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Sam nods. “Alicia and I always liked that house.”
“Is that right?” I look to Alicia.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “The house and the park.”
Good. I have to let go of Alicia’s hands when she reaches for her coffee, but I don’t want to stop touching her. So I rest my hand on her thigh, instead—and she doesn’t tense or pull away. “Does that coffee still do anything for you?”
She stops, looking at me. “What do you mean?”
“The caffeine. We can drink gallons of that and not even feel a buzz.” I gesture to Brandon, who’s nodding. “Can’t get drunk, either.”
A wry smile curves her soft mouth. “I noticed that.”
“Tried a few times?”
A shadow passes through her eyes. “Yes.”
Trying to kill the pain and fear of what was happening to her, most likely. But couldn’t do that. Softly I ask, “Can you tell us what happened?”
“Not much to tell.” She shrugs like it’s nothing but I can smell the fear coming off of her again. “We were in Aspen during winter break. I went for a walk, because the full moon on the snow and the mountains was so beautiful.” Her voice begins to waver and her eyes close. “And I was mauled by a monster who started ripping out pieces of me and eating them, then who ran off when people came to see why I was screaming.”
Holy fucking Christ. Eating pieces of her. Gut churning, I look to Brandon, who’s already texting our parents. Colorado’s right next door to Wyoming. If there’s a cursed wolf running loose on the full moons, they might already know something about it.
Or Sam might, too. “There haven’t been any other attacks there,” she says. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the police reports in that area.”
“Maybe it’s killing elk now, too,” Alicia says painfully. “And I was just the unlucky human in its path.”
I lightly squeeze her thigh. “Is that what you’re doing—hunting elk?”
She looks so haunted, so sad. “For now. Until I run across someone hiking or camping, I guess.”
“Nah, that’s not how it works.” Brandon sets his phone down. “The curse unleashes a beast inside you, but it doesn’t put anything into you. You are who you are. So a sick fuck who always secretly wanted to hurt people will go out and hurt people. When decent people are cursed, though—their beasts don’t go around ripping people up.”
She stares at him in disbelief. “I wake up covered in blood.”
“Of course you do. You’re hungry, so you go out and hunt. But if that bothers you, then after you tame the beast, you don’t even need to do that. Just can just…eat bacon,” he says as the waitress returns and places a platter heaped with potatoes and bacon and eggs in front of him.
By the time she’s distributed all the plates, Brandon and I have practically got a whole pig on the table. Alicia’s double meat order looks tiny next to ours. Her stomach growls loudly again. Her hands shake a little when picking up her knife and fork, but she neatly cuts off a small bite of sausage. Starving but controlling herself.
That takes some willpower. She probably doesn’t even realize how strong she must be to do that.
Across from her, Samantha digs into a stack of pancakes. “So you two were born like this?”
“Not exactly like this,” Brandon says. “I was a wee bit smaller.”
“Only a wee bit? I feel sorry for your mother. Is she the wolf or the bear?”
“Bear.”
“So then…how? And— Nope, nope.” Sam abruptly points her fork at my brother, stopping him just as he opens his mouth to respond. “Don’t even start. I know your type. You’re going to say something like ‘I can show you how a bear and wolf make babies, Sergeant Sam’ and then I’ll have to smack you.”
“My type?” Brandon appears wounded. “You’ve never met my type, Sergeant Sam.”
She snorts and shoves another bite into her mouth.
“But I wouldn’t mind if you smacked me.”
Samantha rolls her eyes away from him and toward Alicia as if to say, “See?”
Alicia’s smile appears, the one that first started showing after she got over her initial shyness with me. The one she shows with people she trusts. Her sister, obviously. Me, thank fucking god. But it looks as if Brandon might be winning her over, too. “But where does it start? How far back does it go?”
“Hell if we know,” he tells her. “On the wolf side, our great grandfather was bit. Don’t know who bit him or where that wolf came from. On the bear side, it must go way back, since we can only be born. But all we know is that in the mid-1800s, a woman came out of the woods in Minnesota and she married a fur trapper, and they had little bear babies. I don’t know of any bear or wolf who doesn’t have a similar story—and I figure most of that history is gone because it wasn’t exactly safe to announce what they were to the general public.” His phone buzzes and he reads the message. “Mom says they tracked down that fucker in January. So that’s that.”
