The Thing About Weres

A low, warning rumble from the gray wolf.

“Wait, there’s a spare.” Biggs lifted a white hanging planter down from its hook, and dug his fingers into the soil around the petrified geranium. “It used to be just—” A couple of cigarette butts fell and rolled down the slanting porch. “Got it,” he said.

I stood aside to let Biggs fit the key to the lock, only to find myself shoved forward by Trowbridge’s impatient snout. “Give it to me,” I said.

The instant the door swung wide, the stench slapped me hard—a horrible invisible cloud of it—hamburger meat gone bad. Trowbridge’s wolf entered first, nose wrinkled, lips curled. Hand covering my nose, I took a step in.

“The light switch is on your left,” muttered Biggs.

My hand grazed the wall. Light from the single, weak bulb illuminated the hallway, but didn’t penetrate the gloom beyond it. Biggs strode over to the bay windows to yank aside the living room’s heavy curtains. The bay windows were reluctant to open, but he and Cordelia forced them up, one by one. That helped, adding light and airflow where there was none before, but not in the way I needed. What I needed was for it all to be gone. The foul smell of the dried blood—so strong, so putrid—completely scrubbed out of the air. The shadows banished, or at least tamed. My gaze saw too many of them: a gray mass behind the battered easy chair, a collection of ghouls beyond the overturned table. They waited for Trowbridge and me, memories from that nightmarish spring night that had somehow taken spectral shape.

Goddess, I’d told Biggs to seal the house, but I’d forgotten, hadn’t I?

The blood. The gore.

I should have come back and cleaned it myself. Sanitized the room, been brave enough to personally exorcise the ghosts with bleach and paint before the door was sealed from curious eyes.

Part of me rued that, as Trowbridge’s wolf padded over to the fireplace. Framed in his father’s hearth, he lifted his heavy head up high and let out a howl.

Long, deep, mournful—the call of an Alpha.

My Were flooded mortal-me with sensation. Pleasurable, but not loopy canine joy. This felt raw, and intense, and somehow primordial. It poured into me, almost sexual in feel, but instead of coming from my loins, it came from her truest core—and its thrill flooded outward, a warm rush that smothered all the other senses.

The Alpha of Creemore’s call to his pack trailed off.

The reply to his summons came the moment Trowbridge lowered his muzzle. One of the Weres waiting outside let out a howl, and almost immediately after that a female added a long sorrowful note. High and clear, almost a whine. Then another and another. So many voices. So many individual messages woven into one hymn to brotherhood.

Tears glazed my eyes as Trowbridge’s pack sang him all the way through his transformation from wolf to man, their vocalization both mournful and meaningful.

The sound of the gathered pack howling in the daylight should have made my skin crawl.

But it didn’t.

Instead of horror, there was deep comfort; the relief you get when a terrible pain is finally lifted from you.

Until last summer I’d never been within spitting distance of a wolf as he reverted back into a biped. Yes, my father was a Werewolf. But he was also a loving dad, who was very strict about certain things. “Lock the door behind me,” he’d repeat to my mum as he left for his moon-run. “Don’t open it until I can tell you what day it is.” That type of caution sticks with you. Still, curiosity had chewed at me. One morning, not long into my tenure as Alpha-in-residence, I’d crouched behind a spy hole in the cemetery hedge and watched a wolf turn into a man. Later, Cordelia had cornered me in the trailer. “There are things you need to understand,” she’d said sternly, her arms folded over her chest. “Emotionally, it’s easier to turn from a person into a wolf, than to change from a wolf back to a person. We’re not completely human in those minutes following our transformation. What you did this morning was criminally stupid.”

“I can hurt you,” her eyes had said.

The Alpha of Creemore lay curled on the dusty floor. Two arms. Two legs. No tail.

Silence fell, and grew.

“Hell, back out of the room as quietly as possible,” murmured my brother. I ignored him, staying exactly where I was. Plastered to the inside wall of the living room, heels pressed hard against the baseboards, palms pressed flat.

I couldn’t have moved. Not from fear—I’d never been afraid of Trowbridge.

From anticipation.

I didn’t give a rat’s ass if he wasn’t precisely human for the next few minutes. I’d take what I could get, though as I stared at my mate on the floor, part of me wondered what exactly that was. I’d sent a man named Robson Trowbridge through the Gates of Merenwyn. Prior to that, his wolf, though an essential part of him, had only shown itself to me in flashes, like brief glimpses of the red lining on a dark winter coat. But over the last eight hours, the fabric of my mate’s soul had been turned inside out. I could still see his canine nature in the feral spark of his mortal eyes, in the tilt of his head, in the flare of his nostrils.

I could see other things, too.

Morning light is harsh and unforgiving. Goddess, he’s so old. Was that fair? Perhaps not. Weres age a trifle slower than humans. Compared to a normal person, I’d hazard a guess that he could pass for his early thirties. But the brackets beside his wide mouth were deeper. And he seemed … harder. Leaner. All his former pretty-boy features had been rasped away, until he was bone and sinew. And his eyes—they were set so deeply they were almost sunken. Looking at him, you couldn’t help but wonder, what measure of suffering made him so harshly beautiful?

He’s suffered … But going to Merenwyn was supposed to fix that.

Trowbridge turned his head to study the corner of the room.

The wooden chair they’d bound him to was still there, sitting upright by the overturned table. Trowbridge’s arm secured to the table by silver chains, his mouth bloody, his nose broken. “Don’t you do it, Hedi! Don’t you tell them!”

Cold fall air streamed through the bay windows.

My mate was horribly still. He took his time as he gazed at the tableau before him. The chair. The table. The footprints—once bright red, now rusty brown—that circled the chair. Then he slowly spun to face us, and as he did, his dreadlocks rustled and stirred the perfume of deep anger seeping from his skin.

My gaze skittered away, suddenly ashamed, landing on the faded chintz of the easy chair, the dust obscuring the family portrait in the corroded brass frame, and then because—dammit, I’d never been able to tear my eyes from his scorching flame—my eyes flitted back to inventory the rest of the changes. His fisted hand offered no clue to how well his right paw had healed. But the other wounds he’d been given that terrible night— one across each thigh, one high across his chest, one on each wrist—had faded, their scars now invisible. The same couldn’t be said of his belly wound—the long thin one, in the seam of which they’d placed a filigree chain. The flesh there had knitted itself back together, but roughly. Where the silver had sunk into his belly, the scar was thick and uneven.

White, too. The type of silvery paleness that’s a gift of time’s passage.

Just how much time has passed for him?

He’d always been lean, and still could be called so, because his new physique carried nary an ounce of fat. Over the passage of 196 days on my calendar, he’d widened the way a man does over the course of a decade. His shoulders were bulkier, his pecs were like two hillocks of hard clay on top of a rippling ridge of abdominal muscles. Fae Stars, even his navel had been put on a reducing diet. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall it looking like that—a shallow divot stretched over a taut belly of muscle. The only thing I recognized on his new and improved body was that vein running down his hip. I followed that familiar road map until my gaze picked up the thin, narrow trail of dark hair just a smidge south of that, and then I followed it like a road traveler following an infallible GPS device, all the way to the darker nest of curls, where his—

Mine, mine, murmured my Were in deep approval.

My cheeks grew hot. My gaze darted back to his face.