Shifted Fate (The Wolves of Forest Grove Book 1) Page 10

  It wouldn’t last forever. Eventually they would see that Jared wasn’t into me that way and I would go back to being the invisible girl I wanted to be…just one friend richer.

  “Nice?” Layla accused. “He’s nice? The guy is a total recluse. I think he’s hiding something. He’s too pretty…like—oh! Like those serial killers you see in old newspapers—the ones where people are so shocked that someone who seemed so nice and so well put together could do something so awful. Like that.”

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “Layla, I really don’t think he’s a serial killer.”

  He’s part giant wolf, but I stopped seeing him as being dangerous over the past few days. I was starting to forget how terrifying his wolf form really was. In my memory, the vision of him had morphed from huge dog that could eat me in a few bites to something far less threatening.

  “Well, either way, I don’t trust him.”

  I pursed my lips and nodded.

  “You’re not into him, are you?” Viv asked, her face puckered.

  I shook my head. “No. I mean he’s really good looking—anyone can see that, but I’m not attracted to him like that.”

  Not even I fully believed that lie..

  I cleared my throat. “He’s just a nice guy who I have some things in common with and who offered me a ride—that’s it. Besides, I’m still working through shit with Devin.”

  I could barely rein in the disgust from coloring my tone.

  Viv began to pull on some socks and tapped her phone to check and see where the Uber was. “You think you’ll work it out with him?”

  “No,” I said, maybe too quickly. “No, I’m done with him. He turned out to be a royal dickhead.”

  Viv’s thick blonde brows drew together and down, there was worry in her gaze. “What do you mean? I know he accused you of cheating—which is super fucking stupid and a total dick move—but that’s all that happened, right?”

  I didn’t answer right away, and Viv didn’t budge, her gaze cold and calculating, daring me to lie to her.

  My throat felt tight and my lips parted to tell her the truth. To tell her what Devin did to me and how I didn’t want them to worry. How I didn’t want to make a huge deal out of it. Devin’s father was a judge. I knew if they forced me to go to the police, he would never be charged. His father wouldn’t ever allow his precious boy to be slandered in that way.

  “I—” I started, but was saved by the dinging of Viv’s phone as it notified her the uber had arrived and was parked outside.

  Viv still didn’t move, her eyes searching mine for an answer I wasn’t yet ready to share. I dropped my head. “Yeah. That’s all that happened.”

  “Come on,” Layla said, her voice a little more tense than it had been a moment before. “We should go before the uber takes off and we have to wait an hour for the next one.”

  Viv watched me quietly as we all rushed to put on our boots and jackets and scarfs and run out the door. After we called a goodbye to her mom who lifted her hand in a lazy Xanax wave in reply and shut the front door behind us, Layla ran to stop the uber from driving away and Viv turned to me. I could tell she was reading the truth in my heavy stare.

  Her face pinched.

  “If that bastard comes near you again, you call me,” she said. “I’ll teach him to mess with my best friend.”

  I reached down and squeezed her fingers in my hand. “Thanks, Viv.”

  “Of course, Allie Cat,” Viv said with a warm smile and wink. “We’re family.”

  11

  Thompson’s place was just at the edge of town. His house backed onto a quiet wood which made it the perfect place for house parties. The nearest neighbor was three blocks away and was a partially deaf older man who went to bed at eight. No one to call the cops. And the cops had little reason to drive down a dead-end road without a call.

  The uber let us off near the old man’s house a few blocks away. It was Thompson’s only rule when he had a party. If you’re getting a ride, you don’t get it right to the house. People in the small town of Forest Grove could be nosey.

  The uber who drove us was a girl named Jess’ uncle’s best friend, Jack. Even though it was unlikely he would rat us out, especially since I saw the creep checking out my minimal cleavage in the rearview, it was possible he could tell someone about the party who would.

  We hopped out and took a breath of the crisp air after being stuffed in the cab for too long with the stale smell of tequila on our breaths and the faint odor of cigarettes clinging to the fabric seats.

  The last time Layla, Viv, and I had been to a party together it was the height of summer and people were shooting water guns full of raspberry vodka into other people’s mouths. The pool in Thompson’s backyard was warm and filled with half-naked bodies. That wasn’t the reason we came tonight.

  It was cold as fuck.

  And as we hustled down the road under the glow of the uber’s retreating headlights, I could see my breath clouding in the air. The thrumming bass drew us nearer like a moth to a flame. The prospect of a warm house full of bodies spurring us faster.

  I tugged out my phone and thumbed a quick reply to Jared. I’d meant to do it in the cab, but I’d forgotten.

  Allie: We just got to Thompson’s.

  Jared’s reply came in almost immediately.

  Jared: Almost there.

  I peered down the street for the headlights of his Jeep coming up the road but didn’t see any car approaching.

  The music grew louder, accompanied by the indignant whine of someone who probably just had beer spilled on them. I felt for them. No one liked to wake up the next morning smelling of stale beer. Barf.

  “Looks like the party started without us,” Viv called back over the music as we picked across a once pristine lawn now littered with cigarette butts, empty beer cans, and what looked like the remnants of a stuffed unicorn…I raised my brow at that one.

  My new converse shoes stuck to something sticky on the wooden steps leading up to the open door and the crush of bodies milling around inside the large house.

  Viv’s height and broad shoulders came in handy in a crowd. She always went first to clear a path for Layla and I to trail behind in her wake. Her size coupled with her very loud attitude usually did the trick. If you didn’t see her and move, she would bark at you to get the fuck out of the way without batting an eye.

  I loved her for it.

  I shivered as my body adjusted to the temperature difference, my cheeks flushing as I tore off my jacket, almost tripping over someone’s discarded boot on the hardwood in the hall.

  It seemed like the entire eleventh and twelfth grade classes were here. I coughed as we walked through a haze of pot smoke near the back of the house. It wasn’t much worse than the general cloying reek of hair product and dollar-store aftershave. Viv saw someone from her lacrosse team and vanished into the kitchen, rushing to whisper a hasty be right back before she vanished.

  I turned to Layla and gestured to the only empty nook I could see in the house. A wide window ledge looking out into the back yard that stood directly across from the wide, dim stairwell leading down to the basement. The clinking of pool balls and the sound of a TV blaring could be heard below. “Drink?”

  “Please,” she said, her body tensing as she craned her neck to get a look around the corner of the wall and up the stairs that were positioned directly above the ones leading down. “Pour me one?” she asked, raising her voice above the thumping music. “I’m just going to run to the washroom. Be right back.”

  I nodded, tugging off my pack to set it down on the window’s ledge. I dug around for the bottle of tequila, wondering if it would be safe to leave the bag for a second while I dipped into the kitchen for a couple of plastic cups to pour the tequila in.

  “Viv,” I hollered into the kitchen, stepping back from the bag to get a look inside. I was about to shout again when a loud curse behind me made me whirl around in time to see a fist connect with a face and for a guy I
didn’t know to stumble backwards, knocking me hard in the middle of my chest. I fell back, my feet leaving the floor as I lost my balance. Gasping, my eyes widened as I plummeted backwards down the stairs.

  Except, I didn’t hit the hard edges of stairs. Didn’t break my neck as I tumbled backward into the basement. The breath was knocked from my lungs as I connected with warm, hard flesh instead. His arms caught me, righting me back on shaking feet. My knees quaked.

  Engine grease and spice filled my nose.

  “Break it up,” Clay growled, pulling the one guy off the other as though they were half as big as they were. As the guy who had clearly been the instigator leveled his glassy stare at Clay, his eyes widened.

  “Clayton?”

  Clay jabbed two fingers hard into the guy’s chest as I bent with shaky fingers to help the other smaller guy stand up, his eye already swelling shut. “You could’ve fucking killed her,” he was practically frothing at the mouth. “If I hadn’t been watching, she could have a broken neck!”

  I opened my mouth to say something. To stop him. But I was still in shock. What was Clay doing here?

  He never went to these kinds of things anymore.

  Had he just…

  Had he just caught me?

  “Fuck off, man” the guy I recognized to be a senior named Jason spat back at Clay.

  Clay rolled his shoulders back and I saw a flicker of something cross his face. His fists clenched at his side, the big knuckles stark white against the olive tone of his hands. Shit. A spark of blue glow was beginning to ring his iris’.

  In a knee-jerk reaction, I stepped between Clay and Jason, placing my hands firmly on Clay’s chest even though Jason was the one who was swinging only a moment before. I knew who the real threat here was. If Clay lost control, Jason would have more than a black eye.

  “Calm down,” I whispered to Clay, breathless and with my heart thrumming wildly in my ears. “I’m fine.”

  Clay glared down at me with a set jaw, the slightest glow that’d been starting in his eyes was already fading, and I doubted anyone noticed it. Just a trick of the light, they would think. Clay jabbed a finger over his shoulder at Jason one more time, turning his haughty stare back at the drunken idiot who’s desire to pick a fight almost had some serious collateral damage. “Leave,” he all but roared.

  Jason’s expression hardened.

  “Let’s go man,” one of his buddies said, grabbing Jason by the shoulder. “This party fucking blows anyway.”

  When Jason didn’t move to depart with his friend right away, Clay gripped me by the shoulder and gently, but forcefully, shoved me from his path, his big barrel chest rising as he stared with murderous intent down at Jason. “Get the fuck out. Now.”

  Something within Jason seemed to recognize the predator standing before him. Seemed to recognize that he was the prey. His lips parted and he fell back a step as though seeing Clay for the first time. Then he shook it off. “Yeah, whatever man. This shit’s lame, anyway.”

  Jason turned and fled with his friend and I sagged against the windowsill where the other guy with the black eye was wincing at the ice-filled rag a girl was pressing to his eye. The girl kneeling in front of him holding it to his face was grimacing as she looked at the garish swelling and small cuts around his eyebrow.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Myra,” she said with a pained smile.

  “Want to go upstairs?” He blushed. “It’s quieter there and we can rinse off the blood in the bathroom.”

  She smirked and nodded, rising with a little difficulty from the ledge. The guy thanked Clay quietly as he passed. “Don’t know what that guy’s problem was.”

  Clay grunted as a response and then turned back to me, his shoulders still tense and raised. His body still tightly coiled and ready for a fight. “You alright?”

  His icy blue eyes had softened, and he was staring at me intently, waiting for my response. He was so unlike Jared. Where Jared seemed unsure and was always gentle—thoughtful—Clay was all hard edges. A straight shooter if I ever saw one. He held my gaze with a fire in his eyes as though if I told him I wasn’t alright he would go hunt down the guy that almost knocked me down the stairs and throw him down them instead.

  “I’m good,” I said and he visibly relaxed, nodding.

  I barely heard his response as the song switched to one that seemed even louder, as if that were even possible. “Good.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him after a beat of silence between us, and when he showed no signs of leaving.

  Clay paused and I saw his gaze fix on something behind me out the window. “Could you just…find someplace else to sit?” he said, though his tone told me it wasn’t a question. He was telling me I needed to move. That sitting across from a stairwell in a house full of drunk teenagers wasn’t safe.

  But that also meant that Clay—the guy who almost chewed my head off a few nights ago, the one who told me the cabin wasn’t a shelter for the homeless and that he didn’t want me there—cared about me enough to not want me to fall and hurt myself.

  That was progress.

  I couldn’t help the small smile that climbed onto my lips.

  “Don’t look so smug,” Clay said, the ire I’d grown used to back in his stare. “You could have been seriously hurt.”

  “But I wasn’t,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes at me. Just then Viv appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, “What happened?” she demanded. “Someone just told me you got shoved down the stairs.”

  She searched me for injury, and I shook my head. “Nearly, but Clay—”

  I turned to gesture to him; to give him the credit for saving me, but he wasn’t there. I stood on tiptoe to see over the crowd, but he was gone. That was when I noticed the sliding door several paces down the wall was slightly ajar, letting the cool air of the night into the house. I turned to the window just in time to see him vanish into the tree line.

  “What?” Viv asked, her brows lowering. Her eyes were unfocused, and I knew she’d likely had a few shots with her lacrosse buddies in the kitchen while the whole ordeal played out.

  “Never mind,” I said instead of explaining. “I’m good.”

  She squeezed my shoulder, letting loose a very exaggerated sigh. “Good, because I just saw Devin come inside.”

  I stiffened. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Why was he here? Could she have mistaken someone else for him?

  “He looked pissed. He was asking Thompson if he’d seen you.”

  Shit.

  “Thanks, Viv,” I said, rushing to sling my pack over my shoulder again, but leaving the tequila behind on the sill. “Layla just went to the bathroom. Said she’d be right back. If you see him, can you tell him I left. I don’t want to deal with that tonight.”

  A little whining voice in my mind bleated this was supposed to be fun.

  This was supposed to be like old times.

  Viv just nodded. “Okay, where are you going?”

  “Just out back,” I told her, squinting out the window into the trees to see if Clay was still there. Hopefully Devin wouldn’t think to look outside for me. And hopefully if he did, Clay was still around.

  I couldn’t fathom why, but I felt like if I was in trouble and Clay was there, regardless of what he thought about me, he wouldn’t let Devin hurt me.

  He may be a brute and total ass. But the reason he’d fought an entire football team that summer a few years back was because one of the guys thought it would be funny to get a girl named Stacy drunk and fool around with her. Except from what I heard, it wasn’t only the one guy, but the whole football team who’d planned to have their way with a drunken female student a couple years younger than most of the players.

  I didn’t know if that was true, and I doubted Clay did either, but that didn’t stop him from knocking out three guys and sending two more to get stitches. He was suspended for two weeks and nearly flunked that year because of it.

&nbs
p; I slipped out the sliding door without saying goodbye to Viv just as I spotted Devin coming through the doorway to the kitchen. I jumped back from the door before he could see me and took off at a sprint into the shadows of the trees.

  “Clay,” I whispered harshly into the woods.

  There came no response and I listened for the sound of his footfalls, or his wolf’s hot, heavy breaths from the brush, but there was nothing. He was already gone.

  I shivered.

  Once I was fully under the tree’s canopy and the dappled moonlight was blocked enough to conceal me in the embrace of prickling pines and withering elms, I took a steadying breath.

  I could hardly see a thing through the window, but I tried to make out the shapes of Viv and Devin standing together as he questioned her. If it was Layla he was grilling I’d have been a bit more worried, but Viv could take care of herself. I had no doubt that if Devin even made a move to hurt her, she’d have him on the ground faster than he could blink.

  She wasn’t held back by the same constraints I was. She wouldn’t be thrown into a state of hurt and shock if he raised a hand to her. She wouldn’t vanish into herself, diminishing into a back corner of her mind while her body quaked like an empty husk in a strong wind.

  “Allie?”

  I screamed, whirling around at the sudden sound.

  His hand came over my mouth, muffling the last of the scream. His lightly calloused hand was warm against my mouth and my eyes took in his glowing amber ones in the dark. He was shirtless but had a pair of jeans riding low on his hips. A belt, a pair of flat converse shoes almost identical to mine, and wrinkled t-shirt lay against the cold earth by his feet.

  He seemed to be studying me almost as intently as I studied him. Taking in the low cut of my navy top beneath the unzipped jacket and the tight-fitting jeans with hunger in his stare.

  The bang of a door flying open back at the house made me jump and Jared’s hand was jostled away from my face. I looked between him and the house where Devin was frantically scanning the forest, his eyes bright and shifting.