When the Red Wolf Hunts (The Red Wolf Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  He better not, I think, then close my eyes and inhale a deep breath. He’ll screw up my plans.

  With that thought in mind, I begin to make my way down the road—heading due east from where Jackson’s house stands and the rest of mine lies in ruin.

  As I walk, slowly but surely contemplating what all it will take to recover the last vestiges of my family’s honor, I find myself dwelling upon what will happen come time I arrive at Wolf Creek—and wonder, quite plainly, what I will do if something goes wrong.

  He could be right, a part of me offers. You could be walking into a dangerous situation.

  Or, another part adds, he could just be overreacting.

  What could those young men take from me that I haven’t already lost? My sanity? My existence? My—

  I swallow.

  Life?

  Fact is: Jackson will know if something happens to me. He will know to go to the police—to say that I went in search of answers and succumbed to foul play because of it. They will arrest the young men. They will question them. Try them. They will be sent to jail. And me? I will simply be dead in the ground and buried six feet under: a final rest for someone whose suffering seems endless.

  I close my eyes, take a deep breath, then exhale.

  The thoughts come rushing at me regardless.

  I was supposed to graduate from high school this year. Go to college. Find myself, discover my future, and work toward it as a result. Now, I’m simply lost in this grand scheme called life, and unsure where or what I will do as a result. I mean, I know I could still go to school. There are grants, and scholarships, and opportunities, and everything in between. But at the same time, it won’t be the same.

  No.

  Nothing will ever be the same, not with my parents gone.

  As I come to the fork in the road—and as I am faced with the reality that I am soon about to put myself in more danger than I could have ever possibly imagined—I swallow a lump in my throat, then reach up to tug at the neck of my shirt.

  Two roads split before me. One says FARM ROAD 45. The other: WOLF CREEK: 1 MILE.

  I decide, here and now, that I cannot let my fear get the best of me.

  For that reason, I turn—and begin to make my way toward Wolf Creek.

  I smell them before I actually hear them. Their sweat, their cologne, the sweet fragrance of flavored nicotine in the air—it assaults me with the tenacity of an airborne virus, and infects every part of my system.

  My heart—

  My lungs—

  My veins—

  All vibrate with an unsung energy.

  I know they are near, and because of that, make my way off the beaten trail and into the woodlands to my left.

  Just remember, the part of my brain that’s been coaching me along this far says. Don’t make any mistakes.

  Anything—a cough, a sneeze, a misplaced step—could signal them to my presence. And if that happens—

  I dread to even think about it.

  Rather than do so, I skulk into the copse of trees, and begin to trace their scent through the woodlands.

  It isn’t long before I begin to hear voices. Muffled at first, but rising in pitch with each footstep, I hear them alongside the sound of slow-moving water, and are punctuated with laughs and the smack of glass upon glass.

  “So,” Dalton West says. “How are we going to go about this?”

  “We just gotta ask Steven’s dad,” another boy who I don’t know replies. “Right, Steve?”

  “Shut up,” the boy I can only assume is David says. “I gotta play it cool. I can’t just tell my pops that we set the house on fire.”

  “You can say it was an accident,” Steve offers. “Say that Dalton tripped and dropped his e-cig when y’all were peeping in the bitch’s room.”

  My room? I think, horrified as revulsion over my invaded privacy overwhelms me. They were looking into my room?

  I knew I should’ve listened to Mom about closing the curtains.

  I step forward, only to find that the copse of trees upon the swell of earth are tapering out. I duck down and begin to crawl forward on my hands and knees as the light from someone’s idling car illuminates four figures in the campground below.

  Dalton I recognize easily. The three others are the boys who were in detention with me. Each smoke cigarettes, Dalton his vape pen. The scent of alcohol is thick in the air, burning my nostrils and causing me to feel dizzy.

  “I think that’s the only way we can go about it without getting in trouble,” the third, unnamed boy says. “I mean… we might still get in trouble regardless.”

  “But it’ll be a lesser punishment,” Dalton says.

  “We don’t want to get punished at all!”

  “I know we don’t, Steve, but this is how we’ve gotta do it.”

  “Maybe we should just skip town.”

  “Then we’ll be in huge trouble,” Dalton offers. “And besides—it’ll look suspicious if we just high-tail it out of here with Easton being investigated for orchestrating the attack on the flower shop.”

  “They deserved it,” Dave says. “That bitch had it coming. Getting Easton kicked off the team, investigated, and put on house-restriction for who knows how long?”

  The boys laugh.

  They clasp bottles.

  They drink and smoke.

  And me? I’m left to stare into the harrowing face of reality—when, as they smoke and drink and laugh and clap, I can only watch, knowing that I’m already too late.

  They aren’t going to talk about it now.

  I arrived too late.

  Dalton will talk.

  The boys will get off.

  And my parents—they’ll be dead, and there’ll be nothing that can be done about it.

  Nothing, I think. Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Noth—

  A tug of sensation pulls as me as something inside begins to take hold.

  I feel, distantly, the effort of nature trying to overrule me.

  Do it, the Wolf inside me says. Succumb to your basic needs. Tap into your primal energy. Use the Spirit of Vengeance.

  I know this isn’t right. I know this isn’t okay. And yet, I know for a fact that if I don’t do something, those guys are going to go on in their lives knowing that they got away with murdering two completely innocent people.

  The thought is maddening, the reality even more so.

  And now—

  Now—

  I feel myself slipping.

  It isn’t painful, though, like I imagined it would be. One moment I am standing, the next I am sliding to my knees as my limbs alter, as my body morphs. My face extends, and my ribcage expands to create the form that is necessary to carry out my act of destruction.

  Within a minute I have become a wolf.

  In moments I am bounding down the hill.

  And in seconds, I am lashing out.

  I don’t know what I’m doing at first. Consumed by anger, by rage, I allow the immortal instrument that is the wolf to take hold and commit its acts of savagery upon the boys. Dalton, I realize, goes down first, as the scent of his vape pen fills my nostrils when I bite into and rip his neck apart.

  The boy named Dave is next. He goes down when I tear his Achile’s tendon from his ankle.

  Steven follows, then the stranger whose name I don’t know shortly thereafter.

  Three of them are not dead. They are merely incapacitated. And for that reason, I go to work savaging them.

  Blood sprays in all directions.

  Bones crack. Muscles are ripped apart.

  I don’t know how long I go at them, how many bites I inflict, how much damage their bodies take.

  All I know is that, come time I finish, all four are dead.

  And there is blood everywhere.

  Chapter Six

  I rush into the forest on all fours. My mouth is filled with blood, my face is covered in gore. And my body—it is lithe and smooth, and bound
ing through the woods at a pace I could’ve never possibly imagined.

  The wind whips past my face.

  The earth crunches beneath my feet.

  I feel, for lack of a better word, free.

  Yet, I know I am not truly broken from my bonds.

  No.

  The chains of pain, if they can truly be called that, are still affixed my ankles; and attempting to drag me down, begin to pull me into the ocean of suffering, the pool of despair.

  It is just like I imagined.

  All of this leads back to Easton Wells.

  And he was not there to fall victim to my acts of mayhem.

  As I bound through the woods, slowly but surely clearing the ground between me and the Meadows family home, I find myself stewing with anger.

  Anger.

  Over what he’d done. Over what he’d caused. Over what he could’ve prevented if he had not have been such a stupid pathetic little weasel.

  I come to a halt at the edge of the tree line, near where my property once stood, and find my body shifting almost instantly.

  Within moments I am back in my normal skin.

  Best of all: I am not covered in blood.

  No way to tell, I think, what could have happened. Who could’ve been there. What might’ve been done.

  I exhale a breath I feel I’ve been holding for some time, then cut across the edge of the ruined property and make my way to the Meadows’ family home’s front door.

  I have just reached into my pocket to withdraw my key when the door opens.

  Someone reaches out. Grabs me. Pulls me inside.

  A moment later, my back is hitting the door, and Jackson’s face is close to mine.

  I start to say, “What are you—“

  But he interjects with, “I saw you, Oaklynn.”

  “Saw… what?” I ask.

  “You lied to me.”

  “What’re you talking about?” I whisper. “Jackson, what’re you—“

  “You lied when you said you were sound in mind. Didn’t you?”

  “I—“

  Jackson relinquishes his hold on me, then turns and presses a hand to his face. “Fuck!” he hisses under his breath. “Just… FUCK.”

  “What’re you—“

  “Don’t play dumb with me,” Jackson growls. “I know what you are, Oaklynn.”

  “What am I?” I ask.

  “You’re a dark wolf.”

  “A… what?”

  Jackson laughs—a cruel, bitter sound that causes the hairs to rise on the back of my neck. “You let it in,” he says after a moment’s hesitation. “Now it’s going to fight to take hold of you.”

  “I… I don’t… I—“

  A wicked voice laughs somewhere within my head.

  I exhale a breath and allow my limbs to relax. “Jackson,” I say, taking a step forward. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”

  “Can’t tell anyone what?” he asks. “That you let a bad spirit inside you?”

  “Jackson—“

  “We gotta do something about it before something happens,” he continues. “Before something—“

  He stops, then, as if he’s been struck by a dumbbell, as if he’s tripped and fallen on his face. His mouth falls open, his eyes widen. But it’s the realization on his face that tells me everything.

  There’s no denying it.

  He knows.

  “Oaklynn,” he says after a moment’s hesitation. “What did you do down at Wolf Creek?”

  And I—part terrified, and part emboldened by my actions—simply say, “I took care of a problem.”

  “What’re you—“

  I push past him and make my way down the hall.

  “Oaklynn!” he growls. “Tell me what the hell you—“

  “You’ll find out in the morning,” I say, and slip into my room without an ounce of hesitation.

  Inside, I close, lock, then lean back against the door and close my eyes.

  It doesn’t take long for the reality to settle in.

  Four people are dead.

  And it’s all because of me.

  The cruel night offers little mercy to a girl like me—who, with her heart open and her mind burdened, can do little more than think on what happened no more than several hours before. As I lie here, slowly but surely attempting to fall asleep, I find myself reliving every action that occurred at that point.

  The trek to Wolf Creek—

  My passage through the forest—

  My arrival at the campgrounds—

  And then, me, discovering the guys—

  They’d sat there so simply, so justly, smoking and drinking and laughing galore, all at the expense of someone and the things she had lost. There’d been sadness in my heart, rage in my mind, vengeance in my soul.

  And then there’d been blood.

  Blood.

  “Blood,” I whisper, and close my eyes.

  Several moments pass, during which I struggle not to feel apprehension over everything that occurred.

  You can’t worry about this, I think. You did what you had to do.

  Did I, though? Did I really? Because if I were to really, truly think about it, I did not have to do anything.

  But they would’ve gotten away, a voice says.

  I turn my head to regard the spirit of what Jackson had called “The Dark Wolf”—who, with its red eyes and black fur, watches me intently from the far corner of the room.

  You made me do it, I think after a moment’s consideration. You were the one that channeled my anger, my rage.

  And you were the one who allowed me passage, the Wolf replies. Who summoned a Spirit of Vengeance.

  I close my eyes, take a deep breath, struggle not to cry. I know, however, that refusing my emotions is futile—and, as a result, allow the tears to come regardless.

  Belle—who has been lying at my side—meows in question.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper, stroking her soft, dark fur. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  But it’s not, the Wolf replies. Not until the other one is gone.

  The other one? I think. Who is it—

  Then it hits me.

  Easton.

  Easton is the other one the Wolf is speaking of.

  Like everything in this town, it all goes back to the Wells family.

  I try not to allow my emotions to get the best of me—to let my temper rise above all the common rationale inside my head—but find it doing just that regardless.

  There, the Wolf says. Allow your anger to fuel your desires.

  You’re provoking me, I say. Stop.

  And let them get away with everything they’d done? The Wolf rises and approaches. That’s ridiculous. You and I both know that.

  But—

  The Wolf comes to stand at the edge of my bed. Its red eyes—eerie so close, and illuminating the space before me—causes me to turn my head away. I am not exactly afraid, but I am not confident either.

  You know what you have to do, the Wolf offers.

  I don’t have to do anything, I reply.

  Yes. You do.

  No, I don’t.

  Yes you—

  I shake my head, then, and roll over to face the wall. Go away, I then say. I need to rest.

  To prepare for what will happen tomorrow, the Wolf then says.

  Tomorrow? I think. What is to occur tomorrow?

  I am just about to question it when exhaustion begins to tug at my mind, my body, my soul.

  Just a little longer, I try to think as I begin to slip into unconsciousness. I just need to think a little more. Just let me…

  A knock awakens me the following morning.

  Drawn from the depths of sleep at an hour during which the sun has already risen, I open my eyes to find that I am staring at my door—which, though locked, offers me very little security.

  When the knock comes again, I ask, “Who is it?”

  And Jackson replies, “It’s me.”

  “What do you—“


  “You need to come out here. Now.”

  Memories of last night come flooding back instantly.

  All I can think is: Damn.

  Moments after I have risen and dressed into fresh clothes, I open the door to find Jackson standing there—his face appearing tired, but his eyes alert.

  I ask, “What’s going on?”

  He shakes his head, then, and says, “This way.”

  I follow him down the hall and to the living room—

  Only to find that his father is resting in his recliner, and watching something on the television.

  It only takes one look to see the headline.

  Local Youths Found Dead at Wolf Creek.

  I am unable to prevent the sigh that follows.

  “You didn’t go to J’vonte Fawn’s house last night,” Zachariah Meadows says, “did you?”

  I turn my head away from both of the men.

  “Oaklynn,” Zachariah says, this time in a sterner voice. “I said—“

  “No,” I reply, and shake my head. “I didn’t go to J’vonte’s house last night.”

  “Tell him,” Jackson says.

  “Tell me what?” Zachariah asks.

  “That she wasn’t clear of mind or intention when Grandma Meadows invoked the Wolf.”

  Zachariah watches me intently—his eyes narrowed, his lips pursed into a frown.

  I want so desperately to just turn and make my way back to my room—to refuse everything they are asking, saying, implying—but I know that is impossible.

  No.

  I have made my bed of thorns. Now I must sleep, and bleed, in it.

  With a monumental sigh that could shake and bring down mountains, I lift my eyes to face Zachariah Meadows, and say, “No.”

  “No… what?” The man asks, obviously tempting a response out of me.

  “I wasn’t clear of thought or mind when Alecia Meadows invoked my Wolf.”

  Zachariah Meadows slams his fist down on the arm of his recliner. “Dammit, Oaklynn!” the man says. “You knew going into this what might happen.”

  “Actually,” I reply, turning my head to face the man, “I didn’t know anything. Remember? You and your clan—if that’s what you want to call them—led me into this blindly.”

  “What’re you—“

  “All I was told was that there would be repercussions if I went into this with vengeance in my heart,” I reply. “I didn’t know something like this would happen.”