I curse when I spot the truck sitting in its usual spot. I was hoping to be wrong about that. Why couldn't the keys in my hand just be his spare set?
If Warren left without his truck, doesn't that imply something is wrong? Seriously wrong? Mr. Atherton is acting like there's nothing to worry about, but is he just sparing me?
My parking job at the end of my drive into town, during which I stall the truck's manual transmission only three times, is not the best the lot behind Denali's has ever seen, but I leave the truck near the rear entrance, where it's unlikely anyone who doesn't work here will be inconvenienced by it. Taking a deep breath, I open the door and step into the biting cold, letting it fortify me for the task at hand.
The bar is warm and deserted save for a bored-looking woman reading a magazine behind the bar. “Where's Warren?” I ask without preamble.
The woman doesn't look up, just points towards a door marked, “Private.”
Ignoring the sign, I open the door and walk up the flight of stairs it reveals.
The stairs dump out into a living room. A battered brown couch, two reddish recliners that have seen better days, and very nice television sit amongst handmade wooden tables, dream catchers, and a vast assortment of forest-themed paintings.
Classic heavy metal comes from behind an archway, and I follow it into a kitchen that was obviously decorated in the nineteen seventies and not touched since.
At an olive green stove, stirring a pot of something, stands a very shirtless Warren.
Well, obviously, he's fine. His throat has not, in fact, been ripped out. There's is not a single mark on his back save for a tattoo of Celtic knotwork on his shoulder blade. He's even singing.
About half a heartbeat before I run away, he turns.
“Michaela?” Holding a large wooden spoon, he takes a step closer to me. “What are you doing here?”
A blush rushes over my cheeks. “I was worried about you.”
“I'm fine.”
Nodding, I feel like a complete looser. I recognize I should be relieved, but there's too much humiliation for me to feel happy about Warren being safe and healthy.
“You could have called, you know.” He steps back again, leans against the counter, and folds his arms across his bare chest, the spoon lying against one of them. There's a hint of amusement in the creases on his face, but his eyes are distant. “I have a phone. Seth even has its number.”
“And it's probably in the student phone book, huh?” I stare down at the ground to keep myself from staring at Warren's partially hidden pectorals. “I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking.”
“Michaela?” The concern in his voice causes me to realize I'm shaking.
“I had this dream,” I blubber. “This wolf ripped your throat out. And there was blood all over the place. And Mr. Atherton said you were alright, but he wouldn't tell me where you were. And then I found your truck sitting in the parking lot, so I was scared, and-”
Suddenly, Warren is wrapping his arms around me, pressing me against his bare skin. I stop trying to talk and concentrate on trying to remember how to breathe. His scent flows into me, comforting but, at the same time, making me struggle all the more to figure out how my lungs are supposed to work. “It's alright, Michaela. I'm fine.”
A few moments of trembling later, I finally relax enough to draw a normal breath. My arms slide around Warren, hugging gently back. My eyes are closed as my cheek presses against his chest and I let myself swim in his warmth. His heartbeat is fast, but its deep timber comforts me. Warren is fine.
He pulls away from me. “I think I need a shirt.”
I think he doesn't, but I don't argue.
His room here is nearly the opposite of his room at school. He doesn't have piles of dirty clothes and old dishes on the floor, or anything. The room is still clean, but the adjective 'cluttered' springs to mind. Three walls are covered in shelves, which are crammed full of books and wooden carvings. The carvings cover everything from kittens to the Grim Reaper. The books include a wide selection of fantasy and horror novels, a decent collection of graphic novels, and a full section on wolves and werewolf myths.
He appears to have the complete works of Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Poppy Z Brite. The entirety of Laurell K Hamiliton's Anita Blake series. And... I find myself grinning inanely. He has a whole shelf of Sherrilyn Kenyon.
“Okay, I'm not going to give you a hard time over Anita Blake, because she's fairly violent and from what I've been told, the later books are fairly pornographic, but the Dark Hunters series?” I turn as Warren drags a long sleeved t-shirt over his head. It's a shade of blueish gray that seriously sets off his eyes, a fact that distracts me from what I was saying.
Warren raises his eyebrows. “What about it?”
What about what? Oh, yeah.
“Well, those books are pretty solidly in the romance genre.”
He pulls a pair of boots from under the bed. Apparently he's decided if he's going to get dressed, he's going to get all the way dressed. “Your point being?”
“Well...”
“It's a stereotype that only women read romance novels.” He quickly ties a lace and moves onto the other boot. “Sherrilyn Kenyon has an interesting take on were-culture. It intrigues me. Even if she is incredibly sentimental and optimistic.”
“Romances wouldn't be much fun if they were realistic.”
He smiles sadly at his boot. “No, they wouldn't be.” Standing abruptly, he leaves the room. “Are you done invading my privacy yet?”
Sheepishly, I follow.
In the kitchen again, Warren turns off the stove, his eyes narrowed at the overcooked oatmeal on it. Shaking his head, he takes the pot from the stove and dumps its contents into the trash with a dull bang on the bottom of the vessel. “Is whoever brought you waiting down stairs?”
“Whoever brought me?” I mimic mindlessly.
“Yeah. Seth? Tod?”
“Me.”
He runs the spoon around the edge of the pot, dislodging the last of the ruined oatmeal. “You?”
“Yeah. I sort of borrowed your truck.” Pulling the truck keys from my pocket, I hold them up with fingers that are suddenly tingling from lack of blood circulation.
“You borrowed...” The pot slams down hard in the sink, the spoon hurled angrily after it. Flames in his eyes and his nostrils flaring, Warren bears down on me with long, hostile strides, a growl in the back of his throat.
“I'm sorry,” I whimper. “I-”
“Michaela!” Fingers dig into my arms, bruising the flesh. “It isn't safe for you to be out alone! What the hell were you thinking?” My teeth rattle as he shakes me.
“I was thinking you were in danger!” I yell back.
He stills. His next line is a whisper. “Even if I were, you should have gotten someone to come with you.”
He sighs and walks away.
He picks up the pot again, then starts to scrub it. “Do you like oatmeal?”
What? Oatmeal? I rub my arms sulkily, but answer, “Sure.”
“Good. I'll try not to burn this batch.”
“You do that,” I grumble.
Stopping, he looks at me for several long moments, until well after the point were I start to feel ashamed of my churlishness.
“I'm sorry, Michaela.” He makes his eyes meet mine. “You scared me.”
“You scared me first,” I whisper back.
Nodding, he acknowledges that with solemnity. “I know. I'm sorry about that too.”
“Why did you do it?” I ask. “What's been going on with you?”
In answer, he turns away again and puts the pot on the stove, starting the water to boil.
Okay. Not going to tell me. I could try harder, but I've already forced my way into his home, being even more invasive would be wrong.
“Could we have apples in it?”
He squints at me, then a look of relief skirts over his features. “Sure.” Grabbing one from a bowl on the counter, he tosses it to me. I'm a bit worried when he gets out a knife that he's going to throw it, too, but he slides it along the buttercup yellow counter instead. It stops exactly on target, right in front of me.
“Are you going to ask me about last night?” Carefully, I start to peel the apple, preparing it for dicing.
Warren sighs. “Don't have to. Mom called the school this morning. She wants to know what it is the pack is hunting.”
The fruit knife moves slowly around the apple. “The pack is actively hunting the male whatever-I-am?”
My companion gives me a slow nod. “He's been slaughtering livestock, breaking into barns in human form, and then eating what he lures out.” His lip curls in revulsion. “Not even eating all of it, letting most of the animal go to waste.”
I can't tell if he's more disgusted by the stealing or the waste, but his repulsion is clear.
“So you left school for a while so you could help your pack find this monster?” I guess. So maybe I'm not willing to let that go completely...
He shrugs, not meeting my gaze.
“What are you going to do to him if you find him?”
“Do you remember when you invited me to go to Anchorage, but I couldn't because I had to stay here and defend someone?”
Coming to the end of the apple skin, I consider tossing it over my shoulder to see if it spells out the name of the man I'm going to marry like the old wives' tale says it should, but I drop it quickly in the trash instead while I answer Warren's question. “Yeah. I wasn't sure if you were joking or not.”
He gives me a pained look. “Not.”
“Alright.” I take a deep breath. “So you didn't want your dad to kill this guy...” Angling the knife, I start to cut wedges.
“He'd taken a chicken.”
“A chicken?”
Warren nods, taking the apple slices and starting to dice them into a small bowl. “It was his third chicken, but he'd never taken anything more noticeable.” He gives me a long look. “His crime wasn't so much that he had taken the birds. The crime was doing something that could draw unwanted attention to our kind.”
“Right.” I nod my understanding. “But a chicken here and there wouldn't draw much attention, would it? The farmer would just think a fox had gotten in or something, right? Or a the mundane kind of wolf?”
“Right. Or maybe the chicken had escaped. Even if he thought it had been stolen outright, he'd have no reason to think it was a were.”
“Okay.” No longer having a task to perform, I put my little knife in the sink. “But your dad wanted to kill him anyway?”
“No, not really,” he says, weary. “But some of the pack did, and the rules were on their side.”
I shiver. “So you had to defend the guy so it looked like your dad wasn't going against the will of the entire pack?”
Warren nods and puts down his knife. Picking up a bottle of cinnamon, he shakes some powder out onto the apple before putting the bowl in the microwave and going to check on the oatmeal. “Right.”
“Did it work?”
“He was sent on a Trial.” Stirring the pot, he glances at me to see if I understood that word. I shake my head. “He was sent into the wilderness to try to survive alone for three days. He's the one who first smelled the Mystery Beast.”
“Mystery Beast?”
Warren shrugs. “They didn't know to call him the 'whatever-Mike-is' when the pack first started talking about him.” A teasing smile is flashed my way before he turns serious again. “Although I'm not sure why not. They'd been told about you, that no one knew what your beast is because your scent is different to everyone and females always say they've never smelled anything like it. I was pretty sure you were connected; I just hoped I was wrong.”
“Why?” I ask softly.
Warren looks down at my hand on his arm. When did I put that there? “Why what?”
“Why...” I move my hand away, wondering what possessed me to put it there in the first place. “Why did you hope we weren't connected? People don't think I have anything to do with the dead animals, do they?”
“I don't think anyone seriously thinks that, no.” Watching the pot closely, he stirs the oatmeal some more. “Would you get the apples?” he asks as the microwave dings.
“Would I get the apples?” I mutter under my breath, going to get the apples despite resenting the way my companion likes to evade questions. Telling myself I'm being unreasonable, that he doesn't actually owe me answers to anything, I open the door to the microwave. The bowl is hot enough I drop it almost as soon as I touch it. Drawing my sleeves down to act like oven mitts, I pick it up again and take it over to Warren, who doesn't seem to notice how hot it is when he picks it up.
Silently, he mixes in the apples and then divides the cereal into two bowls, putting mine on the table for me rather than just handing it over. He puts his in front of the chair furthest from mine, then pours two glasses of milk, stirring chocolate syrup into mine.
“Thank you.” I smile when he brings the milk near, but the expression falters when he ignores the hand I hold out for it and puts the glass down on the table instead. Is he trying to avoid the possibility of touching me? Considering that he was pressing me against his naked chest not half an hour ago, that's kind of strange.
But then, what about Warren isn't strange?
The silence as we eat isn't exactly an easy one, although its not as uncomfortable as it could be.
“It's good,” I offer, but he meets it only with a quiet thanks.
We're both finishing up when the door from downstairs bangs open. “Michaela!” Mr. Atherton's voice storms into the kitchen. Then Mr. Atherton himself storms into the kitchen. “You did not have permission to leave the school.”
Permission? Since when did I need permission? “My understanding,” I state calmly, and as officially mature as I can manage, “is that as long as I return at a reasonable hour, my movements are unrestricted.”
Warren informs me in a grumbling, gravel-filled voice, “That was before something interested in hunting you moved into our territory.”
“Precisely.” Mr. Atherton glares down at me, and I realize his anger was based on fear. “Do you have any idea how worried everyone is about you?”
I blink. It hadn't occurred to me people might be upset to find me missing.
“No, you don't, do you?” Shaking his head, Mr. Atherton lets out a not-so-gentle snort.
The sound rankles, and anger tightens my spine. “If you'd just told me where Warren was, then maybe I would have been happy to stay locked up!”
“That wasn't his fault,” Warren interjects quickly. “I didn't tell him he could tell you, so he didn't know I wouldn't mind. Besides, I wasn't hard to find. Would have been even easier to find had you remembered how to use a telephone.”
“Mike...” Mr. Atherton sighs softly and squeezes his eyes shut for a breath. “I'm sorry I made you more worried about Warren than you needed to be. The fact remains, though, that if you honestly felt a need to search for him, you should have taken others with you. At least half the school would have done it in a heartbeat.” He shakes his head at me. “Hell, I would have brought you down here if you'd just asked me.”
“You wouldn't tell me where he was.” I squint at the principal, thrown more by that one little curse word than by his blustering. “Why would you bring me to him?”
Mr. Atherton shrugs. “Simply giving you a lift to a place you specified wouldn't be betraying a confidence.”
Wolves. Will I ever understand them?
Warren clears his throat. “You need to be going if you're going to make it back before moonrise.”
“You aren't coming with us?” I ask him. The question sounds like half of a plea.
Warren shakes his head.
I get up, trying to keep my head from drooping but failing. “Well, thanks for the food. Sorry I bothered you... and scared everybody... and all.”
“Michaela?”
Warren's watching me with a quiet expression. “I'll be back after the moon.”
Nodding quietly, I decide not to wonder why that comforts me so much.