Scratch the Surface (Wolf Within) (2 page)

I make a decision. I take the exit. The road climbs over a small crest then dips sharply. I brake because we’ve been traveling at seventy miles an hour and now we need to slow down. We’ll still be above the legal speed limit, but this is a Mustang GT, metallic gold like my stiletto heels, with an ink-black leather interior. My dream car is a present from Elena who has just signed a lucrative contract with a company that develops PC games. Elena is a whiz at designing games. We have six different PCs and laptops set up in our house in New Britain and she is always perched in front of one of them, sucking absently on her bottom lip as she contemplates the scenarios in front of her on the screen.

Yesterday she made an important deliverable to the company and they extended her contract for another game, this one even more ambitious—about werewolves. It is slated for tentative release October of 2010, which is two years and two months into the future.

I put my foot on the brake, but it doesn’t seem like we decelerate. Confused, I press harder then we hit the dip and I see a shadow or a bird or something that distracts me then the wheel is a traitor beneath my hands. Elena screams in the backseat as the guardrail looms closer.

I have time to think to myself,
This is just a dream. This is not happening. This is not
—

The Mustang’s front end smashes into the guardrail with a terrific bang. It crumples with a metallic grinding and tearing. The engine screams in protest.

“Stanzie!” Elena shrieks. Grey is stiff and terrified beside me. The whole car reeks of our extreme fear. It pours out of our skins like invisible sweat and the mad stink of it paralyzes my muscles and vocal cords. I am a mute statue. I cannot even blink.

As Billy Idol sings the Mustang turns up and over. Wind rushes in when Grey’s door flies open. I see a blur of movement when he falls out and my paralysis breaks. I reach out for him, but the airbag hits me in the face and something hard smashes the back of my seat. Elena stops screaming. She stops screaming because her neck breaks under the force of her body slamming into the back of my seat. She, like Grey, never wears a seatbelt
.

* * * *

Pressure brought me out of my trance. Murphy squeezed my shoulder reassuringly.

Allerton said my name, probably not for the first time.

The car crash was so vivid in my head I could still hear Elena’s screams and the jagged sound of tearing metal.

“I’m here.” I swallowed an obstruction in my throat. It was two and a half years ago. It was time to let go and get over it.

I’d been doing a good job of that, thanks to Murphy, but one sentence made me realize that maybe I would never truly be free. It was not a pleasant thought.

“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.” Allerton’s voice was rich with sympathy. I visualized his handsome, distinguished face and his dark black hair he wore as fashionably cut as his designer suits. “I thought you should know. There’s something else as well.”

My stomach sank even though I had no idea what the something else could be, only that it wouldn’t be good.

“He wants to speak to you. Privately.”

My mouth dropped open in protest. Sick bile burned my throat and I must have twisted in my seat because Murphy put both hands on my shoulders. I was absurdly grateful for his touch.

With his Pack-enhanced senses, he could hear what Allerton said, and he could smell my distress. I know I reeked of it.

“Do I have to?” Tears clogged my sinuses and, if not for Murphy, I would have been bawling like a baby, I knew it.

“Of course not,” said Allerton at once, and there was just a tinge of disappointment in his voice that I strove to ignore, but it was impossible. Damn him. Damn me for wanting to please him because he was a Councilor.

“Where is he?”

“He’s being held in the safe house in Hartford. I’m here with him, along with one of the Regional Councilors. Riverglow is not being told the whole story. Just that he confessed to doing it not why.”

Riverglow was the name of my former pack—Jonathan, Nora, Callie, Vaughn and Peter.

“Aren’t they even curious?” I couldn’t disguise the bitterness in my voice.

“He’s saying he accidentally put a hole in the brake lining, causing the brake fluid to leak out, and he realized it when he went over the car after the accident but was too ashamed to admit it.”

“An accident? And do they believe it?” My voice shook with outrage. “They didn’t believe me. Are they going to believe him?”

“Constance, he had to say something. We need to keep the knowledge that people in the Pack are murdering others under wraps. He can’t tell them the truth.” Allerton was sympathetic but firm. “And you can ask them yourself what they believe if you come to Connecticut. They want to see you too.”

I wanted to throw the phone into the wall and stomp on it. I wanted to spit in Allerton’s arrogant face. What I didn’t want was to ever see any of my former pack again—especially Grandfather Tobias.

“How am I supposed to face them? How am I supposed to look Grandfather Tobias in the eye after what he did to Grey and Elena? To me!” It was disrespectful to say the least to shout at a Councilor, but I rarely paused to think before I reacted. Allerton took my tirade in patient silence which is what made me stop shouting. My cheeks burned with humiliation.

“I’m not telling you what to do, Constance. I’m giving you the opportunity to hear the man out. It might provide some closure.” He didn’t say it, but I knew damn well he thought I could use a huge, heaping dose of it.

I squeezed my eyes shut and heard Elena screaming in my head again.

“When do I have to be there?”

“As soon as you can make it.” Allerton paused then said, “He’s not going back to Riverglow. The Council will acknowledge his cover story and accept it, but he won’t return to the pack. He’s going to go to sleep one night very soon and he’s not going to wake up. If you want, you can hand him a glass of warm milk or hot chocolate to help him go to sleep. If you want.” Allerton’s tone was deceptively nonchalant but what he offered was the chance to administer the fatal poison. That would be closure for sure.

I didn’t answer because I couldn’t. A part of me wanted to kill that old man, not with poison, but with my claws and fangs—in wolf form. I didn’t know if I could be such a civilized murderer. Or maybe executioner was a better word.

“Can I speak to Liam, please?”

I thrust the phone at Murphy and he took it, but when I tried to get up, he frowned at me.

“I want to take a shower.” I had to get out of the room and away from the phone and Allerton and the sound of Elena screaming.

His dark gaze searched my face for a moment before he let go of my shoulder. He watched me as I stumbled for the bathroom. He acknowledged Allerton then went grimly silent as he listened. I smelled the anger that escaped from his pores and clouded the air around him—protective anger.

Chapter 2

I cried in the shower—bitter, painful tears that ripped my guts to shreds. Intellectually, I had known Grandfather Tobias had done something to the car. He was a mechanic. He’d been under the car. I remembered how the car hadn’t seemed to slow down. When I told my story to Councilor Allerton and the Regional Councilors after the accident, I’d told them I didn’t think the brakes had been working. There were no skid marks on the road and that supported my theory. Grandfather Tobias had stood in front of them all and declared that the car had been mechanically sound. It was suggested I’d hit the gas instead of the brakes and that I’d been drinking. I’d panicked and my judgment was impaired.

A breathalyzer test had been administered but, because it had not been done immediately after the accident, I’d passed it and there was no real way to say whether I would have failed it if it had been done sooner.

It had been my word against theirs. The Regional Council had wanted to rule against me. My punishment would have been expulsion from my pack and a mandatory two-year prohibition against attending Great Pack events and bonding with someone—plus the everlasting and eternal shame.

Allerton, as a member of the Great Council, had persuaded them it had been a tragic accident that was no one’s fault. He did this I now knew because even back then he suspected something was wrong within the Great Pack. There were too many of these tragic accidents and something didn’t feel right to him.

So I had been cleared. However, my pack was free to sever ties with me anyway, and that’s what they’d done as soon as they could. I was told to get the hell out of Connecticut and never come back.

As a non-voting member of Riverglow due to his advanced age, Grandfather Tobias had not been formally involved in my former pack’s decision, but when I’d gone to his home, desperate and grieving, wanting him at least to comfort me, he had refused to answer the door.

His front window blinds had been up when I’d knocked on the door. I’d seen him peer out and when he’d recognized me, the blinds had gone down with a whoosh and the last, dim speck of hope and self-esteem I’d had left had been extinguished. Up until that point, I’d let myself believe I was a victim of a tragic, horrible accident, but after that the doubt had started to creep in and the blame I had struggled not to give in to had swept across me and drowned me.

I’d always known Elena and Grey would not have blamed me—even if I had been drunk. They had loved me. I’d thought Grandfather Tobias had loved me too.

Technically, I was free to join another pack whenever I wanted, but after Grandfather Tobias rejected me, I’d wanted to punish myself. The worst I could think of was exile from the Pack.

I’d gone to the safe house in Hartford, where Allerton had been staying, and he’d invited me up to his room on the second floor so he could finish his packing. His expression had been grave and full of compassion, and I’d followed him up the stairs. Saturated with guilt, I’d barely been able to lift my feet from one stair to the next, wanting only to curl up in a ball, go to sleep and never, ever wake.

* * * *

“I think, Councilor. I think maybe I was drunk. I think maybe I did kill them. Not on purpose, but it’s my fault.” I look at him, full of shame and self-hatred, wanting him to punish me even though I am already punished.

He stares at me and doesn’t say anything.

“Elena has left you nearly three hundred thousand dollars,” he says after a moment.

“I don’t want it.” My lips are numb. My body is too and I want to sit but this is not my room and, anyway, I deserve no comfort.

“Nevertheless, it’s yours. She wanted you to have it.”

“Before I killed her. If she could do it over, she’d leave it to somebody else,” I say.

“She left it to you. Not Grey. You. I think that says a lot about your bond.” Allerton zips his suitcase shut and straightens the cuffs of his Dolce and Gabbana ice-blue button-down shirt. A dark gray suit jacket is draped carefully over the back of the chair in front of the desk in the corner. His pants match the jacket. They are perfectly creased and fit him as if they had been tailored. His shoes are shiny black Gucci loafers. Even though I love shoes, today I feel nothing when I look at them except that one of the tassels is crooked. I long to fix it but I stand still.

“I need to be punished,” I whisper in a dreadful voice. I will not cry. I promise myself I will not cry in front of this man.

He lifts his suitcase off the carefully made bed and puts it down beside his feet. The leather tassel is still crooked. He does not notice. Maybe these things don’t bother him.

“What more can I do that hasn’t already been done to you by your pack?” His voice is neutral and I can’t tell what he is thinking. He smells only of Armani cologne. He hides his emotions well, but then he is a Councilor.

“I killed them,” I insist.

“On purpose?” He fixes me with keen blue eyes that see everything.

“No,” I falter. I squeeze my hands together in front of me. I feel sick and disconnected.

“So I cannot punish you any more severely than your pack has already done.” He allows a small amount of impatience to creep into his voice. He glances at his watch—a quick gesture, but I am meant to understand he is in a rush and has other places to be. I am wasting his time. Shamed, I look down.

“You could make it official,” I tell him. I lift my gaze from the crooked leather tassel on his shoe to stare him full in the face.