“Yeah, girl,” she responded, her voice barely a mumble. I could hardly hear her over the din behind us.
“To your car. We need to get to your car,” I said, pausing to lick my parched lips. “We need to get to your fucking car right now, Sheila. Right fucking now!”
Lacy threw her hands up in the air. “I’m not invited? You’re just going to leave me here?”
“You lied to me!” I snapped back, raising my axe. “You all fucking lied to me! Of course you’re not fucking invited!”
“Look, Jessica,” she said. “It’s not something he can exactly broadcast. He cares about you!”
My eyes went wide with rage. “He’s a monster!” I screamed. “He has paws!”
“We have to go, Jess,” Sheila said, her voice becoming more frantic as her mind began to process what was actually going on, her hand tugging at my sleeve and pulling me back to her car. “We have to go now before they get hungry for more!”
“You’re safe!” Lacy called as Sheila and I both turned and ran into the edge of the trees, trying to circle back around to her car. “You’re safe, I promise! They can control themselves!”
Her words of reassurance fell on deaf ears as we scrambled around the fray and headed back to Sheila’s Lexus.
The clearing in front of the cabin was a battlefield. Men’s blood soaked the gravel; hobbled, disfigured men screaming for their mothers as the giant wolves with bloody muzzles continued to fall on them, cutting them down like grain before a scythe. Gunfire split the air, and a wolf yelped in surprise.
Sheila and I, though, we kept our heads down and stayed out of the middle of it. We reached the Suburbans and began to circle around the front of one of them. We were so close, we could almost reach out and touch Sheila’s car.
One of the bikers must have seen us, though, and he came running up from behind. “Wait!” he screamed. “Wait!”
I looked back over my shoulder, right into the terrified eyes of Wyatt Axelrod.
“You have to take me with you!” he screamed, gun in hand.
“Fuck no!” Sheila spat as she fumbled for her keys.
“Why should we help you?” I growled. “You’ve been terrorizing me for weeks!”
“What?” he asked, genuine confusion on his face. “Ain’t you that gallery lady? We just fucking met!” Sheila got the car door open and all but dove in.
“Jessica, let’s go!”
“No!” Wyatt shouted again, cocking back the hammer on his big silver revolver, leveling it at me.
A wolf, a big sandy colored one, came streaking out of the shadows from the other side, its white fangs bared in attack as it growled like a Harley.
I sprang back from Wyatt, screaming in shock. It was Richard!
Richard sank his giant teeth into the biker president’s hand and shook it like a Rottweiler with a hold on a pork chop. The revolver clattered from Wyatt’s hand and into the gravel as he yelled bloody murder, in a sudden tug-of-war with the giant-sized wolf in front of him. Richard released the grip on his hand, his slathering jaws falling open as he leaped paws first onto his chest, slamming him back into the Suburban. The biker screamed again, falling beneath the weight of the beast.
I lunged forward, landing on my hands and knees as I scrabbled for the fallen revolver. I picked up the heavy piece of steel with both hands and rose, backpedaling towards Sheila’s Lexus.
“Let’s go!” Sheila yelled behind me. “Jessica!”
“No!” I yelled back as I leveled the pistol at Richard and my tormentor. All those things he’d said? About what he was going to do with Richard dead and gone? Screw this guy. He deserved to be chewed apart by wolves, gunned down in this forest haven. He didn’t have a right to anything.
“No!” Richard yelled suddenly, his voice back to human as he looked back at me over his shoulder, his face and mouth covered in blood, all his cuts and scrapes from the fight perfectly healed. I watched as the fur receded from the rest of his body and his limbs began to shorten and become human again. He was hunched down over Wyatt, naked as the day he was born. “Don’t! You can’t kill him, Jessica! I don’t want that, and neither do you.”
“Get out of the way, Richard,” I growled deep in my throat. “I’m going to end this.”
Sheila grabbed me by the shoulder. “Jessica! I can’t handle this shit! This is crazy, and I need to get the fuck out of here. Right fucking now.”
I glanced back at her, and she looked into my eyes with such pleading need. Her lower lip was shaking like a leaf and the hand she had on me was trembling. I realized then that she’d been crying this whole time, too in shock of everything that was happening around her, everything that she’d led these men into.
“Please,” she cried, “please, just let’s go!”
I finally nodded and let her pull me back to the car. I took the revolver and dropped it on the ground.
“Jessica!” Richard called as I went around and opened the door to the little silver Lexus. “Wait!” he yelled as Sheila started the engine.
I stopped and looked at him.
He stood there, completely naked, his body covered in blood, his eyes hurt. “I love you, Jessica Long. I only did this to protect you.”
“You lied to me,” I spat at him without thinking. “I don’t even know who you are—what you are. I never want to speak to you again.”
I climbed into the car, partly because I couldn’t handle the horror of this place anymore. Or the hurt in his eyes.
Chapter Forty-six – Richard
I watched them go, the cool mountain breeze even colder as it blew over the blood covering my naked body. I shivered a little, but not from the wind. I shivered because of the coldness in Jessica’s words, at the icy pick she’d just stabbed into my heart.
I don’t know what I should have expected from her. Outpourings of love for a wolf who could only masquerade as a human?
“You’re a fucking freak, man!” Wyatt nearly screamed from behind me, his voice hoarse and terrified. “You’re all fucking freaks! What the fuck do you want? What do you want from me?”
I spun back on him. “I want you to leave Jessica Long alone,” I growled, my hands balling into fists by my side. I took a step towards him.
“Leave her alone?” he whined. “I told you, I just barely fucking met the lady! I offered her a fair fucking deal on the place, didn’t I? What’s the deal? This shit was about you, man!”
His words knocked me back a step, and I shifted my weight back onto my heel, the rocks stabbing uncomfortably into my feet. “What?” I growled.
“I ain’t done nothing to her! I swear!”
“The turtle?” I prompted. “The calls?”
He shook his head violently. “What the fuck are you talking about, man? We ain’t done any of that shit! I just found out my crazy Uncle Blake left me that fucking thing!”
“Why the hell were you up here, then?” I asked. “And who called her earlier, told her to just take the deal?”
“We were up here for you, jackass! The guys asked me what happened, so I told them some guy sucker punched me–”
“You mean you fucking lied,” I corrected him, my knuckles popping. “That was a fair fight, and you fucking know it.”
He nodded. “I know, man, I fucking know. But, I gotta save face, Murdoch. If I’d known I was going to end up in a fucking creature feature, I would have lied and said I shot the guy who hit me!”
“Well, if you didn’t make all those threats, then who the fuck did?” I asked, advancing towards him.
He cringed back from me, his hands coming up to his face. “I told you,” he whined, “I don’t fucking know about any of that, Murdoch!”
This was pathetic. Without his mask of a big bad biker, or his gun and his goons, this was all just pathetic. “Well, even if you’re not the one stalking her, I still want you out of her life. Leave her out of your money laundering scheme! And I want you to stay the fuck away from Enchanted Rock, or even this part of the state.
This is no-man’s land for Skull and Bonesmen. You hear me?”
He nodded fervently, his eyes big as saucers. “Got it, dude! Whatever you say! We’re ghosts, man, we’re fucking ghosts after this. You won’t ever hear a peep from us, not as long as I live.”
“You take your men,” I said, leaning down close to his face so he could smell his men’s blood on me, “living and dead, and you fucking leave. You ever whisper a word of this to anyone, ever, I’ll fucking hunt you down, Wyatt Axelrod.” I leaned in close to his neck, sniffed sharply like the wolf I could transform into. “I got your scent, Wyatt. I got your scent, and that means I can track you anywhere, anyplace. Don’t believe me, you just fucking try and break your word.”
“I believe you!” he said, nodding, his eyes still full of terror, the smell of fear still washing out all my senses. “Lightning fucking strike me down, Murdoch, I fucking believe you!”
I was lying, of course. I couldn’t track him. Not like that, at least, where I could sense him from anywhere or anyplace. Now, if he were upwind from me? Absolutely.
“Good,” I growled right in his face, careful to grin cruelly and show him bloody teeth. I straightened up, suddenly very aware of how naked I was, and backed away from him. I turned to leave and find my clothes that had been tossed aside on the gravel.
In front of me, the seven or so surviving bikers had been herded together by my partners, who were still in their wolf forms. Blood covered their snouts and their paws, and they paced in a wide circle. When one of the bikers thought he’d get smart and step out of bounds, one of my pack mates would immediately snap at their ankles, corralling them back in place.
The smell of blood seemed to coat everything. This wasn’t what I’d wanted. There was nothing here to celebrate. But, just like Wyatt had to wear a tough guy face to maintain respect, I needed to do the same to keep their fear as high as possible. And, believe me, there was plenty of fear in that circle. So much fear you bottle it and make a perfume. Name it Eau de Pants Shit. I set my shoulders back, walked into the middle of the crowd of men. I looked them all in the eye, individually.
They all backed away from me as far as they dared to, for fear of getting an ankle snapped by one of my partners. Maybe because I was covered in blood, maybe because I had confidence, maybe because I was bare-ass naked.
“I’ve talked to your boss already,” I said, still standing there in the buff. “I gave him a deal. You walk out of here alive, and you never come back to the Rock. Ever. We know your smell and we know what you look like. We’ll find you. That’s a promise. The only reason you’re leaving tonight is that we don’t want to dig a dozen graves. You understand?”
The men cowered away, not wanting to meet my gaze. But, even as there eyes were planted earthward, they nodded emphatically.
They wouldn’t be coming back. They’d all go home, drink a bottle of whiskey a piece, trying to forget tonight. They might mumble about it to each other, when no one else was around, but they’d never tell a living soul. Who’d believe them? Whoever they told would just make a bad crack about too much trucker speed, or a bad trip. I crouched down and scooped up my clothes, then walked right back out of the circle and began to put them back on. As I pulled my shirt down over my head, Lacy came walking up out of the cabin’s shadowy lee.
“Richard?” she asked. “Jessica okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, trying not to think about her parting words to me. “I think so. For now. But I don’t think we’re any closer. Wyatt’s swearing up and down he had nothing to do with this.”
Behind me, my buddies broke away from the circle, and let the bikers begin to collect their dead and pile everyone into the Suburbans. Anytime they’d step out of line, though, one of my pack mates would let out a low, menacing growl and send them scurrying back and away from the cabin.
“Nothing?” Lacy asked.
“That video,” I said. “You showed it to Jess, right?”
She nodded. “Yeah, of course.”
“Nothing from that?”
“Said she didn’t recognize the woman in the video.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and began to fiddle with it. “Want to look it over?”
I nodded, and she slapped the phone in my hand. I hit play and watched the short clip. “It’s a woman,” I said, surprised, and thought out loud. “It has to be a woman she knows. Someone close to her, wanting to scare her. What other explanation is there?” I paused and thought back to all the conversations I’d had with Jessica over the last day and a half. Something clicked.
“Earlier tonight,” I said, frowning. “Jessica said something about Sheila, about how she wanted her to take the deal with the art gallery.”
“Do you think it’s her? Isn’t she her friend?”
I frowned. “I don’t know for sure. Almost any woman in Enchanted Rock could be that woman in the video. But there’s only one woman who’s been involved in this biker thing from the get go. And, right now, she’s with Jessica.”
Chapter Forty-seven – Jessica
“D-d-d-did that just happen?” Sheila asked after we’d been driving in silence almost the whole way back to the little trading post gas station halfway between Enchanted Rock and the Frost Security safe house. It was just a few minutes ahead and, from one glance at the gas gauge, I knew Sheila was going to need to pull in and get gas. Thank God that place was twenty-four hours. As late as it was, it was probably the only business open in the whole county.
My head was in a tailspin from the events of the last hour. Scratch that. It had only been minutes—Bikers, getting shot at, the violence outside the cabin, and, of course, werewolves. Werewolves? I was in love with a werewolf. A man who could shift from human to wolf, and back again. I felt bad, on one level, for reacting to him the way I had. He…he couldn’t help the way he was, could he? I didn’t know. Had he chosen this for himself? Had it just happened from birth? Had he been bit by one of other wolves, who I assumed were the other men at Frost Security? Maybe, if he’d just said something to me, I would have been able to take this all in.
“I think it did,” I whispered.
“Richard’s a…werewolf? Is that even possible?”
“I guess so,” I said, looking out the window, gazing out at the rocks and trees as they rushed by.
Instead, my first exposure to Richard’s animal form was with blood covering his face. Human blood.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. But, still, there was a part of me that wanted to make Sheila turn right back around, to take me straight back to the cabin, to Richard. But how could I do that? Especially with the way I’d spoken to him? I put my face in my hands and took a deep breath.
“What?” Sheila asked, taking her eyes off the road for a fraction of a moment to glance over at me. “You okay?”
I groaned. “No. What I said to Richard, about never speaking to me again. I can’t believe I said that.”
“What the hell? Why, Jess? He obviously cares for you!”
“Oh, God, maybe I should leave town. I should have taken Wyatt up on his offer as soon as he made it, then I could be far away from this place, with all my troubles over.”
“Come on,” Sheila said. “It’s not that bad. Richard’s a good guy. So what if he might get fleas in the summer.”
I turned and looked at her, my mouth agape.
“What?” she asked, glancing over at me again. “He’s hot. He might be a wolf some of the time, but look at him the rest of the time! He gave himself up for me, Jessica. What other guy would do that? You weren’t paying enough for him to do that, and you know it.”
I frowned, desperately wanting to change the subject. Sheila was wearing me down on the whole thing. I mean, who was I really to judge? So what if he was different? He didn’t kiss any different, and his arms and hands felt just like any other man’s arms or hands when they pulled me close. Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. His felt right when they did it, made all the other previous men in my life seem like
poor imitations when they were stacked next to him.
Why was this happening to me? I find a perfectly good man. A perfectly sane, handsome, attractive man who’s good with my dogs, who wants to support me. Who’s a great kisser. And he turns out to be a man only part of the time. What kind of luck was that? I suddenly realized, as these thoughts swirled around in my head, that I needed to change the subject.
“Sheila?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you get wrapped up in this? I thought you were staying in tonight? I dropped the dogs off with you and everything.”
She sighed and groaned. “I fucked up, that’s how.”
I glanced at her, eyebrow raised. “How?”
“I went down to a Skull and Bones watering hole I know, got into talking to Wyatt, asked him about the deal. He was still smarting over what Richard did to him, I guess, and as soon as he realized I knew you and him, they grabbed me and pulled me along when they got a call about following the computer girl that works for Frost. Guess he thought I could be a bargaining chip or something.”
“Aw,” I said. “Thanks. That’s actually kind of sweet, in a weird way.”
She chuckled. “Well, sweet or not, it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Even stupider than Chad. And he was dumb as a sack of door knobs.”
I laughed. “Yeah, but he was so your type.”
She grinned, a little color returning to her cheeks. She looked like she’d begun to, at least partially, put the events of the last couple hours behind her. “I guess so. But you know what? I think my type’s going to change after tonight. Those guys, Jess, the things they said to me, the way Wyatt looked when he put the gun to my head. It was unreal. I thought that shit was just in the movies. I can’t imagine ever being with a guy like that, not again. I thought these guys did Toys for Tots bike rides and shit.”
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