Tales of Aradia The Last Witch Volume 1 (20 page)

She needed him awake,
now.

”Roy,” Aradia prodded
him with her foot.

Roy made a lazy
growling noise as he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Slowly he
propped himself up and rose to his feet.

He stopped, however, as
soon as he realized where he was. "Why am I in jail?"

He was surprised when
Aradia answered him.

"Would you rather be at
the animal shelter?"

He jumped and spun
around to face her. The two of them stood perfectly still, looking
at each other.

Finally Aradia asked,
almost conversationally, "So, you’re a werewolf?”

Roy sputtered, "Whoa,
um… What do you mean?"

Aradia rolled her eyes
and said, "C’mon Roy. I know what you are."

"You’re serious?" Roy
repeated again, fear evident in his voice. His words were no longer
slurring.

Aradia stared him down
like she was at the final table of the World Series of
Poker.

Roy burst out laughing.
“You’re really serious?” he asked as he laughed. He kept it up for
a while, but Aradia kept her face stony straight.

"Aradia," Roy began
while holding up his hand. "Look, I don’t know what drugs you’re
hopped up on, but I’m sure once it's worn off you’re really going
to laugh about this."

"Roy, I saw you,"
Aradia stated.

"Saw what?" Roy
asked.

"I saw you as a wolf
last night. I read your mind, I figured out who you were in your
wolf form, and just a few minutes ago I saw you transform back into
a human. I know for a fact that you are a werewolf!"

Roy opened his mouth to
argue once again, but then clamped it shut after her words reached
him. “What do you mean you read my mind?"

Aradia had considered
not telling Roy about her own powers, but after all the freaky
stuff that had happened, she decided that it was better to take the
gloves off and be perfectly honest with him.

"I said I read your
mind. I probed it. It’s something I can do. That's how I knew you
were the wolf that attacked me."

"Attacked you?" Roy
repeated.

His gaze fell upon her
left arm. All of a sudden, his face turned as white as a sheet of
high gloss printer paper.

Aradia expected him to
deny it even more furiously, but instead he rushed her and grabbed
hold of her shoulders.

"My God, Aradia, I am
so sorry. I am so very sorry, but I swear to God I did not mean to
turn you. Don’t worry, though, I won't abandon you. I will help you
adjust to your new powers, okay? I’ll introduce you to the others
of the pack. We will protect you, and teach you our ways. It will
be hard, and it’ll take some adjusting. You will be fine, though, I
swear!"

"Roy...Roy...Roy...dang
it Roy, would you shut up!" Aradia shouted in the middle of Roy's
ranting.

Roy's look of pity only
deepened. He felt a bit like a policeman who had taken a bullet for
a child, a child who instead of thanking him, had turned around and
bit him. He was hurt, but she had no understanding of her
situation. He couldn’t help but pity her.

"I’m sorry, Aradia,"
Roy responded. "You were right though. I am a werewolf. And now, so
are you. I was just trying to let you know that I was willing to
help you get used to it."

Aradia’s head spun.
“Okay,” she said. “First things first, we need to get out of
here.”

“We need to talk,” Roy
said.

“Walk me home. We can
talk on the way.”

“Um…” he said, glancing
down at himself, bashful for the first time in the
conversation.

“Fine, I’ll walk you
home. Let’s go.”

They headed for the
rear door. “Hey,” Roy said before she pushed it open. “You don’t
suppose this is alarmed or anything, do you?”

“Hmm,” she replied. “I
don’t think so.”

She pushed the door
open. Neither of them heard anything unusual, but they hurried for
the tree line just the same.

"I’m sorry, Aradia, but
despite what you may have read in books and stuff, it really only
takes one bite or scratch from a werewolf to turn you."

Aradia responded, "Do
you remember biting me?"

Roy had the decency to
blush. He shook his head and said, “No, I don’t know. I don't
always remember what I do when I transform. Most of the time I can
control it okay, but on a full moon…"

Aradia didn’t know what
to think.
A werewolf? Really?
She sighed and asked, "How long does it take for
the bite to heal?"

They crept through the
woods as they talked. Roy led the way, as Aradia had no idea how to
get to his house. They stayed out of line of sight of the road.
Dawn had broken, and Aradia wanted to explain being out with
half-naked Roy almost as little as she wanted to explain being out
with unconscious werewolf-Roy.

He replied, "It won’t
heal until the next lunar cycle, when you undergo your first
change. Until then it will… well, it’ll be pretty nasty.
Why?"

Aradia had taken the
opportunity in the jail cell to retreat her arm, replacing the
impromptu bandaging with a more thorough one. It had been a couple
hours, but she had an idea of what to expect. "Well Roy, feast your
eyes on this." With that, Aradia ripped the bandaging off her
injured arm and held it out for him to view.

It did not look good.
Her arm was red, puffy, and swollen. Her veins were clearly visible
beneath the skin which had become pale and almost translucent. Upon
first glance, an observer would think she needed immediate and
emergency medical attention.

Roy looked at it more
closely than that, though. He saw that the puncture marks made by
his fangs and bicuspids had closed and scabbed over. The flesh
around the edges of the wound was less ragged and distressed than
he’d have expected. It was quite a trauma, but her body was
managing to repair it.

"But how?" he managed
in shock. "I mean, I am sure I bit you..."

"You did," said Aradia
solemnly, nodding to the bite.

"But a werewolf bite
can't possibly heal like this. It will stay open and raw until the
next cycle."

“Can this mean I won’t
be a werewolf?” she asked him.

“I… I don’t know,” he
replied. “Maybe. I’m not an expert on this kind of thing. Aradia,
how?”

"Well," she replied, "I
did say I read your mind. I also knocked you out while you were
still in your wolf form. I don’t think a strong healing factor is
that big of a deal, all in all."

Roy walked on in
silence, completely stunned.

Aradia was feeling much
better. Roy was right, she couldn’t be sure of anything until the
next cycle, but her fate was no longer sealed.

She’d finally broken
through Roy’s barriers and gotten him talking, and she wasn’t about
to let him stop now. Coolly she asked, “So are you going to tell me
what the hell is going on, or am I going to have to go all Michael
Vick on you again?"

“These dog jokes are
going to get old real fast,” he replied. He did allow a cautious
grin at Aradia's joke, though, and added, "Okay, I’ll tell you what
you want to know, but on one condition."

"Name it," said Aradia,
eager to finally get answers.

"Full disclosure. I
tell you everything about me and my kind, you promise to tell me
what you are."

"You mean you'll show
me yours if I show you mine?" asked Aradia, coyly raising an
eyebrow.

Roy snorted and said,
"Yeah, something like that."

"Okay," said
Aradia.

Roy was a little taken
aback. “I’d expected you to be a bit more hesitant at revealing
your secrets.”

Aradia just shrugged
and said, "Roy, if I’ve learned just one thing, it’s that it's
better to tell the truth, especially to your friends, and we are
friends, aren't we?"

Roy stopped and looked
Aradia square in the eye. He said, "Rai, not only did you stop me
from killing anyone but you personally put me someplace safe and
stayed by my side the entire night." His eyes grew tender and
locked intimately with hers.

Aradia just shrugged
casually and said, "Hell, the real reason I stayed was because my
dad’s office is in the same complex. I’ve done a lot of tidying
there recently. I was worried you might wreck the
place."

Roy, crestfallen, asked
her, “Really?"

"No," she said with a
teasing smile, and nudged him to start walking again.

He grinned his goofy
ear-to-ear grin and Aradia asked, "So are we friends or
what?"

Roy smiled even wider
and affirmed, "Definitely."

"So, tell me why my
best friend is a werewolf."

He took a deep breath.
"Ok."

It took approximately
two hours for Roy to explain everything to her. They reached Roy’s
house long before he was done with his tale. He took a quick break
to dart inside for some clothes. He returned promptly and picked up
where he’d left off.

He was indeed a
werewolf, and he was not the only one Aradia knew. All four of his
brothers were werewolves, as was his father and presumably his
mother. He really wasn’t sure on his mother, because she had left
right after his youngest brother was born.

“Why don’t you just ask
your dad?” Aradia asked.

“We don’t really talk
about her much. Dad gets upset, and my brothers and I hardly
remember her. Most of us don’t remember her at all.”

“Why do you think she
was probably a werewolf, then? Because you all are
werewolves?”

He shrugged. “I dont
know. Many people say only pure bloods can make offspring
werewolves.”

“So do you think your
bio-mom was a werewolf?” she pressed.

“It’s just… uncommon…
for a hidden to mate outside his kind.”

“His kind,” she
repeated distastefully.

He raised his eyebrows.
“It is how it is, Aradia. You’re the one who asked.”

She sighed. “I know I
did. Go on.”

He explained that his
pack included his brothers, father, cousins, aunt, and uncles. It
was basically his entire family. “Except for the Ortega branch,” he
added.

She paused at the name.
“You mean Officer Ortega?”

He nodded. “They’re not
werewolves. I’m not sure how we’re related, to be honest. By
marriage through a great-aunt, or something like that.”

“I thought you said
werewolves only mate with other werewolves?”

“I said it was uncommon
to be otherwise. Not unheard of though.”

Together he and his
werewolf relatives were known as the SilverMoon pack. The moniker
stood to reason, given that they pretty much lived at the diner as
if it were a second home.

Roy explained that he
was a full-blood werewolf, meaning he’d been born one. Aradia, if
she were a werewolf, would be an initiate. Roy reluctantly admitted
that initiates are generally looked down upon in werewolf
culture.

“Hey, you said ‘hidden’
earlier. What did you mean?”

“That’s what we are,
all of us. Rai, there aren’t just werewolves living in Salem. We’ve
got vampires, fairies, shapeshifters, gargoyles, unicorns, elves,
gnomes, and plenty of other things you didn’t think existed living
here too.”

“Why haven’t I noticed
them before?” Aradia asked. “Why hasn’t anybody noticed them? How
can we have fairies and werewolves running around in secret? I feel
like it should be on the news, or something.”

Roy's face grew serious
the moment she made that remark. He then said, voice quiet, “There
is a generic name for our people. All of us. Humans call themselves
the human race. My race of people and the other races like mine are
together the hidden race. That’s what I meant earlier when I said
‘hidden.’ We call ourselves that because the highest, most
important law we have is that we must remain hidden from the human
world.”

Aradia asked why she
had not met any hiddens when she lived in Arizona.

Roy explained, “Many
hiddens choose not to live among the humans. Instead, they live in
their own separate communities, even cities, where only their kind
dwell.”

“But not
Salem?”

He chuckled. “No, not
Salem. The hiddens out west are old school. They keep to
themselves. Most places, really. There are some more progressive
hiddens though who choose to integrate.”

“With other
hiddens?”

“More with humans.
There’s some of that everywhere, really. Hell, you might have had a
faerie or a vampire in your class and not known it. Some places
there’s more of it than others.”

“Salem?”

“Hidden central,” Roy
explained. “Salem, Paris, Tokyo, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Beijing… a
few other places. It’s a growing trend the last century or
so.”