Authors: Naomi Clark
“
Okay.” She didn’t even
look at me.
“
Shannon?” I touched her
arm, desperate for some contact, and she glanced at me, blue eyes
still moist. “We’re okay, aren’t we?”
She dredged up a tight smile. “Yeah, we’re
okay. I’m just…tired, Ayla. I’m just tired.”
So was I. I returned her smile and went to
work, aching all over.
***
“You look like shit,” Lawrence told me when I walked into
Inked.
“
I feel like shit.” I
slumped down on my seat behind the counter and ran my hands through
my greasy hair. “I’ve had a couple of shit days.”
“
Trouble in paradise?” Kaye
leaned out of the piercing booth to regard me with malevolently
gleaming eyes. “Dish the dirt, Ayla.”
“
Fuck off, Kaye,” I
growled, letting an edge of my frustration into my voice. I don’t
know what my face was like, but it must have been scary because she
blanched and ducked back inside the booth.
Calvin appeared from downstairs and frowned
at me. “You’re late and you’re swearing,” he said shortly. “I’ve
got a customer down here, Ayla.”
I mumbled an apology and he went back down.
Lawrence leaned against the counter and stroked his beard, dark
eyes lit with sympathy. “Smile, cherub. It can’t be that bad.”
“
I had a massive row with
Shannon yesterday,” I said. “I’m not sure… She said we were okay,
but…”
“
Oh well,” he said.
“Everybody argues. You should have heard some of the rows me and my
ex had. Still got the scars from some of them. You wouldn’t be
human if you didn’t row every now and then. Well, you’re not human,
I suppose, but you know what I mean. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” He
leapt up and stretched. “I’m going for a cigarette
break.”
“
Silver Kiss?” I asked,
idle curiosity stirring in me.
“
What else?” He produced
the packet from his shirt pocket with a flourish and I snatched it
off him.
Eddie’s words came back to me as I studied
the ingredients. No sign of aconite in Lawrence’s fags. “Where do
you get them?” I asked.
“
Newsagents,” he said,
sounding faintly mystified. “You thinking of taking up the
habit?”
I wrinkled my nose. Even wrapped in plastic,
the cigarettes had that nasty metallic tang that offended my
senses. “No thanks. Just curious. Loads of young wolves are smoking
this stuff, but they’re getting it cut with this monkshood stuff
and it gets them addicted.”
Kaye emerged from her booth again. “Junkie
werewolves sound like a public threat to me,” she said. “Gareth
told me that some kid in Spain got mauled by a werewolf on crack
last month.”
“
Oh, are you still with
Gareth?” I asked innocently. “That must be, what, a whole week
now?”
She narrowed her eyes at me but didn’t rise
to the bait. “Can I bum a fag, Lawrence?” she asked. “I suddenly
feel the need for fresh air. It smells sort of like wet dog in
here.” She smiled sweetly at me. “I’m really not a dog person.”
“
That’s funny because I
always had you down as a dog…person.” I drew out the pause. Kaye
scowled and swept past me. Lawrence rolled his eyes at me and
followed her outside. I sank down into my seat with a sigh. It was
going to be a long day.
By mid-afternoon I’d been reprimanded by Calvin twice more for
swearing in front of customers and Kaye and I had come close to
blows. We were never exactly chummy, but she seemed to be on a
personal mission to aggravate me today. Constant slurs that were
just the right side of open insults, frequent factoids that her
lovely boyfriend Gareth had fed her about the dangers of werewolves
and enough attitude that even Lawrence lost patience with her.
“
What is your problem
today?” he demanded, rounding on her after we’d nearly come to
blows for about the fifth time in as many minutes. “You’re being a
real bitch, Kaye, even by your standards.”
She tossed her hair and treated him to an
icy glare. “I don’t see what the problem is with pointing out the
true fact that a werewolf was arrested for rape in America last
month. There’s no law against telling the truth.” She gestured to
me. “I just wondered what Ayla thought about it, that’s all.”
I stared at the tray of earrings in front of
me and wondered if I could claim temporary insanity in the event of
me killing her. “I don’t think anything about it,” I said. “Anymore
than you think anything about humans being arrested for rape,
alright?”
“
Gareth told
me—”
“
Fucking hell!” I spat.
“Does Gareth ever fucking shut up? What is he, an Alpha Human?” The
amount of anti-werewolf propaganda Kaye had been spewing today, I’d
be surprised if he wasn’t. She’d never liked me, but today she was
simply poisonous.
Kaye straightened up as if stung.
“Absolutely not,” she said indignantly. “Gareth wouldn’t be seen
dead with those thugs. He’s a member of People Matter.”
The name meant nothing to me, but it sounded
like pure semantics anyway. All these idiot anti-werewolf groups
were called things like Humanity First and Earth’s Children or some
hippy shit and they all had the same basic principles.
“
Well fuck People Matter,”
I muttered.
“
All I can hear up here is
screaming and swearing.” Calvin emerged from downstairs once more.
He’d been down there all afternoon working on a cover-up, appearing
every now and then to yell at us. It was like being told off at
school. The three of us fell into guilty silence, avoiding eye
contact and flushing red. Calvin pointed his finger at me and Kaye.
“If you two can’t get along, you can both start looking for new
jobs. It’s disruptive, it’s unprofessional and I’m sick of
it.”
We both shot each other dark looks and
mumbled insincere apologies. Lawrence cleared his throat and
produced another cigarette from inside his velvet jacket.
“Cigarette break,” he said.
I leapt up. “Me too.” I darted outside
before Kaye could object, leaving her to whine at Calvin.
Outside, Lawrence and I slipped down the
alley running between Inked and the next shop—a vintage record
store—and I kicked the wall in frustration, wishing I could let
loose with a full-on howl. I could feel one bubbling away in my
lungs, waiting to erupt.
“
She’s been completely out
of order today,” I fumed. “I can’t deal with her on top of
everything else.”
Lawrence lit up, the smell of Silver Kiss
drifting down the alley. “She’s all talk, Ayla. It’s this new
bloke. She was dating a goth last year and all we got was self-harm
and absinthe. As soon as she meets someone new, she’ll stop.”
I wet my lips, tasting the cigarette smoke.
It was thick, cloying and made me want to spit to clear my mouth. I
couldn’t imagine what it would be like with aconite in. Surely it
would just clog up your senses, slow everything down? Why would a
wolf enjoy that feeling? I thought of Oscar’s wild mood swings and
couldn’t imagine enjoying that either. Being a teenager was
difficult enough without adding drugs to the mix.
While Lawrence finished his cigarette, I
checked my phone, hoping for something from Shannon.
There was nothing, of course. No personal
calls during work hours for Shannon, even on a Sunday. I shouldn’t
have been disappointed, but I was anyway. I considered texting her
but lost my nerve halfway through the message and cancelled it. I
didn’t want to seem clingy and neurotic, even if I was. It was only
a couple of hours until we closed; then I could head home and try
to get her to talk to me properly.
I tapped my foot nervously. What if she said
she was truly miserable here? The thought made me sick.
Lawrence nudged me. “Penny for ‘em.”
“
Thinking about
Shannon.”
“
You’ve got to chill out,
you know. One little fight isn’t the end of the world.”
“
I know!” Of course I knew.
But this wasn’t just one little fight. This was me nearly drowning,
this was feral wolves and drugs and missing kids, Alpha Humans and
then one little fight. All of which made for one big mess and I
wasn’t sure how we were going to clean it up.
***
Shannon was sitting on the living room floor surrounded by
paperwork when I got home. I loitered in the doorway, waiting for
her to notice me and studying the papers. All stuff from Molly
Brady’s case: photos, notes, newspaper cuttings. Shannon was
absorbed—or ignoring me—so I cleared my throat. She looked up and
smiled. My heart caught as her smile faltered.
“
Hey,” she said. “You
alright?”
“
Not really.” I sat down
opposite her, staring at the carpet. “I’ve had a shit day. What
time are we supposed to be at Eddie’s?”
“
Sevenish he said.” She
shuffled the papers together, clearly just for something to do than
because she needed to.
“
So are we going to talk?”
I asked. “We’ve got a couple of hours.”
She set the papers down and looked at me
squarely. “I was terrified last night,” she said. “That graffiti,
you being missing, it scared the hell out of me, Ayla, after what
happened with Adam and…everything.”
Everything
meant Hesketh, the police officer who’d skinned
Adam and used the wolf strap he made to transform himself into a
freakish wolf-monster. Shannon hadn’t seen it—she’d been nursing
broken ribs from our run-in with Alpha Humans, but she’d heard, of
course. Glory had delighted in telling the gory details to anyone
who would listen.
I hadn’t thought of that last night. I
didn’t really think I’d come close to dying with Hesketh, not the
way I had when I’d plunged into that frigid water and felt it rush
into my lungs. I swallowed and traced abstract patterns in the worn
carpet. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“
So am I. I said some
horrible things, I know. I didn’t really mean them, but you scared
me. I never worried about you before we moved here, not like that.”
She reached across the small space between us and touched my hand.
The contact was like a bolt of lightning to my starved senses and I
shuffled closer to her. “I worried about human things before,” she
said. “Like, what if you got bored of me? What if we couldn’t pay
our rent? Stuff like that. Now I worry about werewolf stuff, like
what if some stupid Pack problem drags you away from me? What if
you get killed? I don’t know how to cope with that.”
“
Shannon.” My throat closed
up and tears stung at my eyes. I wiped them away hurriedly. “Pack
is…” I stopped myself, trying to find the right words and realizing
I didn’t have them. I hadn’t moved back here for the Pack. I’d
moved back for Vince and my parents, for the chance to mend my
relationship with my family. I shook my head. “It’s not even about
Pack.”
“
But all this has happened
because of the Pack,” she insisted.
I rubbed my throbbing temples. “I know.”
“
So what do we
do?”
“
I don’t know.”
She sighed and wrapped her arms around me,
hugging me tightly. I buried my face in her hair, nuzzling her
neck. “Maybe we’re being silly,” she said.
“
Maybe.”
She released me and kissed my nose. “Hungry?
We should eat before we go.”
Food was the last thing I wanted, but I
nodded anyway. It was a bit of domestic normality, Shannon cooking
up spaghetti Bolognese while I fussed over the mess she was making.
For an hour or so, it was like nothing had happened and I think we
both began to relax again. We lingered over the food, putting off
the inevitable as long as we could. But towards seven, the meal was
gone and the washing up was done and we had to go and meet the
alphas.
TWELVE
Eddie’s place was a cozy
little
cottage at the edge of the city, full of family photos and boasting
the one luxury I truly envied him—an open fire place. The crackle
and spit of flames and the woodsy smell of smoke filled the small
living room, creating a palpable atmosphere of warmth and welcome.
Eddie sat in an ancient rocking chair by the fire, cradling a glass
of Scotch, a cat on his lap. I gave the cat a double take—as a rule
cats and dogs don’t like werewolves. This scraggy black mog purred
away contentedly though, tail swishing against Eddie’s
thigh.
His wife was out for the evening, he told
us. “Giving us some privacy. Moira should be along soon.”
Shannon took the other fireside chair while
I prowled the low-ceilinged room, studying the photos with
unabashed interest. Eddie and his wife, Angie, had two kids and
several grandchildren, making them an unusually fertile couple.
Their offspring’s lives were charted in glorious color all around
the room; every birthday, every school sports day and Christmas
party. Other Pack alphas featured in several of the photos. Seeing
them felt like a dig at me, stupid as that sounds. A reminder that
whatever my reasons for coming home, ultimately it was all about
the Pack and always would be.
For a second I thought I understood why some
wolves went feral. The absolute freedom they must have…
The doorbell rang, breaking that chain of
thought before I could take it any further. Eddie shooed his cat
and went to answer the door, returning with Moira Clayton.
I inhaled sharply as the
older woman entered, catching the scent of peonies and tulips,
reminding me of a holiday Shannon and I had taken in Amsterdam a
few years ago. She was tall and slender, dressed immaculately. Her
silvering hair was cropped short in what I thought of as a
no-nonsense
style. She
looked like an ex-copper.