One Deadly Bite

Chapter 8

Two weeks to the day after Callum told me to to stop slacking in algebra, I got a C-minus on a quiz. It seemed like a good counterstrike at the time. After our little encounter in my workshop, the almighty alpha had pretty much disappeared, but true to his word, bodyguards materialized every day like clockwork to escort me home by dusk, willing or not. My promise to Aly meant that I couldn’t do more than keep an ear to the ground to figure out why, and everywhere I turned, there were unspoken whispers, the kind that pulled at my pack-bond and made my hipbone itch, just below the Mark.

“Callum’s going to kill you, you know,” Mac said as I tucked the quiz into my backpack with a quick, vicious grin. Technically, it wasn’t found material, but I thought it would make a rather fetching rosebush all the same.

“I’d like to see him try.” I’d given up on the idea that Mac might c***k and give me some hint about what it was that had every wolf in a hundred-mile radius teetering on edge, gnashing their teeth, and closing rank around their females like we’d spontaneously combust the moment they left us to our own devices. “In case you haven’t gotten the memo, I’m not so easy to kill.”

Mac didn’t flinch, but the fact that he didn’t counter my words with a pithy quote from the Bard or any other poet told me that my words had sent his mind down the same paths that I tried my best to avoid. His pupils didn’t dilate. His jaw didn’t clench, but I felt a hum of energy like the striking of a tuning fork in the air between us.

It didn’t take a genius to infer that Mac’s inner wolf disliked the idea of anyone trying to hurt me. Plain old Mac didn’t seem too fond of the possibility, either, and I knew from previous experience that neither boy nor beast particularly cared for being reminded that if things had gone differently the night Callum had brought me home, I might not have lived long enough to be a thorn in anyone’s paw.

Blood. Blood-blood-blood-blood—

I stopped myself from thinking about it and helped Mac to do the same by jabbing his left side with my index finger. If we’d been alone, I might have butted him gently with my head, but this was high school, and the good people of Ark Valley had enough reasons to think that those of us who lived in the woods were just a little bit off.

“Ten-to-one odds Callum has either Sora or Lance on Rose-duty tonight,” I said, changing the subject with an unspoken apology for bringing up the previous one at all. “You MacAlisters seem to be Team Rose favorites at the moment.”

Mac’s lips settled into an easy, practiced smirk, and the nearly imperceptible tension in his neck and shoulder muscles receded. “If there’s any justice in this world, watching you should convince them how lucky they’ve been to be blessed with a son such as myself.”

“He says with patented Smirk Number Three.”

Mac shook his head and made a sound some where in the neighborhood of tsk-tsk. “You’re getting rusty, Rossetta. That was clearly Smirk Number Two: sardonic with a side of wit.”

I breathed an internal sigh of relief that Mac was fully himself again. All Weres felt the tug between their human sides and their wolves, but Mac fought it more than most. He danced to his own drummer and dared the world to tell him that a purebred Were should have better things to worry about than what he was wearing. All things considered, Mac was almost as much of a rarity as I was. The only difference was, his particular oddity—being the son of a female werewolf rather than that of a male Were’s human mate—gave him the advantage over other werewolves, while mine meant that I’d always be the slow one. The weak one. The one who needed protection from pack secrets that came out after dark.

“Hey, Rossetta?”

Until those words broke the surface of my mind, I’d been deep enough in my thoughts that I hadn’t been paying attention to the finely honed senses that would have otherwise warned me of an outsider’s approach. Was I slipping, or what? It was one thing to let a werewolf get a drop on you, but a normal teenage boy? That was just embarrassing.

“Yes?” I hadn’t expected to see Jerry (of motorcycle fame) in anything resembling a social setting for at least a semester. He’d been avoiding me since the moment I’d hopped off his bike, and like a chameleon, I’d faded into the background, keeping my distance from his human friends the way I had before my little joyride. As I turned to face him, I caught a whiff of a second scent—Juicy Fruit and plastic—and realized that he wasn’t alone.

There was a girl with him, and she was smiling.

Two of my classmates, approaching me of their own free will? I glanced at Mac and raised an eyebrow, but his gaze was fastened on Human 1 and Human 2. They didn’t even seem to realize they were being watched, and they certainly didn’t feel me stiffen as Mac took a step closer to me.

Gently, I put a hand on Mac’s chest and pushed him back. I’d told Callum I had no interest in provoking interspecies aggression, and I’d meant it. Previous grand-theft-auto attempts aside, my instinct to keep my head down and not draw attention to the pack was almost as well defined as the three parallel scars under the band of my jeans.

“You dropped your pen today,” he said in the manner of conversation as he showed me the pen which I used in school to take notes. I was certain that I had not dropped it and someone had taken it from my desk and then supplied this i***t with it.

“At first I thought that I would return it back to you, but now I think that no. I am going to keep it as p*****t for your moment of pride with my bike that day,” said Jerry as the girl who was beside him. I was so not used to recalling the names of humans in Shannon’s Ridge.

“Oh Jerry, You are the worst. I am so sorry Rose,” said the girl as she caught hold of his arm and wrapped herself around him like he was wrapping around a tree and then giggled.

That was sheer courting behavior and then I understood that he had given my pen to her.

Compared to the werewolf version of courting—he bites her, she bites him, his connection to the pack spills over onto her for all eternity—the whole thing seemed artificial and insignificant.

And yet, for a fraction of a second, I froze.

Sorry, Rose.

I was human. They were human. Whatever games they were playing should have been my games, but my talents currently tended more toward flushing out an alpha who swept into my life just long enough to issue orders and disappear for weeks on end, busy with pack business more important than little old me.

Sorry, Rose.

Mac put an arm around me and curled his lips into an expression I recognized as Smirk Number One: sarcastic with a touch of I-couldn’t-care-less. “Why, Bryn,” he said with a hint of Scarlett O’Hara in his voice, “I do believe he’s given her your pen.”

Mac’s words freed up my mouth, which—true to form—spoke without consulting my brain. “Well, get Freud on the phone. He’ll have a field day with this one.”

That should have been the end of it, but unfortunately, algebra was my last class of the day, and that meant that Mac wasn’t the only wolf in the near vicinity. Ark Valley was small, the combined middle/high school was even smaller, and even though I wasn’t close to any of the other juveniles in our pack, when it came to confrontations with the outside world, we were family.

Or as they would have phrased it, I was theirs.

There were only three of them, and one was a seventh grader, but werewolves mature quickly. By age twelve, they look like teenagers, and by the time they’re in high school, they could pass for twenty. Somewhere around fifteen or sixteen, their growth slows down, and most don’t ever age past about thirty, no matter how many centuries they see.

Moral of the story? My age-mates were all physically advanced for their age, and Jerry had reason to be looking nervous.

They didn’t descend, not right away, and they didn’t say a word. My pack-mates just circled us, with long, ambling strides, their eyes flickering from me to Jerry and back again.

Out of habit, I shut them out. Bond or no bond, nobody got into my head but me, and the last thing I wanted was to feel the low, dangerous vibration of a growl beneath the surface of someone else’s skin.

To Jerry, they must just have looked like an odd assortment of strangely intense ruffians whose backwoods roots showed in every crevice of their faces. To me, they looked like Trouble, capital T.

I brushed my hand lightly against Mac’s arm, and he nodded.

“Thank you for that extremely Freudian performance, Jerry. Sir, madam, we bid you good day.” Mac boomed out the words in his best Sean Connery accent, but all the while, he kept his eyes on the others, staring them down, warning them not to come closer. There was a single moment in which I thought the others might disregard the warning and close in, but a few seconds later, the tension broke. Callum’s wolves had ultimate control over their animal instincts, and they knew as well as I did that altercations with the outside world wouldn’t be met with smiles and pats on the back from the pack’s alpha.

Unaware of just how much of a reprieve they’d gotten, Jerry and his little lady scurried away, and I was left with four teenage werewolves—none of whom liked the idea of my walking home by myself.

General rule of thumb: except for Mac, the rest of our age-mates usually gave me a fairly wide berth. One seemingly mild glance from Callum was all it took to warn them away from thinking I was future mate material, and unless werewolves were on the lookout for a breeding partner, most of them didn’t have any use for humans. There were at most a dozen of us human-types living in the woods at any given time, and besides me, every single one was mated to one of the pack’s males. There were more human females, lots of them, buried in unmarked graves: the ones who hadn’t survived taking on a bond with the pack during the mating process, the ones who’d died in childbirth, the ones who’d lived to a ripe old age while their werewolf mates stayed young.