The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (18 page)

The way she said it, the passion
that ran through her voice in those few words, made my heart skip a beat
again.
 
It had already skipped a
dangerous amount of beats that morning because of Layne, so I was beginning to
feel a little lightheaded.
 
I took a
great, big gulp of coffee for good measure as I turned Layne’s story over and
over in my head.

Rockport is pretty close to
Gloucester up the coast, and that’s where I thought we were headed.
 
But a few miles before the town center of
Rockport, Layne slowed down a little.
 
The highway between the two towns is so dense with trees, I often
imagined when we drove down it when I was a kid, that this is what the “new
world” must have looked like when the pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower, this
wild and impossibly green.
 
Now that I’m
a little older and have a bit more history under my belt than I did when I was
seven, I know that this isn’t really what New England must have looked like to
the pilgrims.

But it’s pretty damn close.

Layne pulled into a strange little
parking lot I hadn’t even seen was coming up on the right.
 
The spit of parking lot was situated in a
grove of tightly packed trees that seemed to tower over us.
 
Overhead, and rolling in off the ocean, the
clouds were growing darker still, darker than I’d thought was possible.

As dark as night.

Layne rolled to a stop by the far
corner of the lot, threw the car into park and pulled the keys out of the
ignition.
 
She stretched, rolling her
shoulders as she turned to face me.
 
“Welcome to Dogtown,” she said, sweeping her hands in front of her to
take in the densely packed underbrush and the trees that stood shoulder to
shoulder.

I’d only heard the name before, and
never really with any sort of definition to go along with it.
 
I peered through the underbrush, a frown
tugging at the corners of my mouth.

“Is this where you tell me that
we’re going hiking?” I hazarded after a long moment of seeing absolutely
nothing but criminally choked underbrush and crowded trees.

“Well,” said Layne, drawing out the
word again as she opened her car door.
 
“Not
exactly.
”
 
She was
grinning mischievously as she stood up and came around the side of the car
almost in an instant to open my door for me.
 
“I’ll help you around,” she promised, and then she reached into the car
after I undid my seatbelt.
 
She reached
in much too close, her face an inch or so away from mine, and for a full,
startled heartbeat, I wondered if she would kiss me.
 
But no, her eyes were pointed down.
 
And then there was an arm under the backs of my knees, and an arm
around my waist…

And Layne was lifting me out of the
car.
 
And holding me.
 
And carrying me.
 
The sort of carrying that usually happened to damsels in
distress, or Victorian women who had fainted because their corsets were just a
pinch too tight.
 
The kind of carrying
that a guy usually did to someone half his size.
 
Not that it mattered with Layne.
 
She was stronger than most men, or really, a lot of men combined, I was
learning.

So she stood there, outside the
car, toeing the car door shut gently with her foot.
 
She stared down at me with a wide grin and held me tightly and
gently like I weighed nothing more than a to-go cup of coffee.

“This is a little undignified,” is
what I managed to say.
 
Really, I was
doing my absolute best not think about how tightly she gripped me around my
waist, or how my arm had gone up and around her neck like it was absolutely
meant to be there, like my arm had gravitated to this position a million times
before.
 
Or how her hand was against my
thigh soundly and securely, like she was never, ever, ever going to let me go,
her palm burning-hot, even through the fabric of my jeans.

“Undignified, maybe,” she said, her
mouth set in a sideways smirk, “but easy for you to see some pretty amazing
things instead of hobbling around on those crutches and probably re-injuring
yourself something fierce?
 
Definitely.”

“Hey, miss, I like hobbling.
 
It may be slow, but it gets me where I want
to go,” I managed to banter back.
 
Layne
was already taking easy, long strides across the patchy gravel of the parking
lot, still holding tightly to me.
 
I
felt like I was floating on water.
 
“And…what the heck is Dogtown?” I asked, after clearing my throat.

“How can you be a Boston native,
born, bred and raised, and not know about Dogtown?” she asked mournfully,
shaking her head.
 
“Don’t worry,” she
grinned, then, hefting me up a little as the gravel path began to change to one
made entirely of the overgrown grass, patchy and tall as meadow weed.
 
“You’ll find out what it is today.”

I waited patiently for her to
continue as she navigated up a pretty steep grassy hill.
 
I realized that even beneath the overgrown
grass, weeds and wildflowers, there were still a few patches of gravel.
 
This place kind of looked how I imagine the
world would look in a “Life After People” special.

“So, way back in the day,” began
Layne, “and I mean, we’re talking sort-of pilgrim era, is where this story
starts,” she said, reaching an even part of the path that leveled off.
 
The trees overhead curved their thick, leafy
branches down toward us, and it felt a little like we were in a forested
tunnel.
 
Or, you know, a fantasy novel,
and elves were about to start singing up in the trees somewhere.
 
I stared up, entranced by the intense, woven
greenery overhead.
 

“So, obviously back then, people
settled in Gloucester and Rockport,” continued Layne, ducking under a
particularly low-hanging branch that brushed along my arm with leafy
fingers.
 
I shuddered against her and
picked an acorn out of my hair.
 
“And
most of the people who settled in those towns were fishermen, and merchants and
trades people.
 
But there were, of
course, also farmers who wanted to make their living at farming the land.
 
And obviously, this is way before grocery
stores,” she chuckled, “and people needed vegetables—they couldn’t live off a
diet consisting entirely of fish or trapped game.
 
So some people moved inland from the towns and started a
settlement that was farther away from shore and the really bad storms the ocean
can churn up, which would apparently have wreaked havoc on fields.
 
These people built homes, tried to till the
ground into fields.
 
The
problem
,”
she said, jutting her chin forward, “is that—as everyone now knows—the New
England soil isn’t necessarily conducive to farming since it’s
full of rocks
.”
 
Ahead of her, rising from between the trees
like sleeping beasts, came an entire host of boulders that stood some as tall
as Layne was—some twice as tall as she was or more, towering above us like the
trees.
 
I stared up at their gray,
jagged enormousness with an open mouth.

“They tried to farm
here
?” I
asked, indicating the boulders with my free hand.
 
They really looked like elephants, sleeping on their sides
between the trees.
 
“Didn’t they see all
of these when they got here?”

“Well, yeah—but you know the folks
who settled around here, true New England folk.
 
They’re almost as stubborn as those boulders,” laughed
Layne.
 
“So even though they knew it’d
be challenging, they still thought they could conquer the land.
 
They tilled the soil and tilled the soil,
broke their plows and backs on it, but hardly any crops came out of the rocky
ground, of course.
 
And over the course
of a few years with no success at all, most of even the most stubborn people
gave up and moved back to Gloucester and Rockport, or kept going further inland
into Massachusetts, or went to other portions of this brand new world where
they thought they might have better luck.
 
And then came the Revolutionary War.
 
And, over time, the town began to…well.
 
Change,” said Layne, her voice dropping to a velvety whisper that sent a
chill up my spine.
  
Especially since
the sky had suddenly gotten a whole lot darker.
 
The brooding storm clouds were moving in quicker now, the wind
picking up and creaking the branches overhead eerily.

“All that was left of the people
who had settled here,” said Layne then, pausing at the crest of another hill to
take in the stony, verdant view, “were a few of the most stubborn or poorest
women.
 
And a whole lot of dogs.
 
See, when the men went to fight in the wars,
they left big dogs to protect their women and children.
 
And of course, those wars had terrible
casualties, and most of the men—poor farm folk who wouldn’t have a chance in
any war—never came back.
 
So some of the
dogs went wild, and some of the women kept their dogs for protection.
 
And because there were so many packs of dogs
around, wild or otherwise, people started calling this place Dogtown.
 
But you see,” said Layne, a smile tugging at
her mouth, “people started to come up with a whole heck of a lot of rumors
about this place, too, since it was full of just women.
 
And a rumor started to
circulate—unsurprisingly, when you consider where we are in Massachusetts—that
the town was full of witches.
 
Of
shapeshifters.
 
Of lesbians, even,” she
chuckled a little, and I realized I was staring at her with rapt fascination.

I had to bite the hook she was
dangling in front of me.
 
“Well,” I said
slowly, carefully.
 
“Were any of the
rumors…”
 
Overhead, a roll of thunder
began to rumble from far away.
 
I bit my
lip.
 
“I mean, were any of them true?”

“Well,” said Layne in a hushed
tone.
 
She set me down gently so that I
was putting all of my weight down on my good leg and leaning against her almost
fully.
 
We stared out at the dense
trees, and as my eyes adjusted to the gathering gloom, I began to realize that
there, among a particularly dense copse of trees, rose a very old stone wall,
created from long, flat stones heaped on top of each other, and with a sharp
stone border along the top from sharp bits of shale stacked on their
sides.
 
The skin on my arms began to
rise into goosebumps—I wondered how old this wall was, wondered if it might be
from the original Dogtown.
 
It probably
was.
 
“The best rumor,” continued Layne,
one brow up as she watched my expression change, “was what ended up happening
to the women in Dogtown.”

She had me hook, line and
sinker.
 
She was also holding me tightly
so that I could stand upright without my crutches, and the intense warmth and
closeness of her body was making my good leg as limp as a noodle.
 
I gazed up at her beautiful, changing eyes,
now mostly brown against the verdant greenery of the woods.
 
Her long, lean body was pressed in quite a
lot of places against mine, which I noted while my heart began to beat at a
faster rhythm.

I took a long, deep breath, trying
to steady my erratic heartbeat.
 
“So
what happened to the women in Dogtown?” I said, a playful smile tugging at the
corners of my mouth.

“Well, the history books agree that
with all of the conditions stacked against them they probably all died of
starvation, disease…bad winters,” said Layne, her head to the side as her gaze
shifted from me and peered out, into the trees, and her voice took on a deeper,
darker tone.
 
“But we don’t actually
know for sure—no one knows for certain what happened to the last stubborn women
here.
 
But they did all disappear
without a trace.
 
Odd, when you consider
that bodies should decompose, there should be skeletons…”
 
She gazed back down into my eyes intensely,
searching them.
 
“But there was
nothing.
 
They were just…gone.”

A chill breeze picked up in power
and goosebumps popped up along the skin of my arms as I shivered under that
intense gaze of hers.
 

“But there is, of course, a legend
about Dogtown.
 
It says that on one full
moon night, all of the women went out of their houses and stared up at the
sky,” Layne whispered, ducking her mouth close to my ear, close enough that her
hot breath made me shiver against her.
 
She had one hand, palm planted firmly on the tree behind my head, and
her body was practically leaning against me, her other arm firmly tucked around
my middle.
 
“And, together, on that on
that night of nights, all of the remaining women of Dogtown threw back their
heads and
howled
at that moon.
 
And together, they transformed into sleek gray wolves, and ran off into
the wilderness together, finally free of all of the bad luck of this place, and
finally free to be together.
 
But the
legend says, of course, that they don’t always
remain
wolves.
 
Only once a month during the full moon do
they take their beastly form, but the rest of the time, they look just like
you…human.”