Howl (Howl #1) (14 page)

Samara
held back a laugh. She
looked at Luke and nodded before saying,
that’s why
we’re not best friends anymore.

As your Al
pha, I must say that I approve.

Samara shook her head, angry that Luke (assuming he was her Alpha) thought that he could have any control over who she was friends with just because he was the Alpha of the wolf pack that she hadn’t even met yet and wasn’t even sure she belonged to. Samara realized that the whole class had watched her shake her head,
and she felt like an ass.

“What is it that makes you worry about pregnancy?” Mrs. Kin
g pried.

“I – I just . . . p
rotection’s not always eff
ective,” Samara managed to say.

“Class, does anyone share Samara’s concerns?” Mrs. King asked. When no one raised their hand or said anything,
she moved onto the next person.

When Mrs. King got to
Jason, he just stared at her. “I don’t h
ave any questions or concerns.”

Mrs. King laughed. “Everyone has questions and concerns about sex, Jason. Surely there’s so
mething that you wonder about.”

“Nah, I’m good.” Jason looked over at Sa
mara and shot her a dark stare that sent goose bumps down her spine.
She looked away, but she could
still feel him looking at her as the next few people in the circle talked.

“Colby?” Mrs. King asked. “Le
t’s hear what you have to say.”

Colby ran a hand through his
blonde
curly head of hair before looking down at the desk. “I wonder how
to find the right condom size.”

Around the room, people burst into giggles. Samara looked up at Colby and smiled at him. As usual, she was finding herse
lf feeling sorry for him again.

I feel sorry for him
,
too.

“Okay, then,” Mrs. King replied, obviously unsure of what to say. Aside from not knowing what to say to a teenage boy about condoms in front of an entire class, she had also heard
them making fun of him. “Luke?”

Luke looked up at her and his shoulders. “I don’t know, but I gotta be completel
y honest. This is really lame.”

Just then the bell rang. Samara breathed a sigh of relief. Sex Ed itself didn’t seem all that bad, but it was w
ay awkwar
d to have it with her former BFF, a guy who liked her but didn’t want to be with her, and a
guy who really creeped her out.

As she got up to head towards the door, Samara heard a voice talking to her again.
You look really pretty today.

Samara froze. The voice didn’t belong to her Alpha. It was someone else.
There were two other werewolves in the classroom with her
. But who?

*

As she walked down the hallway
at the end of the day
, Samara’s breath caught in the back of her throat. Luke was standing at one of the loc
kers, grabbing a load of books from the top shelf.

Samara turned away and began walking in the other direction, trying to keep her boots from clacking against the tiled floor.
She didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Confronting him wasn’t something that she was in the mood for today, not after what had happened at Emma’s party. Luke had made it crystal clear that he wanted no part of her right now, and that was exactly
what she was going to give him.

Beautiful
, a
low
voice whispered inside her head.

Slowly, Samara
spun around
and looked behind her
. Luke was standing there, staring back
at her with a sheepish grin.

Can you hear my thoughts?
Samara
asked in her head, unsure if he could even hear what she was thinking. It made sense if he could hear her since she coul
d hear him, but then this
situation didn’
t make sense at all. If she had been told that she would find out that she was a werewolf and could communicate with other wolves through her head, sh
e never would have believed it.

Yep
.

Realizing that Luke’s voice was not the same voice she heard when she talked to her Alpha, Samara tried not to gasp
.

Luke Davenport was her mate. That was the
only
way she could possibly communicate with him whil
e they were both in human form.

Samara wasn’t
sure how she should
feel about him being her mate. She felt a little bit happy and excited. Her mate, the guy she was supposed to spend the rest of her life with, was on
e of the cutest guys in school . . .
a guy who she had already had a crush on.

On the other hand, Samara felt weird about it. Luke hadn’t been one hundred percent honest with her, even though she didn’t know what he wasn’t telling her. He had even been a bit of a jerk. If things didn’t work out, she was destined to be stu
ck with him. That was not cool.

Instea
d of demanding to know if he was her mate
, Samara turned around. This time, she ran down the hall and turned the corner so that Luke was out of sight an
d (she hoped) out of her mind.
 
 

*

After the first ski club meeting of the year, Samara walked home from school. Her brain was beginning to feel like an overly ripe cantaloupe. Every ounce of logical reasoning was gone, and all she could think about was how Luke
could hear her thoughts. For all she knew, he could be l
istening in on them right now.

Samara was beginning to hope that Luke was her mate. Otherwise, something far
stranger
was going on. She wondered what the
limitations were on this weird mind thing that th
ey had going on.
Could he only hear her when they were standing within one hu
ndred feet of each other or something, or could he listen to her when she was far away from h
im
? Since she
couldn’t hear him at the moment, Samara guessed that he couldn’t hear her either. They probably had to be within standing or staring distance of one another to communicate with each other mentally. Just the idea of this type of communication seemed so bizarre that Samara was still having a hard time accepting it.

If Luke was her mate, it would also explain why Samara had felt such an unusual attachment to him so early on. She thought she just didn’t handle rejection as well as she had thought she would, but Samara was so independent that it wouldn’t even make sense.
She usually didn’t care if boys didn’t like her back.

She’d felt a special bond with Luke, and t
hat was probably for a reason.

Samara tried to review everything that she knew about Luke in her head. It wasn’t much since he was the new guy in school. He
had moved
to
Grandview just as school was ending last year, which Samara had always thought seemed like an odd time for his family to drag him to another state and a brand new school. At the time, she had assumed that his parents must have needed to make an urgent move for work (not that she knew anything about either of them or their careers, but it had seemed lik
e the most logical of reasons).

Luke and Samara really hadn’t spoken all that much since he had moved to Grandview, either. Sure, he’d been staring at her since August when he began coming to Emma’s parties, but they didn’t actually start talking to each other until the night she had played beer pong with him at Emma’s house. It was the night before s
he had been bitten by the wolf.

As Samara walked up the driveway that led to her house, she got the feeling that she was being watched. Deciding that she was
just
being paranoid
(which was probably true since her life had been so crazy lately)
,
she walked in through
the
front door.

Almost immediately, Seth began shouting at her, “Careful! Get in the house! T
he wolves are out there again.”

“I’m sure they’re not harmful,” Samara said gently, remembering that her Alpha had said that the other wolves weren’t going to hurt her. “They’re probably just as afraid of us
as we are of them.
”
This was the first time in a while that Seth seemed like he really cared about Samara. It made her feel like she still mattered to him.

Seth paced back and forth, looking out the kitchen window and into the backyard. “I
don’t know . . .
I don’t think they should be there. I think we need to call animal control. Wild anim
als aren’t supposed to be out during
the day, right? They might have rabies or something.
What if they give it someone?
”

Samara put her tote bag down and sat on the beige plush sofa. “If they had rabies, they probably would have attacked someone already. Besides, it’s starting to get dark
out. I’m sure they’re fine. Let’s just ignore them.”

From the way Seth was pacing back and forth and his obvious shakiness, she knew that he wasn’t g
oing to be able to ignore the wolves. Samara couldn’t really blame him, though. If she wasn’t a werewolf and if her Alpha hadn’t told her that the other wolves were mostly harmless, she would probably be really freaked out herself. Even though they often saw deer, bears, and sometimes even coyotes and foxes, it just wasn’t normal to see wolves lurking aro
und in a backyard in Grandview.

“So, umm, Seth, I wanted to talk to you about something,” Samara said, trying to
sound as casual as possible.

Seth looked over at her. His eyes were bloodshot again. Samara wondered if he might be using drugs. That would
explain his temper
. She decided that she
was going to mention the idea
to her parents later, but she didn’t want to bri
ng it up to her brother. He would probably flip out on her if he was or just at the suggestion of not being able to trust him if he wasn’t. Either way
, it was a lose-lose situation.

“Mom, Dad, and I were thinking that maybe you would like to go to counseling.
We could even do counseling together as a family
. That way, a counse
lor can help us work out all of
the problems that
all of us have so that we can improve on being happy as a family again
,” Samara said, grateful that she had come up with
the idea right then and there.

Seth looked at her blankly. “No. I don’t need cou
nseling.”

Before Samara could say anything else to him, Seth ran
off
to his bedroom and slammed the
door behind him.

Chapter 12

****

Are you awake?

Samara bolte
d up in bed and brushed away a sweaty lock of
hair from her forehead. Luke’s voice inside her head had woken her up. Samara groaned. She must have been thinking about the situation too much before she had gone to sleep. Now, she was dreaming
about it and imagining that she was hearing his voice inside her head, too.

You’re not dreaming.

Samara got up and looked out her bedroom window. She didn’t see Luke. How could he get inside her head
if he wasn’t even around? She had to
be imagining things.

I don’t have to be near you in order to hear your thoughts
if that’s what you’re wondering
, Luke said
.

How long have you been listening to me?
Samara asked.

There was a brief pause.
Tonight or in general?

Both,
Samara
frantically
shot
back
,
trying to quickly rummage through her memory to see if she had thought about anything embarrassing.

I’ve been able to hear you ever since the night of our date
, Luke replied.

Samara groaned out loud.
Seriously? You’ve been listening this whole entire time?

Well, I try to tune you out most of the time,
Luke replied.
Most of your thoughts are very boring, to be completely honest with you. I do sometimes listen if I hear my name
, but even that starts to get old after a while. You seem to think abo
ut the same things over and over
. . .
I don’t know how you don’t t
ire yourself out with all of the
thinking you do.