Moon Bound (The Reluctant Werewolf Chronicles Book 3)

by Tori Centanni

  “I’m downtown with Michael,” I said, glad that I had an easy, honest answer to give him. “He can give me a ride home.”

  “Okay.” There was a pregnant pause, and I started to ask what was going on, when Raff added, “Just get home, okay?”

  “I’m on my way,” I assured him.

  Michael’s brow rose in question. “That was weird.”

  Apparently, he’d heard most of the short conversation with his vampire hearing, because he didn’t ask what was going on, he just headed for the car.

  I buckled myself into the passenger seat, and ten minutes later, we were at my door.

  “You want to come in and see what’s going on?” I asked, in part because I was afraid of what I might learn.

  Our pack had been through several devastating loses recently, mostly due to a group of monster hunters who hated werewolves and wanted us all dead. What if they were back? My heart wouldn’t stop pounding.

  “I can’t,” Michael said, licking his lips and flicking his lip ring with his tongue. “All that bloodletting has made me hungry.”

  His eyes flashed, and my skin erupted in goosebumps at my close proximity to a hungry predator.

  “You should get home,” I agreed, and quickly exited the car.

  Inside, Raff paced the living room, stopping only when he saw me. His hard expression made my heart do somersaults. In one swift motion, he stepped toward me and pulled me close, hugging me tightly against his chest with his muscular arms. His body was warm, and he smelled like soap and mint. I could feel his heart thudding against his ribs. After a long moment, he loosened his grip and I reluctantly pulled away.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, breathless.

  “Someone broke in,” Raff said, running his fingers through his blond hair.

  “What? When?”

  I glanced around the living room, but nothing was out of place; the television was still there along with the cable box and the Xbox Raff’s mom had gotten him for Christmas.

  “This evening. I went to the gym and when I came back, the back door was open.” He nodded toward the kitchen, where the back door was. “I was scared that maybe…” He trailed off, his blue eyes fixed on me like he was scared I might vanish if he looked away.

  “I’m okay,” I said, holding his gaze. “It doesn’t even look that bad. Maybe we just forgot to the lock the door, and the wind blew it open. I mean, nothing’s missing.”

  It astounded even me that I could take such an optimistic stance even after everything that had happened. Monster hunters had burned down one of my houses and tried to burn down this one. But it was hard to imagine anyone who robbed the place would leave the video games.

  “That’s the thing,” he said, averting his gaze. “They only went through your room.”

  I stared, letting that sink in. As soon as it did, I bolted for the stairs. I heard Raff following behind but ignored him. I raced to my room and threw open the door.

  What I was found was utter chaos. Every single drawer of my dresser had been pulled out and dumped, and now sat overturned on piles of clothes. My nightstand had gotten a similar treatment, with my collection of Chapstick and spare change littering the floor. My bedspread had been torn off, along with my sheets, and the mattress had been shifted out of place and now skewed to the side, corners hanging off the box spring. The box spring’s fabric cover had been cut open. My bedding had been crumpled at the foot of my bed. Pillows had been flung in all directions. My closet door had been thrown open, and most of the clothes had been torn off the hangers and tossed on the floor.

  I didn’t have a ton of clothes. I’d been slowly rebuilding my wardrobe and collecting possessions, but there weren’t the boxes of stuff people usually acquire. Still, everything I did have had been pawed through, searched, and left carelessly where it fell.

  Goosebumps erupted on my arms, and my stomach roiled. For a second, I thought I might actually throw up and leaned against the door jamb to steady myself.

  “Now you can see why I was so worried,” Raff said.

  I nodded as I surveyed the wreckage of my bedroom. If I’d found a similar scene in Raff’s bedroom and he was gone, I’d have panicked, too.

  “Who would do this?”

  I knew Raff had no answers, but the question escaped my lips anyway. This made no sense. I had almost nothing, certainly nothing of value besides my laptop, which was still sitting on top of my dresser. I turned to face him.

  “No one went into your room?”

  “Someone went in there, all right,” he said. “I could smell their juniper perfume or whatever.”

  I took a sniff and sure enough, there was the lingering scent of pine needles and snow. I shivered. What an odd scent to leave behind.

  “But as far as I can tell, they didn’t take anything, and it’s not torn up like this.” He gestured to my doorway. “Whatever the burglars were looking for, they thought you had it in here.”

  “But I don’t have anything.” I sounded whiny, but it was true, and I was exhausted.

  I was running on fumes, desperate to hunt down a stupid book, and now someone was ransacking my room in hopes of finding… what? Something niggled at the back of my brain, but the thought refused to form.

  “It is really weird,” he said. “At first, I thought it might have been the Portland Pack’s attempt to scare me off. But then I realized it was only your room that had been trashed.”

  “Rayna was here,” I said.

  The words just slipped out, but I couldn’t imagine Rayna tearing up my room. She wasn’t exactly the passive-aggressive type. She’d confronted me directly and said her piece.

  “She was?” Raff frowned.

  “She found me downtown. She said I should convince you to drop out of the challenge.”

  Raff grinned. I stared, confused. That was not the reaction I’d been expecting.

  “That makes you happy?” I asked.

  “It means Levi’s scared,” he said, winking at me. “Or at the very least, it means he’s worried that he’s not going to win. And he’s right. He’s not.”

  A small smile danced on my lips. There was something so reassuring about Raff’s confidence.

  “Good,” I said.

  I turned back to the utter disaster area my room had become.

  “Do you want me to help you clean this mess up?” Raff asked, sensing my rising inability to deal.

  Overwhelmed was not strong enough to describe my current feelings. It looked like a small tornado had come tearing through. It would going to take hours to put things back together, and I’d need to wash everything or I’d picture a stranger’s hand pawing over my blankets and clothes. That meant at least three loads of laundry. And I did not have the time for that at the moment.

  “I can’t do this right now,” I said, eyeing the mess. “I have to find the book.”

  Raff’s brow crinkled ever so slightly, his lips forming a small “o” as he tilted his head and studied me. “Book? For the faerie? I don’t think that’s a priority right now, Charlie.”

  He had no idea. It was my only priority. But because I hadn’t told him the truth earlier, I felt like I couldn’t explain it now. I could explain everything was this was over.

  “I’d rather do that than this.” I waved my hand over the mess. “Besides, I’d like to find it before Saturday.”

  Raff’s jaw tightened. For a second, I thought I saw a flicker of concern on his face, but it was gone too quickly to be sure.

  “It’s your room,” he finally said, the warmth evaporating.

  “I’ll get it back in order,” I said, stepping over a pile of tank tops and underpants to get to my laptop. “I just need to do this first. It’s important.”

  I was already on the stairs when Raff said, “Are you sure this faerie book isn’t what the burglar was looking for?”

  I froze, my heart skipping a beat. That seemed absurd, since I couldn’t even find the stupid thing, but then, it was possible whoever had bro
ken in didn’t know that. And it wasn’t a secret I’d been desperately hunting for it, since I’d asked pretty much every supernatural place I had access to. If someone else wanted it, it would probably be way easier to steal it from me than from Ellianne.

  And then there was the smell, of pine and snow. So similar to Ellianne’s wintery smell that for a second I wondered if she’d been perpetrator. But that made no sense. The minute I got the book, I was going to hand it over to her, so there was no reason for her to try and steal it from me.

  But that didn’t mean someone else wasn’t after it. I shivered as I remembered Kitty saying the book held real magic. Just what kind of curses and cures did it contain?

  “I guess it’s possible,” I admitted finally. “I honestly don’t know why anyone would bother breaking in just to tear apart my closet. I guess that’s as good a reason as any.”

  “Let me help you put things back.” Raff followed me downstairs. “We can do a few loads of laundry and having a folding party. I’ll order pizza.”

  It was a sweet offer. I was starving and would have loved nothing more than to sit on the sofa and eat pizza while watching Raff fold all of my t-shirts. He was good at it, too. He’d worked at a retail clothing store when he was in high school and knew how to fold them the fancy way.

  But time was ticking.

  And if the burglars were after the book, that meant not only was I under a time crunch to find it, but I was racing against someone else who wanted it, too. It was imperative that I get to it first so I could hand it over to Ellianne and wash my hands of this whole mess. Let the burglar try to take it from her if they wanted it so badly.

  Only after my debt was paid would I be able to put my bedroom back together and relax.

  Since I couldn’t do my research at the house without Raff looking over my shoulder and giving me strange looks for caring more about some silly book than my trashed bedroom—which was fair enough—I walked down the hill to a twenty-four-hour coffee shop that was a popular haunt for the goth crowd, as well as students from the nearby community college trying to cram in some late-night studying.

  I ordered a mocha and a day-old doughnut with pink sprinkles, because it felt a little rebellious for the goth atmosphere, even though they sold them. The walls were painted blood red. The floors and furniture were black. A hard wooden bench seat lined one wall, with tables spaced out in front of it with a single chair each to allow two people to sit at each table. I sat on the bench seat next to the window. A few other tables were occupied, mostly by people hunched over laptops, ignoring their cooling coffee drinks.

  Across the way were a smattering of loose tables, including one occupied by four goth kids, probably barely out of high school if they’d graduated at all. They dressed like Michael and I had, black leather and lace, piercings like Michael’s, and hair dyed various non-natural colors. One of the young women had a copy of Dracula on the table in front of her, her fingers lifting the paperback cover and thumbing through the pages as if she were unconscious of the motion.

  She met my eyes briefly, and I smiled before opening my computer. I had been like her once, a teen obsessed with vampires, wanting anything but the reality crashing around me as my parents both fell apart in the wake of my sister’s death.

  I swallowed. My sister Casey had not been into vampires. She preferred pretty boys with big muscles who were into sports. She hadn’t dreamt about being an immortal creature of the night—that had been my dream, and my absurd plan to save her, one I’d never discussed with her in serious terms. She dreamt about being normal and healthy: joining the swim team or the marching band or going out for basketball. Things she wasn’t able to do.

  Not that it mattered now. She was gone, and I was a werewolf. Everything had changed.

  And at the moment, I was a werewolf with a debt owed to a faerie.

  I pulled out the slip of paper from Kitty. The name scrawled on it was Jacob Farrow. I didn’t recognize it, but that’s why the internet is any researcher’s friend. His name was common enough to get plenty of hits, but I eventually narrowed it down to the one Jacob Farrow who lived in Seattle.

  It was only then that I came across his obituary. I swore. The guy two tables down looked up from his chemistry text book. I murmured an apology and read about Jacob Farrow’s fate. He had died in an apartment fire. The building had been saved, and he’d been the only causality in his twelve unit building. The fire had originated in his unit.

  Then I saw something that set my heart pounding: He had died about a week after buying the books from Kitty, if she was right about when that had happened, around April 15th. That was a pretty huge coincidence. Rare book falls into his hands and suddenly his whole apartment burns up? Suspicious.

  And terrifying.

  My hands shook, and I glanced around the coffee shop warily. If someone was after the book, why had Kitty been able to hold on to it for a couple of years without issue, only for the next owner to get burned up? It made no sense. And even if someone had gone after Jacob for Curses and Cures, wouldn’t killing him and setting fire to his place mean the seeker had it already? So why ransack my room?

  I didn’t know what to make of it, except that it was another dead end.

  “Charlotte Lear.”

  My head snapped up. In front of me stood a woman in a corset and long purple skirt. She wore matching purple gloves. Her eyes were almost the same shade of purple, or perhaps it was a trick of the light.

  My throat was dry as I tried to answer.

  “My boss would like a word with you,” she said.

  The chemistry student gave her a big side-eye, but whether that was because of what she’d said or merely the fact that she was talking in his study bubble, I didn’t know.

  “Who’s your boss?” I asked, not even bothering to close my laptop.

  I didn’t recognize this woman. She wasn’t a vampire or a werewolf as far as I could tell. She smelled faintly of honey and lilacs, but that could have been a perfume.

  “I believe you and he have a common interest.”

  She smiled smugly. No fangs.

  “Which is?” I pressed.

  If she thought I was going to meet her mysterious boss at midnight without more information, she was sadly mistaken.

  The smug smile didn’t budge. “A book I believe you’re looking for.”

  Crap.

  She had me with that, and she knew it. Guess she’d earned the smug smile after all. I packed up my stuff and followed her outside.

  Chapter 11

  I knew it wasn’t a great idea to follow a mysterious stranger in the dark, but it’s not like I had a choice. If her boss, whoever he was, knew where I could find Ellianne’s book, I had to talk to him.

  Still, my instincts kicked in enough to fight the idea and made me seriously wish I had other options as I followed the woman down the street and then—despite the voice in my brain screaming not to—as I got into her waiting town car.

  The driver never turned back to look at us, and she didn’t say so much as a syllable to him, but he pulled away from the curb as soon as I was buckled in, already knowing where to take us.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Lynn,” she said.

  “That doesn’t tell me anything,” I said flatly. “Are you a faerie or something?”

  She reddened and clenched her fists. “I most certainly am not.”

  Seeing that she was annoyed, I decided to push her further, hoping she’d give something away. “Then what are you? Because purple eyes sure scream fae to me.”

  Blood thrummed in my ears, but I folded my arms over my chest and tried to look calm and collected as her gaze burned into me.

  “Careful, wolfing. You are not so big and bad without the full moon,” she said, dropping her hands in her lap and turning her gaze to the passing streetlights out the window.

  Conversation time was over, apparently.

  I sighed and decided instead that it was smarter to pay attentio
n to where we were going. The car sped through the empty streets quickly, with no traffic to impede us at this late hour. Most stoplights stayed green as we drove to the International District. We passed Uwajimaya, the Asian market where Michael and I got lunch sometimes, and then the car whipped past the stadiums and further south until we were out of Seattle proper and heading towards the airport.

  I seriously hoped I wasn’t about to be shoved onto a plane. But soon, the car passed the airport exit and continued down to Tacoma. I didn’t know the area once he pulled off the freeway, so while I tried to catch street names and pay attention to turns, I quickly lost track and gave up.

  The neighborhoods we drove through were largely residential. We reached a fancy new construction development with pristine large houses that all had three-car garages and big picture windows in front. The car pulled into a driveway. A moment later, the driver scurried around to open Lynn’s door, then mine.

  The house was huge by my standards but too small to technically be a mansion, though it might as well have been. The walkway was dark stone leading to a stone entryway, and ornate silver porch lights shaped like dragons flanked the double door. I shivered as I stared at the silver dragons, wondering what they meant.

  Lynn pushed me aside and opened the doors. The entryway had a massive silver chandelier hanging above it with the same silver dragons dancing around the light fixture. Okay, so, definitely a theme here. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess that these people were dragons.

  “This way,” Lynn said impatiently, her skirt sweeping the ground as she led me down the hall and into a home office.

  The office door was solid black, and inside, there was only one window behind the desk, the shades drawn over it. A dragon lamp sat on the giant wooden desk. A large office chair with a high back was behind it. The desk was clear besides the lamp and an ornate pen holder.

  Lynn gestured to the shorter chairs in front of the desk. “Have a seat. My boss will be with you shortly.”

  “I should hope so,” I muttered, but she was already gone.