“I’ve never had it before. It tasted fine.” Somewhat bland but I was glad for that. If I was going to puke, better it be simple. “Is that some kind of bird?”
“Are you sick?” He sniffed the air before he looked at his father. “She doesn’t smell sick, but they live in that enclosed environment. Maybe she has something?”
“She’s not sick. I would know. Something bothering you, Rachel?”
“I couldn’t help but think about the dead Warrior.” My turn to ask the questions. I’d told them about me, I’d even given them my name. “Did you guys do that to him? Are the others all strewn in the trees?”
Jason jumped up. “Do we seem like the kind of people who would do that?”
“I have no idea. I appreciate the food very much and that you’ve been kind to me, but your sister whacked me on the head right after I found the dead guy. I’ve never spent time with Werewolves before. Maybe this is something you do. Some kind of trap you lay and then you play with your food or something.”
My heart was beating so fast. Jason looked annoyed, his cheeks flushed red, and really I couldn’t blame him. They’d been nice and I was asking for reassurances about terrible, horrible things. Plus, I couldn’t seem to stop reminding them that they were monsters because, well, they were.
His father stood up. For his part, I kind of thought he looked pretty nonplussed. But then again, Andon Kenwood seemed like a cool character. I suspected that not much fazed him. He hadn’t uttered a word other than an occasional head nod when I had sobbed out my existence to him earlier.
“Take her for some fresh air. It’s her first day up. She’s never seen carnage before and she needs some air. Tell her about us. Then feed her again and lock her in the cage. It’s Full Moon and I won’t have you late.”
“Lock me in a cage?”
Jason grabbed my arm and pulled me down a long hallway before I could say another word. Oh no, he wasn’t going to get away with this. At some point, he was going to explain the lock me up comment or I was going to throw a fit. I’d never actually thrown one before but I was sure I could get the job done if I had to.
“Wait a minute.” I grabbed my arm from his to stare at him right before we walked through a door. “I can’t go out there, you remember what happened to me the last time you dragged me outside into sunlight?”
His grin surprised me. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses. The lenses were so dark they almost looked black. I had seen sunglasses before but never like that. I looked up from the glasses to see Jason’s bright smile. He was waiting for a reaction from me, and his happiness at the glasses was so infectious.
I couldn’t help it, I grinned back.
Like two statues, we stood in the hall grinning at each other and at the glasses he held in his hand that I hadn’t taken yet. Why did he have to be what he was? Why wasn’t he just some boy that I met in the habitat who had moved from Freedom or something?
The thought faded the smile to a frown. He reached out, stroking away a strand of my hair that had fallen onto my face. “I’m not going to hurt you. I wish you could believe that. I know that you think I’m a monster. I promise you, pixie girl, I’m not.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Pixie girl?”
“You’re like something out of a myth my mother used to read us, like a member of the faery people come to life to tempt me.”
“Where is your mother?” I’d met Dad. Was I going to meet Mom now?
“My mother died in a fight with the Vampires.”
His answer hit me in the gut like he’d taken a club and whacked me in the stomach with it. “That’s how I lost my mother.”
We were two motherless teenagers. Even if he was, well, a monster. We had that in common. We both knew what that felt like in a way that others never would. I wanted to reach out to touch him, but forced myself to stop. It would be too weird.
“She would have liked you; she was a human, too.”
“Your mother wasn’t a Werewolf?”
All the revelations he was making were muddling my head.
“Come on, take the glasses. We’ll go for a walk and I’ll answer all your questions.” He handed me the glasses. “You can answer some of mine.”
I put the dark glasses on, and they made everything in his hallway really, really dark. It looked like nighttime even with the lights on. Jason bit down on his lip but couldn’t seem to stop himself from cracking up laughing.
“What’s funny?” Did I look ridiculous?
“They’re huge on your face.” He took my hand. “Come see.”
I followed him to a mirror that hung on the wall next to the door. He was right. The glasses had clearly belonged to a person much bigger than I would ever be. They were huge, covering not only my eyes but also part of my lower cheeks and my forehead.
What was weird was that I couldn’t see my eyes at all. I’d never seen anything like it. The sheer blackness of the outside of the glasses made me seem hidden from the world.
“If I didn’t need them to leave this building, I would take them off right now.” I shivered at my reflection. Eyes were gateways; they let you see what a person was thinking and feeling. Of course, maybe it was better this way, maybe it was better that Jason couldn’t see into my soul.
Jason let go of my hand to open the door and I walked through it into the daytime outside. I noted that while there was still a glare from the sunlight that hit the top of my glasses, I could see pretty well as long as I kept the black sunglasses pressed tight atop my nose, flush to my face.
“If you try to run, I will track you and bring you back here.”
“I hadn’t been thinking about running.”
Surprisingly, that was the truth. My ultimate goal was to run away but not at the moment. I still needed answers. If I was going to have to endure whatever this situation was, and at the moment it really wasn’t so bad because Jason was pretty good company, than I could, at least, bring back information that the habitat could use.
My heart panged at the thought that the Lyons, and my father, would be expecting me back in a few hours. If I didn’t return, they would think I was dead. Would they all miss me? Or would I soon be forgotten like so many others before me? Would I fade into the collective memory of the Warriors who didn’t make it past day one? Like we were all one person instead of so many individuals who were lost?
The breeze was less abrasive on my skin and I actually found the temperature refreshing. Cold enough that it made me want to walk faster, but not the mind-numbing cold of the night before.
I bent and picked up another leaf, letting it crumble in my fingertips. The leaves on the trees around us, as best I could tell through my glasses, appeared a reddish, golden brown.
“My mother used to call this apple cider weather.”
I had been doing my best to pretend I was unaffected by Jason’s presence, but I wasn’t. He felt warm, even the distance we walked apart, like he was a hot presence in a world of freezing cold eventualities.
“I know what apples are. We get them sometimes. What is apple cider? Some kind of drink?”
“Breaks my heart that you live in a world with no apple cider.” The grimace on his face was a huge indication then he meant what he said. He really was…beautiful, in a way most guys, or even grown men, were not.
Jason seemed to light up from the inside out. Maybe it came from actually being outside all the time but his skin glowed with freshness. Or maybe it was a Werewolf thing, a monster thing.
“Do you do this all the time? Take on Warriors and not tell them why you’re holding them prisoner?”
He raised an eyebrow, his lips quirking into a smile before falling straight again. “Do you feel like a prisoner?”
“Do you answer every question with a question?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I did promise you answers. But first, tell me if you feel better out here? Less likely to hurl away all that fine turkey?”
I stopped walking and turned to look at him. “I feel much better, thank you.” I got my first look at the house we had just exited. I covered my mouth with my hand to suppress my gasp and I looked again. It wasn’t really a house—it was a giant tent—standing in front of a dozen giant tents just like it. I could see from where I stood how it was built. The walls were solid, but only because large beams in the ground held them up. I hadn’t thought to feel the walls earlier. Why would I? They had looked like concrete, but they weren’t, they were actually cloth and something else—vinyl, maybe?
“You guys are prepared to leave at any time, aren’t you?”
“We’re nomadic. We never stay anywhere very long.”
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard sadness in his voice. I could ask him about it. He’d put his emotion right out there for me to hear it, which begged the question: just how well did I want to know Jason?
At some point, I was going to turn a corner with this Werewolf where I was going to start thinking of him as a living, breathing, cognizant being whose head I wouldn’t be able to cut off. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that.
And yet…
“Would you rather stay put?” I spoke the words.
“Maybe. See, I can still remember what it was like, to have a house that was a home, to have neighbors, to go to school.”
“You guys have Werewolf schools somewhere?”
Jason sighed and sat down on the ground. “Dad said to tell you. I hadn’t counted on having to be the one to tell you. He wants the people underground to start to know about us. He thinks it’s time. When he said he wanted a Warrior—and we found you—I didn’t realize you would be the one he would tell. Or, now, who I would tell.”
The cool breeze blew at his messy blond hair, and as I sat down next to him, I tried to imagine chopping off his neck. I couldn’t. I knew that. Not while he looked like this. Maybe when he was a wolf, but I wasn’t even sure that I could do it then either.
I’d done it. I’d invested in this creature with the frightening blue eyes that were looking less and less scary to me.
“Whatever your story is, just say it. How bad could it be?”
“Here’s the deal. The monster you call me, I’m not one. Well, not anymore. I was one, but I’m not anymore.”
I patted him on his arm. “You’re still a monster, Jason. I saw you with four paws and fur eating the Vampire.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Being a Werewolf doesn’t make me a monster. It’s just who I am, like I have blond hair, blue eyes, and the ability to shift. It’s a genetic thing. There have always been Werewolves, even if people didn’t know it.”
“We know it now. Forty-six years ago, the Werewolves made us quite aware of themselves. And the Vampires.”
“That’s the thing. I can’t remember doing that, even though I must have.”
“You couldn’t have done it. You’re around seventeen, right? That means it was twenty-nine years before you were born.”
“I’m eighteen.” He cleared his throat. “I guess technically I’m forty-four years old.”
“How can that be? You look eighteen.”
“I am eighteen. The thing is that I stayed eight years old for thirty-six years. I never aged, never changed, I don’t even really remember most of it, just blurred, and then when things shifted back, I started aging again like nothing ever happened. It’s like that whole time was a giant dream.”
His face was so stricken I was trying to follow what he told me. “So what you’re saying is…?”
He interrupted. “I was eight years old when the monsters, as you call them, rose up and killed everyone. I was one of those monsters, well a child monster, but I was still there that day doing whatever it was that I did. Then, ten years ago, I started aging again. Now I’m eighteen. If I had aged the way I should have, I would chronologically have turned fifty-four three weeks ago.”
I stood up. “How can that be?”
“We don’t know.” He rocked back and forth. “None of us can explain it. My Dad woke up. He’s our Alpha. He just kind of woke up one day from the haze and then as he woke up, within days his whole pack—those of us that were still alive—we woke up, too. And it was like we started over. The clock started ticking again.”
“I’m so confused. How did your Dad ‘wake up’?”
“He’s not sure. He says it was like opening his eyes after a long, horrible dream. He didn’t even know where he was for a while. He wandered around. It was horrifying. There were all these Vampires. He wanted to run or shift and eat them but he pretended to fit in for a while as he pieced together information. Then we all started to wake up, and he managed to get us away from the crazed wolves and the Vampires. That was ten years ago.”
I knelt down and closed my eyes. Jason was right. He shouldn’t be telling me this story. I was really the wrong person to hear it. What was I supposed to do with this information?
“Say something, Rachel.”
I opened my eyes at Jason’s plea. “I’m not sure what to say. I’m in a tent city with some of the original monsters, the ones who made it so I’d be underground my whole life or up here fighting just to survive.”
He shook his head as he crawled over to where I was. “I’m not a monster. You’re a Warrior, right? You get signals or something when there are monsters nearby. Have I set off your personal radar once? Did you even know we were in the woods when we saved you from the Vampire?”
“No.” There was that. I hadn’t known. “But I’d never been near a Werewolf before. Maybe I’m Werewolf deficient.”
“Do you think that’s very likely?”
He took my hand and placed it on his chest. “I have a heart, it beats like yours. I know what happened. I can see with my eyes how things are. I had my role, whatever small amount I could have done at eight. I take my responsibility. None of us can undo it or do much to make it better. But I had a human mother, I had human friends, I still think of myself as being human.” He squeezed my hand. “You’re the first new person I’ve met in ten years. It’s just us out here alone with the monsters, hiding from the Warriors who want us dead.”
He grinned in the sideways manner I’d seen him do a couple of times now, and my heart somersaulted. “All the pretty girls are underground. But as far as I’m concerned they can stay there because the prettiest girl I can ever remember seeing is up here with me now, smelling like vanilla beans and cinnamon and, I don’t know, heaven.”
“Jason,” I swallowed away my words, because I couldn’t deal with the things his words were doing to me. I just couldn’t. He was a Werewolf, an original Werewolf from the time of Armageddon, and he was here, telling me I was beautiful—something I knew quite well I wasn’t—and even though I shouldn’t be focusing on that, not when there were so many other more important things to think about, it still made my cheeks feel hot.
“Rachel.” He spoke my name like it was a sigh.
“There are much prettier girls than me in the habitat where I come from.”
He leaned forward until our faces almost touched. “Liar.”
“You just like me because I’m the only girl around you haven’t spent every day with for the last ten years.”
“Not true.” He’d moved so our noses touched. “I’m a human who can become a wolf. Smell is really important to me, and you, Rachel Clancy, you smell like mine.”
His mouth found mine, and I closed my eyes. His lips were soft and warm, but possessive at the same time. I felt claimed; even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to be. There was no doubt about it, Jason Ulises Kenwood was dangerous to me and not necessarily because he was a Werewolf.
But as far as first kisses went, it was pretty darn good.
I might even let him do it again.
Chapter Eight
“Get your hands off of him, he’s mine.”
I was yanked away from Jason and tossed onto the ground. I rolled to my left, avoiding the worst of the impact. Just as Keith had taught me.
I spun and focused on my attacker. Quickly, I summed her up in my mind. Shorter than me by at least two inches, rounder, with brown hair and dark eyes. She had to be Werewolf, or she couldn’t have hauled me around like that.
“Abigail Skyler Banks, stop it right now.”
I heard Jason growl, but I didn’t need his help and I really didn’t want it. The girl hadn’t realized whose first kiss she had just interrupted. I was a Warrior and, frankly, it might feel nice to kick a little butt today.
I lunged forward as I knocked her onto the ground behind me. She went down hard and groaned. Finally, I moved forward and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her left, preparing to throw her hard into the tree.
She shrieked and started to cry. “Oh God, please don’t hurt me.”
I think it must have been the tears that made me stop. Monsters weren’t supposed to sob. I was trained to hurt monsters, not stupid little girls who didn’t like seeing me kiss their boyfriends. I dropped her to the ground.
I stood over her as I spoke. “Don’t ever put your hands on me again, Abigail Skyler Banks.” If they all used three names then I would, too.
Three girls I didn’t know rushed to her side as I turned around to face Jason, his sisters, and a collection of Werewolf boys I hadn’t met yet.
Jason scratched his head. “I was going to ask if you were okay. Did she hurt you?”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
He took a step back. “Do you think I would kiss you if I had a girlfriend?”
“I don’t know what to think. As I was being hauled into the air by Abigail over there, Jason, she seemed pretty possessive.”
Autumn moved forward. “I think she has some wrong ideas about Jason. She’s always had a thing for him.”
“Thank you, Autumn,” I held up my hand. I was getting excessively involved in things I had no business even knowing about considering I was leaving at my first opportunity. “It’s not like I’m his…what would you guys call it? Mate or anything? I need to see your father; I’m getting out of here right now.”
Jason tried to speak. “Rachel…”