by CJ Cooke
“Apparently, I’m going to be some hormonal douche bag for a while, but I’ll try to keep it in check. Send him over. I need to apologise to him anyway.”
“Too fucking right you do. Grey,” he added softly, “you know he could never be interested in Calli in that way.”
I grunted in agreement. I was all too aware that Aidan wasn’t Calli’s mate, and now that she’d bonded to her mates, his wolf wouldn’t be able to see her like that. But for some reason, it still grated on me. In fact, no, not for some reason, because apparently, I was turning back into a prepubescent boy. Fuck my life!
“Look, we don’t have much left to do here, so we’ll be closing up early. How about you and me run the perimeter tonight, blow off a bit of steam?” Tanner suggested.
“That sounds good, thanks, Tan.”
There was a shuffling sound on the other end of the phone before Tanner said, “Aidan just left. I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Yeah, later, Tan.”
Hanging up the phone, I checked out the tray from earlier and stole the last of Calli’s cookies. We’d have to get her some more of these. Maybe I’d find out where that English shop was Nash went to for River and surprise her with something. She was running low on her precious tea bags, and I, for one, wasn't brave enough to see what happened if she didn’t get a cup in the morning.
I was just flicking through my second book when Aidan came into the library and didn’t look too happy to be doing so. The guilt of my earlier behaviour hit me strongly. He hadn’t deserved for me to take out my annoyance on him, especially when he hadn’t done anything wrong. In fact, he’d stepped up to make sure Calli was safe when we’d failed to do it ourselves. I should be thanking him.
“Aidan, take a seat.”
He looked around, no doubt hoping someone else was hiding in the corner so he wouldn’t have to be alone with me, and then reluctantly took the armchair Calli had earlier vacated.
“About yesterday, I’m sorry, Aidan. I shouldn’t have spoken to you or treated you the way I did. You’re a respected member of our pack, and I disrespected you. I greatly regret my actions. I’m having… some issues… and I shouldn’t have directed them at you. Can you forgive me?” It wasn’t hard to say. It was something that needed to be said, and Aidan deserved to hear it. There was nothing worse than when someone needed to apologise and never actually did it, dancing around the issues instead.
Aidan immediately relaxed at my words. “Of course. We’re all stressed with what’s going on, and we’re bound to snipe at each other from time to time.”
“I think we both know it went beyond that, and it was unacceptable, but thank you for saying that,” I conceded.
“I’d never do anything to betray you or the pack, Grey. I know what it’s like to not understand why you feel the way you do. When my mother sent me to live with the pack so someone could help me understand the changes I was going through, it was having the pack around me that saved me.”
It was easy to forget Aidan’s past sometimes. His father had a brief fling with his mother while he was visiting my father’s pack. By the time she found out she was pregnant he’d already gone home and no one could find him. She raised Aidan until he was ten but then as he was growing closer to puberty and the changes started to take place, she had to tell him the truth of what he was. He came to live with my father’s pack not long after that and it had taken him a long time to rebuild the relationship he had with his mother.
“Sooooo being sent shopping with Calli isn’t some kind of weird punishment then?” Aidan asked awkwardly, pulling me out of my memories.
“Believe it or not, it’s because she won’t let me go with her. Soul sucking demons after me and all that,” I shrugged with a grin.
“Lucky bastard,” Aidan muttered.
36
Calli
Sam’s Club was like a twisted palace of dreams. It had everything you wanted, but you had to wade through hell while you were doing it. By the time we left the store, Aidan and I were both pushing flatbeds stacked high with what we’d bought, and I’d nearly thrown up at the checkout when I saw the total.
“Grey’s gonna be pissed that you paid for this,” Aidan mumbled around his second hot dog. It was pretty impressive he was still managing to steer that thing with one in his hand.
“Grey’s going to have to accept I’m going to contribute to the pack as well. You all do. It shouldn’t be any different for me.”
“You’re refreshing, you know that,” Aidan said, sounding a little surprised.
“Why do you say that?”
“We’ve only ever had two women associated with our pack. Neither of them wanted to join. Kelly flat out refused to contribute but was happy to live in the cabin for free, and Jean hasn’t worked since she’s been with Blake, so she hasn’t been able to. She was actually hoping to set up a schoolroom in the packhouse and homeschool Coby and any of the other pups, but it never happened in the end.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I’m not sure. I think Kelly decided she wanted to homeschool him herself or something.”
We pushed the flatbeds out of the store, when Aidan ground to a stop so suddenly I nearly rammed the back of his legs with mine.
“Fucking, shit,” I swore as a crate of beer wobbled precariously on the edge of the flatbed. “What the hell, Aidan?”
“Calli,” Aidan hissed. “Be. Quiet!”
The breath sucked into me with a hiss as I prepared to shout at him, but Aidan moved quicker than I’d ever seen him move before, and suddenly he was in front of me with his hand over my mouth. My eyes widened in alarm, but my body froze on the spot. I could see the urgency in his eyes, and given our current situation, I wasn’t stupid enough to make a fuss.
Aidan moved slightly to the side to give me an unobstructed view of our truck, and I was suddenly grateful for his hand over my mouth. There standing next to our truck, was another shadow demon, or the same one, I had no fucking idea.
Pulling Aidan’s hand away from my mouth, I whispered, “What are we supposed to do now?”
Aidan moved in front of me and pulled his phone out of his pocket, keeping his eyes fixed on the shadow demon by the truck. It looked like it was sniffing the truck, which was just all kinds of creepy. It was running its hands over the surface, moving along the side, and every so often, it would lean in, running its face over the exterior like it was trying to scent or taste the truck. Its creepy liquid shadows slid down the side of the truck before dripping to the ground and pooling at its feet.
I heard Aidan whispering into his phone, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the shadow demon currently inspecting my truck.
“Alpha, we’ve got a problem.”
As soon as I realised what he was doing, my panic surged higher. He couldn’t tell Grey about this, he’d be down here as quick as he could if that happened, and if the shadow demon was still here when he arrived, I’d have a mate missing a soul.
Snatching the phone from Aidan, I quickly spoke into it. “Sweetheart, I can’t believe Aidan called you to tell on me. Look, I paid for the groceries. It’s not a big deal. You can pay for them next time.”
“Erm, okay, we can talk about it when you get back,” Grey said, sounding confused and not at all convinced by my subpar acting.
After he hung up, I passed the phone back to Aidan, and I could tell he was pissed. I didn’t blame him.
“And what are we going to do now?” he hissed, gesticulating to the shadow demon, which was still getting creepy with the truck.
“Have you noticed the humans can’t see it?” I asked suddenly, not sure if it was actually relevant.
Aidan looked about the car park at the other shoppers who were just going about their business. None of them were paying any attention to the creature of nightmares standing a few cars away from some of them.
“How is that possible?” Aidan asked.
I tried to move him to one side to talk to him like a normal pers
on rather than just the back of his head, but he stood firm in his position in front of me, instead giving me an annoyed glare.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “I generally just go… magic… because I feel like that explains everything.” I gave the word magic a bit of extra pizazz with some of my best spirit fingers.
“You’re weird. You know that, right?”
“Takes one to know one,” I muttered back.
“That doesn’t even make sense.” He was so frustrated he looked close to stamping his foot, and it was amusing as fuck. “But again, looping back around, what are we going to do now?”
As we stood outside Sam’s Club whisper bickering to each other with one eye on the truck, I caught sight of an elderly couple walking past us and the woman giving me a sympathetic look. Bloody hell, we must look like a married couple arguing in Sam’s Club car park right now.
When I looked back up, the shadow demon’s attention seemed to have finally moved away from the truck. It tipped its head back as if it was sniffing the air before it suddenly turned to the elderly couple walking nearby, heading towards their car.
They’d nearly made it to their trunk when it suddenly moved. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it moved quicker than my eyes could track it. There was no warning. It didn’t even slow down; it just passed through the man. He was still holding his wife’s hand when his steps faltered. He hadn’t even seen it coming. The demon’s shadows consumed him; it barely even paused as it passed through. Then, it just seemed to evaporate into the air.
My hand gripped Aidan’s forearm tightly. I didn’t even remember grabbing hold of him.
“It’s gone,” I gasped, looking around us, expecting the shadow demon to jump out at us any second.
And that was when the elderly man dropped. One moment he was walking across the car park holding his wife’s hand, and the next, he was falling to the ground. Her scream pierced the air, and Aidan and I were running before we even had a chance to think about it.
Aidan dropped to his knees, checking his pulse before starting chest compressions. He was dead. The old man was gone.
The poor woman was distraught, and I pulled her into my arms, turning her away from the sight of Aidan trying to revive a man we both knew wasn’t going to come back. That shadow demon had torn a vital part of him out, and there was no coming back from that.
We stayed with her for half an hour while another passer-by called an ambulance. When they arrived, they worked on him as they loaded him into the ambulance, helping the elderly woman in after. I could tell from the look in their eyes they already knew he was gone. They were just going through the motions now.
Aidan and I stood side by side, watching the ambulance drive away. I didn’t have words for this. How the fuck did we fight something that didn’t even need to stop to kill us? It only had to run at us, and we were… gone? How was this fair?
We must have stood there staring at the truck for a good five minutes, trying to decide what to do.
“I’ll take the first flatbed over and start loading it up. You wait here,” Aidan instructed, reaching for the handle of his trolley with a determined look in his eye.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be safe over here, and if it jumps out at me, you can run inside and call Grey to…”
“Come and get his soul ripped out? No thanks. I’m coming with you. I’m not standing here on my own. The twenty paces it is to the truck won’t make any difference. Anyway, I’m not shadow touched, it shouldn’t take any interest in me.”
Aidan paused, thinking through my words, I could see his face flickering from acceptance to annoyance, and when it finally landed on acceptance, I nearly sighed in relief. In reality, I didn’t want to stand here alone waiting to get picked off, I’d seen that horror movie, and I wasn’t going to be that chick.
“Fine, we move quickly, and we get out of here as fast as we can. But you have to tell Grey what happened and that you lied to him on the phone, and I had no part in it.”
“Technically, I didn’t lie,” I snarked, putting my back into getting the trolley rolling again. “Let’s just get this done and get the hell out of this place.”
I’d never loaded up anything as quickly as we cleared those two flatbeds in my life. Some stuff was probably going to be a bit squished when we got home, but I didn’t have it in me to care. I didn’t even feel bad when we abandoned our trolleys in the car park without putting them back in the trolley bay—okay, that was a lie, it was going to haunt me till my dying day, but at least that wasn’t today.
37
River
It had been a long day at school, thank god it was the weekend. I was seriously considering dropping my hours at the school, but then there wouldn’t be anyone there with the pups, and that just didn’t sit right with me. We needed a better solution. Maybe all of this would feel better once things had settled down—if they ever did.
“Will you stop that!” laughed Holly. “It’s bad enough I have to listen to your melancholy sighs all day, I don’t want to be trapped in a car with you while you’re doing it as well.”
Nash guffawed from behind the wheel, and I could hear Jacob and Coby giggling on the backseat at me. It was nice to hear them actually being kids for a change.
“River’s in lurve,” Coby giggled while Jacob started making kissing noises.
Nash just started laughing harder and it was slightly concerning given that he was driving.
“Yeah, I am,” I grinned, turning around to look at the boys on the back bench behind me. “Just you wait until you’ve found your mate; you’ll know what it’s like.”
Jacob stopped giggling and looked at me quizzically. With flashbacks of him asking me if Calli and I would be making babies, I quickly turned back around only to find a smirking Holly in front of me. Why did I pick sitting in the middle row?
“You do love her, don’t you?” Holly sighed dreamily.
“Of course, he does. She’s his mate,” Nash answered for me, not quite seeing what he was walking into.
“But I’m not your mate,” Holly said sadly.
Nash locked eyes with me in the rearview mirror, and I could see his panic when he realised he was trapped in the car and this conversation was, not only going to happen, but it was going to happen in front of witnesses. Even the kids had stopped messing about on the back seat.
“I love you, Hols, you know I do. But no, my wolf can’t accept you as his mate because you’re human,” Nash told her quietly.
It was obviously a conversation they’d had before, and I respected how Nash told her the truth without trying to sugar coat it. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must be for him. Everyone knew he was madly in love with Holly, but she didn’t want to be a shifter and given the process it took to turn into one, no one blamed her for it. In fact, it was rare anyone really tried anymore.
Holly fell quiet, consumed by her own thoughts, and an awkward silence filled the car. This couldn’t be easy for either of them. How glad was I that I was stuck in the car with them while they relived it for all of us to watch!
Thankfully we pulled onto the packlands soon after, and Jacob and Coby immediately started to get antsy in the back seat, ready to be free from the car. Not to escape the awkward situation, but because they both wanted to be back with Abby. That situation would be a nightmare when they got older, but I didn’t want to even think about it right now. Mainly because the thought of having teenagers in the pack was truly terrifying but also because the packhouse was coming into view now, which meant I was nearly back with Calli.
Holly turned to look at me, and a smile broke across her face. “You look just like them,” she said, nodding at the boys in the backseat.
I knew I was shuffling about with my need to go find Calli like an overexcited pup, but I didn’t care. I just grinned back at her and shrugged my shoulders.
As soon as the truck stopped, I had my seatbelt off and was jumping out the door.
; “Don’t worry, we’ve got the kids,” Holly called out sarcastically as I jogged over to the packhouse and up the front steps.
As soon as I opened the door, the smell of lilac and jasmine hit me, and I followed it through to the kitchen. Calli stood with Aidan whispering about something and looking guilty with an insane amount of groceries gathered on every surface and across the kitchen floor. They were up to something, but I couldn’t care less. My arms closed around her, and she sank back against my chest, looking up with a smile.
“I missed you,” she sighed.
Leaning down, I pressed my lips to hers. It was short and sweet, but like everything with Calli, it was perfect.
“I missed you too,” I told her, nuzzling against her cheek. “Now, tell me what you’re conspiring about.”
A guilty look flashed in Calli’s eyes, and I had a sinking feeling that maybe I didn’t want to know.
“Yeah, Calli, tell him what you want to keep from Grey,” Aidan snarked.
I felt Calli’s chest expand before she sighed in resignation. “We saw another shadow demon today,” she admitted, “at Sam’s Club.”
“Who knew shadow demons shopped at Sam’s Club?” I shrugged. I mean, it was just there, and someone needed to say.
“Dude, this is not something to joke about!” Aidan exclaimed. “It was being all creepy and like, sniffing the truck or something, and then it killed some sweet looking old guy!”
“And for some reason, you don’t want to tell Grey,” I added in question.
“No, it’s not that I don’t want to tell him. It’s just that I know he’s going to take it badly and be all like growly and overprotective and stuff. And we’ve got enough going on at the minute without him worrying about my every tiny, minute movement.” She winced as she spoke. It was almost like she was trying to convince herself more than me. With a sigh, she added, “But we have to tell him because the pack needs to know so they can be aware of the potential threat. If they’re out there in town and not just at the wards, they need to know to be careful.”