Lunar Marked (Sky Brooks Series Book 4) (4 page)

“Will you go with me to look at her house? Maybe I missed something.”

No, I will not. You hate me, remember?
I had every intention on telling him no, but I’d never seen him so distressed. He was just three stops from crazyville.

I nodded.

B
y the time
I arrived at Kelly’s home, Gavin was already inside. Good, I wasn’t present as he broke laws breaking into her home. But when I got closer, I noticed keys in his hand, and the door didn’t look like it had been tampered with.

“Did she give you a set of keys to her place?” I ventured. I didn’t allow my mind to go to a place of paranoia and suspect that he made a copy of them without her knowledge, although I wouldn’t have put it past him. The affections and protection of the Midwest Pack seem sweet and comically overbearing from the outside looking in; but from the inside, it was a hostile takeover of your life where they violated and ignored your autonomy in the name of protecting you. What started off as a kind, sweet act of benevolence quickly turned into something ugly.

I asked again, and he simply gave me an odd look of censure, as though I had asked something ridiculous. I was left trying to figure out what was ridiculous—thinking she wouldn’t give him a key or that there wasn’t anything audacious and infringing about him making a key without her knowing.

Gavin’s fingers slipped through his hair as I watched his crazy slowly unravel as he walked through her house. “She’s at the pack’s house from eight to three Monday through Friday.” I didn’t know that.

He continued through the house, and I followed him. “She has dance class on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.” He showed me her four pairs of shoes placed in order by the door; two pairs for jazz and another two for tap. I’d seen her performance last year and she was talented but didn’t strike me as someone who considered it more than just a hobby. Missing class wouldn’t be unreasonable.

Taking my arm, he guided me to her kitchen and then opened her refrigerator. “No grapes or strawberries and her apples have gone bad. She eats strawberries and grapes almost every day, and she goes to the grocery store on Sunday. There should be some in the fridge,” he said. “Isn’t that strange?”

There are a lot of strange thing going on, but the absence of fruit isn’t one of them.
I just looked at him. I didn’t know anything more about her than she was a nurse, she danced, how she met Dr. Jeremy—which I found out just recently—and all her scrubs made me think of Skittles. And I also knew that Gavin had crossed the line from perceptive friend to possible stalker.

“She could have gone home, Gavin. What she went through was pretty bad; she probably just needed a break. Have you spoken to Dr. Jeremy?” If anyone knew anything it would be Dr. Jeremy. She was his protégée, and he treated her like the daughter he never had.

He nodded. “He’s been strange since that happened to her. He blames himself and has been distant.” He looked around the room.

“Maybe she went to Georgia, to visit her parents.”

“No, I checked.”

“You went to her parents’ house?” Shock made my voice go up an octave.

His head tilted to the side and he looked at me as though I was the odd one. Then he said, “No, but she wouldn’t go visit without luggage.” I followed him to her closet, where all her plaid pink luggage was aligned at the bottom, her totes and overnight bags placed on the shelf by size and color from light pink to dark pink. All the colors, like her scrubs, could be found in a bag of Skittles.

“She was taken,” he said.

Obviously I was missing something. Everything was meticulously placed, which fit Kelly’s personality. The only thing that stood out were a few empty hangers and a shirt that was on the floor as though she had taken her clothes off in a hurry. All her shoes where in plastic shoe boxes, each with a picture of the shoe inside on the front. It didn’t seem like any were missing out of them. Her bed was made with a plethora of decorative pillows and a fluffy teddy bear protecting them. I didn’t want to say it because Gavin seemed to be convinced that she was taken, but it looked like the place of a person who had rushed home and packed her things to get the hell away from a world where she didn’t belong.

“What do you think?” he asked. His dark eyes shone with hope and entreaty. He needed me to agree with him, but there wasn’t enough evidence and he was on the edge.

“I don’t know, but I will talk to Sebastian.”

He nodded, and as I slipped out of the house behind him I got a glimpse of the Hermès Birkin bag that Dr. Jeremy had given her for her birthday a year ago. Shed’ squealed for what seemed like hours but had only been a few minutes. She’d carried it everywhere and the purse, which was the monetary equivalent of what I put down on my house, had become her most treasured possession. It was odd that she would leave it. Maybe it was symbolic, leaving the baggage of the Midwest Pack behind, but something about it didn’t fit. I stared at the purse for a long time but didn’t point it out to Gavin—he was already too intense. I had no idea what extreme he would go through to look for her if I gave him more to fixate on.

“She wouldn’t just leave us,” he said, voice low with resolve. He needed to believe that, and part of me needed to as well. It was about acceptance. If there were ever a time we were exposed there would always be people like her who didn’t care. We were human—that’s all she saw.

“Have you spoken to her parents?” I was just stalling.

“Not yet.”

“She might have gone home. It’s home, she might not have felt the need to pack a bag,” I offered.

I’m not sure if he believed it, but he wanted to. It was better than her being taken but it was more hurtful. If she had indeed left in a rush, she was running from us—from him. I’d always considered her an adrenaline junkie, riding the wave of danger by affiliation. The rules changed when she was hurt because of her association with us and the people who dwell in this world.

He nodded. “Yeah, she might have. She said she missed her brother.” He didn’t seem any more convinced than I did.

Gavin’s eyes narrowed as he raised his head, inhaling and slowly surveying the area. My focus landed on the jackal moments after his as it started to retreat back into the thicket, the spark of its eyes the only thing that shone through the dusk. Gavin darted, moving fast toward the animal, which turned and flitted around the trees. It was just barely seconds ahead of Gavin, whose speeds were faster than I had seen anyone run. Winter was fast—very fast—but Gavin seemed just as quick. That was another thing that I filed away along with his skill of moving in silence. Two things that didn’t bring me any comfort.

I waited by the car, and when he returned, his breathing was heavy but substantially lighter than I would have expected after running at that distance and speed.

“Why did you go after it?” I asked.

“Were-jackal” was all he offered, as though it should have meant something. It didn’t.

“So?”

“We’ve never had any around here. It’s new. I think it was watching you.”

G
reat, another person that seems to just watch me.
Logan did it often, but he didn’t do anything. Just an odd demon, in whatever form he had chosen that day, staring at me—not staring, leering. Added to the list was a jackal.

“Why?”

“When it comes to you, who knows,” he snipped.

There it was. His general disdain for me had reared its little head. He ducked into his car and I expected him to speed away, but instead he followed me home and waited until I was in the house before he left but not before doing a cursory look around my home, out the back, and in the greenhouse. He even searched near my neighbor David’s home.

“That has to be exhausting,” I mumbled, walking into the house.

“What has to be exhausting?” Steven asked from the couch. He must have parked in the garage because I hadn’t seen his car. My heart jumped and I wanted to ask him if he’d changed his mind. But out of my peripheral vision I saw the packed boxes on his bed, and I felt that the world was too heavy. I tried to ignore them, but it was hard.

His feet were propped on the coffee table next to a bottle of hot sauce and a bag of dill-flavored potato chips. He had convinced me to try his little concoction that didn’t seem fit for consumption by anyone. At what point in his life did he decide those two things should ever be near each other at any given time? But Steven considered it a genius idea, a culinary masterpiece, and didn’t take it kindly when I pointed out that whoever decided to make a cookie with M&Ms was a genius and what he created was an assault on the taste buds. He attributed his creation to being a “southern thing.” I argued that there were a number of people living across the Mason-Dixon line who would take offense to being associated with that snack disaster.

“Being on high alert at all times. It just seems like a waste of energy to be prepared for some kind of apocalyptic danger at every given moment,” I said.

“Who, Ethan or Sebastian?”

“Gavin.”

He looked surprised and then frowned. “What were you doing with Gavin?” He moved over to give me room to sit on the sofa next to him. He put his bowl of yuck on the coffee table and grabbed my legs, and I turned my body with them to face him as he rested them over his legs. It was how we usually sat when we were going to watch a movie, which apparently we were because he turned the TV to Netflix.

I told him everything, even about Kelly’s favorite bag being left behind. His mouth twisted as he rested back against the sofa, his fingers tapping against my leg. “I don’t get her. I can’t imagine she would leave something she loved so much behind, but I can see how she could. I don’t blame her for leaving and needing some distance from us. It just seems like she would at least tell Gavin.”

“Maybe she thought he would try to talk her out of it.”

“Maybe. But if she needed to leave, I would hope he would care enough to respect her wishes,” he said softly, but there was a weight to his words like a hidden meaning. Just as he expected from Gavin, he wanted me to respect his wishes about leaving. I wanted to, I really did, but the thought of him moving out just made me sad.

“What about the jackal?” I needed more to focus on, anything other than the boxes sitting on his bed. “He seemed very concerned about it, too.”

He shrugged it off but didn’t seem as unconcerned about it as he wanted me to believe.

“I should be concerned, shouldn’t I?”

He sagged into a sigh. “We’ve always had small cliques of were-animals that consider themselves nonconformist and resist joining a larger pack. Refusing to bow down to ‘the man.’ Sebastian and Ethan usually don’t bother with them because they usually stay to themselves and cause little trouble. Most have just three or four weres; we never give them a second thought. There are four that we keep a watch on. Two are so small they don’t even have a name, there are about eight in each one. But there are two others; Worgen—”

“They sound scary.”

Steven chuckled. “Not at all. They named themselves after a race in the World of Warcraft. The biggest threat they present is a cyberattack. They might hack into our computers and screw things up just to make a point. There are about twenty of them, very low-key. We’ve hired them a couple of times, and Sebastian keeps a watch on them. If they ever joined a real pack they would definitely take on submissive roles. Most of them were turned and they aren’t as well adjusted as they should be and could benefit from more assistance, but they will not accept our help and declined joining us. I think they are afraid of us.”

“Did Sebastian and Ethan go and show their scary ‘I destroy everything in my path’ face?”

“Yeah, all of us went to meet them, but they only seemed interested in Winter. They couldn’t stop staring until she did that weird eye thing. Things went downhill from there.” He shrugged it off. Vertical slits in pupils may not seem weird on a snake but seeing them on a human was off-putting. I hated when Winter did it to me. “The other group—Ares, yes, they named themselves after the Greek god of war—is just a minor pain in the ass. With a membership of just a little over one hundred they aren’t as big of a threat as their leader, Anderson, would like them to be. But in the past two months they’ve seemed to be increasing their numbers at alarming rates.”

“Is he making more? That can be dangerous.” Temperament plays a big part in dealing with changed were-animals. Making a were-animal with the intent that they will be an ally is a foolish strategy. If they survive, they might hate you for what you’ve done to them. The only changed were-animal that I knew of was Steven. He was badly injured after killing a vampire. Joan, the Southern Pack Alpha, found him and had him changed by were-coyote in her pack in an effort to save his life. He was grateful to her and to the pack because they not only saved his life but also became his family.

“We’ll have to look into it,” he said, dismissing any more talk of it. He started scrolling through movies on Rotten Tomatoes reading the synopses to check out the star ratings. He finally settled on a movie with a two-star rating.

“We have to watch this one, it’s terrible.” He laughed as he pulled up the movie. We watched bad movies and not the ones that were subjectively awful—no, we went straight for the movies that most critics gave two stars or less. The type of movies that moviegoers and critics were so disgusted with that they couldn’t even bear to write a complete critique. Movies so bad that people often walked out in the middle, but we never gave up. We generally talked through them, laughing at the plot, dialogue, and whatever else we could find to make fun of. He rested his dill pickle and hot sauce mess on the coffee table and settled back to watch the movie.

As we sat on the couch sharing a ritual as we had done many times over the past year, I pretended that his things hadn’t disappeared from around the house. I ignored that his blankets were no longer thrown around the house, nor his jackets, which had never managed to make it into the closet. Most of all, I pushed away the thoughts of the packed boxes on his bed.

I had to, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have made it through the movie.