. She reluctantly decided to text Carla, and she told her to meet her at the diner in half an hour. She went downstairs, finding her mother at the kitchen table, grading tests.
“That looks like fun,” she muttered as she looked at the large pile of tests in front of her.
Her mother chuckled and looked at her. “Where are you off to now?”
“Carla texted me. Apparently, she wants to talk. So, I told her to meet me at the diner,” Quinn answered. Her mother frowned slightly.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea that you go outside after dark,” she said, “Especially not with the wolf roaming around town.”
“I’ll be fine,” Quinn replied, shrugging her shoulders. “Knowing Carla, it probably won’t take long. She’s not the best at apologizing.”
“True, but I want you to be careful regardless,” her mother said.
“Yes, Mom. I promise to come straight home after.”
“Great. Have a nice time.”
Quinn stepped away but then turned back to her mother. “I’m not wrong, am I?”
“About what?” her mother asked, not looking up from the papers in front of her.
“Not apologizing.”
Her mother glanced up and placed the pen down on the counter. “I guess there are better ways of handling conflict, but you didn’t exactly do anything wrong.” Just as Quinn was about to agree with her, her mother spoke again. “Then again, you’re also being a bit stubborn yourself.”
Quinn choked on her words before she finally managed to exclaim, “I just don’t think that I need to apologize for something I didn’t do!”
“Maybe not,” her mother responded, “but it would be a shame to throw away a seven-year-old friendship because of a silly argument. Remember that conversation is a two-way street.”
“I suppose,” Quinn muttered.
Her mother smiled encouragingly. “Drive safely, okay? Call me if you feel uneasy, and I’ll come and get you.”
“I’ll be okay. Thanks, Mom.”
Quinn left the house and drove to the diner. Once she was there, she climbed out of her truck and looked around for Carla’s car, but she didn’t see it. Her friend wasn’t inside the diner when Quinn stepped through the door, either.
Well, this is just great, she thought as she found a seat at a table and crossed her arms over her chest. She and Carla had been friends long enough for Quinn to know she wasn’t the most reliable person in the world, but this was getting ridiculous. Carla was the one who had texted her and asked her to talk, and yet she was nowhere to be seen.
Quinn saw one of the waitresses and called her over. “Excuse me, Molly? Have you seen Carla? I was supposed to meet her here.”
“No,” Molly said. “I haven’t seen her all day. Sorry, honey.”
Quinn pursed her lips in dissatisfaction. Great. This was exactly what she had needed: a reason for her day to end on a sour note.
“Should I tell her you were here when she does come in?” Molly asked her.
“Yeah,” Quinn said, nodding. “Just tell her I got sick of waiting.”
“Will do, sweetie,” Molly said.
Quinn smiled tightly and made her way out of the diner. She crossed the road to her truck and took the keys out of her pocket. Just as she was about to unlock the driver’s door, she heard footsteps behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, and her blood ran cold in her veins.
The same two men who had followed her last night were a few feet away from her, and Quinn knew that she had to hurry and get out of there, or she wouldn’t be as lucky as she had been yesterday. She opened the door and rushed to climb inside, frantically locking all the doors just as the two men came up to pound on her window.
“Get out of the car, Quinn!”
Her heart stopped at the mentioning of her name, and she screamed, “Get away from me!”
Quinn started the car and pulled out of the parking spot with a screech. To her horror, the two men climbed into their own car and chased after her. Her mind started to whirl. If she went home, she risked putting her mom in danger… but where was she supposed to go then? She had to lose the men chasing her, and the only chance she had of doing so was to go through the mountain roads. She had never gone that way alone, and the mere thought scared her.
What scared her more, though, was the thought of getting captured.
She drove into the darkness of the mountain road, which was wide enough for two cars to comfortably pass one another. Quinn stepped on the gas, hoping she could lose the car behind her, but they kept gaining on her. She took her eyes off the road for a second to look through the rearview mirror, and she ground her teeth together at the sight of their car still close to her.
When she turned her eyes back to the road, a deer stood in the middle of her lane.
Quinn swerved out of the way, slamming her foot down on the brakes, and her truck went off the road. The uneven snow-covered ground of the surrounding woods made the truck ram straight into a large tree at full force.
Glass splattered in all directions. A searing pain erupted in Quinn’s head, but she couldn’t stop to dwell on it. As best as she could, she dragged herself out of the car and onto the snow, her knees buckling beneath her. She didn’t even feel the cold under her hands. She saw the headlights of the other car shining right in her face, and she was determined to get away from her truck and out of sight as quickly as she could. She heard footsteps close in on her and crawled behind a tree, trying to hide from sight. She pressed her back against the trunk of the tree and brought her knees up to her chest. She closed her eyes briefly, trying to focus.
I need a plan, Quinn thought, but all she could think about was her ragged breathing and the sharp pain in her head. Blood trickled down onto her hand, and she covered her mouth with her other hand when she heard the two men approaching.
“Where did she go?” one of them asked. Quinn bit her lip to stop herself from making any sound that could give her away.
“I don’t know,” growled the other one. “She’s not in the truck.”
“He’s not going to be happy if we don’t have her. We have to find her!”
“Maybe she went back onto the road?”
“Come on, let’s go.”
The men’s footsteps started to fade away, and Quinn exhaled a sigh of relief, pushing herself up from the snow. The adrenaline had started to wear off, and she started to feel the cold around her. The only way she could go was into the woods, but she had no clue whether she would able to find her way back.
As she stepped away from the tree, branches cracked under her feet, and she heard one of the men cry out, “There she is!”
Quinn started running as fast as her legs would carry her through the snow and trees, her heart pounding in her chest. The aching pain in her head returned, and her foot caught on a root, which made her plummet down onto the snow.
A low growl echoed behind her.
Quinn tried to push herself off the ground, but the men had caught up with her—one of them grabbed her ankle and began to drag her through the snow. Even though Quinn attempted to kick the man’s hand off her, she felt weakened by the blood loss from her head wound. She couldn’t even muster the strength to cry out.
There was another growl, and it was louder this time as it bounced throughout the woods. The two men grew tense in front of Quinn, seeming more than a little startled by the noise.
“Oh, no,” muttered one of them. “It’s him!”
Quinn was barely conscious enough to feel the man letting go of her ankle and watch as her captors ran back toward the road. She rolled onto her side, the world spinning around her, and when she was finally able to focus her eyes, she watched as a giant wolf with pitch-black fur chased after the two men.
Then the world went black around her, and Quinn was pulled into the abyss.
The aching in Quinn’s head erupted once again, abruptly yanking her from her pain-induced slumber. At least she wasn’t cold anymore, and she slowly opened her eyes. Her vision was slightly blurry, but she could easily make out a fireplace to her right, and the warmth of the fire warmed her shaking body. She shifted slightly and felt a thick blanket over her. She reached her hand up to her face, and her fingers came across a bandage on the side of her forehead.
“Hey, you’re awake.”
She turned her head and saw River approaching her. He sat down on the low wooden coffee table in front of the couch she lay on.
“Where…” Quinn closed her eyes for a moment. “W-where am I?”
“You’re in my living room,” he answered.
“How did I get here?”
“I found you in the woods,” River said. “You drove your car off the road.”
Quinn began to push herself up into a sitting position, but she winced at the pain in her head and held her head with one hand. “What about the men who were after me?”
River frowned. “What men?”
“The same men from the other night,” she mumbled. “They chased me from the diner, and then there was a deer in the road. I swerved and crashed my truck. The two men were there, and…” She trailed off, recalling the sight of the black wolf.
“And what?” River asked after she hadn’t added anything.
“This is going to sound crazy,” Quinn said, “but I saw a wolf chasing the men away.”
River was quiet. Then he chuckled softly. “I think you hit your head a little too hard.
Quinn sat back on the couch and shook her head. “No, I know what I saw! I told you it was crazy, but it’s the truth!”
Instead of arguing with her, River simply clenched his jaw and glanced away from her, which gave Quinn the chance to try to gather her thoughts. She remembered crashing her truck in the woods. Then she had almost been kidnapped by the two men who had been following her. Then a black wolf had chased her almost-captors away, possibly saving her life.
“River?” she called him. “How… how did you find me?”
“You were almost in my backyard,” he said quickly—way too quickly, as if he had been rehearsing his answer.
“I wasn’t anywhere near Avalanche Canyon,” Quinn replied, frowning.
“Does it really matter?” River asked. “What matters is that I found you before you froze to death.”
“How did you find me?” she demanded.
“I already told you.”
“How did you find me?” she repeated.
“What do you expect me to say?”
“The truth!” Quinn cried. “Did you find me because you were also following me?”
“What? No!” River said. “It’s…” He ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “It’s not something I can just tell you, Quinn.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s complicated,” he answered, and the simplicity and vagueness of his response made Quinn glare at him.
“I don’t care,” she replied, crossing her arms over her chest.
River took a deep breath and leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “Some of the things I told you about myself are not true.”
“Like what?” she asked. “Are you a spy or a secret agent or something?”
“I wasn’t sent to a foster family after the death of my parents. Nor were my brothers.” Quinn was taken aback by his words. She narrowed her eyes at him, suddenly afraid of what was to come. Judging by the look on his face—both remorseful and serious at the same time—she didn’t really know what to expect.
“So… what happened then?”
“We left on our own, going in opposite directions,” he said.
“Wait, what?” Quinn couldn’t believe that River and his brothers, who must’ve been mere children at the time, had just gone their separate ways, much less on their own. “How long ago was this?”
“The nineteen-fifties,” River answered.
Her eyes widened, and she asked in a whisper, “How is that possible?”
“I’m five hundred years old.”
Quinn burst into laughter at the seriousness of his voice. “Good one.”
“I’m not kidding,” River said, speaking slowly and calmly. “My family was one of the first shifter families in the country.”
“Shifters?” Quinn echoed. “Like wolves?”
“Exactly like wolves.”
The image of the wolf that had saved her life flashed in front of her eyes, and she recalled the weird conversation she’d had with Carla about werewolves and what Carla had said: that strange things happened in Jackson.
“The wolf I saw in the woods,” she began, staring at River. “That was you?”
River looked at her with his smoldering blue eyes, which seemed to darken slightly. He nodded his head. “Yes.”
Quinn’s eyes widened as questions flooded her mind. Did Carla know about River? Did she know about shifters and the strange things happening in town? Was joking about werewolves her way of subtly telling Quinn about them? Was Carla a werewolf, too?
“And you chased those guys away?”
“I took care of them,” River said.
Quinn choked back a gasp. She wanted to ask him if he had killed them, but at the same time, she was afraid of hearing the answer. If he had, she’d rather not know. After all, he was the reason she was here with only a head wound.
“But why were they after me?” she demanded, frowning at him.
“That’s what I don’t know,” River answered. “I only know who they work for.”
“And who is that?”
“Some guy called Jonathan Callahan.”
Quinn’s jaw dropped, and she looked at River in disbelief. “Did…” She swallowed. “Did you say, Jonathan Callahan?”
River seemed to read the nervousness in her face. “Do you know him?”
“He’s—” Quinn shook her head. “He’s supposed to be in prison…”
River frowned in confusion. “How do you know that?” he asked.
Quinn swallowed again, but it didn’t help to alleviate the sudden panic in her throat, and her voice was shaky when she spoke again. “Because he’s my father.”
6
River stared at Quinn with wide eyes, unable to believe what she had said to him. After telling her his biggest secret, he had imagined that she would run away in fear, or that she would at least be concerned with the fact that he could turn into a massive black wolf whenever he wanted to. Instead, she sat on his couch, a perplexed look on her face. While there was a hint of fear in her eyes, he suspected it didn’t have all that much
to do with him as it had to do with her father.
“Quinn?” he asked her calmly. “Are you okay?”
“With what?” she cried, shifting her gaze to him. “The fact that you can turn into a wolf, or that my father is out of prison and wants me dead?”
River looked away. It had been a stupid question to ask.
Quinn ran her fingers through her hair, but she winced as her fingers brushed along the bandage around her head.
“Do you know where he is?” she asked. “My father?”
“No,” River answered, “but I could easily find out.”
“How? Your wolf powers?”
“I’m not a tracker. I just hear very well.”
Quinn narrowed her eyes at him and said, “I was being… never mind.” Then she looked around the room. “Hey, where’s my truck?”
“I brought it to my garage.”
Quinn threw her hands up in the air and let out a groan of exasperation. “I don’t even… this is weird. Really weird. A week ago, I was joking with Carla about werewolves, and now—” A gasp interrupted her sentence, and she turned her eyes to River. “Oh, my god. Is Carla involved in this, too? Is she one of you guys?”
“Not that I know of,” River said, slightly frowning.
“I need to call her,” Quinn muttered, and River took his phone out of his pocket and handed it to her.
“Here,” he said. “Use mine.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking it from him. Their fingers brushed against one another’s, and River felt as though a current of electricity ran between them. Quinn pulled her hand back too soon for him to dwell on it, and she dialed Carla’s number before pressing the phone to her ear, waiting for a ringing tone.
“Hello?” River heard her answer.
“Carla? It’s Quinn.”
“What do you want?” Carla demanded, her voice laced with bitterness.
“I just wanted to know if you were okay.”
“Yes, why?”
Quinn glanced briefly at River and sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“Look, Quinn,” Carla said, “if you don’t want to be friends with me anymore, then you should just say so. I told you that I was sorry for ditching you for Randy last week, but ignoring my texts and avoiding me like the plague at class is not cool.”