I had lain in bed with no success at sleep for what felt like hours. Like sand slowly dropping in an hourglass.
The light tapping on the door made me sit up in bed.
“Hello?”
The door cracked open. Levi looked at me, a bottle of gin in one hand and two empty coffee mugs in the other.
“Sleep?”
“Not really.” My heartbeat picked up.
He nodded more to himself than to me. “Come on, then.”
There wasn’t anything as murderous about him now as there had been before, but that didn’t calm my pounding heart as I followed him outside.
Light mist was falling out of the night sky. Levi took a seat on the top step, where the roof still protected us from the drizzle. He opened up the bottle and poured the clear liquid into a mug then slid it over to me, before pouring himself some. “Mind if I smoke?”
I shrugged in response. I doubted me saying no would stop him. He pulled out a pack and fished a cigarette out. I took a long sip of gin as he lit his cig.
“I didn’t think you were a gin person.”
His tired eyes found mine. “I’m not very good at this,” he admitted, before adding “I can be a real piece of shit. I have a tendency to think that less is more—sometimes you end up hurting people when all you’re trying to do is protect them.
I can be a grade A asshole too.” He took a sip from his mug while flicking some ash off the end of the cigarette into the rosebushes. “What he did, your ex, it’s more than shameful.
You did the right thing, and he won’t find you here.”
“It feels like he already has.”
“This place is protected by magic,” Levi said. “It’s like an illusion around the land that most humans cannot see through.”
I thought back to the clearing I had parked at the night I was attacked. To the trail I had followed in the dirt. “The tracks—”
“Magical border.” Levi spoke up. “Those tracks kept going, you just couldn’t see them. He won’t find you. The people at The Hole are friends of ours. They won’t say anything.”
“The Hole?”
“It’s a small general store next to a gas station—safe for our kind and humans. We’ve known the owners for a long time.”
I nodded my head. “But what do we do? What if he files a missing persons? What about the man he sent up here?”
“If he was going to file one, he probably already would have,” Levi pointed out.
I bit my lip then slowly agreed. Nate may have had friends who were cops, but explaining to them why I ran away was a story he didn’t want anyone to know.
“Regardless,” Levi said, “Lander is going to have someone follow him to see what he knows, then Derek will take care of it. He’ll compel him with a new story to take back to Nate. Case closed.”
I blinked. “Compel?”
“Vampires.” He looked up at me, his eyes tired. “They can compel humans. Command them to do things or forget things.”
“What?” I sucked in a breath.
Levi chuckled before he took a drag. “It’s one of many reasons it’s good to have a vampire around. Regardless, the pack can protect itself from outsiders.”
“But the pack? What if I turn rogue? What if Nate does come after me and someone gets hurt?”
“The pack can handle itself. Nate, well, I wouldn’t mind if he paid a visit. Feel like I’d have a fun time with him.”
My brows rose high as a darkness crept across his brow.
The kind that could only be attributed to the monster within.
“And me. What if I lose it?”
Levi sighed. “We’ve all lost it a little at one point or another. Sometimes you can’t stop it. You find your way back.
Find something that’s worth finding your way back for.”
He turned to look at me and it was then that I saw it. My sight had only slightly improved since the last moon, but in the darkness I could spot the faint red lines that slowly danced around the silver of his irises. They were so tiny, only a few of them, that from far away they would be impossible to see. But they were still there. Still holding on. Still quietly present. To the normal person, if they looked close enough, if may have looked like he had allergies or was getting over pink eye. But the sick feeling in my gut knew better.
My breath caught in my throat. Levi took another sip of his drink, then I took a large one of mine.
“Is that what you did?” I found myself asking. “Is that why you’re out here?”
Levi snorted a quiet laugh. He nodded at me in amusement then took another drink. “Let’s play a game, Charlie girl.”
“What kind of a game?” Derek’s room wasn’t far. If I screamed, he would hear me.
“You say two things that are true, one that is not, and the other person has to guess which is the lie. If you guess wrong, you drink. Although you don’t really have to be wrong to drink.”
I’d played this game in college more times than I wanted to admit. The fact that Levi, a werewolf out in the middle of nowhere, knew a frat boy’s favorite drinking game both surprised me and did not surprise me at all. “I’ve played this before.”
“Then you’re going first.” His lips turned into a smirk as he sipped his gin.
I rolled my eyes and took a drink myself. “Fine,” I said with a huff. “Okay, I am an only child, I grew up in Colorado, and my mother has seven sisters.”
“Your mother did not have seven sisters.”
“What? How would you know that?”
“You’re a bad liar.” Eyes meeting mine made me believe him. Eyes that felt like they were always able to see my inner truth regardless of how hard I tried to hide it.
“Your turn.”
He scratched his jaw, the cigarette dwindling slowly between his fingers. “I am over a hundred years old, werewolves can never have chocolate, and I love vodka.”
There was no way this man was a vodka guy. Gin? Yes, but gin was also a sad man’s drink, and there was nothing cheerful about either Levi or me tonight. No, Levi wasn’t some Real Housewife trying to keep things “skinny.” As for him being old, well, if Derek was as old as she suspected, then Levi’s age could be probable.
Inwardly I just hoped the chocolate was a lie. “Vodka?”
“I actually don’t mind it from time to time,” he con-tended, his eyes almost dancing in laughter at my disbelief.
I took a sip from my mug. “So, what was the lie?”
“We can have chocolate,” he remarked, his lip twitching into what I thought could be a smile.
“So how old are you then?”
He rolled his eyes. “I stopped counting a few years ago. I think I’m like a hundred and fifteen, give or take.”
“Wha-what?” I shook my head. “And Lander?”
“Well, he’s younger but not by much. He’s maybe in his nineties at this point.” He sighed into his mug. “It’s your turn, Charlie girl.”
“Fine. But I mean how?”
“We age slowly. Vampires don’t age at all. I think Derek is pushing five hundred.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.” He mimicked me with another eye-roll.
“Welcome to the world of supernaturals. It’s your turn.”
Jesus Christ, he was old. I took a sip of my gin and tried to focus on what I was going to say. “Okay, uh, my father was a huge Broncos fan, I transcribed old notes for a law firm before all of this, I hated living in Malibu.”
He watched me closely like he would watch a book unfold for him. He took another drag then a sip of his drink.
“Broncos.” Reluctantly, I nodded. He was too good at this for comfort. “What team?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “He died when I was young.
Cancer. I remember football being on from time to time, I don’t really remember what team he liked. I don’t really remember much about him.”
He let out a long breath and looked back into the night.
“I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is.”
He nodded as this strange awkwardness set in. “I’ve always lived in this house, I hate peanut butter, and I hate these goddamned rosebushes.”
“The rosebushes.” They were just bushes. It seemed a little arbitrary to hate them.
“Drink up,” he said with dark amusement lacing his voice.
“Why?” I coughed after swallowing the liquor wrong.
For a moment he said nothing—he just puffed on his cigarette before he looked back at me. “Like you, I hate reminders. You’re not the only one running.”
“What’s the lie?”
“The house. I grew up in the pack with Lander. At the pack house. My father moved us away after a while, he wanted more peace and quiet as the pack grew.”
“There’s a lot of them, then?”
He nodded. “We’re one of the larger ones in the area.”
“One more?”
“All right, Charlie girl.”
“My mother hated him—” I paused and tried not to think of Nate. It was painful to think that half of undergrad was wasted with him, and the other years I could have been chasing my own dreams were wasted away too. “My uncle hated him, but a part of me still loves him.”
Levi watched me carefully as the mist picked up, giving me cold kisses on my face. “Your mother.”
“She never met him,” I responded. He eyed me with a question that I knew I would have to answer as well. “She died before I went to college. Car accident.”
He let out a long breath through his nose and eyed my cup. “Want some more?”
“If I do, I’ll just be more depressing.”
“Gin does that,” he noted.
I took a sip from my mug and nudged my chin toward him. “Your turn.”
“A vampire’s bite won’t totally kill a Were, once you go rogue you can’t come back from it, and there’s never been, to my knowledge, a human who was moon-blooded.”
I bit my lip and leaned back against the railing. The other two seemed logical, but just from what I knew of the supernatural, it would seem legit that a vampire’s bite was potentially more lethal. “A vampire’s bite?”
Levi shook his head with a smile. “Drink.”
I rolled my eyes and took a sip.
“It depends on how much you get in your system. Think of it like a poisonous snakebite. Sometimes you live if not that much gets into your bloodstream, and sometimes you’re not that lucky.”
“So most humans—”
“Lander is looking into it. See if something he finds can help you. We’ve never heard of it.” He shook his head with a laugh. “You’re a lucky little shit, you know that? Most humans die their first full. Even the strong ones. Here you are, fucking moon-blood too.”
“But I may go rogue.” I paused then looked back at him.
“The lie.”
“Find something to hold on to. That wolf in you, she’s trapped. It’s like shaking a closed Coke bottle—the moon demands that she come out. Even after you shift, you can’t go too long without letting her out, otherwise you’ll start to go a little mad. That’s the case for all wolves. But you need to learn to work with her. You’re going to be with her for the rest of your life. Fighting with her is only going to make your life miserable, but if you do go rogue, then it’s going to make coming out of it impossible.”
I looked back at his eyes, back at the faint red that I could now spot. “How—”
He took a long sip of gin then stood up. “Better get some sleep. It’s going to rain tomorrow and you’re swimming before the weather turns.”
“And Lander? The pack? These people who can smell me?”
Levi picked the bottle up. “Lander will handle that.”
“I don’t want anyone hurt because of me.”
“You start to worry about other people, you’re going to forget to worry about yourself, and hurt someone in the process because you’re too damn stubborn to see how your actions affect people around you,” he murmured.
He paused and looked at the sky. I stood slowly, biting my tongue because that statement didn’t feel like it was meant for me.
“You cannot keep me in the dark anymore.”
He nodded. “I know.”
