Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) (45 page)

Today I know it’s true.

I stared at the final line, the period a
blotch of blue ink that bled into the page until I lifted my pen.
It was worse, somehow, putting my fears into words. Words made a
thing real, and I’d spent so long in denial. My ancestors all wrote
of the curse in the weeks and months before they died, so it seemed
fitting that I begin documentation of my own story to slip beside
my mother’s letter, behind the final pages of the thick,
leather-bound journal that held my gruesome family history.

With a careful, slanting hand, I
continued.

I am seventeen today. Older than my
predecessors by a full year. Nothing happened the way she said it
would. As far as the history goes, all of them had given birth by
now. All of them were dead by now. Some hunted and slaughtered.
Some, like my mother, dead by their own hand. Maybe it’s because I
haven’t transitioned yet, but I cannot see suicide as a viable
alternative. The book hints of madness that accompanies the curse,
but my mother seemed right enough in her mind when she penned the
letter explaining things to me, arranging for its safe-keeping and
delayed delivery, and seeing that the trail to my father was
obliterated before she walked away from us, away from life, when I
was only three days old.

I cannot help but feel she took the coward’s
way out, even if she thought she was protecting us. But was it
cowardice? Each year since I got the letter, I’ve come out here, to
contemplate whether I could do it. Each year I’ve brought a
different weapon, testing, if you will, my willingness to end my
own life, should it come to that. Acclimating myself to the idea.
Pills the first year, though I learned from this book that our kind
has a stronger constitution and requires something more definitive
than an overdose. A rope the next. I wound up making a swing from
it. Last year was my father’s pistol. The barrel tasted bitter and
oily when I put it in my mouth. I managed to load the cylinder, but
didn’t get so far as cocking the hammer.

You see, I don’t want to die.

I want a life, a future. I want to be
normal. And I thought I was until yesterday morning.

Then I smelled it. The succulent odor of
bacon frying. So innocuous, really. I thought Dad had decided to
cook breakfast, like he used to on Saturday mornings before the
letter. We made it through the worst year, the worst of the
waiting, and nothing happened. Nothing changed. I had hope.

But there wasn’t any bacon frying. There
wasn’t even anybody in the kitchen. Just a note from Dad that he’d
been called in to work, and he’d be back in a couple of days.

I don’t know what possessed me to follow the
smell. I was hungry, I guess. I tracked the scent to the Redmond’s
open kitchen window. They are our closest neighbors. A full
three-quarters of a mile away.

Humans do not have such fine-tuned senses of
smell.

But wolves do.

What will be next? My hearing? My reflexes?
The fevers that precede the first shift? How long do I have before
I change? Before I lose my humanity like those who came before
me.

Will I have the courage to do what must be
done?

I glanced down at the bone-handled knife
sitting beside me on the stone but didn’t touch it. Of all the
weapons I’d tested, this was the first one that truly scared me.
Pills were relatively painless. A rope, well if you did it right,
that was pretty instant. Same with eating a bullet. But a knife… A
knife was something else altogether. A knife meant you had to be
sure, had to inflict pain, had to wait and watch as your life bled
out, heartbeat by heartbeat.

A knife had been my mother’s choice,
according to the coroner’s report.

Setting the notebook aside, I rose and paced
a restless circle around the clearing. I had privacy here, out in
the depths of the park with the slopes of the Appalachians rising
around me like giant hands curved to hold the mist of morning. I
wasn’t worried about being interrupted. None of the tourists would
stray so far from the trails that snaked their way through the
trees. And as far as I was aware, no one else knew about this
place.

Which made it the perfect spot to challenge
myself.

I circled back around, eyes on the knife.
Even sheathed, it made my breathing hitch. It’s not like it was the
very knife Mom used. That one was still in an evidence locker
somewhere. I’d filched this one from Dad’s workroom, so it wasn’t
cloaked in bad juju or anything. But I couldn’t look at it and not
imagine blood. Oceans of it, spilling out of a warm body, skin
growing paler and paler as the life pulsed across the stone in some
horrible sacrifice.

Dad always said I had an active
imagination.

I approached the knife,
willing myself to pick it up.
C’mon
Elodie, you can do this. You can face the knife
.

Closing my hand around the hilt, I could
feel the pattern carved into the bone handle where it pressed
against my sweaty palm. A howling wolf. The irony. I was sure Dad
would never have bought it if he’d known what I was.

My heart hammered against my ribs, galloping
with a fear I hadn’t felt in all my other trials. I wanted to run.
To drop the knife and flee back to the sham of a normal life I’d
struggled to build over the last four years. Instead, I unsnapped
the leather strap that kept the knife in its sheath and slipped the
blade free.

It gleamed, polished and sharpened,
well-kept as everything my dad tended, though he probably hadn’t
used it in months. Nathaniel Rose took care of things—whether he
wanted to or not. Mouth dry, I set the sheath aside and crossed to
a green sapling. Tugging on a branch about the size of my pinky, I
drew the knife across it. Two swipes. That’s all it took to sever
the branch.

The Cheerios I’d had for breakfast
threatened to make a reappearance.

I moved back to the stone and sat, propping
my right arm in my lap, wrist side up. The faint tracery of veins
stood out like blue lace against my fair skin. I lifted the knife,
but my hand shook so badly I had to stop and rest it against the
rock. No way in hell was I going to accidentally slit my wrist
while I was facing down this personal demon.

This is a test,
I thought.
This is only
a test.
I imagined an annoying, high
pitched
BEEEEEEEEP!
My snicker sounded muffled in the trailing wisps of fog. The
sun would be burning it off soon, once it topped the eastern ridge.
Best get this done with.

The near laughter steadied me. I lifted the
knife again and brought it slowly and carefully to my arm.
Gooseflesh broke out at the kiss of the blade, its tip the barest
of whispers against my skin. I focused on that point of contact,
shutting my eyes, and reminding myself to breathe.

I can do this.

~*~

Sawyer

“I’m not going.”

I didn’t yell it, but my dad immediately
changed into the I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-you-anymore
expression that had become the norm in the last eight months.

“Sawyer, you’ve got to finish school. You
were so close to graduating when you got expelled. If you’d just go
to summer school, you’d finish up, graduate, and be ready to start
college in the fall like we’d planned.”

Oh of course, The Plan. Dad had been big on
trying to get me back on The Plan since our lives fell apart. It
was his way of coping, I guess. Ever the scientist, he wanted to
restore order out of chaos. Like that could possibly repair the
massive hole that was blown in our lives.

I thought about the GED shoved under my
mattress upstairs. It would be easy enough to settle this, but then
it would look like I was on board with the program. He’d start
trying to push me back into Normal Life, as if there was any such
thing for people like us. Besides, it was something else to fight
about, and these days, I needed to fight like I needed to
breathe.

“I’m. Not. Going,” I repeated, letting the
edge of a growl seep into my voice and shifting forward into his
personal space. My eyes held his in a dominance challenge that
should have spurred him to action to knock me down a peg. I wanted
the physicality of fists as a release from the pressure constantly
building inside me.

But he answered in words.

“Your mother would be so disappointed in
you.”

My breath rushed out in a whoosh, as if he’d
sucker-punched my gut. Because it was true. Then I leaned in, so
close I could feel his shuddering breath on my face, and delivered
the only retaliation I had against the accusation. “And whose fault
is it she’s not here to say so herself?”

The question slid home like a knife between
his ribs, and even though I believed it, I still felt like a dick
for sinking so low. His eyes shifted to gold, his lip curled in a
snarl, and I knew I’d gotten what I wanted.

At last.
I balled my fists, body
tensing to move, to finally let off some pressure. But the punch
never came.

“She wouldn’t want this,” he said, and his
voice was guttural, already halfway to animal. He stepped back.

Fresh fury boiled up. I whirled toward the
back door, needing to get out, to move, to run.

“Where are you going?” Dad demanded.

“For a run.”

He opened his mouth, to issue a warning
probably, and I lifted my shoes in a sarcastic wave. “On two
feet.”

“Be—”

I slammed the door, cutting off the caution
and sprinted for the tree line. Once in the shadow of the trees, I
paused only long enough to put on my shoes before resuming my
futile escape. You can’t run from what you carry inside.

My rage grew with every thudding step, the
fog shredded by my passage. I was desperate to shed my human skin
and hunt, but I didn’t dare. Not here. Timber wolves hadn’t been
native to the area for at least a couple of centuries, and after
what had happened to my mother in Montana, where we didn’t stand
out in the least . . .

I missed the rugged and unforgiving terrain
of the Rockies. Not only because we blended in, but because it was
wild. Everything here was too low, too worn, too soft, too
civilized
. I hadn’t been anywhere near civilized since my
mother died.

The air pressed close, humidity draping over
me like a big soggy towel. A few more degrees and it would edge
into truly hot and sticky. East Tennessee felt like a world away
from home, where we were lucky if it got up to 70 as a high in the
dead of summer. And I was stuck here. Even if I went along with The
Plan and headed off to college in the fall, there would be
conditions. Rules. Restrictions.

Wolves don’t like restrictions.

Something moved to my left as I burst free
of a cluster of pines. A young buck. It spun away, springing toward
safety. Even on two feet, instinct demanded I give chase. I bounded
after it, pushing myself beyond human limits of agility and speed
to keep the powerful haunches in sight. My muscles ached, and the
pain helped to burn off some of the anger. By the time I lost the
deer at the river, I was somewhat calmer.

But it wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever
enough. Our kind require the tempering influence of mated pairs.
Two parents when we’re young and through transition. A mate when
we’re older. I was only a few months beyond my transition when Mom
was killed, enough in control that I wasn’t
technically
a
danger. At least not once the blood rage had passed. But I
certainly wasn’t winning Son of the Year awards.

Dad had let the farmer live. The
self-righteous, sanctimonious, son of a bitch who put a bullet
through my mother’s brain was still walking around, still
breathing. Fucking
lauded
for his actions. Because he, like
the rest of his ilk who head up the calls to “thin out” the number
of predators in the area in the name of “protecting” livestock, saw
a wolf, saw an opportunity, and took it. One shot. One shot that
should never have happened because Mom should have smelled the
farmer, seen it coming. Taken precautions. But she’d been careless.
Furious and careless because of a fight with my father. She’d gone
out for a run to blow off steam, as I often did, and she had
strayed where it wasn’t safe.

Maybe my father could have protected her.
Maybe he couldn’t. But as her mate, it sure as shit was his job to
avenge her. To rip the bastard to shreds.

He said that would make him into the monster
our kind is reputed to be in legend.

We weren’t so great with the agreeing to
disagree.

I didn’t know what I hoped to accomplish by
goading him. Provoking him to some kind of action that let me know
he was still an alpha male I could respect? Forcing his hand to go
back to Montana and do what needed to be done. Or maybe just
fueling the fury that was my constant companion. Anger was familiar
and in its own way comforting. It was so much easier to cope with
than the grief that threatened to swallow me whole.

The sun peeked over the ridge, burning off
the last of the morning mist. I wasn’t anywhere near a path I
recognized. My explorations of the Great Smoky Mountain National
Park hadn’t been too extensive in the month we’d been in Mortimer.
Our house was just at the edge of the Park proper, which made for
easy access—something I’d have to take more advantage of in the
future.

Rather than following my scent trail back, I
stuck to the river. Might as well start mapping the area. I'd gone
half a mile when I heard the hitched breath.  Veering away
from the river, I followed the sound into a copse of trees.

I stayed low to the ground and crept closer
until I could see who it was.

The girl perched on a huge flat boulder on
the opposite side of the clearing, her face raised to the sun so
that her long black hair fell in shiny waves down her back. She was
crying. Not that she was being noisy about it. She wasn’t
hysterical or red-faced and wailing. She was absolutely silent. I
caught the faint gleam of tears on her cheeks, saw her shoulders
shudder with the effort of holding in her grief. And it was grief.
I recognized the expression on her face as one I couldn’t bear
myself, and I wondered who she had lost.