Werewolf Nights (The Pack Trilogy Book 2) (4 page)

“The Illuminati never respond to hypotheticals,” Nesto said immediately.

“Hypotheticals?” Raya frowned.
What was hypothetical about this question? Not a thing.
He voiced that.

“Do you really want that to be your question? Most people never have access to one answer. No one ever has had two,” Nesto warned him.

Raya thought.

“No, definitely not. This will take some thought.”

Chapter Four

“Honest to God, Petra,” Melina said. “An old man half-dead in a toga on my living room couch? You think this is a hospital or a shelter? What were you thinking?”

“He was way out in the bayou,” Petra responded. “Couldn’t leave him out there like this to be eaten by alligators, could I?”

Melina sighed.

“Suppose not. Well, Doc’s just going to have to...”

“No doctor,” came a whisper from the couch. “Swear it or I must leave.”

The two women eyed each other, and then Melina shrugged.

“OK. It’s no skin off our asses, but we can’t just wait on you night and day, either. We do have our own lives.”

“Two days,” the man said. “Then I’ll go. And no waiting on me – my needs aren’t what you think.”

“Needs? What do you mean?” Melina asked with a frown.

“I don’t eat as you do, for one thing.” His voice weakened.

“You a vegetarian?”

He simply gave his head a small shake.

“What are you, then?”

“Vam…”

“Can’t hear you. A bit louder?”

“Vampire,” he managed to get out before losing consciousness once more.

“Yeah, why not? Got a werewolf right here after all,” Melina said with a grin. “That’s just clear as shit! Maybe he’ll tell us the truth when he comes to.”

That night Petra had the first of what proved to be an endless series of dreadful nightmares. In this first, she was walking through a large city that she’d never been to before. The streets were deserted, until she came to a major intersection.

It looked as though the street had been full of traffic that had just stopped. Cars were standing in lines that stretched to the horizon, going one way. Not one vehicle was on the other side.

The scene changed, and there were young girls dancing in a circle.

Maypole
, Petra thought as she listened to the chant.

Dying, dying, blood needs blood.

“Dying, dying, blood needs blood. Help us! Save us, from the flood. Dying, dying, blood needs blood. Help us! Save us, from the flood. Dying...”

The dancing girls faded as night fell. Occasional fires lit up a square where seesaws and swings marked a playground. Now, though, it was anything but playful. Dead wolves lay sprawled, awful seeping sores visible on their bellies. Human corpses nearby had the same affliction, except the sores were on their thin arms and necks.

The sight was so awful that Petra sat bolt upright, awake, jumping up with a thin scream.

Melina came stumbling in.

“What? What?”

“Bad dream,” Petra mumbled. “It was a real doozy.”

“Go back to sleep,” Melina commanded her as she turned and left.

Easier said than done. All those wolves, all those people… and the eerie rhyme, ‘Blood needs blood.’ An obvious warning, but what did it mean? Any of it?

Dawn was breaking before Petra fell asleep again, this time drifting into a peaceful lack of dreams.

***

Raya was preparing for the journey back; even though it was a lot shorter than he’d thought, he wasn’t dressed for the weather at all.

“We’d be happy to outfit you for your trip, but in return we require one small favor,” Aman said.

“Depends on the favor,” Raya said warily. He didn’t want to agree to something without any notion of what was involved.

“We just need you to take something back with you,” Aman assured him.

Raya agreed, and the brothers brought him warm clothing, a backpack, dried foods, and even boots to descend the mountain. He changed into the warmer clothing and wondered what the tribe needed him to take away.

He didn’t have long to wonder. Nesto walked in leading a very young girl by the hand.

“Oh no! No way. I’ll get out of these clothes right now,” Raya said.

Lead an 8-year-old girl down such a dangerous path? Not a chance.

“She isn’t what she appears,” Aman said.

“And how’s that?”

“She was, ah, born last week.”

All three of the men fell silent, eying the child who looked right back at them calmly from enormous brown eyes surrounded by masses of long, curly black hair that fell to her waist.

“I can show you the best way down the mountain,” she said, in her high child’s voice.

Those eyes were anything but childlike, Raya thought. They stared at him directly into his own eyes, filled with wisdom and a glint of humor. What in hell?

What did it matter? At least it, she, might keep his mind distracted from other, awful thoughts. Yes. He’d agree.

***

Several days later, they’d descended the mountain and were walking through a dense forest. Obviously, the thicker bushes grew on that side of the mountain as well, Raya thought as yet again, his entire arm became trapped and the cloth ripped from his jacket. “Christos, will we ever get out of here?”

“Raya, I’m not feeling so great,” Cilla said. She looked to have aged at least a year in the past few days, Raya thought.

“Why don’t we stop for the night, then? I’ll make a quick fire and warm you up.” He was as good as his word, and even managed to throw together a crude A-frame shelter from downed branches.

But Cilla grew worse overnight. She refused to eat or drink, and just lay shivering with cold no matter what Raya did.

Maybe she’d eat real meat,
he thought. The dried stuff from the tribe might be nutritious, but it tasted awful. A quick hunt, that was the best thing. He informed Cilla that he’d be back before nightfall, and took off.

For hours he walked, examining the ground for tracks – any tracks whatsoever. A rabbit. A deer. This forest had to be full of them! He even had a shotgun that Aman had loaned him for just such a cause. He was to leave it with a tribe member who lived in a village they’d cross on the other side of the forest.

But what good would the weapon do with no targets? Finally, he had to turn and head back to camp, lest he be hunting for it in the dark.

Cilla was noticeably worse after the five hours he’d been gone. She was moaning continually, thrashing about on the rude bed of branches. Hell, she was really sick, Raya could see that. She needed a doctor badly, and night was falling.

Nothing he could do now, but first thing in the morning he’d be heading off.

But she woke him much later with loud groans. He could tell she was literally burning up with fever, and he had only one thought. He’d passed this spot on his useless hunt.

He dressed by firelight, picked up the thin body and set off through the night. After half an hour they arrived at the spot: a small creek roaring down from the mountain.

He stripped Cilla and put her entire body in the icy water, standing in it himself to hold her head up. His feet rapidly froze until he couldn’t feel them, but he didn’t notice. Instead, he watched with incredulity as steam rose from Cilla’s pale body.

Finally, her temperature seemed to lower, so he dressed her and carried her back to the crude shelter. After all that expended effort and so little food, he fell asleep rapidly and heavily.

More heavily than he ever had, he realized, as he woke to a thin stream of sunlight coming from between the trees. His neck hurt like hell and there was blood all over his upper torso.

He reached up and gently felt his wounded neck. Blood was still oozing, and he could feel that it had been ripped into. Christo. Cilla! He sat up, his neck pounding with pain, and looked at her bed.

Empty.

He groaned. The tribe would be furious at her loss, even though he’d had no way of stopping it.

The forest began swirling around him, so he quickly lay back down on his own branches. He couldn’t leave right now at any rate; maybe Cilla would return.

Nearly six hours later she did, and she looked indescribably bad.

She’d gained at least 10 years as well, as she was nearly 5’7” with full breasts. And covered with mud, filth and blood.

She was crying as she entered camp.

“Cilla? Is that you?” Raya didn’t know this young woman at first.

“It’s me, I guess. What is happening to me?” She went from crying silently to full-out bawling, and Raya struggled to get up and go to her. The dizziness came back with a vengeance and he was forced to lay back down.

“I didn’t do that, did I?” Cilla asked in a near whisper, staring at his neck with huge, horrified, dark eyes.

“I don’t know,” Raya had to answer.

She sucked in a deep breath preparatory to a scream, then exhaled and relaxed. “I don’t know a thing about it if I did. Thing is to help you now. Tell me what to do.”

He directed her on cleansing and wrapping the wound with strips of an extra shirt that Nesto had given him, but he really needed nourishment. How she’d provide that he’d never–

An absurd sound cut through his thoughts like a knife: an enormous, rumbling passing of wind.

Cilla’s eyes went wide as she whipped around and looked into the forest.

“What did that!”

Suddenly Raya knew.

“Don’t worry, Cilla, and don’t move. I mean it. Not a hair,” was all he could get out before the large form lumbered into the clearing.

Cilla choked back a scream as the bear dumped a large salmon out of her mouth before heading back into the forest.

“Dinner is served,” Raya said with a grin.

“What kind of creature was that?” Cilla asked, still wide-eyed. “It’s neat that it feeds people.”

“More accurately, if you put the word ‘on’ after ‘feed,’ you have the real animal,” Raya said.

“Oh. That’s weird. Well, I have some good news of my own!”

“And what might that be?”

“I learned to do something fun by mistake. Tell me about where you’re taking me.”

Puzzled, Raya told her about Heureuse: what it looked like, what the weather was like this time of year. He was still talking when an enormous crack sounded. For a moment, he thought they’d been hit by lightning until he was able to open his eyes… and then he had a serious shock.

He, Cilla, and even his backpack and the trout… all were sitting in the driveway in front of Heureuse Manor.

Chapter Five

Joseph was still on the couch, unconscious. Melina and Petra had checked on him all day; he hadn’t even moved from the spot Petra had put him. Petra thought he was disintegrating right in front of their eyes.

How long had it been since he’d eaten, she wondered? He’d had nothing since she’d brought him to Melina’s place late the afternoon before, and it was 4 p.m. at that moment. She’d heard that if you starved long enough, your system began to digest even your own muscles… still, Joseph looked like he was dropping at least ten pounds a day. How that could be, she couldn’t understand.

“… blood,” Joseph muttered.

Petra leaned over.

“What? I couldn’t hear you. Do you need anything?”

Together, Melina and Petra had managed to give Joseph a bath that morning, and Melina had even found an old robe that had belonged to her father. It nearly swallowed Joseph, the dark red material, making his pale white skin all the more dramatic. He had rough, gray hair, long and hanging in clumps, even now that it was clean.

During that bath when he’d been naked on the couch, Petra had noticed that his entire body was wrinkled. It was one of the oddest things she’d ever seen. It reminded her vaguely of a friend she’d had when she was in college. The girl had weighed nearly 500 pounds, and had been determined to get her life back.

She’d had a gastric bypass operation, where her stomach had been stapled into one smaller part and one larger. The food she ate went into the smaller so she felt full after eating a lot less. It had worked and she’d dropped an unbelievable one hundred pounds so rapidly that her belly, legs, and arms were left wrinkled with loose skin. In a year, she was down to 170 and skin just hung off her. She’d had plastic surgery to remove it, and she’d been a new girl.

The way that she’d been so wrinkled, though – looking at Joseph definitely reminded Petra of that. He was still out cold, but he was also very restless. His head flipped back and forth on the pillow, eyes moving rapidly behind closed lids.

“Blood needs blood,” he said clearly and went right back out again. His muscles began jerking, and Petra ran a gentle hand down his arm.