The Wolf in Her Heart

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The Wolf In Her Heart (Samantha and Lou, #3)

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Sam's mind whirled. She was running, and blood was pumping through her ears audibly, accompaniment to the thuds of her bare feet on the carpeted floor. Adrenaline had drowned out the lethargy of her sore and recovering body, a small mercy. The sound of shattering glass and snarls far too close behind her did nothing to help her organize her thoughts.

Nothing about this was right, and for all she knew, Rick had done something to Lou. Lou, the woman who’d changed her life for the better.

The image, unbidden, of Lou still shackled down in her bed came to mind—but this time, she had glassy eyes and her abdomen was shredded, loose insides hanging out of her and over the edge of the bed.

The thing eating them, in her mind, was Rick.

Samantha had never seen any of the werewolves turn before. If Rick’s changed form was any indication, she didn’t want to see Lou’s, couldn’t ever see it. She didn’t want to know what that looked like.

She can’t be dead.

Sam didn’t know it, but she didn’t care. If she knew Lou was dead, she’d turn around now and let Rick kill her. There wouldn’t be any point.

Samantha paused. The glass shattering and snarls were followed now by silence.

Shit
.

She hesitated, then pushed at a swing door into the kitchen area.

Darkness prevailed, with only shafts of light from the face-level windows in the swing doors illuminating the metal of ovens, stovetops, ladles and pots. Faint scents drifted from the garbage in the corner. No sign of the hulking hairy human-shaped wolf at all.

Sam knelt and slid the locking bolt in place on the swing door, as quietly as she could, then did the same with the other one.

Where is he? Why isn’t he coming for me?
It made no damned sense at all.

Samantha hunkered down between two large refrigerators and tried to ignore the musty scent and spiderwebs. Fear motivated the hiding, but it made sense upon reflection.

Even in human form, the werewolves were far stronger than unturned humans. Sam couldn’t imagine what a motivated werewolf in wolf form could do, particularly since Rick had smashed through plate glass with barely any trouble. She couldn’t fight him. She wasn’t sure she could get away, either. For all she knew, Brentwood was locked down, or the rest of the Colbys were prowling around outside.

If she wanted to survive, she’d have to think.

What had Rick said?
He’d said so many useless things and wasted apologies, and she was so groggy and losing consciousness at the time that it was hard to sort through. One shining sentence stood out after a moment:

Maybe the gift will change your mind
.

He’d called this a gift. Could you change your mind after being dead? Probably not.

He wanted to turn her, and thought it would win her back.

This was crazy. Even assuming she wanted to be turned, there was no way she’d go back with Rick.

If she had her phone, she could call Lou or Reggie or someone else, someone to help her, but he’d taken it when he drugged her. She couldn’t flee the building. She wouldn’t let him turn her. She’d have to play hide and seek until the morning, and she didn’t even know how far away it was.

Soft snuffling in the direction of the swing doors caught her attention.
Shit
.

Sam crept forward, keeping low. If he didn’t see her, she could crawl out the other door and then get through into the meeting room across the hall. The doors were solid oak and might buy her some time, and there was a window she could use to get an idea of whether anything else was outside.

She was almost at the door when a screeching howl pierced the night, and the swing doors shuddered. The small windows in them shattered immediately.

As glass fragments rained down onto the floor and the bolt groaned in protest, Sam abandoned the pretense of stealth and scrambled out the other set of doors, across the hall, and through the ceiling-height oak door.

The room’s walls were stained oak, dark and rich. Moonlight cast from the windows, illuminating the large oval table in the middle of the room. Chairs sat around it, the spires of crafted wood cutting through the pale light.

Sam locked the door shut, but almost immediately there was pounding and clawing. For a moment, she wondered if she’d just boxed herself up like a lunch, but then it calmed, and there was a loud whine from the other side of the door.

“Poor baby,” Sam muttered.
He isn’t here to kill me. He’s here to turn me. Right?

Lou had not given Samantha the impression that the wolf could be controlled, though. So maybe Rick had no idea what would happen. Maybe Rick was just
hoping
he’d end up turning Samantha, and that if the wolf killed her, he could cover it up.

Warm metal fury rose in her, but another jostle at the door tempered it.
Think.

There was a phone in the meeting room, a throwback from Brentwood’s original construction. Landlines were hardly necessary in this day and age, but not every member of the club was exactly an early adopter. Sam picked it up.

No dial tone.

Shit
. They’d thought of everything. Samantha headed over to the window and peered outside. The blue cast over the landscape lent a quiet, introspective nature to the grounds that Sam would absolutely have found charming, if she wasn’t scanning intently for murderous furry things.

For a moment, she saw no sign of any presence—but then, a shape in the distance moved, and it had eyes. Not at ground level, but nearly the height of a human. Reflective eyes.

“Worth a look.” Sam sighed and shook her head.

A fresh, savage roar sounded outside the doors. No, not outside the doors—beside the doors. The wall shuddered, then bent towards Samantha. She caught her breath and scanned the room.

No other exits. Bookshelves, table, chairs, little else. That wall wouldn’t hold forever, either. It was also original construction. Much of the club had been remodeled in one way or another, but the meeting room and a few others were untouched.

No, that wasn’t right. Something nagged at her mind.

Remodeling
. The image she’d seen of this room, back when the renovations were being done, didn’t have a low ceiling.

Samantha looked up, at the drop ceiling, and smiled.
Awesome
. She started pulling out enough of the books on the shelves to scramble up it like a ladder, then pulled herself into the couple feet of space between the top of the shelf and the drop ceiling tiles.

A hard shove up left a spray of dust in the air, a freshly musty odor, and a new exit from the room.

Sam reached up and pulled herself through the hole, into the dark crawlspace. She slid the tile back into place as chunks of the wall broke off and the roars became louder.

Samantha moved, on hands and knees, over the wall. The new goal was to get as far away from the meeting room as possible.

She had to get back to Louann.

The far wall of the original construction was some distance away. Sam focused on the task at hand and tried not to think about what else was probably running around up here. Drop ceilings were all too often a home for rodents and other pests.

When she got to the wall, she paused, and listened. Fans, somewhere in the building. No snarls, no thuds, no howls.

It was waiting to find her, and now she had no idea where it was.

Only one way to find out if I’ve picked badly, I guess.
Sam lifted up the drop tile nearest the wall and peered down.

It was a hallway. There was linoleum, and a set of metal doors at either end. It looked nothing like the rest of Brentwood, though. It had to be part of the service areas, but even with knowing it was at one side of the building, she’d never seen it.

“Too many strange little passages in this damn place.” Sam awkwardly slid out of the hole she’d made and hung down, then let go. She was lucky enough not to twist her ankle or worse, but it didn’t feel great landing on bare feet.

Once again, she cursed that this happened at a dinner party. If she’d had sneakers, she’d be at less of a disadvantage. Bare feet were the better move when her other option were heels, and her heels were upstairs where she’d woken up.

Lou had said it’d be a trap. Lou had said she should have come with.

If there was any way Lou could have, Samantha would have brought her. But she was in heat the night of the party, and no doubt now she was changed and howling somewhere to keep her wolf reigned in.

Samantha drew a deep breath and shut her eyes.
If Lou was here, I’d be safe. I’d feel safe, at least.
Feeling safe sounded nearly impossible right now.

A long, slow howl sounded, and Samantha turned her head to the direction of it.

At the far end of the hall, a shadow moved on the other side of the metal doors, a terrible shadow with jagged furred edges and a long muzzle.

Samantha turned to the other end of the hall and took off in a dead run towards those doors. If she was lucky, the doors at the other end were locked. If she was unlucky, the ones she was running towards were locked.

She smashed her palm against the push-bar and the door swung open.
Thank god.
Samantha burst through, her lungs burning, the chemical headache throbbing through her skull. She didn’t slow down. There wasn’t long before Rick was going to explode through them after her.

A scraping sound of metal on metal caught her attention and she spun around.

A crowbar hung, slid through both the handles of the double metal doors. They strained against it for a moment as Rick bashed the other side of the doors.

The figure in the dark hallway turned, and somehow it was Lou, in her leather jacket and a band tee.

“Oh my god! Lou!” Samantha wrapped tight around her for a brief moment.

“Hey.” Lou staggered a little, and when she stepped back, Sam got a good look at her. Sweat poured down her face and soaked into the tee. Tings around her eyes spoke of little sleep. There was a pale green pallor to her face.

“What happened to you? Are you okay?” Samantha wrapped around her tight, somehow convinced that if she didn’t, Lou would turn out to be her imagination.

“It’s a long story. We need to get safe. Come on.” Her hand was clammy and hot, but it was the most comforting thing in that moment. “That crowbar isn’t going to slow him down long.”

Sam scrambled after Lou as the double metal doors shook and clanged.

Lou pulled a spray bottle out of her pocket and spritzed it into the air as they traveled the hallway.

“What is that?” Samantha’s voice was barely a whisper. It was stinky as anything.

“Wolf musk. It won’t prevent him from tracking us but it’ll make it harder.” She sprayed one door directly several times, then opened a door down the hall from it. “If that tricks him, then he’ll try that door first and we’ll get a head start running again.”

Samantha forced herself to catch her breath. “What’s wrong with you? Talk to me. Why do you look like you’re about to die?”

Lou shut her eyes and rubbed her face. “I took an aconite tincture. Wolfsbane. It’s a poison.”

Sam blinked. “You poisoned yourself?”

“Kind of. It keeps me from changing on the full moon, but only until it wears off. I needed to come find you, and I needed to be able to think for that.” Lou pulled Sam through the open door, into what appeared to be a small office of some sort. “The wolf isn’t so great at strategy, wouldn’t you know.”

“It’s
poison
. That can’t be good for you. It’s kind of a universal trait of poisons.”

Lou whimpered and shook her head, shutting the door behind them. “It won’t kill me. It’ll just make me weak until it passes, and keep me from changing. I’ll be okay.”

“You better be. I thought you were—“ Samantha wrapped gently around Lou. “I thought I’d never see you again, Louann.” Samantha pressed her hand to Lou’s forehead. “You’re burning up.“ Sam pressed her palm to the center of Lou’s chest. “Oh, god, Lou, your heart. It’s going crazy.”

Lou shook her head. “I’ll be okay. We just have to buy time until morning.” She locked her eyes on Samantha’s, and hugged her tightly to her chest. “What happened? Have you been here since the party?”