Chapter Fourteen – Angela
Chapter Fourteen
Angela
It was raining outside. One of the torrential rains that happens sometimes in the desert, like the sky’s unzipped itself and everything inside of it pours out.
I barely had time to throw the car in reverse before Pack members bounded out of the bar at me, but I hadn’t turned on my headlights—I careened wildly into the dark, where I hoped they couldn’t see me, able to go further, faster, safer in this weather with the car then them on bikes.
At first I thought I’d drive towards civilization—but if I did that, they would see me. They were probably going that way now, hoping to chase after me.
There was only one other place I could go, one other person I could count on for support. Gray. He—he’d said he loved me. Loved us. He wouldn’t just let Willa die. I turned on the next road I recognized, and started weaving up the same way he’d taken me on the bike a month earlier.
The road kept going up—I thought I recognized the same trees, but after ten turns in the rain I didn’t know anymore—was I being an idiot? Willa was counting on me—
I blindly took another hair-pin turn, waiting for the farmstead she said she’d seen, where all of Gray’s stupid business was happening. And that’s when I ran into…something.
It’d been running across the road—it clipped the front of the car and gone spinning unto the underbrush.
What the hell had it been? A deer? One of the headlights started to flicker, as I screeched to a halt and got out of the car.
Rain was still pouring, the trees above only serving to turn individual raindrops into semi-permanent streams. Everything felt impossible.
I didn’t know what was really happening, or who to believe, or how to help Willa.
I started to cry as—a wolf emerged from the underbrush beside the road.
That’s what I’d hit—oh my God.
It came out, head low, lips pulled high, nose twitching as it smelled me. I went completely still, too far away from the car to run back to it safely. The wolf padded over, and by the broken light of the moon and a bolt of lightning, I could see a furless scar, running down its front leg.
“Nice doggie,” I whispered and it growled, lifting its head—then rose up on its hind-legs.
The move was so unfamiliar I was too awestruck to run.
Its feet landed almost precisely where my tattoos were, pushing me down on the wet ground.
It stood over me, I could both smell and feel the wet weight of its fur, as it looked down at me with golden eyes.
It nipped at my neck, and then started snuffling me all over, working its way down my body, growling any time I moved an inch—until it made its way to my crotch, where it caught its teeth into the seam of my jeans and tugged.
“No!” I shouted, shoving it away. It crouched and snarled at me. “Get away!” Spell broken, I started to look around for something I could use to scare it—and saw another shadow racing in.
Another wolf came out of nowhere and bowled the first wolf over.
I scrambled to standing, as both of them growled, teeth bared as they circled, looking for an out.
The first wolf’s scar was starkly apparent—as was the new wolf’s gray coloring, like it was made of the moon itself.
The first one lunged in, and the second one twisted, going for its neck and—
Lightning flared overhead, the trees rattling with thunder, making everything momentarily bright.
Bright enough for me to see how the wolves’ shapes flickered, from wolves to men to back again, like a bad strobe.
I slapped a hand across my mouth to stop from screaming and ran for the car, leaping in and then driving perilously backwards down mountain roads.
Inside the car, I could scream. “What the fuck!” I shouted, twisting to look back over my shoulder, trying to figure out which way to go without much light behind me.
“What the actual fuck?!” I cursed, my mind unable to bend far enough to understand what was happening—why for a moment back there it’d looked like Gray and Wade were fighting in fur-covered bodies.
I made it halfway down—but a mudslide covered the side of the road, and in an effort to avoid it I’d swung wide and—the car went wide and slid off the edge of the road, the rear wheels sinking into mud.
“No. No!” I said, slamming my hand down into the steering wheel.
Willa still needed me—and I needed to be the hell off this mountain.
I pressed the gas and the back tires spun without purchase.
“Fuck!” I shouted, getting out of the car, so cold I was shaking.
The mudslide had come down with a torrent of rocks, I could see them casting jagged shadows with my one good headlight.
And then my artistic eyes saw them for what they really were.
Bones.
A field of them. The pieces to at least ten different skeletons, femurs jutting, shards of skulls. I leaned over, trying to puke. Nothing came up, but the feeling of sickness remained.
I went behind the car to where it’d bottomed out. I needed to get it on the road. If I didn’t, I’d be trapped here—with all this death.
“Please,” I begged anyone, anything that’d listen.
“I’ve got to get out.” I set my hands against the trunk and pushed.
Club business—wolves—and dying girls—whatever Gray was doing, whatever the Pack was into—it wasn’t right.
And if I didn’t get away now, I knew I never would.
“Come on,” I shoved the car, willing it to somehow help.
A sudden wind pushed a cloud away, and moonlight shone down from up above. “Come on!”
A surge of strength flowed through me, through every limb the moonlight touched. I felt it like I was being electrocuted, like a full-body shock. And with a wrenching shove I pushed the car six feet forward.
I stood behind it, panting, feeling like a monster. “You’re kidding me,” I whispered.
Moonlight faded behind another cloud and the strength it’d given me waned. “My God,” I whispered, running up to the driver’s side—where a skull with some scraps of hair still attached stared up at me from the ground.
It was up to me, to make a choice. I grabbed it, ignoring the way touching it made me want to vomit madly, and put it in the passenger seat.
The cops didn’t want to hear me until I showed them the skull. I’d had forty minutes driving in to make up a lie. It wasn’t very good, but a skull was a skull.
“Your…dog brought these in? From the Farm?” The detective I was talking to was African-American, with his hair in a buzz cut, like he’d just gotten out of the marines. The metal his nametag was printed on, on his desk—Paul Derizzio—was so shiny I was sure it was new.
“Yeah. My dog’s always digging where he shouldn’t be.”
“And you’re always out walking him in the rain?” he asked, giving me a look.
“Dog’s gotta piss, Mister. Rain doesn’t make him hold it.” It was all I could do not to shake him into believing me. “You should check it out tonight. Before the rest of her washes away, if she’s up there.”
“Her?”
I shrugged. “Isn’t it always girls that go missing in this town?”
He finished bagging the skull and wrote down my fake name along with my fake phone number.
“You should stay here, while we go check it out.”
“Fine, but I’ve got to pee myself,” I said.
“It’s one door behind you.” He pointed back, but his attention was on the skull now, not me. I heard him call for someone else to look as I dodged to sneak out, the thin nightshift crew none the wiser.
And then, I went back to the bar.
I could’ve, should’ve run. But I knew I’d seen too much—and done too much, now that I’d talked to the police. There was no way the Pack wouldn’t catch me. I knew them, I knew Gray, they could chase anyone down. And now I knew why—chasing must come easy to werewolves.
But you’re probably asking yourself why I didn’t tell the cops about Willa.
I think it was because I knew, somewhere inside me, that it was already too late.
The truth about what the Pack was, was settling inside me—just like Gray’s child.
The monster that he’d put in me, and the monster I’d somehow let myself become.
But Willa? She didn’t know. And I knew, on some level, woman to woman, that she wasn’t strong enough to make it.
The only thing left to do was to find out for myself. I drove up, the bar denuded of motorcycles, and found Murphy sitting behind the counter, looking grim and nursing his hand.
“You look like shit,” I said.
“So do you.”
“I got into an accident. I’ve been in a ditch for three hours—I just got a tow.”
His face showed the merest hint of concern. “That explains why the boys couldn’t find you.”
“Not my proudest night,” I said, slicking my wet hair back, praying the rain had washed away any of the smell from the precinct. “How is she?”
He inhaled deeply, to tell me the bad news I could already feel in the air. “She—she didn’t make it.”
And even though I knew it was coming, it still felt like a blow. “What happened?”
“Her baby….” he said, rounding the bar to my side. “It just—didn’t work out in her. It happens sometimes, you know?”
I sank down to my knees. “I wanted to take her in—"
“Doctors couldn’t have helped. They don’t know everything—"
“They know a fuck more than you do!” I screamed at him.
Even though I knew what’d happened—it was still his—Gray’s—all the Pack’s fault.
Even the women that tried to help her. I swooned with the enormity of it—literally every other true pack member was in on it.
All of them knew that Willa might die and none of them tried to save her. All to give another baby to the Pack.
The realization broke me and I howled, sobbing.
“I know, girl, I know,” Murphy said, patting my back, consolingly.
“You don’t know shit,” I cried, and sank to all fours.
I cried it out there, on the floor of the bar, and when I could stagger to standing I did so, walking behind the bar.
“What’re you getting into?”
“My best friend just died. I need a drink.”
Murphy nodded as I pulled out a Pbr—and turned the bottle they all added to shots around. The label’d been ripped off, but poorly, and I could make out half a word.
‘Ver.’
Sil-ver, my brain filled in. Obviously.
I took the unopened can back into the bedroom.
Willa wasn’t there. Neither were the sheets, or the presumably bloody mattress.
Just a bed frame and a jumble of our pillows on the floor.
I went through them until I found the one that smelled like her and lay down on the ground at the foot of the bed, waiting for Gray to come home and kill me.