Chapter 15: Ticking Bomb

Sam’s Point of View

  When I was eight, one of my friends had hosted a birthday party at their house. Normally I would’ve loved a good party--cake, candy, ice cream, and goodie bags. What kind of deranged little kid wouldn’t be happy about being invited to one?

  I had gotten dressed in my favorite pair of jeans and newest polo top so I looked just as cool as the other kids, but like most of the time they hadn’t noticed. The party was huge and over the top, especially for an eight year old, but I hadn’t minded because it had felt like I had been invited to a mansion, plus the cake was supposed to be amazing. Only ten of us showed up early and with the awkwardness that hung in the air since we obviously weren’t the birthday girl’s first choices to have come, she decided on a game of hide and seek.

  Since it was such a huge house I was thrilled to find a hiding place that no one would ever find me in. There were two floors and each had at least six rooms, making the possibilities seemingly endless. While the girl that was it was calling out numbers I had rushed up to the second floor, finding the most secluded corner and stashing myself in the closet. The moment I closed the door in on myself I had been surrounded by darkness, not even a sliver of light shone under the door because the carpet blocked the bottom.

  Though the darkness sent fear into me, I forced myself to sit down on the floor and wait out the turn so I could win the game. Time ticked by slowly, ever more so with each second I listened to silence. No one came running down the hall and not even another kid’s voice rang through the hall telling me to come out. Since this was supposed to be the biggest party of the year, I figured that more people had shown up and they all just forgot about me. Smiling, I got up and dusted myself off, ready to gloat that I had beat them all. But when I tried to open the door, it was jammed in the frame--warped from the heat vent being right by the wood.

  Trying to call out without embarrassing myself, I just knocked on the door and tried to get anyone’s attention, but no one was even on the second floor. My heartbeat had been going frantically, but the pace sky-rocketed when I started to hear the fire alarm go off. All dignity out the window, I screamed and pounded on the door. There were no lights, no openings, not even a window to look out of. I had been truly trapped, and freaking out because I thought I was going to burn alive in a stranger’s house.

  Eventually someone found me in that closet, hours later. The fire alarms had turned off--it had only been smoke from the barbeque. I was curled up in a ball on the floor of the closet, tears streaming down my face and blubbering something unintelligible about being trapped. They had taken me home right away and I had found solace in my mother’s hug.

  But never less I had never gotten over my apprehension of enclosed spaces.

  Now that I was locked away in Ian’s house, it was only worse because I was in real danger. Sure, I was older and more experienced than eight-year old Sammy Williams, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t just as jittery.

  The room was shrinking--I was sure of it. Every step I paced across the floor was only succeeding in making me more anxious. God only knows how many times I had tracked the perimeter of the room, determined to not let myself go insane from claustrophobia.

  Jay had come in three times since the first, and since he had an apple each time he came, I could only guess it had been three days. One piece of fruit a day. My stomach was concaving on itself and its growls broke the silence every few minutes. If this was anything like solitary confinement in prison, I could confirm that it would be easy to start hearing voices in a few weeks.

  My vigorous walking had worn a hole in my leggings where my thighs brushed against one another, and my shirt was turning sour. With no supplies to wash my clothing I had to resort to sitting in the bathroom while the clothes were being soaked in the shower. But even if they were cleaned once every few hours, water could only do so much to keep them cleanly.

  I had been pacing for hours when I was growing restless of it and about to collapse back onto the bed, but footsteps coming down the hallway to the room had me pause from any movement. My bond that I had with Ian was weak because there was nothing between us, but I could still tell that he wasn’t anywhere near the house, so therefore couldn’t be the one coming for me.

  And luckily Jay was the only one to ever come for me.

  Flopping down on the bed, I waited for him to open the door and close the lock behind him; isolating us both from the world outside. The air wasn’t nearly as tense as it had started out between us, in fact if it were under different circumstances me and him probably would’ve been great friends. But there was the fact that he was holding me here captive that drove a rift the size of the Mississippi in our could-be friendship.

  Seconds after he had come into the room and slouched down at his usual spot on the wall, an apple landed inches from my head. The soft impact didn’t make me flinch, but I felt for it instinctively with my eyes closed knowing that it was my only meal for the day. Unlike the first few times when I had devoured it without a second thought, now I took each bite at a time, pausing to let the food hit my stomach.

  “Are you guys determined to starve me to death?” I finally muttered after a few minutes of nothing but my chewing.

  Jay sighed, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know much, do you?”

  “No, probably not.”

  Involuntarily I chuckled, but the sound came out strangled in my throat. I wanted so much to be able to laugh at his resignment to his own stupidity but I couldn’t. Not when it dealt with my own life or death.

  The apple disappeared quickly and I rolled over onto my stomach, a pillow propped under my chin so I could see Jay. He was staring right back at me, his eyes trained on my face. But his expression was far away, clearly thinking of something else.

  “Do you know anything? Or are you a mindless drone that follows orders because you have to?”

  A blink and his focus was back on me, silver eyes clouded with some emotion that I couldn’t pin point. “Does it have to be one or the other?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I know certain things, because having me know them will not affect any plans. Yes, I do follow orders obediently, but I’m unfortunate enough to know what’s behind them.”

  “If there’s no harm in you knowing, why is there any harm in me knowing? I’m stuck here anyway, so it’s not like I could go out into the world and sell the Redwood secrets to the highest bidder...” I closed my eyes again, not really expecting an answer. Every day our conversations had gone the same--I ask him if he knows anything, him denying to being able to tell me, and a resulting silence. It was getting quite old, but my mind had to be trained in on something important, lest I lose it to the shrinking walls that crowded in on me.

  “If I tell you, you have to promise that you won’t interrupt. This room might be soundproof but that doesn’t mean there aren’t members of the pack keeping track of the business that goes on in here.”

  I flashed my eyes open briefly to see if he was telling the truth, but his head was leaned back against the wall, gaze inspecting the ceiling. The hard lines of his jaw suggested that he was being serious, and since he hadn’t done much lately to make me believe that he was bluffing I close my eyes again to just listen to the sound of his voice.

  “Fine, I won’t say a word,” I whispered.

  “I don’t know how much you know about werewolves, but it’s become increasingly obvious that you don’t know some very important key points. It feels ridiculous to list them out like this...” he scoffed, “but I guess it’s just like teaching any child.”

  I tensed on the bed, not like being called a child, but it was coming to the point that all the new facts being thrown at my face made me feel infantile.

  “One. We don’t exactly age like normal humans. I mean we do, up until a certain point--right around the time we turn twenty. I’m still nineteen so my aging lines up with that of a human born the same year I was, but the moment I turn twenty my body’s biological clock slows. It’s a evolutionary trait to keep the race going, due to the fact that we are extremely rare in comparison to our human counterparts. It’s not much, but we age twice as slowly as people, so for example, I will only look thirty when I could really be forty.”

  Great, I get to deal with life like this for twice as long.

  “Two. I noticed how surprised you were when Ian said something about Mooncreak and Redwood being one pack, and that is true. The two split roughly around forty years ago due to irreconcilable differences. I say we, but I wasn’t really born yet, but Redwood was the controlling power. We were one of the last packs who still believed in power of command--the steadfast ability to follow orders when they were given out by a superior. All werewolves have the power to use their command to order around those of lesser status; male wolves to their mates, Alphas to their Betas and inferiors. Ian’s father was Alpha of Redwood at the time and though he was determined to keep the strict upbringing his ancestors had insisted on keeping with the pack, he was losing the battle of personal rights due to the pressure from other packs."

  "Three. Tristan and Rayne’s mother is the one who split the packs.”

  There was silence as the words sunk in to my thoughts. Their mother? What in the world did she have to do with anything along the lines of splitting the most powerful pack in the country in two? I sat up, no longer able to stay relaxed while listening. Jay seemed to sense the same tension in the air because he pushed himself off the wall and resumed the same pacing I had been doing before his arrival.

  “Ian’s father, Kyle, had a teenage sister who was rebellious against her older brother’s wishes. She was just as entitled to the title of Alpha as Kyle, so his commands had little affect on her. But she still wanted to fight for the rights of others in the pack, so she started the pact to divide the pack--her and her mate from a small bordering pack, against her Alpha."

  "I’m not a certified expert on the subject, but I knew that the break was a messy one. A lot of the men who liked the way things were run stayed behind with Redwood and the rest left to follow Rayne’s mother. She married her mate, and because they wanted to show their new pack that they weren’t in charge because of lineage, they named it Mooncreak, instead of Everdeen.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” I finally asked, interested in the story but still wanting to know exactly how I fell into the equation. I could understand fights, and the one over a person’s free will was a huge one, but that didn’t make Ian’s orders on me any less true.

  Jay paused and glared at me, “You said you wouldn’t interrupt. I can stop now, if that’s what you want?”

  I clenched my jaw and rolled my eyes, but made a show of zipping my lips shut.

  Even though I could see he was annoyed, he couldn’t keep the best of the information from falling off his tongue. Some things, once started, couldn’t be stopped.

  “Ian took over after his father died, determined to keep up the same traditions. This was only ten years ago, when he was eighteen or so, meaning that he didn’t have very long to adjust to taking the reigns. People followed him simply because he was exactly like his father and fit the needed profile of being a Redwood. I heard from people that were close to him that he wasn’t nearly as bad as his dad, at least before he lost Clara."

  "He fell in love with her in high school, but she was human. It was very rare to intermingle with humans because things always got messy. Questions would get asked, secrets exposed and allies strained. No one wanted to get into the hassle it took to keep humans as friends, never less spouses. It is possible to change a human to a wolf--as I’m sure you know by now--but it is highly illegal in our world because of the after affects it can have. As natural born werewolves, we have the chance to grow up along with our feral counterparts, maturing and learning alongside one another. If you infuse a human, who has already established their sense of identity, with a wolf spirit, then unpredictability is bound to happen. They can never change at will, it always is regulated by the full moon and they usually have less control over their actions because they aren’t as tapped in with their wolves as they should be."

  "I’m pretty sure Ian panicked when he changed her, it was crossing the line for an up-in-coming leader of the were-world. Instead of allowing her to flourish and at least try to come into harmony with her wolf, he locked her up so that no one would try to persecute her. My older brother used to be Ian’s right hand before the accident, and he relayed to me on how much he cared for Clara. For months he kept her hidden and tried to get her to cooperate with her wolf, but nothing worked. The blood-thirsty qualities of a wild animal slipped into her human self, and drove her crazy.”

  I could feel the tightening in my chest, every word about Clara hitting a chord in my soul that let me know that this was what was going to happen to me. My own wolf was fighting to control my every move, even from the shroud of a human skin, she held power with every movement I managed. It wasn’t just a phase, this was my life.

  Jay stopped, gaging my reaction but continuing on, “She didn’t last long before she committed suicide. Ian couldn’t stop her, she wanted an out and couldn’t find another solution. Her death signaled the end of his rebellion from his father’s control, and he took up every custom back to full power. Ever since he has been the most controlling and menacing Alpha in the country, the strictness over the members considered borderline illegal against werewolf rights.”

  “But no one can stop him,” I muttered, burying my hands in my hair. The fascination that Ian had had with me from day one suddenly made sense. He didn’t want me because I resembled his mate, but because he could keep me from ending my life like his mate did. But what in the world did my specific condition have to do with him keeping me locked away?

  I asked the exact question to Jay and received a contorted look of pain that reflected deep in his eyes. “I’ve really already said too much, any more and I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself.”

  “Please,” I begged. There was no way he could keep me hanging, not when he had successfully toyed with every single one of my emotions and insecurities in his revelations.

  “All I can say is that the full moon is tomorrow night and I don’t think Ian is going to let an untapped weapon of feral quality like you get away again.”