Walking Wolf Road (Wolf Road Chronicles Book 1) (29 page)

“Why are your walls so bare?”

“Mom doesn’t want me ruining the walls, with my ‘junk’.” he grumbled.

I looked around his room, “Still, for as many times as I’ve ‘slept over’ here, it’s sorta cool to finally see the place.”

“Yeah, no kidding. So uh… I need to talk to you about something…” Guilt swam through the room as he looked down and away from me.

Finally…

“Well, not so much as talk to but… tell you… um…” His eyes darted around, looking at everything except my eyes. In that moment, he kind of reminded me of Corwin.

“Go on, you can tell me anything.” I tried to reassure him while I struggled to mask my own unease.

“Well, we’re uh…” He set his jaw and took a deep breath, “my family is leaving.”

“What?” I fought to keep myself calm as cold splashed down my spine. “Wait, when? Where? Talk to me Geri, what’s going on?”

“Next week… Dad got a job offer out in Michigan; and after what happened to Fen…” Geri faltered and shuffled his feet, “They thought it would be best…”

“Best to uproot you in the middle of a school year? Best to take you away from your friends? Your Pack? Box you up and shuttle you away like a piece of furniture? Didn’t you ask them not to go?”

I stood and paced, but he didn’t answer or meet my eyes. I stopped and looked at him. Geri hunched his shoulders as though bracing for me to hit him.

“You didn’t… did you?”

“I’m sick of pretending, Jimmy! Sick of trying to be something I’m not just so I wouldn’t be alone. My so-called ‘friends’ pretended to like me just so they could have an Omega to pick on.”

“What do you mean? We’ve never ‘pretended’ to be your friends, we
are
your friends!”

“Can you say that for Fen? For Loki? How can you be so sure about how they treated me before
you
came along?” His eyes blazed with long-bottled bitterness when he finally met my gaze and it brought me up short.

“I guess I can’t… But I’m not them; and I
do
consider you my friend. You’re not my scapegoat, you’re my pack-brother…”

“We’re not a
Pack! Don’t you get it? We’re not werewolves! We don’t transform under the full moon, we don’t have special powers, and it sure as hell didn’t take a silver bullet to kill Fen.” I flinched but he kept rolling, “It’s all in your fucking heads and I’m so sick of this game. I just played along so I wouldn’t be alone anymore!

“When we moved here, I didn’t make a single friend. Not one. I was fair game;
everybody
picked on me. So I jumped at Fen’s invitation, but when he ‘bit’ me nothing changed. I’m sick of crawling on my belly, playing into their delusions just so they wouldn’t look too close and see that I was lying to them every day.”

I stared at him, silent, while he caught his breath. “I never wanted you to crawl.”

Geri smiled ruefully at me, “Notice how you’re the one I’m saying goodbye to.” He took his head in his hands and sighed. He seemed exhausted after his outburst and we lingered in uneasy silence while he collected his thoughts.

“There’s another thing too,” h
e started, uneasy. “Um… Dad doesn’t want to pay for moving my car. I know you don’t have one so I’ll sell it to you if you want.”

I stared at him. “So basically, you called me over to tell me none of us were ever your friends, but you want me to buy your car?”

“Uh… yeah, I guess.”

“Dude, that’s a shitty move.”

“Yeah, I guess…” he said again, uncomfortable.

I sighed and pressed my fingers into my eyes. I knew better than to think John would ever help me buy a car. Unlike Chicago, this town didn’t seem to even know the meaning of ‘mass transit’, and I knew I’d need one. “How much?”

“How much can you afford?”

I ran some quick numbers in my head. “Not much dude, um, five-hundred bucks at best.”

“That’s fine,” he answered quickly, “let’s do four-hundred and just be done with it. I have too many memories associated with it.”

I reached out and pulled him into a hug, surprising us both. I just held him while all the things I wanted to say spun through my head. In the end though, I said nothing.

He offered to let me use his phone to call for a ride, but I declined and he walked me to his front door.

“I’d like it if you’d email me when you get there. I still consider you my friend, and I don’t want to lose you too.”

“Sure…” He stuffed his hands in his hands in his pockets and looked down.

I sighed and zipped up my jacket. “You really don’t think you’re a wolf?”

“I know it.”

“Well, I guess that’s your thing.” I stepped down a couple steps toward the sidewalk. “But I remember how you
ran. I remember your eyes. Even if you don’t believe in yourself,
I
do.”

He blinked, taken aback, and I smiled sadly as I turned and walked away, catching one last glimpse of his father’s rifles. He stood there a moment as if about to say something, but then he turned and closed the door.

I was a block down the street before I sat down on the curb, covered my face with my hands, and started to cry.

I miss you Fen…

Fen’s Pack, his legacy; was crumbling through my fingers. I just wasn’t strong enough to hold it together. Loki tried as hard as she could to convince me that it wasn’t my fault, but it was all I could think of. And while spring stirred to life around me, I was dying inside.

I failed him…

What small healing I’d accomplished was ripped raw again as I watched the Mayflower truck pull away from Geri’s house; a red and blue realtors’ sign stuck in the gravel of the front yard and a signed title to Geri’s car in my hand. My car now. It was a beautiful spring day, but no matter what anyone said, I felt like I’d betrayed Fen as I watched Geri drive away.

Was it all just in my head?

A cold numb settled into me. Sound dulled, everything slipped out of focus, and I felt… nothing…

My wolf stopped responding, and as the days passed my phantom limbs disappeared. The worst affirmation to my fears came a week later when I watched the full moon rise over the mountains and felt nothing. No shudders. No surge of energy. No reaction
at all. Even my wolf had abandoned me…

But had it ever really been there to begin with?

Maybe it was just a matter of faith, and mine was spent. Doubt ate me alive, and left me broken like a discarded toy. What pathetic hubris to imagine I was anything more than I was born; so desperate to feel wanted and accepted that I’d hypnotized myself into Fen’s delusion wholesale.

Was it all a lie?

Loki sensed something was wrong, I saw it in her eyes. I wanted more than anything to bare my soul to her, but Fen’s memory haunted me; I hadn’t survived his rejection intact. Better to well the venom inside; when you’ve lost everything else, you covet your last hopeful illusions above all else.

I’d reached my breaking point, and I knew I couldn’t survive losing Loki too.

At home, Mom and John tiptoed around me. I came home a couple times to find them deep in some angry hushed conversation, or John would hurriedly wrap up a phone call as soon as I came near the door. Suspicion festered inside me, and I wondered if John was messing around on my mom.

I came home one day and heard Mom and John arguing in his office with the door closed. I crept close and listened from the other side of the door.

“—the hell can we believe anything he says? He
lied
to us! God only knows what he was doing over at that girl’s house at six in the morning, and did you see the way he kissed that boy’s face at the funeral? It made my skin crawl…”

“But
those aren’t what upset you John, I know you better than that. You’re the one who’s talked
me
back from the ledge a bunch of times with him.”

John was silent. After a minute, he sighed and said. “Jimmy never saw me as a dad. He never will. He made his mind up about
that
years ago.”

“Honey, you have to remember that Jimmy wasn’t just an only child; I was his only parent. Emotionally, I was everything to him. When you came along Jimmy got jealous; he’d never had competition for my attention before. Besides, there’s so much he doesn’t know about you. There’s so much you haven’t
told
him.”

“What am I supposed to tell him? That I have no clue how to be a father? That my old man spent
his life working, golfing, and cheating on my mother; so he was never there for his own boy?”

“John, I don’t know what you expected. Jimm
y looks up to you, I can tell—”

“Does he? Really? ‘Cause he sure as hell doesn’t show it! When I married you, I swore I’d try to be the best dad I could for him,” John said, and I swallowed a lump in my throat, “but he resents me for trying to teach him how to be strong; how to be a good man, how to figure shit out on his own! And god-forbid I ever try to show him that I love him… I just don’t know what to do with him; I can’t stand his attitude and I’m sick and tired of being his goddamned punching bag!”

“Look,” Mom snapped, “You think
your
situation’s rough? I’ve been dealing with Jimmy for eighteen years.
Literally
half my life John, with zero breaks! I never got to be young, I never got to go out and live! I don’t resent him, it was my decision, but I’m exhaustted! I can’t tell if Jimmy can’t see the toll he takes on us, or if he just doesn’t care!”

The room went silent and I wiped my eyes. The feeling of betrayal ran even deeper that the hurt and shock.

John’s sigh was audible even through the door, “So what am I supposed to do about the church? How am I supposed to teach the boys to be good men if I don’t follow my own morals?”

“Look honey, I understand why you want to drop the job. But be realistic; we need that money to pay the mortgage, we can’t keep living out of savings like we have.” Mom muttered, insistent.

“It’s bad enough that the pastor’s son assaulted our boys,” I blinked; I hadn’t realized the church John was designing was for Jack’s dad, “there’s something about that pastor that reminds me of my old man. There’s a serpent behind that smile, mark my words…”

I heard them move and slipped away before they opened the door. I retreated downstairs and leaned against my bookcase while I waited for the tears to stop.

With mounting desperation, I launched myself into anything I could devise to distract myself from my dissolving home life or try and rouse my wolf. The amount of time I spent alone in my Dungeon quadrupled as I devoured the small library I’d inherited from Fen, and checked out every book I could find on wolves from both libraries.

The more I read of Fen’s books, the more I realized that almost all the things he’d talked about with such conviction were nothing more than adaptations of things he’d read. I’d built my entire identity around Fen’s amalgamated lies. It was all there in the books; shifting energy, astral planes, turquoise… Defeated, I stared into the eyes of wolf pictures, hoping to trigger some kind of response, but all I got were dry eyes.

I turned eighteen in April, and surprised myself with how little I gave a crap. Eighteen. Woo hoo. Mom and John gave me a cell phone, which was ironic considering I could count on one hand the number of people I would actually call with it. “Oh, cool, thanks guys. Now you can track me down whenever you want.”

I guess that reaction wasn’t quite what they had in mind.

“Don’t you like it?” Mom asked, “Was there something else you would have rather had?”

Anything I would have rather had? Bring my wolf back? Raise Fen from the dead? Bring Geri home, ruing the error of his ways? Loki’s confession of eternal love? “Nope
, it’s great,” I lied.

Clouds lingered for weeks until the slushy snow and hail finally relented to the lengthening spring days and turned to a cold punishing rain
, like the weather mirrored my mood. I stared out the library window while Bo and I researched for our American Government final in the Library before Spring Break. “Still overboard about wolves?” Bo snapped me out of my reverie as he leaned over and looked at the screen of my computer.