Time Mends (6 page)

“
When is the last time you
ate? You need to be sure and get a ton of calories pre and post
Change.”

I narrowed my eyes, ignoring the tingle of
panic spreading from my stomach to my heart. “You’re avoiding the
question.”

“
I’m trying to keep you
healthy.”

“
Talley…”

She exhaled loudly, shoulders slumping.
“You’re supposed to appear before the Pack at seven o’clock
tonight.”

“
And then what
happens?”

The finger was back in the hair. “That’s all
the Pack Leader has authorized me to tell you.”

The panic swept through my heart and
railroaded its way to my brain. “What are they going to do?” Alex
explained Pack politics to me once. At the moment, all I could
remember was something about fights to the death.

“
I can’t tell
you.”

“
You’re my best
friend.”

“
And Toby is my Pack
Leader. I can’t override a command no matter what I want to
do.”

My gut reaction wasn’t what I expected.
Instead of begging her to give me a clue as to what to expect or
breaking down into tears, an unfamiliar mixture of incredulity and
anger threatened to short-circuit my thought pattern. She was
following another Shifter’s commands? I wanted to lash out and
demand she give me what I wanted. The impulse shocked me enough to
reign it in before I actually acted on it, but not before a low,
threatening growl erupted from my throat.

“
Oh God, Tal. What is
happening to me?” That reaction wasn’t a Scout-like reaction. That
sound wasn’t a Scout-like sound. It wasn’t a human sound. “What am
I now?”

Talley was hugging me before I could stop
her. “It’s okay. You’re going to be fine. You just need to calm
down and take some time to adjust.” Her hand was stroking down my
hair.

“
You’re petting me like a
dog.”

Her hand stilled, and she
pulled back to look at me. “It’s the day after a full moon. Your
wolf is still close to the surface. Sometimes touch can keep
him…
her
calm and
in check.”

“
The wolf is close to the
surface? What does that mean? Am I like Sybil now?”

Talley took a full step back, but she was
now patting my arm. I would have told her to stop, but it actually
was kind of soothing.

“
Your wolf isn’t a
different personality. It’s still you, just a bit more…”

“
Animalistic?”

“
Exactly.”

I put my hands on either side of my head and
squeezed. It was all too much. Too much noise. Too many smells. Too
many questions. Too many Scouts. I couldn’t deal with it all. I
shouldn’t have to. I should be worrying about getting a summer job
and whether or not I picked the right college, not about how I was
supposed to keep Wolf Scout in check.

“
I can’t do this,” I
finally admitted, the pressure against my skull somehow making it
easier to think. “I don’t know what’s going on or what to do about
it. I just want to crawl back in bed and —”
Be with Alex
is what I was going to
say, but caught myself before it came tumbling out.

“
And hide? Like you have
been since the accident?”

My head whipped up, the
anger once again white hot and explosive. “Hide?
Hide?
I had been gutted
like a pig, in case you forgot. I wasn’t hiding, I was
recovering.”

“
The injury forced you to
stay in bed, not to shut out everyone who loves you. You’ve been
hiding from what happened then and you want to hide from what is
happening now.” There were blots of red in my vision. My hands
twitched, fingers curling as if they were trying to become claws
again. “Honestly, I don’t know who you’ve become either, because my
best friend wasn’t a coward.”

“
You don’t know what I’ve
been through,” I said through clenched teeth.

“
You’re not the only one
who lost someone the night Alex died, you know. He was my friend.
Maybe we didn’t have the same relationship you did, but I cared
about him. It broke my heart to lose him.” I opened my mouth, but
she plowed on. “My best friend almost died right in front of me,
and most days I’m not sure she didn’t. Jase has become a tsunami of
wrath, plowing over everyone misguided enough to get in his way.
They’ll still be talking about how he loudly dumped Tinsley in the
middle of the cafeteria at our twenty year reunion. Of course,
that’s better than Charlie, the silent anger ball who is going to
go nuclear any minute now. I’m their Seer, I’m suppose to keep them
from imploding, but I don’t know what I’m doing since no one ever
saw fit to train a latent.” And then Talley burst into tears. It
was a tactic she’d been using since we were little girls trying to
sneak into her mother’s workshop to play with all the shiny
costumes. We would inevitably get caught, but before Mrs. Matthews
could dole out our punishment, Talley would become a sobbing,
blubbery mess, and we would be pardoned.

You would think that after seventeen years
of friendship I would have stopped falling for it.

Nearly five minutes later, Talley pulled
herself out of my embrace, wiping the remaining tears from her
face. I had to swipe a hand over my cheeks, too. It seems I never
quite got out of the habit of crying right along with her.

“
You really do need to get
something to eat,” she said. “I’ll go down in the record books as
the worst Seer ever if I let a Shifter pass out from
hunger.”

Talley followed me to the kitchen
downstairs, keeping up an overly-enthusiastic monologue about the
travesty of being able to burn through five thousand calories just
by taking a nap. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to break the
tension or if she was just jealous of my new
eat-all-you-want-plus-more-and-never-gain-an-ounce diet plan.

No one was home, which was a relief. I
wasn’t ready to face my parents again and talking to Angel would
have required more enthusiasm than I was willing to muster at the
moment. Jase was still with his Pack.

“
How much do you remember
about last night?” Talley asked as I slathered a piece of bread
with a giant helping of peanut butter and honey. It was the best I
could accomplish on my own. Anything else would have required
cooking, which I am forbidden from attempting due to my tendency to
set off smoke alarms.

“
Ummm…everything?” I
thought through the night in search of missing time or holes in my
memory. My mental eye paused on a gray wolf with human eyes. “Yeah,
I think I remember everything.” Especially the Change parts. Pain
like that didn’t just erase itself from your memory, no matter how
much you want it to. “Doesn’t everybody?”

Talley rummaged through the fridge, opening
various Tupperware containers and examining their contents. “The
first Change is pretty traumatic. Some Shifters find it hard to
reconcile their beast brain with their human brain.”

“
Because Wolf Scout
doesn’t think like Real Scout?”

Talley popped a container full of my
favorite chicken casserole in the microwave. “Right. She depends
more on instinct and sensory input than logic.”

“
Like how I kept getting
distracted by bunny and squirrel trails?”

“
Exactly. In wolf form the
procurement of food is the highest of your priorities. Part of my
job is to keep you from doing anything that will put yourself or
your Pack at risk by doing something…”

“
Stupid?”

“
Ill-advised.” The
microwave beeped and she pulled the container out and divided its
contents onto two plates. I was impressed with her mad cooking
skills. I would have somehow managed to turn it into a rice,
chicken, and cheese brick. “I check in with everyone throughout the
night, forcing them to think as humans.”

“
What do they hear when
you talk to them? Is it just like you’re standing right there
beside them, or is it like a cosmic intercom? Or do they just feel
like a crazy person?”

Talley blew on a forkful of food, which was
a smart thing to do. I was going to miss the top layer of skin on
my tongue. “Don’t you remember?”

I thought about the voice I heard the night
before. It was sophisticated and authoritative, nothing like the
chipper chatter coming from the girl in the chair across from
me.

“
You talked to me last
night?”

“
I asked who you were like
three times before you pushed me out of your head.” She stopped
eating to look at me, her fork posed in mid-air. “How did you shut
me out like that, by the way? I’ve only known one other Shifter who
could do that.”

I pushed her out? Huh. Maybe the head shake
thing worked. “I don’t know. I just didn’t want someone talking in
my head, and then they weren’t.” I scrapped the last bite off of my
plate. “Who was the other Shifter?”

Talley shoved the rest of her food over to
me before knotting her fingers into her hair. After her rather
dramatic pause she practically whispered, “Liam Cole.”

Of course Alex’s brother could shut out a
Seer. If a Shifter could do it, Liam could. He even managed a few
things that were supposed to be impossible, like Shifting back
human during a full moon. He was a super-werewolf, as dominant as
Dominants came.

“
But not Alex? You could
talk to him?”

“
Only when he would stop
talking long enough for me to get a word in.” She smiled at the
memory. “It was mostly all ‘Scout this’ and ‘Scout that’.” Her
smile was small and sad. “He was so in love with you.”

I felt a familiar knot in my throat. “I
loved him, too.” I scraped up a rogue bit of cheese off the plate.
“Tal, has anyone ever, I don’t know, stayed a wolf? Like they got
stuck in their animal form?”

Talley looked confused by the sudden change
in topic. “I don’t think so. Most Shifters can’t manage to be in
animal form more than a couple of hours a month, no matter how hard
they try to Change. I can’t imagine anyone being able to maintain
their animal form permanently.”

“
But what if there was an
accident? Something that made it impossible for them to survive in
their human form?”

A frown tugged on the corners of Talley’s
mouth as she realized what I was asking. “I told you, Scout. That
wasn’t Alex you saw at the cemetery.”

“
That’s not —”

“
He’s dead, Scout. You
know that, right?” Her bright blue eyes bore into mine. “Tell me
that you understand that Alex is gone and never coming
back.”

“
I was there when he died.
I watched them put his coffin into the ground.”

“
And you still believed
you saw him at his own funeral. Now, tell me you know that he’s
dead.”

I thought again about the wolf in the woods,
the one I saw on the day of the funeral. “Alex is dead,” I said.
“He’s gone and never coming back.”

The remainder of my afternoon passed fairly
peacefully. I spent most of my time with Angel, who wasn’t quite
sold on the “I took a special pill and it made me all better”
story. She felt a full physical was in order. It turns out that a
seven-year old’s version of a physical is a lot of finger poking
and trying to pull your scars open. I was fairly certain my entire
body would be covered with tiny, finger-tip sized bruises the next
day.

When I wasn’t being poked and prodded, I
reread Dr. Smith’s book on Shifters. I had the thing practically
memorized, but I held onto a sliver of hope it would explain how a
non-Shifter girl was able to Change. Sadly, no new chapters
magically appeared to offer up some answers.

I drove my new car down to the Base that
night. I was fully prepared to hate it because of where it came
from, but it was just too cool. After an hour of being on the road
together we had completely bonded, and I was more than a little in
love. I named him George and promised to take care of him - keep
the gas tank full, have the oil changed, check the air pressure in
the tires monthly and to never, ever let Jase leave his sweaty gym
clothes in the back seat for a month during the hottest part of the
summer. I knew from experience that a car would never be the same
again after facing such abuse.

The entire Pack was already at Gramma’s when
I arrived. They milled around the back yard where Grampa had
constructed a fire pit decades ago. I always thought it was a
rather elaborate set up for a place to roast marshmallows and
hotdogs. The pit was surrounded by beautifully handcrafted benches
made from entire halves of oak trees, each large enough to sit four
adults comfortably. They were arranged into three rows of five that
semi-circled the pit. Fifteen benches for a small family was
excessive, but it suited the needs of a large Pack of Shifters
nicely.

I made my way towards the fire pit where
some of the younger Shifters roasted hotdogs while the older ones
manned the three grills loaded down with hamburgers, chicken, and
pork chops. I had stopped by McDonald’s for a super-sized Big Mac
meal on the way down, but my stomach growled at the smell wafting
through the air. I hoped my new Shifter metabolism was doing its
thing, because otherwise I was going to weigh three hundred pounds
by the end of the week.

“
You came.” Makya stepped
in front of me, blocking my path. “You do have brass ones, don’t
you?”

I let out a frustrated sigh. “I don’t have
any at all, Makya. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a girl. Now,
for the second time today, could you please get out of my way?”