Wolf: To Your Bones (Wolf series Book 2), page 10
“Years?” I gasped. “Are you serious?”
I imagined him nodding. “I’m working on detecting the pathogen in blood samples, but it’s more complicated than it sounds. Especially without the right equipment.”
He almost sounded like he was defending himself.
“Until then, you must be careful. That’s all I can tell you.”
I understood there was nothing more Liam could do for me. He had come here in the middle of the night to stitch up my wound and give me painkillers—and the truth. On the one hand, I wished I had just never known about the infection. On the other hand, of course I had to know where I stood and how I should prepare for the future. At least, as far as possible.
“Okay,” I murmured. “Thanks, Liam.”
“Sorry, Ruby.” He must have heard my dejected tone. “You’re welcome.”
After we hung up, I turned off Josh’s laptop. I’d done enough research for today. I now knew that at least my blood group didn’t match that of my attacker, and the website also said that not everyone was forced to transform after a bite. I wanted to think positively. It was no use driving myself crazy all the time with these thoughts, especially not when my transformation could happen in ten days or even ten years. I would try, with caution, to continue to live as before. Even if that meant putting my fate in Liam’s thesis and the claims of a website that was based in Hawaii.
Chapter 8
After about an hour I heard Josh come back. At first it was just unspecific steps on the street, which could also belong to the postman or a neighbor. Only the second sound was clear. It was the trudging of heavy boots. Josh must have brought Keith back with him again. When the door opened, there was a lump of discomfort in my throat. I liked to know that the pack master was far, far away from us. A look at Josh’s face made me forget this worry quickly, though, because his skin was ashen. He didn’t say anything as he came in. He just stopped and looked around as if he had forgotten something important.
“Josh?” The expression in his eyes scared me. “Is something wrong?”
For a split second, I suspected Josh had been intimidated by the need to remove the dead werewolf. Who knew what kind of idea Keith had for getting rid of it? The pack leader had stopped in the doorway, arms crossed, and looked as discontented as Josh. Something was definitely wrong.
Josh shook his head before he answered my question.
“The body . . .” he said monotonously. “It’s gone.”
My head went blank. What did he mean by that? A dead body couldn’t just get up and walk away!
“We’ve combed the entire area,” Josh continued. He let himself fall resignedly onto his sofa to run his hand through his black hair. “We couldn’t track him. As if he was swallowed by the earth.”
I arched my brows. As far as I knew, Josh couldn’t tell by the scent if werewolves were male or female, but maybe it was something with Liam’s blood sample that had them now calling this werewolf a male.
“He’s probably still alive and just gone,” Keith added. He was standing in the doorway and seemed to feel no need to come in. He didn’t even really talk to us. His eyes weren’t focused on Josh or me.
Josh’s head popped up to give him a look.
“No,” he said immediately. “Liam took his blood yesterday. There’s no way he could have been alive, the way . . .”
Josh fell silent. He didn’t say anything else, but I knew what he wanted to say. The way I messed him up. It sent goose bumps down my back, and the pain in my shoulder flared up again.
“Could someone have found him?” I asked. Keith’s presence made me uncomfortable. It seemed to block all the sunlight that tried to enter the room. Like a great, threatening shadow cast over us.
“Certainly not.” Keith snorted. “Otherwise, it will definitely appear in Shatterlake’s rag.”
I figured he meant the Shatterlake News, our newspaper. In a small town like this, there was so little to tell that Mr. Harrison’s shop had already received a big report about his shop twice. That could also be because my boss was friends with one of the editors, though.
We kept quiet, until Keith finally moved.
“We’ll take care of it,” he growled. “He can’t have gotten far. When I find him, I’ll just kill him a second time.”
It was the last we heard before he slammed the front door and went out to his old Dodge. I could hear that he was driving too fast, but at least he was gone quickly.
Josh leaned back in the sofa. He looked tired, although he had been in the forest for only an hour. He was probably racking his brains, so I went to sit next to him. My movements were still very cautious, even if a little faster than last night.
“Hey.” I took his hand. “Everything okay?”
He looked me in the eye. “Yeah, but I didn’t want to worry you.”
I looked toward the bedroom. Josh had borrowed a tarp from his neighbor this morning and taped it to the window. There was no pane left, so he would have to find a glazier.
“Do you really think someone took him?” I asked. “The werewolf, I mean.”
I heard the clock ticking in the living room. It seemed incredibly quiet now that Keith had left. Even though the alpha had only been standing in the corner, his presence had seemed loud to me. It had to be because I was tense with him. Just looking at him was enough to tighten every muscle in my body. Something inside me still thought I had to escape from him.
Josh shook his head. He seemed at a loss.
“I can’t imagine he’s still alive,” he said. We both knew the self-healing powers of werewolves, though. What if he hadn’t been left dead, but just barely dead? He could’ve dragged himself away after Liam collected the blood sample. It was a logical consideration, but I didn’t really like it.
“I wouldn’t know who could take a werewolf without a word. After all, they weigh at least two hundred kilos,” Josh said. “It’s . . .”
He was staring into space.
“What? Did you have an idea?”, I murmured.
“Not exactly,” he replied. “It’s . . . just like Ian.”
The only name in this world that still made me wince.
“I could smell his blood and his trail,” Josh murmured. “Just like with Ian. But his body was gone.”
Josh had never found Ian’s body—just such a huge amount of blood that it was hard to deny what must have happened to him. Now that I thought about it like that, the situation had a whole new side to it. We had found out that the werewolf from yesterday had already chased me after the town fair and had probably stayed nearby since then. Ian had disappeared one day on one of his expeditions and had never returned.
“Josh,” I said. “Could it be that Ian was killed by the werewolf?”
His eyes widened. “Theoretically, yes. Ian was insanely strong, but the werewolf may have bided his time if he was chasing Ian.”
I guessed that was something we should tell the pack. Josh was of the same opinion, because he took his phone and wrote a message to Liam. Keith was probably going to freak out and search the forest day and night. I still remembered how much the death of his friend had affected him. No matter how unstable and dangerous Ian may have been.
“I caught him easily yesterday because he was careless.” Josh avoided looking at me. He was probably afraid I thought he was a murderer. I hadn’t found time to think about it in detail yet, but Josh’s words placated me. He had chosen between me and the werewolf and decided for me. I couldn’t get rid of the thought that this stranger was also an individual that shouldn’t simply be killed, but he had given us every reason to do so. I didn’t know what I would have done in Josh’s place.
“Thank you.” I leaned forward and placed a kiss on his temple. “You saved my life.”
He didn’t smile, but the light in his eyes told me he was relieved.
“I don’t think so.” He sounded very serious. “I don’t think he wanted to kill you, or he would have done it already.”
It was a terrible thought—for both of us.
“He was aiming for your shoulder,” Josh said. “Not for your head. He wanted to infect you.”
I sucked in a breath. “Why should he?”
Josh stretched out his arm so that I nestled against him. His body glowed and filled me with such a cozy warmth that I relaxed a little.
Josh shrugged his shoulders carefully. “He was a hunter. Perhaps he was lurking at my window to kill me in a moment of weakness.”
I turned pale. I hadn’t even thought of that.
“When he saw it was you and not me,” Josh continued, “he decided to bite instead of killing you. That werewolf didn’t tick normally. Maybe he thought it was funny.”
With Josh’s words, two of the sentences that I had read on the website came back to my mind.
They are anxious to stay hidden. But many of them are bloodthirsty.
“That means that his fun was more important to him than his life,” I said.
Josh nodded. “Definitely. Otherwise, he would never have returned to Shatterlake, although he knew that a pack of werewolves lived here. He enjoyed being chased.”
I lay on the sofa, my head resting on his shoulder, and thought about Josh’s assumption.
“Maybe he was after you too,” Josh whispered. His cheek touched my hair while he closed his eyes. As he did so, his hand moved gently across my back. He used to do that whenever we talked about something unsettling. It was like a reflex to want to comfort me.
“He didn’t catch you at the town fair. That may have triggered his hunting instinct. Perhaps it’s because he knew I’d protect you.” He frowned. “It was a game to him. He could’ve meant to ambush you at Harrison Sports, or that was just a coincidence, and he decided that night to get you later.”
He breathed out audibly. Whatever version of his reasoning may be true, it all made me hope that the werewolf was no longer alive. As much as I hated to see Josh’s hands drenched in blood, it was better for him, for me, and for all the people of Shatterlake. The idea that the monster could have ambushed Josh, not me, scared me almost more than the bite mark on my shoulder. Losing him was a fear that had hardly let me sleep peacefully before Ian’s disappearance. Now Josh and I had only been together for a year, but the deep pain in my chest made it obvious: I couldn’t imagine a world without Josh.
I must have pressed myself harder against him, because he looked at me gently.
“Don’t worry.” His words were followed by a very tender kiss on my forehead. “Nobody will break us up that easily.”
It was like he was reading my thoughts. His words were a balm to my soul. “Yeah.”
The disappearance of the werewolf had left questions that none of us could answer yet. Whether he was alive or not, only time would tell.
It would have been easy to be very worried over the next few days. According to Josh, there was a rather disgruntled Keith who vigorously searched the woods, and there was either a possibly not-dead werewolf on the run or someone or something that had taken away the werewolf’s body right from under the pack’s noses. I didn’t know which possibility would be the worse, but I caught myself looking anxiously at the Shatterlake News cover every day.
There was another thing that occupied me even more: keeping my bite wound secret from my parents. From now on I had to choose high-necked tops that didn’t allow a view of the bandage—even though it was late summer. I couldn’t relax as long as Mom or Dad were around, and my strange behavior quickly brought me some glances. I didn’t want to ride, didn’t want to help with the hay, and withdrew as best I could so as not to attract attention with a sudden sound of pain. When I refused to go to the swimming pool with my mother on the weekend, Dad raised his eyebrows. He looked like he was about to accuse me of secret pregnancy. I was grateful to him for not saying it out loud.
I tried my best to appear as fine as possible on the outside, but changing the bandage constantly reminded me that I was no longer normal. My normal life had possibly ended with the bite. From now on, something could be slumbering inside me that might sooner or later become a danger to the lives of everyone around me—or not. It drove me crazy not to know for sure. It forced me to constantly make plans that I later rejected out of pure optimism and then reconsidered. I felt like I was no longer at home in my own skin. I knew how suddenly Josh’s mood could change, how suddenly he could get angry. What if it happened to me? What would I do if I suddenly transformed in the middle of the kitchen because I had a fight with my parents? How would I explain it if I accidentally trashed my room? However, beyond all these rather minor worries lurked the worst of all: I was afraid the virus would destroy my and others’ lives. I was afraid for my family, my friends, my job, and even my pets. So, I controlled everything I did.
I had tried very hard over the last few months to put myself in Josh’s shoes, to understand him. Now I could do it better than ever before. It gnawed at me, the knowledge that I was potentially dangerous. It brought a distance between me and other people, a distance which I had to fight against unrelentingly. With how much rejection Josh had experienced, it was no wonder he had lost touch with others, and that was threatening to happen to me.
I kept thinking about how my own parents would react to my transformation. I remembered well how severe the consequences for Josh’s father had been. He had packed up his things and disappeared. Josh had nothing left of his father except some old photos. Talking about Josh’s past always made me feel a bit queasy.
My parents were different, though. Mom had said to me, “If you love your child, there are always ways to cope with their fate.” But would it be the same if I turned into an eight-foot-tall monster? On the one hand, I trusted my parents unwaveringly and believed that nothing could separate us. On the other hand, I was afraid that they would distance themselves from me. It would break my heart. I couldn’t imagine how Josh must have felt at four years old when his father disappeared. I admired him for having endured the hurt and loneliness for such a long time.
“How does it feel?” I asked. It was nighttime. We lay in my bed, the light already switched off, and looked at the ceiling. The stars glued there didn’t shine as brightly as they used to, so I suspected that they would have to be replaced soon. Actually, I was much too old for them anyway.
“What do you mean?” Josh had his arm around me so I could rest my head on his collarbone. It was my favorite sleeping position. His breath tickled my forehead and smelled of tiredness, love, and security.
I hesitated briefly. I didn’t want to ruin the relaxed atmosphere. My parents had gone to bed, so Josh had taken the opportunity to sneak into my room.
Keith had decided to continue the morning and evening rounds himself. Josh had been helping the pack by using the hybrid’s nose to search for the missing body, but there had been no success so far. The strange werewolf seemed to have disappeared for good. The first night Josh had thought he could follow the trail a little way into the woods, almost as if the werewolf had actually crawled away. In the end, however, the trail had broken off and had been nowhere to be found again. Josh strongly believed that the werewolf had died. Maybe a bear had dragged him away, or perhaps dead werewolves even disintegrated—after all, Ian’s body had never been discovered either. It was a farfetched theory, but we still couldn’t refute it. We simply knew too little about the supernatural creatures that Josh and the others transformed into.
Because I was silent for so long, Josh chuckled and nudged me with the tip of his nose. “Come on, tell me. Don’t leave me hanging.”
I smiled at him, even though he couldn’t see it.
“What does it feel like when you change?” I asked cautiously. “You never told me.”
Josh held his breath for a second. He had probably seen this coming.
“It’s difficult to describe. The first time you change, you lack all control. Your body is transforming back and forth. You don’t know how long it’ll last.” He kept peering up at the ceiling while he spoke. The green dial of my alarm clock threw a barely visible glow on his cheek. “It hurts.”
I could tell he wanted to spare me the details. He hoped as much as I did that I wasn’t infected and wouldn’t have to worry about it. I was grateful to him, but I still needed answers. I just had to know what I might be in for.
“It feels like you’re shattering.” He frowned. “From strength. From mass. From hate. You get angry at the pain and at everything else.”
I noticed that his heartbeat increased a little. He had just wandered through the forest, so his skin glowed under my ear, but now the thought of a transformation was enough to accelerate his pulse—his body was ready to change shape at any time.
“But you get used to the pain.” His fingers found my hair and slipped through it in slow strokes. “Slowly, everything is coming together. At some point, you’ll be able to control whether or not you turn.”
I leaned on my elbows so I could look him in the face. The darkness only left shadows that could hardly be interpreted.
“How do you actually decide whether to become the hybrid or the werewolf?” I asked. “How can you separate them?”
I knew Josh could do both—change into one form and then the other. It made him unique among the werewolves so far. We just didn’t know why.
He laughed. “I don’t know. It’s a feeling. If I want to become the hybrid, I think about speed and skill. And light. If I must become a werewolf, I bring out the dark.” He paused. “Yeah, you could put it like that. The hybrid and the werewolf . . . they’re light and dark. And because they’re so different, I can tell them apart.”
This made sense to me.
“I’m afraid of the full moon,” I said, sinking back onto Josh’s chest to fill the silence inside me with his heartbeat.
Josh’s arm held me tighter.
“I have to think all the time that I might attack them,” I continued. “My parents, I mean. I’m afraid of losing control.”
