CHAPTER SIX || HARRIS
Alone in the cabin, I took stock. Reed was a werewolf. He’d been imprinted on my brain as the warm and sweet guy I’d met at Thierry’s wedding, but he was behaving kind of like an asshole. Though I was reasonably sure that was an act.
But he’d made it clear he wanted me to leave.
That was insane, right? He was my fated mate. While I wasn’t quite sure what that meant yet, the bond between us was undeniably there. Why the hell would he not want to explore what that meant?
And I’d kissed him. My first kiss with a man. And it had been…
Nice. Better than nice. Until that moment, the idea I might be bisexual or pansexual or something along those lines had seemed like an academic question. A faraway notion that might’ve been true, in a very abstract way.
Reed was anything but abstract. He was here and he was very real.
But what was I going to do about it?
What, exactly, did I want from this situation?
Why not just leave? It was probably the most sensible thing to do.
After all, Reed had point-blank told me that was what he wanted.
Plus, he was a dick. Hell, I wasn’t even sure if I was ready for a relationship at all, much less one that challenged my long-held notions of who I was as a sexual being.
Certainly not one that was fated to be life-altering or whatever.
Somehow, I doubted Reed would be willing to go at a glacial pace while I went on a journey of self-discovery.
I had only ever been in love with one man before and I hadn’t even realized it until after he’d died. Paul. My former partner.
He had been the only openly gay detective in homicide, which had made me a little nervous in the beginning—but, looking back on it, only because in the back of my mind, I knew I was bi.
But Paul was hard not to like. He was pragmatic but still good-natured.
That’s rarer than it sounds in our line of work.
He’d been talented at his job, too. Hell, he’d been in SWAT for years.
But he had a way about him that immediately disarmed other people, making them want to talk to him.
Brute force and violence were never his go-to tools.
And while I’m pretty damn muscular, I’d looked downright lean standing next to him. A fact my body had frequently responded to—which I just as frequently ignored.
But the urge to kiss Paul had gotten harder to ignore every single day.
It didn’t help that we did everything together.
We were friends outside of work, too—looking back on it, we were a lot more than friends.
We went out to eat together every time we had a day off.
When a new movie we both wanted to see hit the theaters, we went together.
He was constantly at my place, or I was at his, shooting the shit about nothing and everything, practically every single day.
Of the two of us, he was the talker, and he had a brain that worked about a million miles a minute.
Hell, even our Christmas shopping—both of us always at the last minute and frantic about it—we always did that together, too.
We’d been in a quasi, nonsexual half-relationship for years. The entire time, I had told myself he was just my best friend and my partner on the force. That it was normal, our level of closeness. But it had always been more than that.
He shouldn’t have died.
We had finished up for the day and were in the car together, on the way back to his place for a game of pool.
He had a table in his basement and cold beers in the fridge.
And I was working up the nerve to act on the impulse I had been feeling for months—years, even.
I was going to kiss him that night and let the chips fall wherever they fell.
And he probably knew. The bastard. He’d known for years, most likely, and was just waiting for me to finally do something about it.
Because he was never in a romantic relationship, was he?
He had stopped hooking up with anyone, too, in those last couple of months.
And his hand sometimes brushed mine and when I didn’t immediately pull away, but instead met his gaze and flashed him a smile, he probably knew exactly what that meant, even before I consciously admitted it to myself.
He’d probably been waiting for me to come to my senses.
We’d gotten a call over the radio that there was an active shooter at the office building three blocks from our location.
Paul had immediately responded to it, because when all units are called, we all have to respond if we can.
And when we arrived, because we were closest, we were the first ones on the scene.
And then we heard the gunfire. Paul stormed in and I followed after him, our weapons drawn. Without our tactical gear and without backup.
Even though it had been two years, I could still smell the faint acrid scent of floor cleaner in the air.
The tile had just been mopped over by the lobby elevators.
There was a yellow “slippery when wet” sign.
And the fluorescent lights were too bright, almost garish.
The lobby island, where a receptionist should’ve been sitting, was vacant.
The tall decorative glass panels all around the lobby, wavy and pale blue, were covered in spiderwebs of cracks radiating out from bullet holes—close enough together that it had to have been from a semi-automatic weapon.
I tried not to look at the carnage. I couldn’t help anyone, not yet, and looking made it real. But the metallic smell of blood mixed with gunpowder was lodged in my memories, too.
There had been a moment of absolute silence as we entered the building.
Then the pop-pop-pop of gunfire, coming from down the hallway to the left.
Paul and I traded a glance and then he raised his weapon, indicating he was going first. I kept mine down, so I wouldn’t accidentally flag him.
And then we went in, like we’d done together dozens of times before. It was muscle memory. Automatic.
Paul got the shooter. He had saved lives that day—maybe even dozens. But the shooter had gotten him, too. If he hadn’t gone first, maybe he would’ve lived.
And I had never gotten the chance to tell him how I felt.
He was just… gone.
Then I was left with the realization that, while I had been right next to him all that time, I had spent years running, too. Being a coward in all the ways that actually mattered.
And I couldn’t—wouldn’t—do that again.
Never again.
So yeah, I couldn’t leave, could I? This might’ve been some sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo wolfy connection, but it was real, too. And I had to see it through. Even if I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted—or what I was even ready for.
I looked around the room and decided it was time to act. Because if Reed thought I was going to sit on my hands in here and wait for him to come back, he was out of his damn mind.
I stepped out of the cabin and shivered against the cool mountain air—it was way colder here than in Los Angeles.
But it was invigorating, too. Evergreen trees hugged the commune—tall and shockingly green.
I had spent a fair amount of time in the cabin, and the day was rapidly dwindling, the overcast light dimming to gloom.
The shadows from the log cabins elongated into ominous shapes inching along the ground, and everything around me was still and silent.
There were thirteen cabins on the ridge, twelve small ones and one larger one, lined up at even intervals on both sides of a dirt pathway.
All of them were dark and shuttered. Some had roofs completely covered in moss.
Only a handful looked like they were still used.
It looked almost like an abandoned campground.
Like Camp Crystal Lake from Friday the 13th, twenty years after the credits rolled and everyone had long since come to their senses and closed up shop.
The fire pit at the base of the ridge, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet below, looked recently used—there was charred wood and the ground around the pit was hard-packed and lacked any evidence of overgrowth.
It was almost hard to believe anyone lived here at all. The place felt… empty. Hollow.
The door to one of the cabins closest to the pathway leading to the fire pit opened and a pale, dark-haired man stepped out. He was wiry, short, and couldn’t have been much older than his early twenties. He froze when his gaze landed on me.
I started walking toward him without even thinking about what I was going to do.
“You’re Harris,” the man said, watching me as I approached.
His voice was soft and low. Not quite a whisper, but hushed, as if he was almost afraid of being heard at all.
His arms were crossed over his chest, hands on his elbows.
My detective brain noted it as both closed-off and self-soothing. Weird.
“Good guess.”
“Reed asked me to check on you before he left.” He flashed me a shy smile. “We don’t exactly get a lot of visitors here.”
“Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t. Changing into wolves under the light of the moon would probably freak out the tourists.”
“It’s definitely not on the brochures.”
“There are brochures?”
“Figuratively. I’m Daniel, by the way.”
I noted that, while he smiled, he didn’t offer me his hand.
“Harris. But we’ve already established that.”
“Right. So, um… do you need anything?”
“A tour would be good.” An explanation would’ve been even better, but I doubted Daniel could provide one.
“Oh.” Daniel lifted a hand and gestured around us vaguely. “Right. Um. Well, this is kind of it, I guess.”
It was probably a trick of the light, but the air around his hand seemed to shimmer and crackle. Just for an instant, then it was gone.