Chapter 4 Will #2
Will imagined himself in bed with the human who had fallen for him. He wasn’t sure what the man looked like, wasn’t sure what he would smell like. I might actually be okay with a woman too. I wouldn’t mind that at all, so long as they’re kind.
With most of the lights dimmed, Will—as John—would look into his human’s eyes. I have something to tell you, he’d say.
The human would be surprised. They’d want to kiss John, but John wouldn’t let them, would insist on telling them.
I’m a werewolf. I can change into a wolf whenever I want, and when the full moon is out, I have to.
They’d look into John’s eyes, giggle nervously, and tell him to stop wasting time with jokes when they could be kissing.
I’m not joking, cupcake, I’m telling you the truth. You have to know. And if you can’t love me for it, then—
The human wouldn’t have that. There’d be some back-and-forth, but in the end, John would turn. He’d be able to smell the human better, the emotions and…yeah, Will was pretty sure there’d be fear, but also admiration. If John picked someone, Will was pretty sure that person would love him.
Will gnawed on his bottom lip. Just like in the stories. Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. Okay, those didn’t really have a soulmate, just some prince, but…the stories about finding your soulmate, and then when you do, nothing else matters and you get your happily ever after.
Will lay there, imagining it over and over again—telling the truth and being loved for it.
The fantasy was enough to distract him from his fear.
He feared that if he ever told anyone what he’d gone through, they’d cast him away.
Or, maybe not cast him away. He was afraid that they’d look at him but wouldn’t be able to see him.
All they’d be able to see was what he’d gone through.
Does that make anyone a bad person? I don’t know. If I’d stayed there then…I wouldn’t have to think about this. Not for the few more years I might’ve made it with those guys.
In the other bedroom, Will could hear what it sounded like to find safety in the arms of another. He wondered if that was something he’d ever be able to have.
He couldn’t not listen. His hearing was too acute, and even when Corvin and Mike were done, Will couldn’t drift off. Confusion, fear, and uncertainty raged in his thoughts like big black clouds, overshadowing everything else.
Deep into the night his thoughts carried him, but at one point, he got up, thirsty.
He snuck out of the room. Will knew that as a siren, Mike was all kinds of dangerous, but at the same time, he hadn’t seen him lock the front door.
I’ll check. It’s on the way to the kitchen.
As quietly as he was able, Will walked toward the stairs and down them.
He took in the scents of the house. It smelled nice, just like Peter’s house, but this place had something Peter’s home didn’t.
There was a warmth here that came from people sharing the space, making it a home where they loved one another.
That love had been so evident in how Corvin had waited for his boyfriend on the couch with a bowl of popcorn in his lap and a smile on his face.
Will hadn’t known something as simple and wholesome as a man waiting for their lover to come home to them still existed in the world. His parents had had it, but Will hadn’t seen it in a long while.
When he got to the kitchen, Will froze, and his heart nearly beat out of his chest.
There, just outside the window by some bushes in the drive across the street, was a loup-garou; one of the pack in his beast form. Will was pretty sure it was Jeff, but he didn’t stick around to get a closer look.
He shot up the stairs and banged on the siren’s door. Mike opened it.
“They’re here,” Will told a very pissed-off siren.
Will was there for parts of the chase, but also not. It was like having an out-of-body experience, except his body kept on moving and acting and doing what Mike told him to do. It was like Will had just stepped back behind the persona of John, and John could handle this shit.
Mike took charge and got them all in the car, keeping the loups-garous at bay with his song. The four loups-garous followed them to where Mike was taking them.
Corvin was still sleep-drunk in the back of the car, but he obeyed Mike, implicitly trusting his boyfriend.
Will, on seeing this, wondered what it was like having someone you could trust like that.
Someone who told you to leave the house when evil monster wolves were out there, and you did, knowing they’d keep you safe.
It took a while for Will to realize that something else might be going on.
Mike had the windows down in the car so he could use his siren power.
He’s probably using it on me and on his boyfriend too.
If he’s doing that, I don’t feel it, and if I don’t feel it, then being dragged under by a siren can’t really be that bad.
Guess I’d take a siren over a loup-garou any day.
Except Mike had Corvin, and Will was just the third wheel with all the baggage.
Even though Will was afraid to die and get the two lovers killed along with him, he remained in the moment while not being fully part of it; probably because of Mike’s song, the melody of which wouldn’t quite stick in his head.
Will’s body acted, his mouth made words.
It was simply that none of it felt real or like it was happening to him.
“The people after me have dogs,” he told Corvin at one point, and Corvin apparently bought it.
Mike took them to some abandoned factory.
It was creepy as fuck, all dark, vaulted ceilings and uncanny shadows climbing up the walls and slinking across the floors.
But there was no arguing with Mike. Will—the observant part of himself, the part that had helped him survive—admired what Mike was doing.
It was badass. Far more so than those fake hunters in the werewolf movie had been.
Inside the building, they ran through the darkness, echoes surrounding them, Mike’s power keeping them in an iron hold. At one point, Mike left Corvin hidden away in a dark, abandoned room.
If there were someone who’d hide me…if they’d hidden me from Ed then…
No. Giving me away was easier. And yet, Will knew that it was what an alpha should have done—keeping all members of the pack safe, making sure they could thrive.
He remembered his grandfather. What did I ever do?
I told him it was stupid that he made his pack run all their decisions past him, that he’d even demand the right to name the pack members’ kids in this day and age.
Guess he didn’t like being called backwards to his face.
The small, obedient wolf part of Will wanted to feel sorry, but the bigger part of him knew he’d been right. And he still felt the same. And I’d call him backwards again. I’d also call him a bad alpha for…giving me away like that.
Mike wasn’t like that. Even as a siren, he was better at protecting than a real wolf. Will respected that, even as the darkness around them filled with the stink of his own fear, with the scent of the loups-garous, and with Mike’s song.
Mike took Will’s hand and pulled him along, still singing. Not just singing. Protecting.
Will got angry, so fucking angry, even as his body shook with the fear of teeth and claws and worse. I should’ve been protected. I should’ve been safe.
He’d wanted so many things once, and none of them had included dying under the paws of Ed and his pack.
Will knew he wasn’t strong enough to take on his grandfather, but if he survived this, he would find a way to become someone.
He’d become someone who could go back to the fucking pack that had sold him, and he would walk up to his grandfather and he would tell him that he, Will, had survived all of it.
Will might not have been an alpha, but he wasn’t just a thing to be used either, even if being free meant dying tonight.
A small voice spoke up in Will’s muddled thoughts, telling him this could all be worse. With the siren leading him and not leaving, Will could at least be sure he wouldn’t die alone.
They had run through the darkness of the factory, going up and up, and now they were on a metal walkway, with Mike keeping himself between Will and the loups-garous. Like an alpha, protecting the weak. Protecting me.
Only three of the pack were following. Mike had managed to stop one of them on the stairs leading up to the offices.
Ed though, he was one of the three coming for them, coming for Will.
He was the one in the front, the one whose teeth would be the first to break skin.
Will shivered, but Mike kept on singing.
Slashes of moonlight fell across Ed’s ash-gray coat from tall windows, and Will saw the loup-garou drool and sneer, eagerness to tear and bite and bleed them in every line of his body.
He’d been much like that in his human form too, only eager for different things, things that weren’t on offer, things he had taken by force.
There’d been fists before the grunts of sick pleasure, and Will’s blood on filthy sheets—a token of memories that were harder to keep, even harder to let go of fully.
Suddenly, the feeling of being apart from what was happening went away. Will’s entire focus came back to this one moment. The siren song had stopped.
Ed was coming for him, his sharp claws making the metal walkway sing. Mike, whose lunch Will had inadvertently stolen, was right there in front of him, and he wasn’t backing down.
I want to be like that. I want to be able to face down what scares me.
And I want to know that I can win. Will shivered.
But I’m nothing like that. Maybe I never was.
I’m not an alpha, I’m just angry. But if I ever have a mate, if anyone would want me, I’d protect them.
I’d do anything. I’d never let them get hurt, never ever.
Moonlight glinted off Ed’s eyes. Will’s blood rushed loudly in his ears.