He kissed my cheek. “I’ll be home soon.”
I heard his clothes fall to the porch and the soft thump of his paws hitting the ground after he leaped off the porch. I rolled my eyes at the ceiling.
Werewolves could be so melodramatic.
I WALKED INTO the bedroom and peeled off my clothes, which were now suspiciously stained and smelled of raw steak and sautéed onions. The house seemed so empty, even with the turtlenecked Oscar yipping and yapping at my heels. I’d become accustomed all too quickly to midnight snacks, communal showering (for water conservation, of course), and going to bed together. As tired as I was, the idea of crawling under cold sheets alone was depressing.
I slipped into one of Cooper’s T-shirts, pulled Oscar into my lap, and fired up my computer. I’d been dealing with this werewolf issue from the wrong angle, trying to apply stuff I’d learned from movies and myths or Mutual of Omaha specials. I was dealing with real people. Cooper said there were packs all over the world. There had to be other bewildered were-girlfriends out there. I just had to find them.
Unfortunately, you get a lot of weird results when you Google “werewolf girlfriend.”
Gingerly touching my spanking-new bite mark, I waded through pages of results before finding a Web site for some occult book shop in Kentucky called Specialty Books. It was the only online store I could find that carried relationship-advice books for people dating were-creatures. It’s not as if they carry this stuff on Amazon.com. I bought four hundred dollars’ worth of books and agreed to the outrageous shipping prices.
I continued to surf, trying to distinguish the “could be factual” from the “total crap.” A lot of stuff I already knew from experience. For instance, according to WerewolvesDebunked.com, werewolves were far more in touch with their natural instincts than most humanoid supernatural creatures, which also made them impulsive, temperamental, fiercely territorial, and intensely physical. Sound like anyone I know?
And I learned why Cooper ate so much and never gained a damn ounce. Shifting from human to wolf requires huge amounts of energy. Younger werewolves have to scarf down calories all day to keep their bodies fueled and ready to change. There’s also a bit of instinctual hard-wiring to keep fed, because real wolves never really know when their next meal will be.
I didn’t know, however, that there was no “magic bullet” solution—silver or otherwise—to kill a werewolf. While they do have increased healing abilities to cope with their rough-and-tumble lifestyle, wolves are as vulnerable as any creature. So if it will kill a real person or wolf, it will kill a werewolf. I couldn’t explain why, but that made me feel both more and less safe.
I was surprised to find that there were many kinds of were-creatures. Bears, horses, lions, skunks, cats, dogs. Name any animal, and there is likely a person out there who can change into it.
At this point, I eyed Oscar suspiciously. “If you turn out to be a potbellied, middle-aged accountant, I will be supremely annoyed.”
Oscar huffed, as if the very idea offended him.
FOR THE NEXT FEW days, my face felt as if I’d been head-butted by a cement truck and didn’t look much better. I spent most of the next day in the kitchen to avoid questioning looks from customers. The last thing I needed was domestic-abuse rumors running rampant in Grundy. Alan might clamp a bear trap on Cooper intentionally.
Cooper was reverting to his previous “grumpy bastard” persona to everyone but me. He seemed to want to pretend we’d never gone to the valley. Other than giving me updates on Pops and occasionally inspecting my injured eye, he didn’t comment on his family. He was, however, snapping at the general population and being overprotective to the point of annoying me.
It didn’t help that he was leaving town for the next few days to escort a group of Tennessee lawyers interested in hunting caribou about seventy miles south of Grundy. I wasn’t anxious. I knew he had to work. He’d taken fewer guide jobs since we’d “taken up together,” as Abner called it. But he seemed afraid to leave me alone, unwilling to be away from me. It was sweet, but knowing I had that sort of pull over someone was strangely uncomfortable. I was used to my parents’ overbearing attention, but it was something I’d worked to avoid. The emotional growing pains were starting to freak me out.
“I want you to promise me that you won’t take Oscar out at night by yourself,” he said in a voice that sounded so dangerously close to a command I considered threatening several of his orifices with a spatula. He was keeping pace with me as I crossed from the stove to the pass, back and forth, more like a caged animal than I’d ever seen him. I didn’t think provoking him with kitchen utensils was a great idea at this juncture. “Don’t get out of sight of the cabin. Lock up tight at night.”
“OK, but you’re ruining my plans. Evie and I were going to order pizza, raid the liquor cabinet, and invite some boys over to play Spin the Bottle.”
“I’m not kidding, Mo,” he said, shooting a snarling glare toward where Alan sat devouring pancakes.
“I lived alone for years before you came along,” I told him, taking his chin in my hands and giving him a stern look.
He countered, “Within six months of moving here, you were robbed at knifepoint and stumbled into the path of an angry bear.”
I shrugged. “So if the laws of probability hold, the chance of anything else happening to me is pretty low.”
He growled, a low rumble that started deep in his chest. “Mo.”
“Honey, I know this is all part of that instinctual protective alpha-male thing, but you’re pissing me off. You’re the one who’s going to be stuck in the woods with a bunch of drunk, armed attorneys. Frankly, I’m more concerned for your safety.” I snickered, kissing his chin where I’d swiped flour across his skin. “But I promise, I will not go out alone, tell unknown callers I’m home by myself, or accept candy from men driving unmarked vans.”
“That’s all I ask,” he said, his lips quirking.
IT TOOK ME practically dragging Cooper to his truck to get him to leave, but I managed to get through the afternoon relatively unscathed. Lynette gave me the wrong orders, called me by the wrong name, or just slung dirty dishes at me through the pass. It was kind of nice to return to that normalcy.
Evie had agreed to come over to my place for a Sandra Bullock chick-flick marathon. She was going to make something she called “Melt Your Face” margaritas, which had my stomach lining quivering in fear. I’d just popped While You Were Sleeping into the DVD player when Evie was called away from whatever the hell she was pouring into my blender by an obnoxious pop tune from her cell phone.
“Aren’t you a little old for Britney Spears?” I asked dryly.
“Buzz?” she snickered into the phone. “I told you, we’re getting drunk and watching people being obnoxiously likable. Serious girly business—What? What’s going on?”
I sat down on the couch with a heavy thud. Oh, God, who is missing now? Which one of my friends was missing or hurt or worse? I thought of Alan, who had been able to venture out into the woods more often as the weather warmed up. What if he’d been attacked? Abner had been going on his prospecting trips into the preserve lately. Walt had been fishing. Hell, Gertie had been planning to dig a garden in her backyard. None of them was safe. I buried my face in my hands and waited for Evie to get off the phone and give me the bad news.
She snapped her cell phone shut and returned to the blender, measuring and pouring with a chemist’s precision. I stared at her, dumbfounded.
“Well?” I asked.
“Alan found the hikers, what was left of them,” she said, sounding oddly resigned. “Buzz wanted to let me know that Alan asked him to contact the state medical examiner’s office to handle the remains. Buzz is heading up the mountain now.”
I took the tequila and poured us each a shot. “Where were they?”
She tossed back the liquor and winced. “A mile or so from their campsite. They were just . . . bones, scattered around a ravine. Alan was finally able to see them now that the snow has cleared. Buzz said they’d been gnawed on . . . by a lot of different animals. Alan doesn’t want to leave the scene until they can get them somewhere decent.”
I didn’t know why this news was such a blow, when I’d known there was little chance of those boys being alive, that it was only a matter of time until their bodies were found. Knowing that they’d been found made the situation seem so final but at the same time opened up the same old questions. What happened to them? Who had attacked them? Would there be more attacks? Thinking of Alan, sitting on the dark mountain, keeping watch over bones, made my stomach hurt.
“How about we put this off until another night?” I suggested, reaching for my Tums. “Buzz is probably going to want to see you.”
“Buzz is going to help Alan,” she said. “And you and I have a date with too-good-to-be-true romantic comedy.”
“Evie.”
“Moonflower,” Evie shot back. “What else can we do? They’re up on the mountain, and we’re here. It will be hours before they’re home. Do you think there’s anything you could do to help Alan?”
I shrugged. “What if I told Alan, ‘Hey, I know where you can find a huge population of wolves. How about we go make some dental impressions and compare bite marks?’”
“Then you’d betray Cooper and the pack after they trusted you with their secret,” she said, slamming the bottle down on the counter. “This isn’t something we’re meant to interfere with, Mo. If I’ve learned anything from living with the pack, it’s to let them sort out their own problems, figure this out on their own.”
“It’s not exactly a squabble over the last Moon Pie. The problem is, they may or may not have someone in their pack who’s killing people!” I cried. “Your husband is up on that mountain. Alan is up on that mountain. What if whatever is out there comes back to that ravine looking for its trophies?”
“Is that honestly what you think is happening?” Evie demanded, the color draining from her cheeks. “You think someone in the pack is doing this?”
“You’re telling me that you haven’t thought of it?”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Those people are my family. They might hurt someone in a fight, but none of them is capable of random killing. I meant that this is probably just some rogue werewolf, a loner who enjoys any kill. If that’s the case, the pack will hunt him down. Honestly, Mo, sometimes I don’t know what goes on in your head.”
“Well, then, tell me what to think. You’re so sure of yourself, sure of the pack. Tell me what to think so I don’t feel so damn guilty all the time. How can you watch Alan beat himself up over not being able to find the wolf every day, when you know you could help him?”
“How will handing my family’s secret to a representative of the U.S. government help anything?” she asked quietly. “And I can watch Alan struggle because I’ve had years of practice keeping secrets. Dead-liners aren’t able to phase. The one service we can offer the pack is our silence. I didn’t grow up in a hippie love commune where you made a collage every time you had a thought or a feeling!”
“Hey, that’s not fair!” I shouted. “I don’t run around expressing every thought in my head. I just think we have some responsibility in this situation.”