AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No, you’re not,” Benny said with a sigh. “What 21?”
“You’re guessing!” Trevor accused.
“That you’re 21? That’s a guess,” Benny said. “That you’re lying when you say 22? No, I can tell that. You two really don’t know anything about being a shifter. How long ago did someone change you?”
Silence. “Will!” Benny said sharply. “Answer the question!”
“Six months.”
“So you met someone, and then what?” Benny asked. He ignored Trevor’s spluttering and outrage that Will was talking.
It took a bit to get the story out of him. Benny got Will up and sitting in the front seat. He stood outside the Jeep, leaning against the passenger door, and asked questions. Duncan just listened. And Trevor kept interrupting. Finally Benny looked at him. “Shut up,” he said, pushing dominance at him. “Or I’ll kill you here, and stuff you in the back. You need to get this through your head. You’re only worth the answers you give me. No answers? I don’t need you.”
“You won’t kill me,” Trevor sneered.
Benny looked at him steadily. Finally he walked around the other side of the vehicle and pulled him out of the car. And then he administered as thorough a beating as he’d probably ever given. And he’d killed men with his bare hands before. When Trevor was unconscious, Benny tossed him into the back seat.
“You were going to tell me the story,” Benny said calmly. And Will began to talk.
Benny got in the back seat with Trevor’s body, just shoving it aside. He saw Duncan’s concerned look in the rear-view mirror, but he ignored it. Yes, he was barely holding it together, but he was still in control. Barely being the key word. “While Will tells us this story, why don’t you drive by your house?” Benny suggested to Duncan. “I’d like to see what we’re sending the women to.”
Duncan nodded, and he put the Jeep back into gear and pulled back onto the road.
Will couldn’t stop talking once he started. He was raised in Medicine Hat, Alberta, about 600 miles east of Penticton. He’d been about to start his senior year of high school. This man, he’d said his name was Diogenes, Will said, stumbling over the word. “But that wasn’t his real name,” he added.
Benny kept any expression off his face. “No,” he agreed.
Diogenes had watched him at a football practice. Will had thought he might be a recruiter for a college team. They got them now and then.
“How old was he?” Benny asked.
Will shrugged. “He looked like a college student,” he said. “But....” He trailed off. So Will had learnedsomethings since then.
Diogenes said he thought Will had potential. Then one evening after practice, he said, he was hosting a D&D game for some guys. Did he want to come and join? “Dungeon & Dragons?” Will asked, making sure Benny knew what D&D was.
“Go on,” Benny said. The Hat Island pack had speculated that this could work —if you could identify humans with a latent gene and had some kind of gift that allowed you to pull the wolf through to that first shift. Belief would be key, and you’d have to lower the target’s defenses. A good part of why Benny and Ryder —both with human mothers — came through first shift is that they knew about shifters and that they had a wolf. Theybelieved.
“So he ran a marathon D&D game,” Will said with some enthusiasm. “Friday evening, then all day Saturday. But it wasn’t like D&D I’ve played in the past — we were all werewolves almost right away. Diogenes said he could see the wolf in us.”
Saturday night, he’d lit some kind of pipe, and set it in the center of the table.
“Weed?” Benny asked.
Will shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said doubtfully. “I’ve smoked weed. Something else.”
But playing the game with the drug-smoke made the game realer somehow. “And finally Diogenes said, ‘Would you like to see the wolf inside you?’”
They’d all agreed, thinking it was a joke. But then Diogenes stared at each one of them and said, ‘I see you’ and there was a wolf standing there. Then five wolves. And Will was one of them. Will said he passed out, and when he woke up he was human again, in a van, headed here.
“Well, not exactly here,” Will amended. “He took us to some big log cabin the woods north of here.”
Benny saw Duncan flinch. Yeah,that‘cabin,’ Benny thought sourly. They were sitting on the street in a residential section of Penticton near the Heights. There was a big white house across the road —Duncan’s home, he guessed.
“And we learned to be werewolves — shifters — there,” Will was continuing. “If you passed the basics, you got to come into town, and we were promised we’d go to Vancouver eventually, to fight in the big war that was coming. I thought I might like to see Vancouver.”
He looked anxiously at Trevor. “I know he’s angry and rude,” he said. “But he protected me when I was homesick and the others picked on me. Will he be OK?”
Benny glanced at the big guy filling most the back seat next to him. “Probably,” he said with a sigh. “I haven’t decided yet.” He ignored Duncan’s snort at that.
