Marked by Moonlight, page 14
“That is, until this morning. I was out for a run before the sunrise when I saw a few of the males carrying garbage bags and dropping them off in the back of a truck. Then, they drove away to the East, the same direction where Susan’s body was found. I think her body was in those trash bags, and I think they did something inside the facility during the full moon that resulted in her death. If what I’ve gathered about missing women in the area is accurate, I believe they are holding at least eight more women in the facility and that they will kidnap another soon. One for each full moon.”
“Do we know about any rituals they could be performing under the full moon?” Ryan asked, back with his popcorn. “I haven’t heard of anything like that.”
“I don’t think it matters what they’re trying to do with the women,” Elliot said. “We just need to save them. What’s the plan?”
“Tomorrow at first light, Peter, Ryan and I are going to head back up to the cabin to get the lay of the land and get an idea of any back entrances to the facility and see if we can dig up any building records for the area. Hopefully they didn’t do anything off the books and we can get some blueprints. We’ll research, and then Wednesday night, Chloe and Elliot will head up and see if you can find anything suspicious or figure anything else out at the coffee shop where Susan usually went missing.”
“Can I go with someone else?” I interrupted. Obviously, the rescue mission was my top priority, but I really did not want to be in a room with Elliot. He’d been lying to me for the past month, and I didn’t feel like I could trust him. Zac was not happy with the way I was acting, though. I could see it in his eyes. Luckily, he still gave in to my request.
“Okay, I will go to the coffee shop with you,” he said. “But you will get a ride to the location with Elliot, and you will travel back here and be in school again on Thursday. By Friday, if we have enough information, we will infiltrate the facility and hopefully free the women. It’ll be dangerous, but I can’t see a way around it.”
“Do you think Friday is soon enough?” Ryan asked.
“Yes,” Peter said. “All signs point to them waiting for another full moon before they perform any sort of ritual. The women should be safe enough until then, and we’ll be much safer if we go in with enough information rather than just going in without knowing what we’re getting in to.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Zac said. “Does anyone have any issues with this plan?”
No one responded. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help but think about how I’d never lied to my mother about anything big before and now I was lying about my whereabouts for the second Friday in a row. Not only that, but I was also heading right into the place where a pack of werewolves were kidnapping girls that fit my description. It might not have been the smartest idea, but I wasn’t going to be able to sit back and do nothing while their lives were in danger.
“Can you guys tell me why I’m the one you changed now?” I asked. “I assume it has something to do with Elliot, since you wouldn’t tell me before.”
“Elliot, I think that one’s on you to explain,” Zac told him.
Elliot turned to look at me and reached to take my hand, but I pulled away. I’d decided that he wasn’t allowed to touch me. I needed to know what he’d done and why he’d chosen me.
“As the Beta, I was tasked with finding a female to join our pack,” Elliot started. “And, in order to get someone to turn into a werewolf, you have to be bitten by an Alpha under the light of a full moon. I was at that party last month, and I was supposed to choose between one of the cheerleaders as a new member of our pack.”
“I’m not a cheerleader, though,” I reminded him. “And that’s kind of gross. Why did you want a cheerleader?”
“We have reason to believe Morgan, the head cheerleader at your school, has connections to Mikel’s pack,” Zac said. “That’s why we wanted a cheerleader; we figured that someone already in the group would be able to get closer to her than someone outside of it. And once someone got close to her, we would be able to get more information out of her.”
“That’s the same reason I dated her earlier this year,” Elliot told me. “But when that wasn’t working out, we knew we had to change the way we were looking at things. When I got to that party, my plan was honestly to change Leah or Taylor, but when I started talking to you, I knew it had to be you. It was like you were somehow glowing. Like you were marked by the moonlight or something.”
“Oh, so you took me to those woods because I was easy?” I asked, knowing that I may have been blowing that part of the equation out of proportion.
“No, I did it because I liked you and I knew whoever we turned would become a permanent member of our weird little family,” Elliot said. “So I decided to bring you out there.”
“And you didn’t want to tell me what you did?” I asked him.
“I was worried that you’d never talk to me again,” he told me, and he did look sincere, but I didn’t want to believe him. It didn’t make any sense. “And I couldn’t have that happen. I had such a good time with you that night and I was excited for homecoming, that’s why I didn’t come here last night after the game. Plus, I knew you’d be okay. I trust Zac with my life, and I knew I could trust him with yours.”
“Those are beautiful words for someone who did a really ugly thing,” I told him, and then I turned away, thinking about how I needed to get home before curfew. “I have to go home if we’re done, my mom will be waiting up to make sure I had a nice time at the dance, and I definitely can’t get grounded if I’m going to lie about where I’m at next weekend.”
“I’ll take you,” Elliot said.
“I drove here,” I reminded him coldly.
“I think we need to talk more first,” Zac told me. “What does Tyler know about us? And how do you know they’re not a danger to our pack?”
I told him what I knew about Tyler and his mom including the fact that she already knew who Zac was and that was how I’d found out he was the Alpha in the first place. My logic was that if she was going to harm them, she would have done it already, and he seemed to accept that answer.
“Just be careful around him,” Peter said quietly. “People like them hurt people like us all the time. They can be just as harmful as Mikel and his pack, just in a different way.”
“No offense, but I trust Tyler more than I trust almost anyone in my life,” I said honestly. When Peter still looked concerned, I added, “But I’ll be careful, I promise.”
“You look really pretty all done up, by the way,” Ryan told me, as if he’d just noticed my formal attire for the first time since I arrived, and knowing him, he wanted to break the tension in the room. “Almost as good as you look naked.” He winked at me, but I could tell he was joking, and it seemed like it was just as much for Elliot’s benefit as it was for mine.
“When did you see her na…” he started, then, as if he realized he had no right to ask.
“When I was feeling as if my body was being torn apart muscle by muscle and tendon by tendon, thanks for asking,” I said, walking away from the table and toward the door. “Keep me updated about the progress, and send me the address for Wednesday,” I said to Zac, who got up to walk me out to my car.
“Hey, go easy on Elliot if you can manage it,” he told me. “He’s been through a lot, and I think he really likes you. He did want to tell you, I think he just didn’t know how.”
“He should have thought about that before he had you bite me,” I said bitterly, not even wanting to think about Elliot, who I’d left sitting at the table inside.
“You’re right, he should have,” Zac conceded, and then he smirked. “But he does things without thinking all the time, I blame it on the concussions he got from football before he was changed.”
I got in my car, and before he closed the door, Zac leaned down once again.
“You really do look beautiful,” he told me. “Sorry again for cutting your night short.”
“It’s not your fault,” I reminded him. “It’s Mikel’s. And he’s going to pay.”
***
The next day, I met up with Tyler to talk about everything that had happened the past two nights. Sitting in his hot tub, we talked about what it felt like for me to shift into a werewolf, and I told him about the breakup (if you could even call it that) with Elliot based on his Beta and werewolf status. He seemed much less concerned about the breakup than he was about the plan to infiltrate Mikel’s base.
“From what you’ve told me, you can’t even shift on your own yet,” he told me. I was trying not to think about that, though. I sat with my head back, hair up, and my eyes closed. “How do they expect you to be of help against other werewolves?”
“We’re not trying to kill or hurt anyone, Tyler,” I said, sighing. “We’re just going to sneak in, free the missing women, and get out. I don’t think Zac would ask me to help if he thought it was too dangerous for me.”
“I’m sure it won’t be that simple, Chloe. Plus, Zac told you that it was going to be dangerous. You’re going anyway.”
I was feeling incredibly guilty for sitting around in a hot tub when Zac, Ryan and Peter had left early that morning to go up to the cabin and investigate. I knew there was nothing I could do other than research here and find out what Tyler and his mother knew, but it still felt like I was wasting time. Tyler and I looked through his mother’s files on the remaining missing girls, but Tyler had convinced me I needed to relax and lured me into the hot tub.
“I’m still going to be worried about you. Mikel is obviously taking these women for a reason, and, I might be the only one that noticed, but you are also a girl and you fit the demographic for someone he would kidnap and keep.” I wasn’t going to lie to him and say I hadn’t thought of that, because of course I had. But even if I was scared to do what needed to be done, there were eight women that were locked up somewhere in Mikel’s facility that were more scared than I was, and they were undisputedly in more danger than me. That’s exactly how I replied to Tyler, and he seemed to understand, though he didn’t respond right away.
“Did you know that Elliot might be one of them?” I asked him, needing to know if he’d been lying to me, too.
“Of course not,” he said. “I thought there might be some guys from school, but I would have told you if I had suspicions about him. He keeps a relatively low profile on the werewolf front. I’m honestly impressed.”
“He kept it from me for an entire month even when he knew what was happening to me. I don’t know how I didn’t figure it out sooner. I must have been blind to it because I was excited to date him. The evidence was all there; he lured me out to those woods, Tyler. He put me in a prime position to get bit, and then he didn’t tell me what was happening to me or even give me a hint as to what I should do about it. How can someone be so thoughtless?”
“He probably didn’t want to tell you because he was worried that you’d be angry with him.”
“And I am angry with him! And I probably would have been less angry with him if he would have just told me what was happening in the first place!” I could feel myself getting emotional as the lump in my throat continued to grow and get more painful. “I’m just saying that he should have been honest with me. I thought he really liked me and that he was different than other guys. I felt special when he asked me to homecoming and told me I was beautiful. Now I don’t know if he was being honest then or if that was all just a ruse, too.”
“Did you ask him?” he asked me timidly, like he really didn’t want to know.
“I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to talk about him anymore, either. Let’s talk about your night, how was the dance with Kate?”
“It was okay, and Kate’s really amazing, but she wasn’t the person I wanted to be there with.”
I opened my eyes and looked at Tyler. He was looking directly at me, not jokingly at all. He might have previously had a smirk on his face when making confessions of his attraction toward me, but not now. I knew how Tyler might be feeling about me before that, but that was as close to an admission he’d gotten, and I started blushing, and it wasn’t because of the heat in the tub. I gave him a weak smile.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t lead Kate on or anything,” he said, looking away. “I was honest with her about my feelings and intentions.”
“I’m sure she appreciated that,” I said, laughing.
We sat in the tub for a little while longer, absorbing the heat and relaxing before getting out and getting back to our research.
We drew a 120-mile radius around Cliffsbane on the map, which is the town where Mikel’s pack and facility were located. All the missing women had been taken within that radius. All of them had brown hair and were young.
Of the women, six were in their twenties and went missing from their homes: Elaina Pratt, Nina Garner, Angelina Callaghan, Lauren McCullough, Elsa Waller and Izzie Andrews. The other two women were both in their teens and went missing from school or on their way to or from school. Their names were Autumn Jacobson and Liberty Flynn. All of the women were described as athletic, independent, and there was no evidence left behind in any of the cases other than Liberty’s, where a scuffed surveillance video showed her talking to a middle aged man an hour before she was last seen.
The police had only publicly connected some of the cases, but Tyler’s mom had painstakingly gone through each of them and found little things that showed they may be intertwined, like Lauren visiting the same coffee shop as Izzie and Izzie having the same therapist as Lauren. There was a connection in every single case, no matter how small they may have been, and I believed that each of them was in Mikel’s custody.
I sent each of the missing persons flyers along with the files of information I had to the group chat we’d now set up for our pack, and Zac thanked me for the information and told me to send him anything else I could find. Ryan chimed in sarcastically to tell me I could send him “other” types of pictures if I wanted, and both Peter and Elliot stayed silent.
I’d also had time to think through my cover for being gone for an entire long weekend, and I came up with different stories for my mom and for my friends. Unfortunately every single story I could think of for my friends involved Elliot playing along for the week. I was going to tell my friends that Elliot and I wanted to get away for the weekend and his uncle has a cabin up north that he said we could use. I was going to have Kate tell my mom that I was with her once again if she asked. That meant, unfortunately, that I wouldn’t be able to tell my friends that Elliot and I had broken up or even that we were having problems, and I’d pretend that we were still together and doing well for at least another week.
C: I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend for the week
E: I would rather not be pretending
I rolled my eyes. That sounded like something Ryan, not Elliot, would say to me.
C: I need to tell my friends that you and I are going away for the weekend together so they’ll cover for me
E: Fine.
I didn’t respond to him, thinking that that was that and that I would have my cover, no problem, but he continued texting me.
E: I’m really sorry for what I did. I really like you and I was scared of what would happen if I told you the truth, I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you.
I couldn’t help it. I responded to his message, even if I was still extremely upset with him.
C: That doesn’t mean you didn’t hurt me
E: I’ll make it up to you, I promise.
Chapter Fourteen
The next few days trudged by like I was walking through a muddy field in the middle of a storm without a raincoat or an umbrella. By the time Wednesday afternoon came around, I was more than ready to get out of town for a few hours, even if it meant going to do recon in a coffee shop with Zac for a few hours.
If I thought the days were going by slowly, that hour car ride with Elliot was even more monotonous. He tried, continuously, to break the tension with jokes or comments about the weather, but I didn’t feel like talking to him. It’d been exhausting to pretend to be happy around him for the past few days in public, and I didn’t want to have to do it in private as well. I turned up the podcast we were listening to and kept my eyes on the road.
“Chloe, I need you to know that I was always planning on telling you about me,” he said, and when I didn’t reply, he kept talking. “Do you want to know how I became a werewolf?”
I did want to know, but I didn’t really want to dignify him with a response, so I kept my eyes on the road and kind of grunted.
“My dream has always been to play football as a career, but I didn’t know how I would get there. A few years ago, I had coaches telling me that I might be good enough to get recruited into college, but I would need to continue to get stronger and faster and stay injury-free. Sophomore year, I got sacked during a game, and I broke my leg. It wasn’t completely shattered or anything, and it did heal, but it wasn’t quite the same after. Sadie worked at the hospital where I was doing physical therapy, and we talked quite a bit when I was there. I confided in her that my dreams of eventually making a career out of football were probably down the drain, and she told me she might have a solution for me, but she said she couldn’t tell me yet.
“The next time I went to physical therapy, I noticed a guy hanging around nearby watching me while I worked, but I didn’t think much of it until he came up to me in the parking lot, told me he was a friend of Sadie’s, and asked if I wanted to go for a milkshake. Knowing what Sadie had told me previously, I agreed. I worried that he might be trying to get me to buy steroids or something, but that wasn’t the case.
