24. Loup Garou
Chapter twenty-four
Loup Garou
The intruder came on a Thursday.
I was alone in the garage apartment. I'd stayed in to work. Normal evening. Normal night.
Except nothing had felt normal since Callum pinned me to the kitchen floor and got me off, twice.
Since I'd lain next to Jasper that night and felt like a fraud.
Since I'd started cataloging my sins like rosary beads: Eli in the archive.
Jasper in my bed. Callum's fingers inside me while I moaned his name.
I was working on a logo design, trying not to think about any of it, when someone knocked on my door at ten PM.
My first thought was Marcus.
Three years of conditioning doesn't disappear overnight. My body went rigid, and I was already calculating escape routes before my rational brain caught up. The fire escape. The window in the bedroom. The phone in my hand, ready to dial.
But when I looked through the peephole, it wasn't Marcus.
I didn't recognize him. Tall, lean, with pale skin and dark hair slicked back from a face that was almost too symmetrical.
Handsome, in the way a knife is handsome, all edges and sharp lines.
He stood on my porch with his hands clasped behind his back, his posture relaxed, but the way he held himself set my lizard brain screaming.
His eyes were wrong. I spotted it the instant he stepped into the porch light: they caught the light like an animal's eyes in headlights. Too still. Too focused. Like something that hunted in the dark.
Every instinct I had screamed at me not to open that door.
I opened it anyway. Just a crack. Just enough to speak through.
"Can I help you?"
"Serena Calloway." Not a question. He said my name like he was reading it off a kill list.
"Who's asking?"
He smiled. It was the smile of something that had studied human expressions without understanding them; the right shape, the right muscle movements, but empty behind the eyes. A mask worn by something that had never been human at all.
"I'm here to deliver a message," he said. His voice was pleasant, conversational, completely at odds with the predatory stillness of his body. "You should leave, Serena. The Voss boys can't protect you from what's coming."
Ice flooded my veins. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"You will." He stepped closer, and I stumbled back, the door swinging wider than I'd intended.
The air around him seemed to ripple, like heat rising off summer pavement, and I caught a whiff of something animalistic, something off: stale musk, copper, and something rotten, like meat left too long in the sun.
"You're going to want to remember this conversation when—"
He stopped mid-sentence. Tilted his head, like a dog hearing a distant whistle. His nostrils flared.
And then they were there.
All three of them.
I didn't see them arrive. One moment I was alone with this stranger, and the next Callum was between us, his back to me, his body a wall of flexed muscle. Jasper flanked my left side. Eli stood at an angle, his hands raised in a way that seemed almost ritualistic.
"You're on Thornwood territory." Callum's voice was different; lower than usual, and rougher, with a growling cadence that vibrated in my chest like bass through a speaker. "Uninvited. You have ten seconds to leave."
"Or what?" The stranger's smile widened, showing too many teeth. "You'll make me? Three against one? Over a human? Have fun explaining that."
His eyes slid to me. Lingered. Something hungry in that gaze, something that made me want to scrub my skin raw.
"Five seconds," Callum said.
"She smells like all of you. Like she's been rolling in your scent." The stranger laughed, a sound like bones grinding together. "That’ll be interesting info to share. I wonder who’ll pay the most, the Beaumonts or your fa—"
I saw it—a flicker of something raw on Callum’s face at the word Beaumonts. Not just anger. Recognition. Whatever history lived between those families, it ran deep enough to make a man who feared nothing flinch.
Jasper lunged. What happened next will live in my nightmares until I die.
The stranger's face changed.
Not metaphorically. Not subtly. His skull cracked and reformed, bones pushing against skin that stretched, tore and knitted back together in ways that made my stomach heave.
His jaw elongated with a wet, grinding sound—cartilage separating, tendons snapping and reattaching.
His eyes sank deeper into his skull and then bulged forward, the irises flooding yellow, the pupils narrowing to vertical slits.
His hands twisted. Fingers elongated, knuckles popping one by one like firecrackers, nails thickening and curving into claws that looked capable of disemboweling someone with a single swipe. Fur sprouted along his forearms in patches, gray and coarse.
He opened his mouth and his teeth—God, his teeth—lengthened into fangs, rows of them, far more than any mouth should hold.
I screamed.
The sound ripped out of me before I could stop it—raw, primal and absolutely useless.
My back hit the doorframe. My hand shot to the doorframe, fingers closing around the heavy ceramic lamp I’d set on the entry table.
I swung it hard at the creature’s back as it lunged past me.
The base connected with a satisfying crack, ceramic shattering against something that felt like hitting a tree trunk.
It barely flinched—but it turned, snarling, and that half-second of distraction was all the brothers needed.
The creature that had been a man tossed Jasper into the railing and lunged at Callum.
And Callum changed too.
His hands became weapons; fingers extending into curved black claws that caught the porch light like obsidian blades.
His shoulders broadened, muscles rippling beneath his shirt, seams tearing.
When he snarled, his jaw was wrong: too long, too full of teeth, and the sound that came out of him was nothing human. Nothing close to human.
They collided with a sound like a car crash.
Claws met claws. Blood sprayed; dark, almost black, splattering across the porch railing, the walls, my bare feet.
The creature raked its claws across Callum's chest, and I saw fabric and flesh part, saw the meat of him exposed, saw bone gleaming white before blood welled up to hide it.
Callum didn't slow down. He grabbed the creature by the throat, claws sinking deep, and threw it. The thing sailed through the air and hit the magnolia tree with a crack that might have been wood or might have been spine.
Jasper was there before it could recover.
His face was wrong now too; jaw elongated, eyes glowing amber, teeth bared in a snarl that showed far too many points.
He moved faster than anything human should, a blur of motion and violence, and when he reached the creature, he tore into it with a savagery that made me gag.
Blood everywhere. On the grass, on the tree, on Jasper's hands, face, and chest. The wet sounds of flesh tearing, of something trying to scream through a throat that was being systematically destroyed.
Eli hadn't changed as much as his brothers; just his eyes, glowing golden in the darkness, but he was doing something with his hands, tracing patterns in the air that left faint trails of light, and wherever those patterns touched the creature, it burned. I could smell it: cooking meat and sulfur.
The creature finally broke free, missing chunks now: an ear, most of one arm, something glistening and organic hanging from a wound in its side.
It howled, a sound of rage and pain, then it fled.
It ran into the preserve on legs that bent wrong, leaving a trail of blood and ichor that steamed in the night air.
Jasper started to follow.
"Let him go," Callum said. His voice was still that inhuman growl. "Message delivered. Both ways."
Silence.
The three of them stood in my yard, splattered with blood and worse, breathing hard. Slowly, almost naturally, they shifted back. Claws retracting with small, wet sounds. Faces smoothing, bones resettling, teeth shrinking to human proportions. Eyes fading from gold and amber to their normal colors.
And I stood in my doorway, barefoot in a puddle of someone's blood, and tried to remember how to breathe.
"Serena," Jasper's voice, gentle, careful. He took a step toward me.
I ran.
There was no way past them. I ran inside, slammed the door, threw the deadbolt, the chain, backed away until I hit the kitchen counter and couldn't go any farther.
My hands were shaking. My whole body was shaking. I could still smell the blood; that metallic-ish, pungent odor of physical trauma, and when I looked down, I saw it on my feet, between my toes, drying in sticky patches.
The bile rose in my throat. I made it three steps to the sink before my body rejected everything.
Someone knocked on the door.
"Serena," Eli's voice, calm and measured. "Please. Let us explain."
I didn't answer. I sat on the kitchen floor. The image kept cycling: Callum's chest opened to bone, blood everywhere, the wet sounds. I couldn't stop thinking about it, with my arms wrapped around my knees and my eyes fixed on the door. I had grown so close to all of them.
They aren't human.
The words kept cycling through my brain: a broken record, a prayer, a curse. They aren't human. They aren't human. They aren't human.
I'd been sleeping with something that could grow claws and fangs. I'd been falling for three creatures who could tear a man apart with their bare hands. I'd been building a life in a town full of monsters. I hadn't known, hadn't even suspected, had been so blind and so stupid—
Not just rich and eccentric… Not human… They aren’t human.
"We're not going to hurt you." Jasper, this time, his voice cracking slightly. "We would never hurt you. Just gonna sit out here for awhile, and talk a little."
I thought about Marcus.