by Heather Karn
Chapter 3
I glared up at the ceiling, the same ceiling I’d been staring at for hours since I’d woken from a restless sleep filled with dreams. My eyes stung with unshed tears. This was always how it was. When Mom and Dad died, I hadn’t been able to cry at their funerals. People talked behind my back because of it, but they never had the nerve to confront me about why I never cried.
The locals had mentioned to Gram that I needed to see a therapist, and the school suggested that I see a grief counselor twice a week. I’d said no to both options, and Gram hadn’t pushed me. None of them understood.
I felt emotions like everyone else, but sobbing wasn’t my way of releasing those emotions. The foolproof way I’d found to release them was through physical exercise, which was why I’d loved to bike to school, and why since Mom had died and I’d stopped running I’d been crankier. I was overdue for a run.
Rolling out of bed, I grabbed clean clothes and headed for the bathroom. It was better to get my shower out of the way since I was awake and Gram and Aunt Gwen were still asleep. There was nothing like all three of us trying to use the bathroom at the same time. We must have been a sight to see some mornings all squished into the tiny space doing hair or makeup, or checking our reflection in the only full-length mirror our house possessed, which of course was attached to the back of the bathroom door. Someone needed to rethink that.
After closing the bathroom door, I switched the light on and stared at myself in the small mirror above the sink. The walking dead was the best description I could think of to describe the young woman staring back at me. My red hair was a tangled mess from tossing and turning, my skin was paler than normal, and my eyes were red and puffy from lack of sleep. It took me less than ten seconds to decide that I was skipping church. Gram wouldn’t be happy, but I couldn’t go looking like this.
I also couldn’t go feeling the way I did. I’d be liable to take some unsuspecting widow’s head off. Nope, I was staying home and going for a run. My heartache needed a release.
Though sleep had evaded me most of the night, when I had slept I’d dreamed about nothing but my parents. The most vivid dream had been almost an exact replay of our last Christmas together. It had felt so real, and I’d been so happy until I woke up. Then reality set in and my gleeful heart was crushed and ached with a new wave of loneliness that no one alive could take away.
Since I wasn’t going to church, there was no reason to shower until after I’d finished my run. That didn’t mean I couldn’t brush the tangles out. Once I could pull the brush through my thin hair with minimal effort, I finished the rest of my morning bathroom routine and crept back to my room to change for the run.
Gram wasn’t going to like my wardrobe choice, but this morning I wasn’t giving her the option of making me change before leaving the house. It was either the running shorts and a t-shirt or my bathing suit. Her pick. Knowing Gram, she wouldn’t see much of a difference in the two outfits. To her, it was too cold for anyone to be outside without a jacket. Having grown up in Michigan, I could handle cold well, and the temperatures here weren’t even close to cold yet.
By the time I’d changed into my running clothes and pulled my hair back into a ponytail to keep it out of my face and off my neck, I could hear Gram in the kitchen making her breakfast. It was oatmeal, and I knew that without smelling it cook. It was part of her morning ritual. So much so that Gram’s scent was always oatmeal and some fruity flavor. No amount of coaxing could get me to try the stuff.
Fur was about to fly, and there was nothing I could do to change it. Taking a deep, steadying breath as I gripped the door handle, I let it calm me before I twisted the knob and shuffled into the kitchen. Gram’s reaction was classic. Her eyebrows rose, eyes widened, and her face turned beet red. She opened her mouth to say something, but never got the chance.
“Well, that’s an interesting outfit to wear to church,” Aunt Gwen commented as she entered the kitchen, not missing a beat while taking in the situation. Nothing ever seemed to faze her.
“I’m not going to church today. I’m going for a run.”
Grabbing the water pitcher from the fridge, I filled a glass and began drinking it as I pulled two protein bars from the pantry. Gram hadn’t taken her eyes off of me as she continued to sit at the table with her oatmeal. Folding her arms over her chest, she stared me down with an icy glare.
“And why not, young lady?”
She’d caught me mid-chew of a rather large, unladylike bite. Aunt Gwen laughed and shook her head at my chipmunk cheeks as she took her Cocoa Puffs and milk to the table. That left me to finish chewing and swallowing as fast as possible, without choking, to answer Gram.
“I had a rough night last night. I need to clear my head, and I really don’t want to be around people today.”
“What, you didn’t sleep well? Are you sick? You’d best not go out dressed like that or you’ll end up sick if you aren’t.” Gram’s eyes scanned my body, lingering on my shorts. Sure they weren’t super long, but they weren’t that short either, and it wasn’t like I was wearing a tank top with it.
“Gram, my clothes are fine. I’ll be warm enough, and when I’m done, I’ll take a shower.” While I waited for her to respond, I took a bite out of the second protein bar.
“That doesn’t tell me why you had a bad night.”
“Gram, I slept like crap,” I explained with a mouth full of food. She wasn’t going to let this slide without details, so I walked over to the table and sat in my usual place across from Aunt Gwen, who was busy chowing down on her cereal. “I dreamed about Mom and Dad last night. When I woke up, they weren’t there, and I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. I don’t want to act like my life is perfect and all put together, because it’s not, and if I don’t act like that you know darn well that everyone is going to talk. So just tell them I’m sick or something.”
Gram reached for my hand that wasn’t holding a half-eaten protein bar and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Do you need me to stay home with you?”
“No, Gram, I’m fine. I just need to run and be alone. I promise I won’t stay outside long.”
After another few minutes of reassuring Gram that I was fine and not about to have a mental breakdown from dreaming about my parents, and finally appealing to Aunt Gwen for assistance, I was free to go outside. Gram still argued about my wardrobe choice, but I’d stuck my ear buds in and let myself out the door to begin stretching. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but Gram and I could go all day without agreeing on that topic, and I wasn’t budging.
The sun was well above the horizon by the time I began jogging down the road to the mountain trail. Once I reached where the trail intersected the road, I turned left to go deeper into the mountains since going right would take me to town. There were steeper inclines in this direction, but the river flowed beside a portion of the trail which reminded me of running back home.
Twenty minutes, and two miles later, I was ready to give myself a break. Before moving to West Virginia I could run three miles without a problem, but that was on a flat surface. Now I was running in mountains that were at a higher elevation than what I was used to. The run had done its job, though. My tense, emotionally-stressed, muscles had relaxed, and I felt free from the world.
The sweet scent of mint on the air drew my attention from my mental coaching to put one foot in front of the other. It caught me off guard because I’d never smelled it on this trail before, and though I hadn’t run it in months, I’d been on it plenty all summer without a trace of the smell. The more I ran, the closer I got.
Deciding I’d have to check it out since I loved the smell and taste of mint, I let my newfound enthusiasm carry me up the last steep hill before the trail flattened out by the river for the next half mile. Then it was back to steep hills, but if I was right, and I usually was with smells, the mint was somewhere off the trail in the flat section, opposite of the river to my right.
Sweat trickled down my back as I firmed my determin
ation to finish the last hill at a run. My shaky legs were screaming their anger at my abuse of them in the only way they knew how: pain. Near the top, my foot clipped a rock that jutted out of the ground, almost causing me to topple over. It took everything left in me to stay upright.
As I reached the top of the hill, I slowed from my sprint to a light jog. There was no way I wanted to trip down the hill and face plant at the bottom because my legs were shakier than Jell-O.
Breathing in deeply to find the mint’s location, it hit me that the minty smell was moving, and not just anywhere, but toward me. Mint didn’t just up and decide to walk around. Something was out there, and it was pretty much on top of me.
Fifty feet up the trail, a massive orange, white and black shape jumped from the tree line beside the trail. It took a millisecond for my brain to register the giant tiger trotting toward me, and for my feet to stutter and get tangled up in one another, sending me face first down the hill, the very thing I’d been trying to avoid.
My head hit every rock on the trail, and every stick available stabbed my body until I came to a complete stop at the bottom. The tree tops in my vision swam. Closing my eyes, I let my brain recalibrate as I did a mental check for any severe damage to my body. From what I could tell by laying still, no bones were broken, but I was going to be covered in bruises. This was what I got for skipping church.
A twig snapped as the minty smell I’d been following engulfed my senses. My eyelids flew open meeting a set of pure black eyes staring down at me, inches from my face. They were unblinking and wide with the same amount of shock I felt running through my body. I tried to look away, but his eyes held mine in their endless depths.
He blinked, releasing me from the hold he’d had as his mouth popped open.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
His melodic, tenor voice distracted me by its beauty so that I didn’t notice his shaky hand moving until it cupped my bruised face. I couldn’t stop the wince when his thumb brushed against a sore spot on my cheekbone, and he pulled his hand back a little, only to feather his fingertips over my abused skin.
“I didn’t mean to scare you. Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so.” Well, to be correct, I was hurting everywhere from head to toe.
The longer I lay there, the more I determined I must have hit my head harder than I thought. I shouldn’t have been laying down talking to a strange man when a tiger was lurking nearby, ready to kill its unsuspecting victim. We needed to get out of here.
Neither one of us was prepared for how fast I sat up as the man beside me almost got his nose flattened by my forehead. That didn’t worry me, though. The missing tiger did. As I searched for it, moving side to side to see around the man, he watched me with eyebrows pulled low and black eyes so full of shock, confusion and wonder that I had to stop and stare at him.
“Wait…” The word left my mouth as my stupidity caught up with me.
Tigers weren’t native to West Virginia and certainly didn’t run wild in the forest. But here was a man with black eyes, arriving at the same exact moment as the tiger, and had the same smell. There couldn’t be any coincidence between these three facts. There could only be one logical explanation, and that had my heart beating like a rabbit on caffeine. I was a goner.
His hand reached out, but I scooted back, trying to get away from the man who I was certain had been a tiger moments before. With my fear evident, he pulled his hand back and watched me as I took a good hard look at him.
He appeared to be in his early to mid-twenties and tall, but while he knelt I couldn’t tell for sure. Black was his color of choice as his boots, pants and shirt matched his eyes. Even his long hair, which he had pulled back into a ponytail, was as black as a moonless night. His skin was a dark tan which kept him from looking sickly.
His cheekbones were high, and his sloping nose fit his face perfectly. The black t-shirt he wore wasn’t skin tight, but it hugged him enough to see that he was built. Muscles flexed as he adjusted himself while watching me. He was mouthwatering in every physical way possible, and I needed to stay alive long enough to confirm the truth to Chrissa. Actually, I just needed to stay alive, period.
“You’re…you’re…” The words wouldn’t come. They were stuck in my throat as my voice trembled. With a few feet to separate us, a shaky voice and lack of words were understandable.
He arched an eyebrow at me as he lifted one side of his mouth in a grin. “I’m what?”
“You’re a…a weregal?”
My small voice wiped the smile from his face, and he cocked his head to the side to look at me, much like a dog would do.
“Yes, I am. Didn’t you see me on the trail?”
“I saw a tiger, and then I saw you.”
“Ah.” He nodded slowly, bringing a hand up to tug on his lower lip. “You didn’t realize that I was the tiger and the man.”
The expression on his face was both unreadable and an open book. He was thinking hard about something, but he wasn’t giving anything away.
“What’s your name?”
“Joey. Yours?”
“Kev.”
“Like Kevin?”
“No, just Kev.”
“Oh.”
“Is yours just Joey?”
“No, it’s Joette.”
“I see.”
Taking his hand from his face, he used it to steady himself as he moved from kneeling in the dirt to crouching on the front of his feet. Once settled, he continued to watch me. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I asked the question I’d feared since the light bulb had flickered on in my head.
“Are you going to eat me?”
He snorted and laughed until he looked back at my face. I hadn’t twitched since asking, not even to crack a smile at his laughter. That sobered him within a heartbeat.
“No, Joey, I don’t plan on eating you. I’m not even going to harm you. In fact, I’m sorry that I scared you enough that you fell and hurt yourself.”
What do you say to a predator who admitted they didn’t want to eat you? The answer: nothing. I didn’t want to agitate him in any way by saying something foolish and have him change his mind. While he waited for me to speak, we sat in silence, once against staring at one another. I still wasn’t convinced he wouldn’t go all furry and shred me with his claws, but he wasn’t moving at all, so that gave me some peace.
His scent drifted to me on the air, calling to my sense of smell to bask in it. The fact that a smell could affect me like that was unnerving.
“Do you live nearby?”
The question caught me off guard and startled a squeak from me. His lips twitched in an almost grin before they stilled in a frown.
“A few miles up the trail and down the road.”
“Do you mind if I walked you back? You hit your head pretty hard.”
“You’re letting me leave?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe because he wanted to eat me for a snack.
He sighed, squeezing his eyes shut as he pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and finger. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand how I’m scaring you. I haven’t done anything, have I?”
The fact that he didn’t know why I was scared lightened my heart with hope that maybe he didn’t want to hurt me. It could be possible he was new to the area and didn’t know about the whole weregal and human war going on. Or he could be full from his last meal, whatever or whoever it was.
“You startled me, I guess.”
“Then I apologize. That wasn’t my intent.”
“Then what was your intent?”
His hand dropped as he stood from his crouch, and proceeded to offer me a hand up. Though he smiled, it didn’t reach his eyes. I still couldn’t understand how I could read the emotions swirling in his eyes like I could a book. All I had to do was look, and I knew what he felt.
Confusion, wonder and excitement were the big three. A pinch of concern and fear followed in th
e background. He was the predator here, so there was no reason for him to be afraid. There was no malice or evil intent that I could see, so I accepted his calloused hand and let him pull me to my feet.
A wave of dizziness struck moments after I was up. My legs wobbled as they tried to keep me upright as I clung to Kev’s hand for support. Concern was the prevalent emotion in Kev’s voice as he held my arm to prevent me from falling if my knees gave out.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have stood up yet. Do you need to lay down?”
Okay, so maybe this guy wasn’t going to eat me. I doubted it if he was this upset about me falling over unless he didn’t want my body more bruised than it already was, but his kindness and caring appeared genuine.
“I’m fine now. Thanks for helping me up.”
He looked around us nervously. Not like we were being watched, but like he didn’t know what to do. His black hair glimmered in the sunlight, and for some crazy reason, I wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch it. I was a sucker for a man with a ponytail, and his called to me, just like his minty scent. It was the oddest thing I’d ever smelled.
When his worried eyes turned back to me, he caught me staring. Finding the ground more interesting saved me from showing off my heated cheeks to a man I should not find attractive. Maybe I had hit my head harder than I thought.
“I’d wanted to talk to you, just talk, but I think that will have to wait. You should go home and rest, and when you feel better, we could talk another time.” Regret soaked his words. I couldn’t decide if it was from scaring me or because he was letting me go.
I wasn’t about tell him that I was never going to see him again because if I did he’d likely change his mind and keep me his prisoner. And I needed to beat Gram and Aunt Gwen home from church. If they saw me like the train wreck I looked like they’d ask too many questions, and I didn’t know whether or not to tell them what had happened.
“May I walk you home?”
Now that my cheeks were back to their normal pale complexion, or rather I hoped they were, I let myself look up at him again. He didn’t disappoint. His wide smile was playful and for the first time since we met, he appeared relaxed. On the other hand, I was still a tense mess. He may have looked harmless, but I’d seen the other side of him, so I knew he was anything but.
“If I said no, would you follow me?”
“Of course.”
I may have smiled back when his grew wider, and he chuckled. It was a soft sound that made my toes curl. If he was trying to put me at ease before attacking and having me for dinner, it was working, and nothing I could do was stopping my body from responding to him. It also could have been his heavenly scent, which was stronger than any man’s cologne I’d ever smelled, that was disarming me. It was taking willpower not to lean in and take a deep whiff of him.
There wasn’t time to think about it though because I needed to go home, and Kev was speaking to me again.
“I’d follow you to make sure you were safe. If you want, I could shift and carry you on my back.”
Shift. Back into his tiger form. Not gonna happen. Something in my face tipped him off to my decision.
“I promise I won’t harm you, but I’m not sure you’re ready to walk.” When I didn’t respond, he closed his eyes and shook his head. “Is there anything I can say that will make you trust me?”
“Nope.”
With a snort he let me go as he turned and kicked a loose rock across the trail. It rolled into the dying grass and fell down the small rocky cliff to the river below.
“Fine. Then I will walk beside you, and if you change your mind, my offer is still open.”
Or he could stay here and let me walk back on my own. Why wasn’t I brave enough to tell him that? That’s right; his alter ego was a giant cat with sharp teeth and claws ready to chew me up, spit me out, and shred whatever was left.
Taking a closer look at him, it was apparent that he wouldn’t need to be in his tiger form to cause some serious damage. Good looks and muscles aside, the man was huge. The top of my head didn’t even reach his shoulders, so he had to be close to six and a half feet. Next to him I was a midget, but next to most anyone I was tiny. Yeah, it was better to keep my mouth shut for now.
“All right, you can follow me. Not that I could stop you, anyway.”
“Good, at least we agree on something.”
He winked at me and my heart stopped once again. No guy had ever winked at me in my entire life, and when he smirked at me, I found I’d been staring. It was time to go home now.
He motioned me forward. “Lead the way and I’ll follow.”
I took one step forward before I stopped and turned to him, my eyes narrowed from my suspicion. “I don’t think so. The trail is wide enough for us to walk side by side, so you don’t have to walk behind me.”
“One day you will trust me,” he replied, chuckling, though I could hear the tension in his voice that he was trying to hide. “One so young shouldn’t be so distrustful.”
“The world isn’t a safe place, and since learning about the existence of weregals two days ago, it’s a bit scarier now.”
The short hike up the hill I’d rolled down gave me chills. I’d never look at this section of the trail the same again if I ever ran it anytime soon. My aching head thumped as I exerted myself to reach the top and down the other side.
“You didn’t know about weregals? How is that possible?” The shock in Kev’s voice had me looking up at him. From this angle, my neck was craned back so far that I was looking straight up to see his face. That didn’t feel too good on my beaten body either.
“I’m not from here. I moved here about six months ago. Apparently, weregals are a local thing that most people outside of West Virginia don’t know about. Or maybe it’s outside this general area.”
“So where did you grow up if not here?”
“Michigan. It’s a few states north of here,” I explained when his eyebrows drew together. I assumed he didn’t understand what I said, and from his slow nod, I was right. “Do you know what a state is?”
“A little. One of my friends is human, and he explained human customs and places to me. Are you sure you should be walking?” Kev asked, catching me as I tripped over an exposed tree root. I’d seen it coming, but I’d still managed to hook my foot on it.
We stood at the top of another hill. Though this incline wasn’t nearly as steep as the one I’d rolled down; I wasn’t looking forward to making another head dive. Weighing my options, which was made difficult with the pounding in my head, I made my decision with a groan.
“Fine, you win. I’ll take that ride.”
A sincere, happy smile crept across Kev’s face. “I’m glad. Your skin is pale, and I’d hate for you to fall down another hill.”
“You and me both.”
“Good. Now where do you live?”