Chapter 17
Storm
Twenty minutes later, we were on the boat, and everyone had a drink. We were headed toward the full moon, but there were clouds, so it was still kind of dark out. Magnum had the boat’s lights on, though, and it made it… creepy. We could see what was on the boat, but not what was around us.
That’d never bothered me before, so I wasn’t sure what was bothering me. All evening, though, I’d had what can only be described as the heebie-jeebies.
Magnum took us near an island, anchored, and shut the engine off.
“There’s something about me that helped me survive the fight ring,” Mason told me, sitting across the boat and directly in front of me.
“It’s a big secret, and one I’m not really supposed to share with humans, but I’ve received permission.
It isn’t something you can report on, but you asked me how I’d survived so long, when most were dead and gone within two or three months, and I was there for fucking years. ”
I wanted to point out he needed to watch his language around Brooke, but the thought went away as soon as it arrived, and I waited for him to keep talking.
“Brooke asked you about bigfoot earlier, and I’m curious how you feel about werewolves.”
I frowned at him. “Same answer, I guess. The myth comes to us from all over the world — Greek, Norse, Celts, Navajo. And it isn’t just wolves.
The Egyptians had shapeshifting birds, and the Cherokee, the Welsh.
There’s also coyote shifters in Native American lore, foxes in Japanese lore, and don’t get me started on the merpeople.
” I sat back. “Where the fuck are you going with this?”
Because if he told me he was a werewolf, I was gonna need to see proof, but how would that have worked? Couldn’t he just have gone to wolf on the full moon and killed his captors?
“It’s good you know about the bird shifters, because that’s where I’m going with this.
I can shift into a hawk, and the magic of that lets me heal faster than human even if I don’t shift, but if I do, when I come back to human, all injuries are healed.
I couldn’t do that if I had stitches, of course, but for a concussion, or a broken bone they didn’t pick up on? ” he shrugged.
I stared at him while a thousand questions formed, and I couldn’t figure out what to say or ask first. A good twenty seconds later, I landed on, “How did you change to hawk with the Lucite walls? Were you ever alone?”
“Not for the first six weeks, but even once they eventually let me shower by myself, I was too worried about cameras. At first, I had to just stay human, for like, months. Not easy, but…” he shrugged.
“I seriously considered shifting and flying away when outside, but there were always men with rifles, and while I can probably take a bullet and survive in human form, the hawk is a lot smaller.”
Take a bullet and survive. My mind went straight to Logan getting shot during the raid, but I needed to stay on topic, for now. We were talking about Mason right now.
“So, you didn’t shift the entire time?” I didn’t really believe him, but I decided to ask questions as if I did for a little while, before I got around to needing to see proof.
“I did some tests to figure out what they could see at night, and it appeared that, as long as I stayed in bed, I didn’t draw anyone’s attention.
I changed to the hawk under my covers a few times, just to give him five minutes every once in a while.
And then, I got hurt pretty bad in a fight, but I hid the worst of it and changed that night. ”
“Can you show me your hawk now?”
He looked to Squatch, who said, “Hawks are diurnal, but wolves aren’t, so it’s my job to show you the proof. We had to do this at night, for reasons we’ll get to later.”
While he talked, Kitty and Magnum dropped the fabric sides of the boat down. They are rarely put on, but Magnum had told me he sometimes uses them in the winter, so he can go out and stay warmer.
And that — them making it so no one outside the boat could see what was happening inside — made me actually believe they might not be fucking with me… though I was still assuming that had to be the case.
Squatch stood, pulled his shirt off, and then turned to face away from me while he dropped his jeans, and I realized he wasn’t wearing underwear.
He turned to the side at the same time he kind of bent and leaned over, and then he just kind of morphed into a gorgeous, huge fucking wolf standing in the center of the boat.
Huge. Motherfucking. Wolf.
He was the size of a pony. No, the size of a small damned horse. I stopped breathing long enough I got dizzy, and I sucked air in and looked at Kitty. “Are you a werewolf, too? A wolf named Kitty?”
“No,” she said with a chuckle. “I’m a tiger, actually.”
I looked back to Mason a second, and then looked at Magnum. “Did you know?”
“There are rules against humans knowing, but there’s a way to tell them once certain lines have been crossed. However, famous humans, or at least the ones with a huge platform? The rules say you can’t know.”
“Rules.” I said it monotone and flat. Magnum follows his own rules, and we both knew it.
“The penalties for telling a human can mean their death…” he sighed. “Or worse. Much worse. Not something I was willing to risk.”
And if he knew, and he clearly didn’t see himself as human… my insides twisted at the implications, and I asked him, “Are you a wolf, a bird, or something else?”
He looked at Brooke, who nodded, and he met my gaze again. “I shift into a snapping turtle.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. A hawk, a wolf, and a damned turtle? They had to be fucking with me.
“Show me,” I challenged.
“Not yet,” Brooke said, and she moved out of her seat and came to stand in front of me. “If werewolves are real, what else might that mean?”
I stared at her and thought I might lose my dinner. The way she was looking out of her eyes reminded me of that movie where the gay vampires turned a child and then played house with her for a couple of decades until she went mad and turned on them, and others had to step in and kill her.
She nodded. “Most of us turned as young children do not last a full century. I am the exception, and I was the one Magnum had to go to for permission to tell you.”
She did a little pirouette and then faced me again.
“But this means I can be held personally responsible if you figure out a way around the magic and convincingly tell tens of millions of people that werewolves and vampires are real. Most won’t believe you, even if you have decent proof, but if even one-half of a percent do…
” She tilted her head. “The vampire hunters were once a true danger to my kind. It works for us, to have humans no longer believe we are real.”
Fear threatened to take over when I realized that, if they were telling the truth, I was the only human on the boat. Trapped. I considered jumping overboard and swimming away, but immediately nixed that idea. There was too much I needed to know.
I met Magnum’s gaze. “I’d like to go back to land, please.”
“Brooke is in charge right now. I’ve done what I can to make it so I can tell you my secret, but there’s a process. Would you like me to sit with you? I started over here so I could watch your face, but if you want me close, I can do that.”
“You’ve passed the first and second tests,” Brooke said.
“Your mind is accepting the fact that it appears werewolves, vampires, and other supernatural beings are real, and you aren’t immediately considering how to share this knowledge with the world.
The next big test comes in whether you will properly follow instructions to be bound to our secret. ”
Kitty was sitting on my right, and the wolf was on the other side of her feet, lying down. Gears, Mason, and Magnum were facing me. Brooke had been sitting in Squatch’s lap until he stood to… to turn into a damned fucking werewolf.
Magnum stood and walked to me, his pace slow, as if he didn’t know if I’d want him to sit beside me or not, and that was fair, because I wasn’t sure if I did.
“Kitty,” Magnum said. “Can you talk to Storm about Brooke a little, please?”
“Yeah,” Kitty said. “Brooke saved me. I was in a really bad situation, and she… it’s a long story, but I wouldn’t be here without her.
The most powerful vampires have what’s called a coterie — a houseful of vampires and supernaturals, maybe some humans, who are under them, part of their power base, I guess.
Brooke calls hers the Island of Misfit Toys, because she takes on those of us who aren’t…
normal. Those of us who have a hard time fitting into society, living in the human world.
She protects those the Concilio — the big scary Vampire Council — would enslave, and maybe she can’t allow them total freedom, but she gives them as much as she can.
As Magnum kind of said, she’s scary powerful, but mostly, she uses her power for good. ”
Brooke gave Kitty what can only be described as an adoring look. “I try to. In the beginning, I brought those to me who would come, but over the centuries, it’s turned into my preference, to seek out the ones who don’t… fit.”
Brooke looked at Magnum. “Sit beside your Storm. She’s unsure about pretty much everything, but she doesn’t want you to go away.”
“You can read my mind?” I asked.
“I can do so much more than that, dear Storm.”
Gears stood, went to a cooler, opened it, grabbed a recorked wine bottle, pulled the cork, poured about two inches of the deep red wine into a stemmed glass, and handed it to Brooke.
One second Brooke had normal teeth; the next second she had vampire fangs.
She pressed her thumb to her fangs, squeezed some of her blood into the glass, and licked her thumb.
Her teeth were normal again, and I wondered if I’d imagined it.
“We need a few drops of your blood,” Magnum said from beside me. “Brooke wanted to drink from the tap, but I convinced her to allow us to handle it this way.”