I laughed, my head rolling back as the sound poured out. I was bouncing, my feet quick to leave the fluff of the comforter and reach for the ceiling instead.
Gareth laughed, watching me, his eyes crinkling as his mouth opened to let out bigger and bigger laughs—laughs that bordered on shouts of joy.
And then, suddenly, his face became serious—intense—and he stopped his jumping, his legs spread wide to keep his balance as my own jumping died down, my face getting as serious as his.
“What?” I asked, reaching for him. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” he replied, his tone flat, eyes shining. “You were laughing.”
I nodded.
“Everything’s right.” He grabbed me by my shoulders and kissed me. Hard.
CHAPTER THREE
Jessie
Noise outside the shed made me peel my eyes open again. I was still nauseated from my last vision of Derek. Being inside his head—or, more properly, having him inside my head—was unsettling at best.
Had Derek been bred like his memory showed? Had some dark agenda been going on in and around Junction for years? What sort of group would arrange marriages in today’s society just in hopes of getting kids with freaky super powers? Sure, it wasn’t like the bite of a radioactive spider was enough to do it (and how many people would volunteer to try, spiders being creepy and all—especially the ones with hairy legs), but getting married to someone just because of the kids you might produce seemed even worse.
What sort of group would have that much power over people to encourage that sort of behavior?
Of course … Derek’s parents did both come from money. Perhaps that was how the other half lived—bizarrely.
There was a scratching noise at the shed’s door. Too light to be a wolf or dog.… A shadow moved in the little space between the doors, and a small nose with whiskers poked its way into the opening. A mouse wiggled inside and pulled itself up on its haunches to sniff the air and peer at me with tiny black eyes.
Snow peppered down from a small hole in the shed’s roof, flakes tumbling not far from the mouse’s twitching whiskers.
Great. Add insult to injury by dumping me in a mouse’s nest. I growled and thrashed toward it, and it let out a little squeak and dodged back out the way it had come. The brief sense of victory I had was quickly replaced by the knowledge I was still trapped. Still bound and gagged and helpless.
Alexi may have trained me to fight hand to hand, and Wanda may have increased my combat shooting capability, but no one had trained me for this scenario. Once again I was on my own—left to my own limited devices.
I didn’t want to do this anymore. I didn’t want to constantly worry about the rivals of werewolves and their relationships or retribution for me just being me and loving who I wanted to love and living the way I wanted to live.…
I was babbling.
Something chewed at the edges of my vision, and a shiver ran through me, making me tremble from the inside out. I felt him like static when laundry was fresh from the dryer on a winter day, making the hairs on my arms prickle and rise even covered as they were in my long sleeves and jacket. I itched with the sensation of Derek again taking hold of me, and I cried out as the view of the shed’s interior was violently ripped away and replaced with the quivering view of another posh room in what I could only presume was Derek’s expansive home up on the Hill.
This room had a carefully appointed ceiling, trimmed with crown molding—like the stuff you saw in restored historic houses that had been relegated to becoming museums. Wallpaper with delicate and organic scrollwork coated the walls and gave the place an air of being untouched and unchanged over many decades.
I gasped, my focus coming back to someone standing right before me. I heard her before I saw her. She was gagging.… I squinted through Derek’s eyes, and she snapped into crisp detail—as did the stinging sensation ebbing through my cheek. It was his mother. Choking. On her tears?
“Mommy’s sorry,” she said, wiping clumsily with the back of her shaking hand at the water that raced out of her eyes. “But you have to focus. You have to master this lesson before she arrives, otherwise…” Her eyes closed and more tears seeped out. “Auntie will be here in less than an hour, Derek,” she insisted. “And you have to show her…”
My lips—his lips—were moving, and I heard us say, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t like this.”
“I’m sorry, baby,” she murmured, wiping at my cheek, her fingers coming away wet with Derek’s tears. “This is why you were born. When you’ve learned all these lessons, no one will ever rival your power. Don’t you want that? To be powerful? To never be afraid?”
“I want to go play.…”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her eyes flashing. “Most of us don’t get what we really want.” Her head hung a moment, and when she looked at us next, her jaw was set and firm even in that soft-looking face of hers. “You can take some time away after Auntie comes and sees that you’ve learned your lessons. That you’re fit.”
We nodded.
“Now focus on her.”
I gasped, seeing a woman in a jogging suit slumped in a nearby chair. A woman with blond hair hanging loose around her shoulders, and strong features that I’d come to recognize too well now. I knew her even without her signature ponytail.
Wanda.
About ten years ago.
“Be gentle, but be firm. We don’t want to reduce every visitor to a drooling idiot like we accidentally did that Bible thumper. All you need to do is slip into her brain and find what she most wants to do in life.…”
Our gaze focused on Wanda, and the skin of her forehead seemed to peel back and her skull unfolded and we were absorbed into her gray matter. In a moment we stood in the foyer of a dimly lit house.
“Hurry, baby,” a voice oozed out of the woodwork of the hallway and spurred us forward.
“Hurry, hurry—find the door.…”
“It’s not here,” we hissed, spinning to again view all the doors lining an impossibly long hallway. A hallway that, the more we tried to look to see its end, to see where we had entered, the longer it stretched and the more doors popped into existence to fill the walls.
“It is there. It has to be,” Mommy urged us. “You don’t have much time. She must have some defenses.”