Fingering the bandage taped to her neck, Kaitlin’s fear escalated. She tore off the bandage and winced at the raw, extremely sensitive puckered line of raised skin beneath her right ear.
That can’t be right. I’m awake now.
Dizziness threatened as flashes of memory returned. Night. Blood. An attacker with incredible strength. In that nightmare, she had been mauled by a monster.
Her eyes swept the room in a desperate attempt to set things straight. No man, wolfish or otherwise, sat on the bed, or appeared anywhere else in the small studio apartment. Morning light seeped through the filmy curtains. There was no brown bedspread. She sat on familiar worn floral sheets.
“Kaitlin?” her visitor repeated.
“You can’t be real.” Kaitlin avoided the woman’s green-eyed stare.
“Really? Then I wonder why I bothered to brush my hair. Still, I guess you’d have to think that way, wouldn’t you, since your reality is being inconveniently rearranged.”
“Who are you?”
Her visitor tossed her hair, scattering a whole bunch of scents into the air at once: soap, lipstick and something else Kaitlin had no time to pin down. Damp fur?
Also, now that she thought about it, other smells came to her above and beyond those: dust, pencil lead, chemicals from the lava lamp and a pair of dirty socks stashed under the bed. She also smelled the iron tang of anxiety. Her anxiety. Because, hell...the crisp denim of this stranger’s dark blue jeans had a unique smell. Also discernible was the scent of the worn-out fabric of her own T-shirt. Edging those smells was a lingering odor of badly injured skin, blood and matted hair.
Her hands fell like rocks to the mattress as she studied the scratches crisscrossing her forearms.
“Looks like you might have picked those up last night,” her visitor said. “Sometimes puppies forget how vulnerable their skin really is.”
“Who are you?” Kaitlin repeated.
“I’m Rena. And you, it seems, are Michael’s little secret. Until now.”
Michael. That name belonged in a dream. Kaitlin refused to let this woman see her shake. She swallowed a rising protest.
“He hasn’t told us about you,” Rena continued. “Since Michael has been MIA for a few days, I got worried and followed him here.”
Michael was here? Yes. With her eyes closed, Kaitlin found hints of her dream man in the room. There were scents of shaving cream, faded jeans and musky maleness.
“Who are you, exactly?” she asked Rena, her voice faint.
“Kind of a new relative. A distant cousin.”
That made no sense at all. Kaitlin tried another tactic. “What do you want?”
“Merely to see you and find out why Michael would do something like this. I suppose he wanted to ease you through the process on his own first, before letting us know what he’d done.”
“What process would that be?”
In Kaitlin’s mind the word wolf kept flashing. Fragments of what she’d begun to worry had not been a dream began to coalesce. In it, the man this woman spoke of had turned into an animal right before her eyes.
The fine line between reason and insanity made Kaitlin’s nerve endings fire. As she wrapped her arms around her knees and considered Rena carefully, fear continued to make her heart race.
She looked again at the scratches on her arms. Had she gotten those from being pressed to the bark of a tree, or from a madman trying to kill her in the park?
Rena’s smile suggested that none of these panic attacks Kaitlin was having might be warranted. Whoever this Michael guy was, and whatever kind of trauma she had been through, she couldn’t believe there were alternate species in the world. If she’d had an accident and some guy named Michael, acting like a Good Samaritan, had helped her home, possibly jealousy was what had brought Rena here today. Rena could be Michael’s girlfriend. His lover.
As calmly as she could, Kaitlin met Rena’s scrutinizing gaze. “Where did your friend go?”
“To the corner store, probably to bring you something to eat,” Rena said. “We need to keep our strength up and require lots of fuel. More than usual.”
“We, as in what? Wolves?” Kaitlin asked cynically.
Rena smiled again, flashing very white teeth that almost made the idea of wolves seem plausible.
“He didn’t have to bother. I’m not hungry,” Kaitlin said. In fact, she was sure she’d never be hungry again.
“You’ll be hungry as soon as you smell the food,” Rena told her. “Our metabolisms run hot.”
In her dream, Michael had been hot in more ways than one. But Kaitlin couldn’t turn inward to look for answers to the problems at hand with this woman staring at her. In another minute, she’d sprint for the door.
“It wasn’t a dream, you know,” Rena said as if she had the ability to read Kaitlin’s mind. “You’ll find that out soon enough.”
Rena seemed to be waiting for her to say something, as if they were going to have a conversation that made sense. All Kaitlin could get out was, “What day is it?”
“Monday.”
“That can’t be right. I couldn’t have lost two days.”
With another glance at the discarded bandage, Kaitlin added, “What is going on? Really going on, I mean?”
Rena stood up. “I’m sorry I can’t explain it to you, Kaitlin. For the time being, I guess I’m not supposed to know you exist. Imagine my surprise in finding out that you do.”
Kaitlin was feeling stranger by the minute because Rena was fairly convincing. She decided to go for broke, hoping that when this woman she had never seen before heard what she had to say, Rena would laugh her head off and hit the road.
“Are you a wolf, Rena?”
“You can’t tell?” Rena countered noncommittally.
“Hell, I’m not even sure I’m awake.”
“Then the answer is yes.”
Yes...
The room suddenly felt cramped. Too many ridiculous ideas were taking up space, and the air seemed to beat with a foreign rhythm. Kaitlin blinked slowly to get her bearings and went for round two of the most inconceivable questions possible. “So, that would make you and Michael part of a group of...wolves?”
The question sounded silly in a truly horrifying way. Rena didn’t laugh, though. She said, “You call us werewolves. And we call ourselves a pack.”
Werewolves. Pack. Kaitlin’s stomach tightened. Her next question bordered on hysterics. “You believe that? For real?”
Rena held up a hand in a gesture that indicated she was telling the truth. Scout’s honor, or some such equivalent thing for females.
Kaitlin stared at the pretty, rather feline-featured visitor. “How many of you are there in this pack?”
“Four. There are four of us here, and then there’s you.”
The hairs at the nape of Kaitlin’s neck stood up. Chills iced her spinal column as phrases came back with a startling clarity—bits of words the Michael in the nightmare had used.
It’s the only way you’ll make it. And Remember that I gave you a choice.
She did not want to ask the next question and knew Rena anticipated it, because the scent of Rena’s excitement wafted in the air.
“Are you hinting that I’ve become