Hot Springs Werewolf Complete Series (BBW Werewolf Erotic Romance) (27 page)

As if my thoughts had summoned him, my phone suddenly rang. I looked down in shock and saw I had full signal while sitting in Boris.

"Hey gorgeous, I have some amazing news for you."

Red, full of love and happy, his voice so light and wonderful but it felt like a stab into my heart.

"Red, your house is on fire. They burned it down."

My voice was a monotone. I was done. Broken. Burned out.

"Wait there!"

I heard the fury in Red's voice and then a roar that turned into a howl. Then silence, the line still open. Red must have shifted and was running home.

But there was no more home. It was destroyed. The sun was rising and the fire burned on and it felt like it would never stop. No matter what he was to me, no matter what I'd felt last night, it had been a trick of my body. I did love him but the longer I was here, the worse the Toulouses were going to get.

I started Boris and drove out the gate, heading away from Hot Springs. Soon the glowing fire disappeared behind me and it was only then that I started to cry. But I didn't stop driving.

It was over.

***

"O
h, c'mon Boris, you can make it!"

Hot Springs was at least a hundred miles behind me but Boris wasn't going to go any further. Prayers, threats and begging had all failed. There wasn't even a hill to coast down this time and I was sure when I broke down no black truck carrying an incredibly hot guy who was also a werewolf was going to come to my rescue.

Boris coughed and shuddered and then shut off. We rolled, my eyes fixed on the distant horizon but we didn't have the momentum to get there and soon we stopped and all I could hear was my breathing and the ticking of hot metal cooling.

I stepped out and looked around before letting out a groan. I knew where I was. Red's cabin wasn't far from here. I narrowed my eyes at Boris.

"In cahoots, huh."

Boris didn't say anything.

I looked up and down the road but there was no one coming in either direction. I'd driven out of Hot Springs and then I'd... it was a bit of blur. I'd been crying for a while and then numb and I turned a few times but honestly I couldn't remember what I'd been thinking. I was leaving. Escaping. Fleeing.

I took out my phone and saw I was in another country dead spot. I got back into Boris but he didn't suddenly conduct a signal like back at the cabin.

The cabin
...

Red surely would have made it home by now. Home that was burning down into ash. And instead of me being there to meet him, I was gone. It wouldn't take him long to figure out I'd packed and left. Even if I'd left half my things there.

I sat in Boris looking at nothing for a good half hour but still no one came driving past. It was still ridiculously early in the morning and I suspected I'd be waiting a while. Finally I got out, packed my broken laptop into my bag, locked Boris and set out on foot for Red's cabin, arguing with myself every step of the way.

No one is coming past for ages - go there, have some breakfast and come back later in the day so you can flag someone down.

Oh, so you're going to pretend you're going to the cabin for breakfast? Uh, huh.

I need something to eat.

You might be hungry but what you need is Red, not food.

My stomach grumbled, somewhat bolstering my flimsy argument but that other half of me was having none of it. It knew the reason I wanted to go to the cabin just as well as I did. I wanted to be where Red and I had been. I wanted to sit at the table and imagine that night one more time. I wanted to eat breakfast and pretend that a cowboy in a black truck was going to come over the hill for me.

Despite the many arguments against it, I kept walking, step by step, toward the cabin.

*

"H
ome sweet home," I said once I opened the door and immediately regretted it. It was sweet but it wasn't home and I was acting like a fool. I stepped in and closed the door, immediately feeling warmer. The sun was streaming in through the windows, lighting the cabin up. It looked like something out a movie set. I put my bag down and then walked over to the table, running my fingers across it. Here is where we ate. I remembered sitting across from Red and then blurting out that we should be boyfriend and girlfriend. I looked across to the bedroom and the memory came flying out of the black like a freight train, hitting me with almost as much force. I felt a pressure through my body for a moment and knew if I looked in a mirror, my eyes would be turning gold. I even felt my canines lengthen a little before shaking the image of Red away like a wet dog after a bath. It was just a bedroom and it was just a cabin. Yes, I'd been here with Red but still, it was no reason to go mad and start barking at the moon.

My stomach took this opportunity to grumble, reminding me that food had been a long time ago but I dismissed it. In the back corner of the cabin was a bookshelf and last time I'd been here I'd ignored it (too focused on the wolf in the room). Now I was staring at it from across the room, hardly believing my eyes. Sitting on the middle shelf was a copy of Millie's book,
The Fire Complete
. Next to it were diaries, six of them, identical to the one Big Blue had given Millie.

I almost ran to the shelf, my hands starting to shake and pulled out the first diary. I opened it in the middle.

...she is as wild as a hellcat and I can't get the scent of her out of my mind...

I turned to another section and found a very explicit sex scene. I almost turned to another page but made myself read through it. Within a few... descriptive phrases... I realized I was reading the other side of one of Millie's entries.

If Big Blue kept a diary then he'd have an entry about what happened to the Finchs...

I turned to the end of the diary but it was just another sexual adventure he'd had with Millie. I pulled out the second diary and skimmed through it, trying not to turn red with embarrassment as I read about him and Millie, searching for the partner to Millie's final entry.

Soon I found the reason his diary was much longer. Big Blue didn't just write about her. He wrote about werewolves. He wrote about the Finchs and the Toulouses. He wrote about challenges (for big things at least half the pack needed to be there to witness it) and the proper way to hold a fight. Mixed in between this were rather banal notes about his construction business and goings-on in the city. I kept skimming, seeing the name of Toulouse appearing with greater frequency. I also noticed Big Blue was swearing a lot more and not in regard to his sexual exploits. Eventually I turned a page and found a violent rage put into words. Scratched at the top of the page in jagged black lines was written:
I AM GOING TO KILL THEM ALL

I read, feeling his rage and pain. The meeting was no meeting but an ambush. Big Blue wrote that the Toulouses had pressured the Finchs, attacked them secretly, sabotaged their businesses, pushed them and hurt them and all without being detected. There was no proof, only rumors and lies. Then the Toulouses had called for a meeting at the Finch mansion (Big Blue used this phrase earlier: A Call - a formal gathering of great importance between two packs) and instead of a truce or an accord, the Toulouses had killed every one of them. He wrote how he knew it to be true but how there was no proof. The Finchs were dead but no one had seen or heard a thing.

I kept trying to read but my eyes were filling with tears. Millie's family killed.
My
family. Almost destroyed entirely by a pack of dishonorable scum. I wiped the tears from my eyes and then decided I needed to slow down, eat and read or I'd end up sobbing and starving all at once. I took Big Blue's diaries over to the table before opening a tin of beans to heat on the stove. I made myself wait until they were ready and I'd had at least a few bites before continuing on read on.

Millie's diary had come to a stop after her family had died and if she'd even written anything about it again, she'd kept it private and it certainly hadn't been amongst her possessions. Big Blue hadn't stopped writing. Almost half the second diary was filled with violent bloodthirsty rantings and rage. He'd written lists of Toulouses he suspected were involved and written how he planned to kill each and every one. He wrote about "going wild" and how his pack had locked him in a basement vault until he came back. It wasn't until near the end of the diary that he finally wrote about Millie again.

She's leaving.

It was printed in the middle of a single page and I felt the ache of it stretching out over the years.

The entries that followed were like they were written by a different person. No more rage and anger - just sorrow and heartbreak. He wanted her more than anything in the world but she was gone and his soul was dying. I kept reading, speeding through the third diary which covered another year or so. Big Blue eventually started writing about a girl named Tilda but even in his first entry he'd written that she wouldn't be able to capture his heart the way Millie had. By the fourth diary they were mated and having cubs but as the entries continued, they were darker in content and tone. The endless battle against the Toulouses had eased off a little (Big Blue guessing that after killing the Finchs they were keeping their heads down) but it wasn't them that drove his sadness. Millie was meant to be his mate and she'd left. The entries started to space apart, skipping six months at a time and each one was a dark missive from a hollow man. Blue spoke of the terrible mistake of letting Millie go and how by taking another mate, he'd doomed the Guile pack.

When they killed the Finch pack they killed me.

Without a Finch, we are nothing.

In the final entry he wrote that he was leaving his pack and was going to end his life. After that all the rest of the pages were blank.

I closed the diary and found myself in the cabin, hunched over the table, living in the present. I'd been so absorbed in the diaries that I hadn't finished my food and the sun was well and truly up in the sky. It was close to mid-morning and I'd spent the last few hours reading, feeling my heart break over and again.

Millie's diary had been about an explicit love affair and she'd written of her feelings about Big Blue but after her family died, she'd done her grieving in private. Blue had poured it all out on the page, breaking down over the years and despite finding another women to sire children with, he knew he'd made the wrong choice. Millie leaving had broken him - it had just taken years for it to happen.

Just like it will to Red. And you.

I closed my eyes and felt the pain bursting up from inside me. A Finch had left Hot Springs decades ago and destroyed a Guile. And now it was happening again.

The pain intensified, deepening and filling my entire body. It came quick like fire and slow like ice creeping across a shallow lake. I wanted to rage and scream. I wanted to curl up and whimper. I tried to get up from the table but the room started swirling. My body was wrong. Too tall. Too big. Too long.

Too human.

As I shifted my scream became a howl that shook the windows and then I was gone.

*

A
, B, C, D, E, F, G...

My face was pressed up against a damp plant the smelled of mint and I was singing under my breath. With each letter I felt myself return. Harper. That was me. Big Blue. That was the Grandfather. Millie, his lost mate. Red. My wolf.

I opened my eyes and saw I was kneeling on thick grass in what remained of the garden behind where Red's house used to stand. Many of the plants were wilted and blackened, destroyed by the intense heat. Even from where I was I could feel it radiating off the still burning pile.

I had become the wolf... and the wolf had returned home.

I stood up and then felt pain throb through my hands and feet. It wasn't emotional pain but physical. Judging by the position of the sun it was early in the afternoon. If it was the same day that meant I'd run all the way from the cabin back here in just a few hours. Almost a hundred miles...

"Red?"

My voice felt strange in my mouth, like it was weak compared to the howl of a wolf. A wave of feeling wrong in my body lapped over me but I pushed it away by quickly reciting the alphabet again.

By the time I hit M I was feeling more human and when Z rolled around I was moving. I took a wide berth of the burning house and went down the hill to the cabin. There was no sign of Red and I couldn't smell him either. Or rather, I couldn't catch a new scent of him. There was fire and wood and grass and Red overlaid but I couldn't tell if it were old or new.

I reached the cabin and saw there were scratches up and down the door frame, gouged an inch deep. I ran my finger over them. What had happened here? I used the spare key to enter. Everything was as I left it (including a few stray grains of rice). In my packing yesterday I'd taken my best clothes and what I was left with wasn't great. I dressed in a very worn pair of jeans and a shirt that didn't do much for my body, had a drink of water and went outside. There was something tugging at the back of my mind, some scent that I couldn't quite catch. I walked outside and moved away from the house, feeling it grow stronger.

I stripped off, shifted and it flooded into me.

Red. Anger. Fury. A rage complete.

I followed the scent and saw a footprint, larger than a man and deep too, as though he'd weighed more than usual. Claws digging sharp lines into the dirt. A man's foot with talons.

As I walked around I caught the sense of what had happened. Red had returned home as a wolf and shifted to a man. But I wasn't here and his house was burning down to the ground.

Somewhere between the cabin and the house he'd... shifted into something else. A wild thing with sharp claws that had gouged the wood on the door frame. A wild thing that smelt of rage and fear and sadness.

I returned to my pile of clothes and shifted back, feeling my senses dull. As I pulled on my clothes I tried to pull myself together too.

I, Harper Finch, human, had run away.

I, Harper Finch, werewolf, had returned.

What would happen if I just hitchhiked my way back to Boris, got him towed and repaired and kept going? Would I think of Red in the night, shift and then find myself back here three weeks later, missing everything in between?