Dreamwalkers (20 page)

(Try)

She closes her eyes and crouches down.

(It might help to take off your clothes)

The look she gives me tells me that isn’t
going to happen. I shrug.

(They’ll probably just rip off anyway)

(i never want to see these rags again)

I smile.

(It might help to listen to your wolf senses.
Like meditation. Especially smell and sound)

For long, agonizing minutes, Misty remains
still, crouched on the ground with her eyes closed. I tune in to
the men up at the office. It’s too far to hear specific words but I
can hear the general rumble of voices. Then the truck revs.

(Shit, they’re coming)

Misty opens her eyes wide.

(Come on, turn!)

(i can’t, i tried)

(We have to get out of here! They’re coming
back!)

(i can’t do it!)

(TURN WOLF)

(TURN WOLF NOW)

Misty trembles, and her eyes grow wider. Her
back rounds, and at first I think she’s smiling, then I realize
it’s the wolf’s mouth stretching hers. She stares at her hands as
the fingers shrink and the fingernails harden and curve. Then the
hair starts growing, and her human expression is lost even as she
shrieks inside my head.

I flow into wolf and use my teeth to free her
from her clothes. She growls at me.

(are you okay?)

(fuck you)

She’s angry. It’s boiling off of her. I
decide to ignore it and instead, once she is free from her nasty
pants and everything else, I bolt off toward Martin’s trailer.

(Martin)

(Martin wake up)

(who’s martin?)

The broad sweep of headlights passes over the
cage area and I dive under Martin’s trailer. Misty follows me. Not
happily.

I watch a black truck pull into the area near
the cage. Ben climbs out of the passenger seat and walks around to
the back, where his men have someone tied up.

(what happened to escaping?)

(If it’s another woman, we need to help
her)

Misty seethes. She wants out, and I don’t
blame her. But I have to see. And I want to pull Martin out if I
can. And the others.

They are my pack.

The wind shifts and I can smell blood.

I can also smell that it isn’t a woman.

(blood)

I glance over at Misty. Saliva drips from her
jowls. A new wolf has a lot less control than an older wolf, and
Misty has also been starving for weeks. If I don’t stop her, she
will run out there and expose both of us.

(STAND DOWN)

She whimpers.

The men haul their hostage from the truck
bed. He’s grown, but his slight build makes him appear young, maybe
late teens or early twenties. He staggers when he hits the
ground.

“This could be easy, or it could be hard,
Jeff,” says Ben. “You could tell me what I want to know, and we
could fix you up real nice, take care of that gunshot wound. We’ve
got doctors here.”

Ben strolls around in front of the hostage.
“Or, you could play with this nice little alpha bitch we’ve got
here. She killed twelve of my men this afternoon. I’m sure she’ll
make quick work of you.”

“I don’t know anything,” the kid named Jeff
croaks.

He’s in bad shape. Major blood loss. I don’t
think the bullet hit anything vital but this didn’t happen just
now.

“My tracker here knows Daniel Connor’s scent.
He smelled it on you. We’ve got his cousin here, and we know he’s
looking for her. So I will ask you again: Where is Daniel?”

“I don’t know!”

Ben shrugs. “That’s too bad. I guess you’ll
get to have to fun with Miss Kayla. She’s every bit as vicious as
Daniel is.”

He turns to head toward the cage, then stops.
Then he lifts his nose to the air and inhales deeply.

“Fuck,” he mutters, then snaps, “They’re
gone. Both of them.”

Immediately, two of them growl and turn
wolf.

Martin will have to wait. I run and Misty
follows.

“Find them!” Ben bellows.

Around us, trailers of full of werewolves
awaken and follow his order. Misty and I ran flat out, passing most
of the trailers and tents long before anyone emerges.

The air is thick with their alien stink.
Misty isn’t as fast as me and I keep having to slow to allow her to
keep up, even though I’m injured too. I try to remember that she’s
been malnourished and beaten and has never been a wolf before. I’m
still frustrated.

I stick to the wider roads, since there isn’t
enough light to illuminate the trees and I know Misty isn’t as
experienced as I am in running through the forest. But it quickly
becomes apparent that she is going too slowly. We aren’t going to
be able to outrun these guys.

Also, the road I chose seems to be looping
around. Up ahead I can see the gleam of moonlight on the clearing
where Ben and crew were threatening Jeff.

Shit

There’s a body lying on the ground, and I
don’t see anyone else around. The truck is gone. My ears flick: the
sound of an engine.

A familiar engine.

My mom. My motherfucking MOM. I run faster as
she leaps from the passenger side of Remy’s Jeep and looks around
wildly. Aunt Jenny emerges next and is nearly knocked over by
Daniel’s wolf barreling out of the back seat behind her. He races
at me, legs churning so fast that for a split second I feel my
heart go cold. He’s ready to attack me.

Then he passes me, and as I turn I watch him
pass Misty and then see him meet the swarm of wolves that are at
Misty’s heels.

Remy’s wolf flies past before I’ve even
turned around. Then my mom, and Aunt Jenny, and suddenly I’m
following them.

There are so many, and I’m so tired, but
being with my pack invigorates me. I focus on one at a time. I’m in
the open now. I’m uncaged. I’m a wild creature with fangs and claws
and I know how to use them better than these newbies, these mutts
with diluted blood, raised by humans.

I quickly tear through one of the wolves
who’d spent the cage match drinking–slow, stupid man–and start
toward an unfamiliar wolf before something stops me. I use up
precious seconds to sniff, and realize this wolf smells like
pack.

Like Martin.

He blinks at me, then turns and helps Aunt
Jenny with a gray wolf that has his teeth in her back. Martin bites
the back of the wolf’s neck–not the best move, when the jugular was
right there for the taking–but it gets the gray wolf to let go of
Jenny, and then she is able to finish him.

Looking over my shoulder, I look at the
wolves still fighting. There seem like a lot, but some are just
standing around, not joining the attack on Daniel. I’m confused for
a moment, until I recognize them. Phil, Terry, Laura, Mike–they all
fight for me. Did I give this command? Or did they simply realize
who I was, and wait among Ben’s pack for me to find them?

(Fight–fight–kill everyone who hurt you)

My command sparks something in those wolves
standing there dumbly. They turn to Ben’s wolves and attack. I can
tell the degree to which each has been tortured by their ferocity.
Laura, her wolf a golden yellow, goes straight for a gray wolf with
one eye. The blood from his jugular sprays three feet in the
air.

With Daniel ripping through Ben’s pack like
they’re rabbits, and the rest of my pack mobilized and evening out
the odds, I turn my attention back to Misty and the body on the
ground near the Jeep.

Misty has lain down near the boy. She has
remained wolf, as if she feels somewhat safer in her new form. I
pad up to the boy.

In the dim moonlight, I recognize him as Alex
Lo. Then I blink and see that it’s someone else. His hair is much
longer than Alex’s. His nose is sharper, his face narrower.

I lick his neck. My tongue feels a pulse. My
nose smells blood, so much blood. He may not survive the night.

I turn human and lean over him. “Jeff?” I
ask.

He moans and cracks open his eyes. He seems
to focus on me for a moment, just a moment, before his eyes slip
closed again and his head falls to the side.

Misty watches me with her own eyes
half-closed.

“Well, well, well,” says a male voice behind
me.

I change to wolf as I whirl around to face
that voice. That voice I’d recognize anywhere. I growl at the tall,
dark-haired man smirking at me from a face full of stubble. He
wears a pair of worn jeans and a white t-shirt, barefoot, so
casual, like he’s just going to relax on the couch.

“Oh, you want to play?” he asks.

His t-shirt starts to move, and hair begins
sprouting up along his arms and from under the collar. His canine
teeth grow and transform his face into a wicked smile that is
horrifyingly unnatural.

I stare in horror at his transformation. I
should attack–I know I should do it, now, while he’s vulnerable,
but something in the way he is transforming is so slow and
controlled that I wonder if he really is vulnerable. He seems to
relish the way his limbs lengthen and narrow and contort.

I watch, frozen, and then I do that one thing
I never imagined I would do.

(Mom)

The word is full of much more than just the
word. It is full of warning and a call for help and underneath I am
screaming, “IT’S MATTHEW.”

“
You want to play?”

I stood in the doorway of our living room
and glared at the guy sitting on the couch, Xbox controller in his
hands. Matthew wasn’t bad looking, for one of Mom’s boyfriends:
full head of hair, all of his teeth, and his stomach didn’t hang
over the waist of his jeans. Unfortunately he seemed to know it,
and it set my teeth on edge.

“
No, thank you,” I said frostily. “Haven’t
you heard that video games rot your brain?”

He narrowed his eyes and smiled at me.
“Don’t know where you learned to be such an ice princess,” he
said.

I kept my face frozen. I knew exactly what
he was saying, and I certainly didn’t like it, but considering that
I shared the same opinion, I had nothing to say in my mother’s
defense.

Every night I heard them, going at it. Like
they weren’t even trying to be quiet. It kept me up at night, to
the point where I’d bought some big headphones, the insulated kind
that really blocked out all sound, and the moment I heard the bed
start creaking I would put them on and spend the next few hours
staring at the screen of my laptop with scratchy eyes.

No sleep=grumpy Kayla.

I didn’t ask why Matthew was there in our
living room instead of at work. Mom said he was “freelance” which
was apparently the same thing as unemployed, except he’d
occasionally get a phone call and leave for a few days. “I think
he’s a hit man,” I had told Sissy and Melanie at school. “He never
says where he’s going or how long he’ll be.”

Now, I left Matthew to his Xbox and went to
my room, flopped onto my bed. Grabbed my favorite blanket, the one
that had been Gram’s. The sunlight was coming through my window
just right, and I felt my eyes start to slip closed, just like they
had been doing all through History class earlier that
afternoon.

“
Hey.”

Matthew’s voice made me near jump out of my
skin. My whole body jerked, and I bolted upright.

“
Can I help you,” I snapped.

He smiled that smug smile and leaned against
my door frame. He took up the whole doorway, and I suddenly felt
trapped.

“
Why are you always so mean to me?” he
asks, then steps into my room.

I instinctively recoiled.

“
See? Sometimes I just get the feeling
that you don’t like me.”

There was something weird about the way he
was smiling at me. Almost like... no, I didn’t want to let that
thought live.

Like he was flirting with me.

I shuddered.

“
I mean, I haven’t done anything wrong,
have I?”

“
No,” I said.

Matthew nodded and took another step into my
room. My bedroom wasn’t exactly huge, and I tried not to visibly
cringe away from him.

show no weakness

“
Good. I’ve got a little surprise for your
mother later on, and I’d like for you to remember that. I’m the
good guy here.”

“
Okay...” I said slowly. All I wanted was
for him to leave my room.

He didn’t.

He lingered, looking at me. It happened
quickly, but I caught the way his eyes flicked up and down over my
body. “Too bad you aren’t just a couple years older,” he said
finally, with a shrug. “Or if you had a few older sisters.”

On that note, he sauntered out of my room. I
listened while he went into the kitchen and popped open another
beer. Then his game unpaused and the sounds of video game war
filled the silence.

I couldn’t figure out what he had meant by
his parting statement. Too bad I didn’t have any older sisters? It
sounded completely perverted. Like if I had been eighteen, he would
have been dating me and not my mother.

Crazy that I hadn’t even thought of it
before, but Matthew was younger than my mother. Not too much
younger. Mom was in her late thirties, and Matthew, if I had to
guess, was at most thirty-five. To me it didn’t seem like a big
deal. They were both old.

The idea of a thirty-five-year-old man being
interested in anyone under the age of twenty was disgusting.

I couldn’t even think about napping after
that. I got up, did my homework, read a book.

Mom got home from the diner a little after
five, and I heard Matthew snap off his video game and greet her.
“Let’s go out for dinner,” he said.

“
Ugh, I’m tired,” Mom said.

“
Come on...” I listened while Matthew
convinced my mother to go out. And then I listened to them get
ready, and then Mom popped her head into my room to tell me they
were going out for dinner, and I could make some mac and cheese for
dinner or whatever.