Rebecca Royce: Summer’s Wolf

Death.

Someone inside her parents’ house was dead.

Summer Morrison shut the front door with a thud and covered her nose and mouth with her hands. She tried not to gag. The stench of rotten flesh permeated through her hands, into her nasal passages and then coursed around her bloodstream. Her heart pounded and her stomach churned as its contents threatened to make an undesired reappearance.

Whatever was dead hadn’t been that way very long or she would have smelled the putrid rot outside on the street. Even so, to her, inside the house, it smelled like it was days decayed. Her white wolf paced back and forth inside of her. The four-legged part of her wanted to shift. She felt the dry prickle of the change start in her eyes. She blinked to clear the sensation and quelled the urge. She couldn’t succumb to that now.

In three years, her wolf’s nose had never been wrong.

She needed information but her wolf wasn’t giving it to her . Who is dead?

I’m not telling you.

What did that mean? Since the day the shifter knowledge had been forced upon her, Summer had struggled with her inner canine to give her a moment’s silence. Now, when she needed to know the identity of the dead person, her wolf decided to play games.

Part of Summer, the sane human part, wanted to turn around and run out the front door. But if she’d wanted to cower or hide she should have turned around and run away the second she’d stepped in the house. She could go back to New York and her disastrous singing career. Maybe she could even talk her landlady into not throwing her out of her apartment for being so late in her rent. She shook her head. None of that was likely and besides she needed to focus on the situation at hand.

Her heart pounded in her chest, her pulse erratic, and she knew if she wasn’t careful she might hyperventilate. She concentrated on her breathing, it needed to stay even, and her footsteps, they needed to stay silent.

Shift .

No. Stop being pushy.

Whatever the danger was, it must be near. But she had no control of herself as a wolf. She couldn’t afford to lose her conscious reason. She needed to stay human.

Summer’s legs felt heavy, like she’d overexerted them. She knew it was her wolf trying to force the shift.

No . She gritted her teeth. Until she knew what was happening, she would stay on two feet.

She reached the living room door. Cracked open, she pushed it the rest of the way with her left hand as she slid her back up against the adjacent wall.

“Why don’t you come in and join us, Summer?”

A cold, masculine voice with an accent she would guess to be Southern Creole was not someone she was familiar with. She leapt an inch in the air and pushed her back closer to the wall, as if it could hide her from whoever was in that room. Her hands shook and she clasped them together.

The rancid smell of death was so powerful that she could taste it in her mouth as it flowed through the open living room door. She wanted to spit to remove the acidic burn from her tongue. Summer imagined the death-smell filling the house and attaching itself to the brightly painted yellow walls of her mother’s front entranceway. They’d never be able to clean it off. She knew there was something she should focus on, something other than strange musings, something that eluded her, but her wolf’s constant bid for control of their brain kept her consciousness fuzzy.

What hadn’t she realized yet?

Seconds passed and she still hadn’t moved. Her feet seemed frozen to the floor.

Let me handle this, please. Summer wasn’t used to her wolf begging.

Fear clogged her reason and before she could stop it, the white light that precipitated a shift to her wolf form surrounded her.

“Now, now, someone in Westervelt must have taught you better control than that. Have you learned nothing in three years?”

A man—the voice—stepped through the doorway into her line of sight. As if she was under his command, the white light stopped and her wolf quieted inside of her. It was as though his voice had incapacitated her animal side.

The stranger stood well over six feet. She’d guess perhaps as lengthy as six-foot-four or five. In any case, he dwarfed her five-foot-nothing frame. Dark brown hair—odd on a man whose wrinkled face told her he was possibly pushing seventy—capped his pallid face. A stubby, black mustache bristled below a ruddy, porcine nose and black-dot eyes completed his corn-fattened-hog appearance.

“My name, child, is Claudius Brouseax. I imagine you’ve heard of me. I’ll ask you again, and this will be the last time I do it nicely, please come in the living room.”

She didn’t think it was prudent to tell the huge man she’d never heard of him. Right at this moment, she wished she’d paid attention to her mother’s long explanations about her wolf heritage. But it was too late to do anything about that now.

He extended his hand in a formal gesture of invitation. She didn’t move. She couldn’t bring herself to walk into that room and see who lay dead in it, even though she already knew. Somewhere in her mind she had known from the moment she stepped into the house. She just didn’t seem to be able to access the information.

Claudius exhaled audibly. “Next time, my children will assist me with your cooperation.”

Summer heard growls in the living room and she swallowed hard.

How many?

She felt her wolf struggle to wake up from sleep. For a moment she could see through her canine eyes. The room looked fuzzy and distorted, like she was drunk. The sensation passed and Summer was back in control of her vision. Wow, her wolf must be really out of it to relinquish control that quickly.

Fifteen. Bad wolves, sick. Bad man. He did something, make me go to sleep. I can hardly keep my eyes open but I guess I can wake up when you call me even though everything looks strange and smells wrong .

Relief swept through her when her wolf answered, which was strange because usually Summer couldn’t stand canine interference. Today she couldn’t be more grateful for it.

Fifteen wolves in the living room.

She didn’t stand a chance, and if she tried to flee, they would catch her before she even made it to the door.

She walked past Claudius to freeze a few steps over the entryway. She gagged and swallowed the bile that rose in her throat.

The wolves had formed a circle around a dead person that lay next to a dead wolf. Blood stained the floor around the two bodies, and the idle part of Summer’s brain noted it was also all over the couches and the walls. Several of the wolves looked up when she entered but others continued what they were doing which seemed to be either licking the blood off the floor or nibbling on the body.

Summer stared at the eyes of the few wolves who acknowledged her. Flat and dead was the only way to describe the reflection. So different from the wolves in her sister’s pack. She could see no sign of the humans within. The few that had looked grew bored with her and returned to pacing around the body.

Glad she hadn’t vomited yet, she covered her mouth with her hand just in case. Sweat broke out on her body and her limbs felt as if they were made of water.