Monsters in the Midwest (Book 2): Northwoods Wolfman (14 page)

Aletia
looked ready to spit, like she’d bitten into a mealy apple and realized it a
second too late. After a moment though, her expression softened. With a sigh,
she placed a palm on Dallas chest before reaching around him and pulling him
into a hug.

“I
never told you why I joined the Society,” she started, voice heavy with
emotion. “Now’s probably not the best time for the whole story, but…”

Aletia
looked up at Dallas, eyes gone moist beneath her long, dark lashes.

“I
know what you’re going through. Go talk to her, Dallas. When you’re done
though, you come straight back to camp. You have to tell Colton about this. If
you don’t, you’ll leave me no choice.”

Stepping
back from him, she stood up straight, arms still on Dallas’s shoulders.

“We’re
the Society, Dallas. We’re all that stands between the world of men and the
monsters of the dark. Brujas might be humans, not monsters like vampiros or
werewolves, but they choose a side the second they cast their first spell. They
open themselves up to the dark, and that’s it. They become the enemy. But if
she’s a new witch, well…” Aletia looked down for a moment before seeming to
reach a decision.

“Maybe
it’s not too late for your friend.”

Dallas
nodded eagerly and turned to go, but stopped when Aletia spoke again.

“But
Dallas, if it is too late, you have to be able to do what’s needed.”

Neither
spoke again as they walked from the bowling alley, but Aletia’s words rolled back
and forth through Dallas’s mind like heavy crates on a storm-tossed ship,
threatening to break open and unleash the full import of their contents on a
strange and confusing world.

Chapter 21

Dallas
pulled his truck into Lois’s drive, killed the headlights, and rolled to a
stop. Like most of the homes in Trappersville, Lois’s little rambler was set
back in the trees and fairly isolated from her neighbors. For a moment, the
only sound was the rumble of Deloris’s V8 engine. With a determined turn of the
key, silence prevailed. This wasn’t the regular silence that Northwoods
dwellers were accustomed to though. Usually, a silent night was still full of
the small sounds of the woods. Stepping from his truck to the gravel drive,
Dallas felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle and stopped to consider
the cause. His head cocked first one way, then the other as he listened.
Nothing. Not a sound. No breeze through the stubborn leaves still on the trees,
no motors from the nearby road, no bird calls or rustle of small, nocturnal
woodland creatures going about their evening mischief. It was truly and
completely silent.

As
he crunched his way toward Lois’s front door, Dallas felt distinctly out of
place. Each step, each breath seemed to crash and echo around him while the
silence
waited disapprovingly for his
rude noises to dissipate.

Finally
reaching the steps leading up to her door, he steeled himself and reached out
to knock. A split-second before rapping his knuckles against the storm door, he
heard voices and froze. Lois’s voice was easy to identify. The other voice was
much quieter and sounded… Dallas searched for the right word.

Tinny,
he thought.
Maybe the radio?

Hearing
Lois’s voice again, he decided that must be it. She was probably on the phone
and had left the radio on. Knocking lightly on the door, his sharp ears heard
Lois say, “Shhh! Quiet,” before footsteps crescendoed as they approached the
door.

“Who’s
there?” Lois asked.

“Dallas.
I, uh. You said you wanted to talk and, well. I’m here,” he finished, lamely.

“Are
you alone?”

“What?
Yeah, I’m alone. Just me. What’s going on, Lois?”

A
deadbolt
thocked
, a chain
clinked,
and the door opened a sliver.
Lois peered out, looking first at and then past Dallas. Satisfied that he was
alone, the door opened further, allowing Dallas to step inside.

The
front door opened into a small living room. To the left, a galley kitchen
peeked out through a narrow doorway. Across the room, a hallway led to where he
assumed were the bedrooms and bathroom were. Taking in the space, Dallas again
found his expectations at odds with reality. Her home didn’t look at all like
he thought it would.

It
seemed like every flat surface held a candle, most of which were lit. The
candles themselves were black, deep red, grey. Some were tall, slender tapers
in elaborate candelabras. Others were round or square pillars, their sides
marbled with the cooled tracks of once-molten wax.

Beside,
between, in front, and behind the candles were an extensive assortment of
oddities. His head turning in a slow arc, Dallas took in the strange ornaments,
gleaming baubles, glass vials, and what appeared to be a whole family of
squirrel skulls neatly arranged in a row. Eyes widening and nose twitching, he
wondered at the variety of vases holding clumps of drying weeds and dead
flowers.

His
head finishing its left to right circuit, it reversed course and swept the room
again. Tables and shelves that still had space between the candles and curios
held books. Dallas wasn’t exactly an avid reader. Sports Illustrated and bar
menus did a pretty good job of satisfying any urges he might get to read the
written word. That said, he still knew what books were and what they were
supposed to look like. Stanley, for example, had a lot of books. They were
normal things. Normal sized packages of words with front covers, back covers,
and stories or facts or pictures in between.

The
books in Lois’s house didn’t feel like
books.
Sure, they had covers and bindings and pages, but their resemblance to what he
considered books to be ended there. Lois’s books made him nervous
.
They were all sorts of shapes and
sizes, and they all seemed to radiate
something.
His molars vibrated like there was diesel generator somewhere nearby, a tad
too far away to be seen or heard but close enough to be felt. Flummoxed, he let
out a slow whistle.

“Gee,
Lois. I, ah, like what you’ve done with the place. It’s really, um. Exotic
like.”

Lois
stood in the center of the room. Her hair was pulled back, drawing the lines of
her face into sharp angles that caught the flickering lights of the candles and
gave her visage an otherworldly appearance. The effect was accentuated by the
dark black shawl that was pulled tightly around her shoulders. It made her pale
face appear to float detached from the rest of her body, and her hands gripping
the shawl looked more like a strange, twisted broach than the usual collection
of fingers and thumbs.

“Thanks
for coming, Dallas, and thanks for not bringing that other chick. I don’t think
me and her are going to be BFF’s, if you get what I mean.”

“Oh,
Aletia, right. Um, I’m sorry about that. She’s a, well, she’s um.” He thought
for a moment. The Society was a
secret
organization,
but Aletia’s display at the bowling alley made him wonder if it was a secret
that was supposed to be actually kept, or a secret that was something it was
okay if people knew as long as they knew that they knew a secret. It was a
little confusing for him.

“It’s
alright. We can talk about her and your other friends later.” Lois moved to
clear a space on the sofa, shifting a collection of books and what looked like
scrolls to a still-empty space on the side table.

Scrolls? Who reads scrolls?
Dallas wondered.

“Sit,”
she instructed. “You want anything? A beer?”

“Beer’d
be great, I guess,” Dallas responded, still feeling very unsettled. He’d only
been a member of the Society for a couple of weeks but felt like he’d learned
enough to know a thing or two about a thing or two, including how to add up
black clothes, lots of candles, weird stuff, and old books, and get
witch.

“I
see you’ve got a head start on me,” he observed, pointing at an empty
Milwaukee’s Best can sitting in the center of the coffee table.

Lois
looked at the can, and her expression softened a smidge.

“Just
be quiet for a little bit longer, okay?”

Dallas
shrugged, his discomfort sawing at his patience like a rusty blade at an old
rope.

“Sure.
Whatever. You tell me to come over, say you want to talk, and then tell me to
be quiet. Makes perfect sense. Guess I’ll just sit here and not say a thing.”

Crossing
his arms and plopping heavily onto the couch, he
hmph’d
and pointedly looked at nothing, which also happened to be
the beer can on the table.

“No,
not you…” Lois replied. “Oh, never mind. I’ll be right back.” Lois disappeared
into the rambler’s small kitchen and returned a moment later with two beers,
holding one out for Dallas.

Settling
in next to him on the couch, she pulled the tab and took a long, slow drink.
Dallas did the same and then sat quietly, waiting for some clue as to what this
was all about. The silence stretched until he couldn’t bear it any longer.

“Why
the hell are you witch, Lois?” he blurted. “And don’t deny it. You can’t go
around being all witchy, turning necklaces into gumballs, dressing in black,
and having all this weird stuff all over the place, and tell me you’re not a
witch. Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, I always say, and it is pretty
damn obvious that you’re a duck. So whatever you got into, whatever phase
you’re going through, you just knock it off. You get your regular clothes and
your tan back, fix your hair, and you just stop being a witch, alright? No one
wants a witch around these parts, and if you keep being a witch, you’re gonna
get…” he snapped his mouth shut and stared at his beer can.

“You
just can’t be a witch,” he finally managed. “End of story.”

During
his outburst, Lois hadn’t said a word.

“Well,
okay then,” he said with a slow nod. It had actually been much easier than he’d
expected, but Lois was a smart girl. She just needed someone to shake her up a
bit and set her straight. She’d be okay now, he was certain. A huge weight he
hadn’t even really known was pressing down on his shoulders suddenly lifted.
He’d go back to Colton, to Aletia, and he’d let them know Lois was going to be
fine. He’d talked some sense into her. She was going to be fine, and they
didn’t need to worry about it.

Mood
drastically improved, Dallas took another drink of his beer, let out a
satisfied sigh, and smiled.

 
“Now that we’ve got that all squared away, you
said you wanted to talk. What’s up?”

Lois
took a breath, held it for a moment, and let it out through her nose. Another
breath, then she opened her mouth to speak. This time, the breath rushed out of
her open mouth instead of her nose. Shaking her head, she looked at the coffee
table.

“I
don’t even know how to start,” she said softly. “It’s like talking to a
man-sized toddler.”

“He’s
always been like that.”

Dallas
whipped his head around, startled by the voice.

“Who
was that? Who else is here?” he asked.

“Shhh,”
Lois said. “I’ve got this.”

Turning,
she looked at Dallas. “We need to talk about this summer, about what happened.
About Herb.” Lois paused, looking down at her folded hands.

“After
you... after Herb died, I was a mess. For the first time in my life, I had
found someone that I really connected with. Someone I could be myself with,
someone who actually liked me and wasn’t a total ass.”

“Hey!”
Dallas protested. “I liked you. Hell, I liked you a lot. Still do.”

Lois
just looked at Dallas.

“Oh.
Well, yeah. I guess I get your point,” he said. “What can I say? I am what I
am, and that’s all that I am.” Dallas grinned. “But c’mon. You know we had a
little something.”

Lois
raised an eyebrow.

“A
tiny little bit of something?”

Lois
continued to skewer him with her stare.

“Okay,”
Dallas finally conceded, “but even so, I think we can both agree you were on
the verge of being totally into me, even if you didn’t quite realize yet,
right?”

With
an exasperated sigh, Lois ignored Dallas and continued.

“I
won’t say I’ve made the best choices when it comes to guys, but I will say
this. Every bad boy that I’ve dated, I’ve
known
the guy was a jerk. My eyes were always wide open. I either ignored what I knew
was true or convinced myself that they might change, but I never,
never
dated a jerk that I didn’t know
was a jerk. You knew Herb for a long time. He was a lot of things, but tell me
honestly, do you think he was a jerk? An asshole? A bad guy?”

Dallas’s
faced screwed up in thought. She had a point. Herb was probably the nicest
person Dallas had ever known. Hell, half of the trouble Dallas got him out of
was usually the result of Herby getting into a jam because he was too damn
nice.

“So?
Herb was a nice guy. I’ll give you that. But I don’t see what that has to do
with the price of beer at a Brewers game.”

“I
knew Herb before he was a vampire, too, remember?”

Dallas
yelped in surprise. “You believe me? I told you so. I told you that he was a
goddamn bloodsucker, and you saw. You saw him burn right up when I staked him.
He didn’t skip town. No sir. Goddamn vamp, that’s what he was, and I saved you,
and you know it.”

Lois’s
mouth compressed to a tight line, and her brow wrinkled above eyes gone
dangerously dark. Visibly regaining her composure, she continued.

“I
never said Herb wasn’t a vampire. Other folks might be able to rationalize away
what they saw that night, but not me. Yes, Herb was a vampire, but he wasn’t a
monster. I hate to burst your carefully constructed bubble, Dallas, but you
didn’t save me.”

Lois
looked at him imploringly. “Herb and I worked together four, five days a week
for over six months. He was always... sweet. Kind of a mess, definitely a dork,
but sweet. When he became a vampire, he didn’t turn into an asshole. If he had,
I would’ve known. No, when Herb was changed, he didn’t become a monster. Not
even a jerk. Herb blossomed. He became someone amazing. If you hadn’t been so
busy being jealous, you would’ve seen it.”

“I
wasn’t being jealous! Me? Jealous of Herb?” Dallas forced a laugh and tried not
to grimace when he heard just how forced it sounded. “That’s crazy talk. Me,
jealous of Herb.”

Suddenly
very uncomfortable, Dallas rose to his feet and walked toward the kitchen.

“You
got more beers in here?” he asked, leaning into the kitchen entrance.

“Fridge.
Help yourself,” Lois answered in a monotone and then continued more quietly,
“This is going to be harder than I thought.”