By the time I got home, exhaustion hit me like a truck. I'd barely closed the front door when something cold and sharp stabbed through my brain.
Tyler.
I froze, staring at the ceiling like it might give me answers, and whispered, "Oh crap."
I yanked out my flip phone and punched in his number. It rang three times before he picked up.
"Yo?"
"Tyler, man, I'm so sorry. I completely forgot to pick you up."
There was a beat of silence… and then he laughed.
"Yeah, I figured. But don't worry, man, I got a ride with Eric. Everything good, bro? You solve your thing?"
I let out a tired breath and rubbed my forehead. "Only half of it. The other half… there's nothing I can do right now."
"Well," he said, cheerful as always, "half is better than nothing."
In the background his mom called him for dinner, Beth had perfect timing as always.
"Gotta go," he said. "Still picking me up tomorrow?"
"Yeah, of course. And tell Beth I said hi."
"Not a chance," he snapped immediately. "Stay away from my mother."
Then he hung up on me.
I just stood there staring at the phone, and snorted out a laugh.
Good. That was normal. I really needed a bit of that after all the supernatural stuff.
…
After that, I grabbed a towel and went straight to the shower. I smelled like I'd rolled down a mountain and fought the forest itself, dirt, wet pine, random animal scent… and layered on top of all that? Wood smoke, vampire ash, and that horrible burnt-battery metallic aftertaste of venom still clinging to my tongue.
Yeah. Another half a tube of toothpaste died for my sins.
By the time I stepped out, clean and only mildly traumatized, my parents were already home. I'd barely thrown on some clothes when Mom called me downstairs for dinner.
We'd just started eating when she fixed me with a laser-beam stare.
"I got a call from the school," she said, every syllable sharp. "Asking why you didn't attend today. Mike, are you skipping classes to go see your girlfriend?"
Dad looked up in alarm, then immediately tried to bail me out. "Karen, come on. Kids do this stuff all the time. Weren't we the same?"
Wrong move there.
She turned and hit him with the same glare but upgraded. "Brad, shut up. Don't you see I'm trying to discipline our son?"
He raised his hands in surrender and mimed zipping his mouth shut.
I snorted at the sight of my dad being domestically obliterated. Unfortunately, that caused Mom's glare to snap back to me like a heat-seeking missile.
Great, now she's back on my case…
I opened my mouth, ready to invent a lie about… I don't know. Food poisoning? Helping Tyler with an emergency? Getting kidnapped by raccoons?
But then I remembered James stalking my parents' store. Remembered how close I'd come to dragging them into something they never asked for. And with Victoria still out there…
They needed to know. At least the parts that mattered.
"Yeah, about that…" I said.
Both of them paused, forks hovering.
"Mom," I asked carefully, "did Grandma Dorothy ever tell you about the Quileute legends?"
Mom blinked, softening just a little. "Of course she did. She used to tell them to me when I was little. I actually believed her for a while because she told them so seriously." She smiled at the memory.
Dad looked between us, confused. "What legends?"
"Well…" I rubbed the back of my neck. "You weren't wrong to believe them, Mom. They're real."
"What part?" she asked, brows knitting.
"Everything," I said. "The wolf part. The cold ones. All of it."
Dad cut in immediately. "Wait, what is happening? Someone explain something to me, please?"
Mom answered, still half-skeptical. "There are old Quileute stories about warriors who could turn into wolves to protect the tribe from the cold ones, vampires."
Dad's eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas. "So vampires versus werewolves? That's cool as heck."
"You're such a child," Mom muttered, shaking her head fondly.
Then she returned her full interrogation stance to me. "And what does that have to do with you skipping classes?"
I swallowed hard. "I… have the wolf gene," I said. "I transformed already. And I got into trouble with some vampires. I killed two actually, but one got away."
Dad's chair scraped as he leaned back, staring at me like I'd just told him he won the lottery and got drafted on the same day. Total shock, but also total belief.
Mom, meanwhile, narrowed her eyes. "Very funny. Nice story, but no. That is not going to work on me. I want the truth."
Dad gasped dramatically, betrayed. "That was a lie?!"
"Of course it was a lie, Brad," Mom said, exasperated. "Did you seriously believe all that?"
"Yes!" he said, pointing at me. "I trust my son! And you know how bad he is at lying!"
Mom paused, then her eyes flicked to me.
"You're right," she murmured slowly. "He didn't stutter even once…"
"I'm not that bad at lying," I protested. Then stopped. "But I'm not lying. Seriously. Think about it. How do you explain my recent growth spurt? Or…"
I reached across the table and gently took her hand.
"How do you explain that?"
Her eyes widened, and she nearly shouted. "You're burning up!"
"It's part of being a wolf," I said. "Our temperature runs higher."
I hesitated, then added, "I can show you. But we need to go outside. My wolf size is not exactly house-friendly."
That got them moving fast.
We headed to the strip of woods behind the house. I told them to stay back while I went to take off my clothes so they wouldn't get ruined, ducked behind a thick tree, stripped, and reached for the fire coiled in my mind.
A heartbeat later, the world snapped sharper as I landed on four paws.
I stepped out and saw Mom slap a hand over her mouth, swaying like she was about to pass out.
Dad went pale at first seeing my size, but then brightened like someone flipped a switch.
"Oh my GOD," he said. "This is the coolest thing I've ever seen!"
Mom reached for a tree like she needed it to stay upright.
Yeah. Astonished was an understatement.
…
Honestly… that went better than I expected. A lot better. I'd walked into that whole conversation with Mom and Dad bracing for yelling, grounding, maybe even an exorcism, but they'd surprised me. They listened. They actually listened.
And, weirdest of all, they agreed to what I asked next.
They promised to call me immediately if they ever saw anyone with red eyes, no questions, no delays, no "maybe it was the lighting." Just call. I'd even told them to pick up two cheap prepaid phones just for that. Burners, basically. Dedicated vampire-alert lines. It sounded ridiculous saying it out loud, but it made sense to me. If they used their regular numbers, I'd have a panic attack every time I saw Dad's name on my screen.
With the extra phones, I could set a special emergency ringtone, something loud and impossible to miss. That way… I'd know. I wouldn't be left guessing whether they wanted me to get milk on the way home or whether they were staring down a murderous immortal.
It wasn't perfect. None of this was. But still… half a win was better than nothing. And right now, half was enough to keep me moving.
Of course they were worried about me fighting vampires and everything, but they knew there wasn't much they could do other than wish me safe and tell me to be careful.
Now I just had to tell Leah about all the vampire mess, whether she wanted to hear it or not. If Victoria ever decided to target her, she deserved to know. Yeah, the reservation should have a few wolves watching over it, but "should" didn't exactly make me feel any better. Not when two of those wolves were Sam and Paul. And there was no universe where I was leaving Leah's safety in the hands of those two idiots.
Speaking of wolves…
With all the vampire chaos, I hadn't really stopped to think about something important. Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of… mind link? A shared headspace between pack members? I remembered reading something like that in my past life, it was also in the movie I think. And yet earlier, when I'd been transformed for hours, I hadn't heard a single stray thought. Nothing. Total radio silence.
Maybe none of them phased today. That was the simple explanation.
But it felt too easy.
Something in my gut told me it might be something else. Maybe I wasn't actually part of their pack. Maybe that connection wasn't automatic. Or maybe I was doing something wrong, was there a switch I was supposed to flip? A ritual? A handshake? Who even made these rules?
And seriously… how did any of this work?
…
(Support with power stones, comments or reviews. Your contributions keep me from procrastinating 🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🎶🎶🎶)