Alison Paige - Little Red and the Wolf

He couldn’t stay with Granny 24/7 and trying to ban Cadwick from the premises wouldn’t work any better than Maizie’s attempt had. Gray had used his werewolf-enhanced charm and familiarity with the staff to skirt around Maizie’s restricted-visitors list, but Cadwick was a master at zeroing in on a person’s pay-off point. He’d locate the weakest link in security and buy his way in.

No. Granny would have to use her mind and wits to protect herself. The locket would help.

“You never got to bury your wife, did you?”

Granny’s question caught him utterly by surprise. He stuttered. His mind shifting gears so fast he didn’t have time to throw up the barriers that would keep the most painful of the memories at bay.

“No. I…she… No. Donna died before she could shift back to human form. They disposed of her body as they would any roadkill .” He winced at the term, his heart pinching.

“You couldn’t request they leave her with you? The accident happened on your land.”

Gray shook his head. If only it’d been that easy. If only he’d been able to think clearly, quickly, maybe he could’ve come up with a way. “Taking the… carcass …is procedure. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t seem strange. I had to think of the pack. Protect the rest from curiosity or suspicion.”

Gray had given permission to the Hood family alone to use the shortcut through his forest from the housing subdivision on one side to the cottage on the other. He would never advance such trust again. The police arrived as fast as they did because Riddly and Lilly Hood had betrayed their agreement.

Another car, friends of the Hoods, was following behind when they’d hit his wife. Because of them, because of the police and ambulance and everyone else mulling around in his forest, he’d had to stand by, helpless as they thoughtlessly disengaged his wife’s body from the mangle of metal. They tossed it in the back of the tow truck like it was so much debris. Carted his wife away to be burned to ash in a city furnace. Or God forbid, something worse.

His only consolation was that nothing like it would ever happen again. He’d closed the single-lane gravel road, technically just two tire paths with weeds growing between, immediately after the accident. He planted trees, encouraged undergrowth, so that by now there was barely any sign the road had ever existed.

Granny shifted the locket to one hand and wrapped the other around Gray’s palm. “It was an accident, dear. I know you blame my Riddly, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He wouldn’t have wished the kind of suffering you and Maizie have endured on his worst enemy.”

“I don’t blame him.” Gray was surprised how easily he said it. He’d been thinking it from the start, but never out loud. “It was my fault. Donna and I were arguing…fighting. I accused her of cheating and she ran out. I didn’t go after her.”

He remembered the smell of another man on his wife, a man he recognized. There was no suspicion, no guessing. He knew she’d been with someone else. The rub was he wasn’t as upset over her infidelity as he was with himself for not feeling more betrayed. He loved Donna, but there was something missing between them, something that only became truly perceptible after she’d turned him. Maybe children would’ve made a difference, filled that missing piece between them. He’d never know.

“I was happy for the distance between us,” he said. “Until…Jeezus, I can still hear that sound, that crash, like an explosion. I knew before I started running. I knew Donna was gone. I could feel it.”

“I heard it too.” Granny shuddered. “What an awful sound. I knew my boy was gone. I’m just thankful my Little Red survived. Lord knows how she did.”

Gray knew how she’d survived. He’d been the one rushing headlong down the hillside over the butchered swath of forest so fast no one saw him go by. With the family friends useless, gawking down at the ruin from the road through the rain and darkness, it was up to Gray to assess the damage.

The truck was on its roof. He’d recognized the unmistakable odor of death, a mix of bodily fluids and cold meat. The parents were dead. The smell told him before he’d reached in to check for a pulse. Neither had been wearing seatbelts. They were gone before the truck stopped.

Their little girl, Maizie, was buckled into the backseat, but the shoulder strap had slipped to strangle across her neck. She was unconscious, her little face turning blue. But she was alive-barely.

He tried to unbuckle her, but the lock had jammed in the roll. Breaking it was nothing for his enhanced strength. Her little body fell into his arms and for a strange moment, gazing down into her slowly pinking face, he could breathe. His mind didn’t allow him respite for long, though. The sound, the thunderous explosion of metal and glass, the hideous thud, and the instinctive knowledge Donna was gone all came crashing in on him anew.

He laid Maizie in a soft patch of ferns and slowly made his way to the front of the truck. He couldn’t see her at first, the way the truck was lying, the rain, the darkness, made seeing anything difficult. Then he crouched and peered under the front of the truck. Only her tail and hindquarters showed, soft brown fur, wet with rain, and blood.

Gray raced around the truck to the driver’s side front wheel. Donna lay at an angle, pinned between the fender and the tree, her front paws, chest and head spared the crushing weight of the truck. She was dead. She was dead before the truck had stopped-God willing.

How long had he stood there? How much time passed? He wasn’t sure. Maybe if he’d snapped out of it quicker, reacted faster, maybe he could’ve gotten Donna’s body away before the police showed up. But once the first cop tripped and stumbled his way down the hill, it was too late. These people and their pretty little redheaded girl had altered his life irrevocably.

And now that pretty little redhead was poised to do it again.

“I’m not mad. I’m just curious.” Yeah. If she said it out loud a few more times maybe she’d actually believe it. After all, what other emotion would make her do something this stupid. And, Maizie had to admit, walking deep into the forest at dusk, full moon rising or not, was stupid. Really stupid.

But she had to talk to him. She wanted to know why Gray had waited twenty-one years to give Granny the locket. “Twenty-one years. That’s a long time to hold on to something that’s not yours. Not that I’m mad about it.”

She wasn’t-really. It was just an excuse. More than anything she wanted to know about where he’d found it. Granny told her Gray had been there at the accident. But she was so pleased with having the locket back she didn’t seem to care what his being there meant. He could answer questions no one else could.

What had he seen? What did he know? Had her parents said anything? Were they alive? Did he see the wolf that’d killed them? She had to know.

Anytime she’d asked those sorts of questions of Granny, or anyone else who might know, she’d gotten sad puppy-dog eyes staring back at her and no solid answers. “Just put it behind you, dear,” Granny would say. “It won’t bring them back. Consider yourself blessed that you can’t remember.”

This time she had a good excuse to broach the subject. She had a firsthand source to give her some answers. She wouldn’t settle for puppy-dog eyes and placating clichés. This time she’d get her answers and that, more than anything else, pushed her into the forest to a place she hadn’t been in years.

Maizie shined her flashlight off to the left. The path was clear, dirt covered, with tall weeds and brush kept at a distance. A small turn of her wrist to the right and the beam exposed a swath of low weeds cutting through the forest eight feet wide. Beneath were the remnants of a long-forgotten path. She could still see the twin ruts like old tire tracks through the weed stalks, though as far as she remembered there’d never been an actual road.