CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

Mick stood at the edge of the forest with Carrie, who was being difficult.

“It’s just that I think it would be better if we ran by ourselves,” she said, a defiant gleam in her eye. “You said you didn’t want me to tempt you, and I don’t know what might happen if I take off my clothes.”

He glared at her. “It was not your fault, and I’m sorry that I blamed you. It won’t happen again.”

“What won’t happen again? You won’t kiss me? Or you won’t slap me?”

“Neither,” he said. At the moment, he was certain that it was true, as well. He’d never felt so horrible as he did after their interaction this afternoon, and he was never going to allow himself to feel that terrible ever again. No, he would keep himself in check from now on. He would stay in control. That was what an alpha needed to do, after all. He needed to stay in control.

“I’m not taking off my clothes in front of you.”

“Then do it behind me.” He turned his back.

There was a sound of shattering glass.

They both started, turning in the direction of the noise.

A wolf was leaping through the glass doors in the kitchen, breaking the glass. They watched as it touched down on the deck and then bounded over the edge of the deck and landed on the lawn beneath.

The wolf began to run for the both of them.

Mick looked at Carrie. “What did you do?”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“Fuck,” Mick muttered. This was the last thing he needed. He sprinted across the lawn to intercept the wolf. As he ran, he tugged off his shirt. He jumped into the air pulling off his pants and shifting at the same time, letting his wolf overtake his body.

He landed directly in front of the other wolf, and he stared it down.

The wolf whimpered and lowered its head in submission. It could see that Mick was dominant.

Mick took the other wolf by the neck, gathering folds of its skin and fur into his teeth. He poured his force over the wolf, demanding that it submit completely to him.

There was no resistance in the wolf whatsoever. It surrendered to him immediately.

Mick released him.

And since he was now the wolf’s alpha, he forced the wolf to shift back into human form right away. Mick shifted himself.

Holden appeared in his human form, gasping on the grass, still on all fours.

“Holden?” called Carrie, running forward.

Mick dragged a hand over his face. “You idiot. Did you bite him?”

“No,” said Carrie. “I didn’t do anything like that.” Then she winced. “But we did sort of… do it without a condom.”

Mick squeezed his eyes shut. “Of course. Well, this is just great. Excellent, Carrie. Why don’t you go out, spread your legs for the entire senior class, and make werewolves of all of them?”

Holden was sputtering, looking down at his hands. “What…? What happened?”

Mick ignored him. “I’m not taking him with us, Carrie. I don’t care if I am his alpha, I’m not claiming responsibility for this mutt.”

“How are you his alpha?” said Carrie. “And how come he shifted back?” She looked up at the moon. “It’s still a full moon.”

“I just asserted my wolf over his wolf,” said Mick. “He surrendered, so now I’m his alpha. And alpha wolves can control the shifts of their betas.” He was frustrated, and he just blurted it out, because it was the truth.

Her eyes widened. “What?”

Shit. He’d forgotten he was keeping that from her. He wasn’t going to do it forever. Eventually, he was going to tell her the truth, but he was waiting until she trusted him a little bit better, until she could handle it.

“That means you can control my shifts?”

He sighed.

Carrie’s lip trembled. “Then you made me shift, didn’t you? You made me shift, and you made me kill my parents.”

“Carrie,” he said. “Listen, it was the only way to free you from them. And you have to admit that you’re glad that they’re gone.”

“I am not.” She was crying now.

“Wait,” said Holden. “You did kill your parents?”

Carrie slammed her palm into Mick’s chest. “It’s your fault. You did this.”

He forced her hand away. “You’re being stubborn about this, Carrie. You’re better off without your parents. You need to admit it to yourself.”

“I’m not better off.” She angrily wiped at her tears. “I loved them. I never wanted them dead.” She pointed at Mick. “You get away from me. You get away from me forever.” And then she stalked back up to the house.

Holden stood up. “Uh…”

Mick sneered at him. He turned and walked away too, leaving the naked boy alone in the moonlight.

* * *

Holden didn’t know what the hell was going on. He watched the big naked guy—Mick, right?—leave him alone out here, and he was completely confused. He had no memory of getting here. The last thing he remembered, he was in the house, all the bones in his body breaking painfully. The next thing, he was naked out here.

Naked. In front of everyone. And Mick had acted like it was no big deal.

If Holden looked at him, he’d still see Mick’s bare ass as he walked back to the house.

Not that Holden was looking.

Well, he glanced up occasionally to see how much progress Mick had made, but he wasn’t watching or anything. He didn’t want to check out Mick’s nude body. Seriously.

Holden wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He wanted to just get in his car and drive back home, but he didn’t have his keys anymore. His keys had been in the pocket of his jeans, and he didn’t know where the hell his jeans were. The last time he remembered wearing them was back in that house, so he guessed he was going to have to go back in there to try to find them.

He didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to. He would have much rather just run far, far away from this place.

What the hell had happened?

He didn’t want to face it, but he was pretty sure that he had, in fact, shifted into a werewolf. And that meant…

Fuck.

His life was over. He was going to get carted away to the SF place, and everyone was going to know that he was a werewolf. No one would ever trust him again. Girls wouldn’t fuck him, because they’d be afraid of catching the disease. People would stay clear of him, frightened that he’d wolf out and kill them.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Holden kicked the ground, but he only managed to stub his bare toe.

Shoulders slumping, he made his way back to the house.

On the porch, there was glass everywhere, and he was barefoot, so he had to gingerly maneuver around that. But he made it back into the kitchen. And he found his clothes. What was left of them.

His clothes had all been ripped to shreds, and they seemed to have exploded everywhere. There were strips of ripped fabric lying all over the kitchen like discarded confetti.

He didn’t see his keys anywhere, though.

If his clothes had exploded, the keys probably had too. They would have flown through the air, and they could have landed anywhere.

Holden began to search the kitchen, picking up all the scraps of fabric, looking in every corner and cranny.

Eventually, he found the keys.

They were lying in the sink, all splayed out next to the drain. He couldn’t believe they’d ended up all the way over here.

But now, with his keys in his hand, he wondered if he really could just drive home. Was it legal to drive naked? He imagined getting pulled over. He didn’t think it would go over well.

But he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like he had any other clothes. If he wanted to get home, he was just going to have to do it this way.

It was only that he was still so damned confused. What had happened? Why had it stopped? Was it going to happen again? What had that Mick guy done to him? Why had he said he was Holden’s alpha?

Holden squeezed his hand around the keys and let out a noise of frustration.

He needed some answers. It would be easier to get answers when he was dressed—this whole experience was like one of those terribly embarrassing dreams where he was trying to function normally without any clothes—but he didn’t have that luxury. Besides, it wasn’t as if Carrie hadn’t seen him naked already. He’d go talk to her.

For the second time that night, he ascended the stairs to the second level of the house.

This time, Carrie’s door was shut, and the light was on inside.

Holden banged on her door.

“Go away!” she yelled from inside. Her voice was thick with tears.

“I’m not going away,” he said. “I need some kind of fucking answers here, okay?”

“Holden?” The door opened, and Carrie peered out, red faced. “Oh God, Holden, I forgot about you.”

He glared at her. “Well, that’s great, Carrie.”

She looked him over. “Oh. Your clothes.”

“They’re, um, ripped up.”

“Oh.” She bit her lip, and then she pushed past him into the hallway.

He followed her back into the room where they’d made love the first time, and she darted into the large walk-in closet. She came back with a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.

“It was my dad’s,” she said. “It’ll probably fit you, though.”

He yanked on the clothes, happy to be covered. It made him feel human again. Civilized.

But once the biggest concern was out of the way, once he was dressed, he began to feel terror over the rest of everything that was wrong. Things were so screwed up, and he didn’t know what was going to happen. He clutched his forehead. “What the fuck, Carrie?”

She cringed. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” He sucked in a breath. “Well, that’s absolutely perfect. Fucking amazing. You’re sorry? That fixes everything.”

“I never meant…” She looked around at their surroundings, at the bed where they’d lain together. “Let’s go back to my room.”

He followed her again.

Once there, she sat down on the bed. She patted a space next to her.

He shook his head.

She looked disappointed.

“Am I a werewolf?” His voice cracked.

“Well… I guess so,” she said. “I didn’t even think about it, not when we, you know… did it. You have to understand that I was doing my best not to shift into a wolf and hurt you. I tried to channel it into something else. But I guess it didn’t really work.”

“You were trying to keep from shifting?” he said. “But it wasn’t a full moon.”

“I know,” she said. She looked troubled. “I don’t think that matters. But I don’t understand it, and Mick won’t tell me everything.”

“Who the hell is Mick?”

“He’s my alpha,” she said. “I guess he’s your alpha now too.”

“What?” Holden’s head was spinning. “You’re telling me that we’re like in a wolf pack? Like we’re animals?”

“You just shifted back from being an animal only a short time ago,” she said. “I saw it.”

Holden began to pace. “But you…” He took a deep breath. “Why are we here? Why aren’t you in the SF?”

“Mick says they’re bad. He won’t let me call them. And besides, I wanted to finish school. Things were going so well.” Her face fell.

Holden let out a harsh laugh. “Well, that’s just perfect. You wanted to live it up, so you just stayed here, and you passed your filthy werewolf disease on to me, and—”

“I didn’t mean it.” She shot up off the bed. “I never wanted to hurt you, Holden.”

He shook his head. “What am I going to do?”

She came over to him and grabbed both of his hands. “You’re going to come with me. We’re going to leave together, run away—far away. I have to get away from Mick.”

He pulled his hands away from hers. “I can’t leave. My sister is here. I have to finish school.”

She looked down at the floor. “Right. You hate me, don’t you?”

He opened his mouth to tell her that he did—that she’d ruined his life. But once he was looking at her, he found that he couldn’t say the words. They weren’t true anyway. This was Carrie, the girl who’d changed everything for him. He felt closer to her than anyone on earth. They were connected somehow. He looked at the floor too. “I don’t hate you, Carrie.”

“Really?”

He sighed. He ran a hand through his hair.

And from the bottom level, there was the sound of knocking.

Carrie furrowed her brow. “Someone’s at the door.” She looked confused. “Who would be here now? That doesn’t make any sense.” She opened the door to her bedroom and peered out into the hallway.

The knock came again.

Carrie turned to Holden. “You stay here.” She left the room.

He was alone again.

* * *

Carrie made her way down the steps. She didn’t think that anyone had knocked on her door since that first night with Mick. And he hadn’t knocked, had he?

No, she’d somehow known he was there. She’d been overtaken by the change, and she’d been driven to go to that door, to let Mick in.

Was it Mick at the door again?

No, Mick wouldn’t knock. He didn’t need to knock anymore. She’d already let him in, and now everything was falling to pieces. What was she going to do?

The knock came again.

Carrie was at the bottom of the steps. She swallowed, crossed the foyer, and then she opened the door.

A man stood there. He was in a uniform of sorts. It was black. It resembled a police uniform, but the man had no badge. There was also a woman behind him. She was also wearing the same uniform.

“Hello, ma’am,” said the man. “We’re here from the Sullivan Foundation. We want to ask you a few questions.”

Her stomach turned over. The SF? Here? How had they found them? She’d killed Mrs. Finch, and that was supposed to have stopped the problem. They couldn’t be here now, not after everything she’d done.

Her first instinct was to slam the door in their faces, run out the back, and try to get as far away as she possibly could. But she knew that would only make them more suspicious.

So, she plastered a smile on her face. “Sullivan Foundation? That’s the people who deal with werewolves, right? Why would you want to talk to me?”

“Are you Carrie Beckett?”

“Yes.” She was still smiling.

“Well, someone has reported suspicions that you’re a werewolf, and that you’ve passed on the lupine virus to Holden Rane, who happens to be missing right now. Do you know where Holden Rane is?”

“Holden? No, I haven’t seen him since school,” said Carrie.

“Could we come in, ma’am?”

Again, she wanted to scream at them that they couldn’t, definitely not, but she knew she had to play it cooler than that. Odds were these people were just investigating. She knew that the SF sent trackers after wolves that killed people. When a wolf kill scene was found, then the SF would track the wolf and put a tranq dart in it, and forcibly take it away. But these people weren’t here to do that. They were here to ask questions.

She opened the door wider. “Come on in.”

The two SF workers trooped inside.

“It’s a little late for visitors,” she said. “But how about we go to the den?” She didn’t want to go to the living room. What if they would somehow sense or smell or know that her parents had been killed there? No, the den was definitely better.

They followed her to the den.

She had them take seats, and she sat down opposite them. She was still smiling, and she worried that her smile looked fake. How did she usually smile? Was it like this? She wasn’t sure.

She took a deep breath. When she did, she remembered her confidence—her fearlessness. She remembered that wolf had taught her how to be self-assured and comfortable. And with her next breath, she breathed out all her nerves and filled herself only with her wolf’s bravery.

Now her smile came easily and naturally. “So, this is about Holden Rane, is it?”

“That’s right, ma’am. He’s been behaving strangely. There’s concern he’s a werewolf.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.” She crossed her legs. “But I have to say I’m confused. Why would you think I had anything to do with that?”

“Isn’t Holden Rane your boyfriend?”

Carrie laughed. It bubbled out of her, free and easy. “Boyfriend? Oh, that’s a word you don’t say around Holden Rane. He can’t stand any thought of commitment. No, I’m not the girl who inspired Holden to settle down. I’m afraid it was just business as usual with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know that kind of boy. He’s charming and sweet, but he’s only after one thing, and once he gets it, well, you might as well be invisible. He’s on to his next conquest. Holden and I did have… a connection. A brief connection. But he’s long moved on by now. Not the least bit interested in little old me.”

“You seem pretty broken up about it,” noted the female SF worker wryly.

Carrie shrugged. “I knew what kind of boy he was when I got involved.” She leaned forward. “Honestly, don’t you think it’s sexist that everyone assumes all women fall madly in love with every man they have the slightest physical interaction with?”

The female SF worker arched an eyebrow.

Carrie lowered her voice conspiratorially. “When I say brief, I mean it literally, if you know what I mean?”

The male SF worker snickered.

The female glared at him.

Carrie pretended to be embarrassed. “I’m sure he’s a very nice boy, but I just wasn’t, well, interested in anything else.”

The male SF worker nodded. “We understand, ma’am. So, you haven’t seen him?”

“Oh, no, not in quite a while.”

“And you have no idea where he could be?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Well, all right, then.” The male SF worker started to stand up.

Carrie’s heart leapt. They were going to leave? Great.

But then the female cleared her throat.

“What?” said the male.

“There’s the business about her parents,” said the female.

Jesus, they knew about that too? Carrie smiled again. “I’m afraid my parents are out of town. They’re working on the estate of a late relative. She unfortunately lived in a very remote area, and it’s difficult to get in touch with them.”

“Oh, is it?” The female looked suspicious now.

Damn it.

“Is it true,” said the female, “that no one has been in contact with your parents since the last full moon?”

“Of course not,” Carrie said. “I’ve spoken to them quite a few times. But I have to wait until they call me. They have to drive nearly half an hour to get a cell phone signal.”

“Anyone besides you.”

“I have.”

All three of them turned to see that Mick was standing in the doorway to the den. He smiled at the SF agents.

“Hi there,” said Mick. “I’m Carrie’s uncle. I’ve been looking after her while her parents are gone.”

The workers looked surprised. They apparently hadn’t expected to see Mick here.

“Well, hello there,” said the male SF worker.

“What’s this about her parents?” Mick asked.

“We’re just verifying that they’re not…”

“Not what?” said Mick.

“Well, uh…” The female worker seemed flustered. “Dead, I suppose. There was some speculation that—”

“They’re not dead.” Mick laughed a big, booming laugh. “No. Great-Aunt Agatha is dead, but Christopher and Jennifer are just fine. Why would you be concerned about that?”

The two workers exchanged a glance.

“You have to understand,” said the male, “that we have to investigate every single tip that we receive. Werewolves are serious business. They kill people.”

“Werewolves?” said Mick.

“That’s right, Uncle Mick,” said Carrie, smiling at him. “These folks are from the SF.”

The male worker held up his hands. “We’re just doing our job, that’s all.”

“But,” said the female, “this seems like it might be a case of overactive imagination on the part of the sister. We’ll get out of your hair.”

Carrie and Mick both smiled.

The workers got up.

Carrie escorted them out of the den and began to take them back to the door.

But the male worker suddenly stopped. He turned his head, sniffing down the hallway.

Carrie shot Mick an alarmed look.

“Can I… help you?” said Mick.

“I smell him,” said the male worker.

“We track,” said the female, by way of explanation, “and when someone’s missing, we’ll often get their scent, which we did.”

“Well, you would smell him,” said Carrie. “He’s been here before. Like I said, we had a connection.”

But the male worker was going down the hallway.

Carrie and Mick darted after him.

He stopped in the kitchen, surveying the broken glass and the strips of clothing lying all over the floor. “What happened here?”