Page 11 of Were-Geeks Save a Kitten

Pauly’s room was next. He’d been the prankster with a love of magic and mischief. His room was also occupied by a new recruit. At least this guy was a neat one. Freakishly so, by the looks of things.

Across from his room were the adjoining bedrooms for Cream and Coffee. The two had paired up in training and were like one single mind split into two bodies. Cream had been the playboy, and his handle was as gross a joke as any horndog could make. Coffee had been the gambler with so much energy to burn that everyone said they needed a cup of coffee after spending five minutes with the guy. He could be that exhausting. He also had a computer-like brain for statistics and weird facts. Yordan had learned early never to play trivia games unless Coffee was on his team because the guy never lost.

Yordan twisted the doorknob to no avail. When had the puppies been allowed to lock their doors? Then he remembered that Coffee had a magic twist to his door. Yordan didn’t know if it was a mechanical tweak the guy had added or just a freak of door engineering. In order to open it, Yordan had to lift at a diagonal angle and then wiggle the knob in the right way. It took him a moment to remember the exact pattern, but he got it.

And then, like magic, the door swung open like normal. Which was to say it opened halfway because it was blocked by a dropped bag of rocks, of all things.

Yup, the place was Coffee’s usual disaster. The guy could have the room spotless for inspection, but five minutes later, everything went every which way. Coffee carried things with him when he needed them and dropped them when he didn’t. Shorts, tablet, his glasses, or his coffee mug—they ended up wherever they landed, and he’d find them eventually when he next needed to unearth them from the piles.

Yordan stepped in, his heart in his throat. Why hadn’t the room been cleaned?

He looked around at a year and a half’s worth of dust and felt his breath choke off. But underneath the dust were wave after wave of emotion. Coffee had been his oldest friend. They’d woken up together in the Wulf cages down below. That was where they put all the new, out-of-control puppies. Together, they’d found a way to control their animal and had become good men. Not just good fighters for Wulf, but good men.

And now, here was everything they had of Coffee, layered in dust and abandoned like a deserted cabin the woods. It was horrifying, and yet, it felt so damned familiar. Without even thinking, he stepped into the room. There on the dresser was the only clear spot in the room. Coffee called it his payment box for every bet he’d ever made.

The guy once said he had to make a bet once a day or be turned to goo. As of the moment Coffee died, Yordan was $182 in the hole. They never paid up, but they carried the tally into the next challenge, the next bet, or the next drinking game. Except there would never be another because Coffee was gone. Burned to ash, and the pain of that cut like a razor down the spine. Coffee had been the one with endless energy. Coffee was going to outrun, outwork, and outlive them all. He’d even tried to get them to bet on it, but no one would agree. They all thought he’d outlast everyone.

Until a demon had burned all but Nero to ash, and now Yordan had to pay up. Without any idea of what else to do, Yordan rooted blindly in his backpack and pulled out his wallet. He jerked out the bills, pretending to count but too shaky to care. He placed bills one by one on the dresser, while memories of drinking games, midnight drills, and tussling together as wolves burned through his mind. He couldn’t see through his tears, and still, he pulled out bills.

He leaned hard against the dresser because he couldn’t hold himself upright anymore. And when his wallet was empty, he slapped the entire billfold down on the dresser and laid his head down on the pile and sobbed. Loud, gasping heaves that drowned out everything but the sound of his grief.

He tried to keep it muffled. He buried his head in his arm and pressed his forearm to his mouth, but it didn’t stop the pain. His friend was gone. And not just one friend but four.

He didn’t know how long he struggled. One minute? One thousand? Every breath was wretched; every exhale was ragged. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

He stiffened immediately, trying to cut off the display. It ended up choking him. He wanted to straighten up, but instead, someone shoved a T-shirt into his hand. He used it to wipe his face. And then he heard words spoken in a low brogue.

“Grief is an honorable emotion. There is no need to hide it.”

The Scottish asshole speaking some fortune-cookie platitude. Yordan wanted to dismiss it, but the words sank in anyway. And once inside, he felt the meaning of them soothe him. There was nothing shameful about mourning his friends, and fuck anyone who looked down on him because he was weeping like a child. He’d gotten the news the day before his pack had taken on an evil witch coven. There’d been no time to properly mourn then, and afterward, he and Gummy had gotten rip-roaring drunk. That had been more about burying the pain instead of feeling it.

Now, he’d somehow ended up sitting on Coffee’s unmade bed, and he couldn’t stop himself. The tears wouldn’t stop flowing.

“We’re alone,” The Scot said, his hand squeezing tighter. “No one will see.”

The Scot was seeing, but it was too late to prevent that. So Yordan let the grief flow. He knew it was an open wound that needed to bleed. He stopped fighting it and breathed into the cotton tee while the tears seeped into the fabric. McNabb remained at his side through it all, eventually sitting beside him and drawing him close with his large body, warm and comforting.

Yordan sobbed like a child for a very long time. It wasn’t just because he grieved Coffee and Mother and all the others who had died in the last two years. He grieved for himself, the survivor who had to go on somehow with a gaping hole in his life where his friends once stood.

He’d managed to do it for a while. For eighteen fucking months while he filled his life with postapocalypse cleanup and poking at his packmates. But here, now, he saw what was wrong with his life.

He missed his friends. He missed Coffee, who was more of a brother to him than anyone else. And he missed the innocent belief that as trained combat werewolves, they could face down anything and win.

Sometimes surviving sucked. And with that realization came a fresh wave of tears. Fortunately, these felt like cleansing tears. And in time, they faded to nothing. Eventually, he could breathe again without shuddering. And while he used the tee to mop up his face, The Scot finally asked a question that had obviously been weighing on his mind.

“How’d you get into the room?”

“What?”

“We’ve been trying from the beginning. Couldn’t get into his room or Cream’s.”

“I just opened it.”

“But—”

“There’s a trick to it. On both their doors.”

“Oh.” A long pause followed as the man leaned back against the wall. “What kind of trick?”