Lunacy (13 page)

The earth greedily swallowed both the human and wolf
gore that lay strewn about. It actually made a squelching noise,
and it made me want to toss my cookies. But the thought of the
ground sucking up my vomit like a dry sponge made me even queasier
and I managed to resist the urge. A naked human shaped Jynxx lay on
the ground, his bare skin the color of fresh milk, curling up into
a ball and strangely clean in comparison to the mess that had been
all over Conner. Must be I had actually managed to improve from
just a single run of the torturous technique.

I took off my sweatshirt and covered him with it. His
eyelids fluttered like he was struggling to maintain consciousness
and I half expected to need to run and grab some smelling salts
from the first aid kit I’d spotted in the living room. I knew that
it had taken a lot out of him, and we hadn't eaten breakfast,
either. That made me wonder if maybe food consumption had anything
to do with how well wolves recovered from trauma. I had a feeling
that the boys had a big breakfast, for the most part. Everyone
barring Jimmy, that is.

He fought off the temptation of passing out, sitting
up and holding his head in his hands like his skull was trying to
split apart. When he moved, I hurried to look away before seeing
something that I wasn't quite prepared to see just yet. It was
pathetic, really. Being eighteen and worried about seeing a guy
naked. I blamed my parents and the location of our house out in
bumfuck nowhere for making me a social pariah, as well as awkward
as hell when it came to situations like this. When you don't grow
up around a bunch of people your own age, it turns you weird.

Apparently Jynxx had caught me blushing and averting
my gaze, because he reached out with fingers that were hot enough
to scald and brushed them lightly across my cheek. "You really are
such an innocent little thing, Kaysh. I can't get over it." His
voice was shaking, but he was trying to keep the conversation
light, as if he were on the verge of breaking down mentally... Or
just into tears. Again with the waterworks... I could see unshed
tears glittering in his black eyes, and it made me help him to his
feet without him needing to ask, very careful not to let my gaze
travel any farther south than his deliciously sculpted chest.
Nipples I could deal with, I decided. Bully for me.

I can't stand it when guys cry. It goes against the
natural order of things, and it's just damned depressing. You know
something is either really wrong, or they're in immense pain. I
felt like Jynxx's tears weren't just due to the excessive pain I
had inflicted upon him. I'd forced him to shift, and I felt like
I'd deflowered him because of it. Like I’d taken away his Ulven
virginity or something. I felt like your first change should have
been something special and magickal, not something filled with
blood and screaming. But then, from what I've heard from some of my
friends... That was a fairly accurate description of their first
time having sex, too. I grimaced at the thought and Jynxx tilted
his head at me questioningly.

"Don't ask," I said simply. "You really don't want to
know where my brain just went to, Jynxxie."

"Stop calling me that!" He sounded exasperated and
tired.

I chuckled and we made our way back into the house
with Elomina tailing behind us. She was congratulating me on my
success, but I just felt guilty. Conner was passed out on the couch
curled up next to Jimmy, his hair wet and sticking to his forehead
in clinging strands from his recent shower. "You really did very
well, Kacea. Everyone came out of it in one piece, and that is the
most important thing. You should be proud of yourself."

Jynxx ran off upstairs with my hoody, likely going to
clean himself off as well. I sat on the floor, my hands covered in
grossness that I wasn't quite prepared to acknowledge just yet.
"Elomina... I reek. I am literally covered in bits and pieces of
two guys. Bits and pieces that a girl should never see, much less
be splattered with. Once Jynxx is done, I just want to clean myself
off and have something to eat. We never did get to have breakfast
this morning..." I was focusing on normal things, trying to cocoon
myself in the ordinary. I knew that if I dove too fully into what
had just happened, what I had just done, that I was going to go
into shock and lose my mind. It was scary, and it wasn't
natural.

But maybe that was exactly my issue. It was natural.
It was more natural than anything I'd ever experienced in my entire
life. The power and knowledge had just come to me, and flowed
through and out of me almost effortlessly. Thinking about it that
way, I knew that I wasn't okay with it. I wasn't ready to accept
that werewolves were real, and Gods only knew what else was true,
and that I had the power to draw a horse-sized wolf from the body
of one of my classmates. Elomina gave me a soft, understanding
smile and patted me on the shoulder, her accent strangely soothing
to my currently battered psyche.

"Worry not, Skadhi.” She paused and corrected
herself. “You will be fine, Kacea. You stress yourself too much
with worries about that which you cannot control. Were you not
meant to manifest as the Goddess now, you would not have.
Everything is as it should be in this world, whether you believe it
to be truth or not. Many things can change, and nothing is truly
predetermined, but you can rest assured that this was meant to be.
You coming into your power, and bringing Jynxx into his, is a good
thing. It means that he will be able to see his parents once more,
to be reunited with the family he thought lost to him forever.”

Damn it. I hate it when other people are right…

I sighed and responded back with, “And how am I
supposed to explain this to my parents? I know they aren’t anything
other than human. Do I keep this a secret from them?” My mother
would likely have me committed if I told her anything about
werewolves, exploding boys, glowing eyes, and Goddesses reborn into
the body of her little girl. I could practically feel the arms of
one of those lovely huggy jackets tightening around me just from
the thought of it. Her silver eyes regarded me silently, knowing
that she didn’t need to respond. The decision to involve my parents
or not was much like Jynxx’s about Jimmy. Elomina seemed older to
me, then. I had thought her to be in her late twenties, maybe early
thirties, but her Zen statement about destiny made me wonder...

“
Elomina?” She looked at me
curiously. “How old are you, exactly?”

She laughed heartily, and it startled me a bit with
how sudden it was as it bubbled from her lips like a small stream
over a bed of pebbles in the woods. “It is not polite to ask a
lady’s age, Kacea. But I shall indulge your query. I am older than
Skadhi, by quite a bit, actually. I spent a large number of years
in Romania, as you may have guessed from this accent, but I was
born in Ireland nearly twenty-five hundred years ago.”

My jaw dropped. I expected it to hit the floor, but
thanks to the functional structure of the human body, I was spared
that embarrassment. "You mean... You're two thousand and five
hundred years old?!" I managed to stammer out.

Elomina nodded like it was no big thing. "Nearly. My
birthday falls later in what everyone now calls November."

I was beyond shocked, but then my attention was drawn
by the feeling of being watched. I looked over to see Gavin staring
at me with those creepy red eyes of his. I narrowed my eyes and
shot him a rather nasty glare, half contemplating seeing if I could
shove a change down his throat from across the room. But then I
realized that it would make a huge mess and I didn't want anyone to
have to clean up that mess inside the house. It just wouldn't be
nice, and I had a feeling it would be poor Conner who'd be doing
the cleaning. Aloud, I half snarled, "Got a problem?"

His response was a slow smirk that chilled me to the
bone and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. His
words, however, were rather innocuous. "We do have a second
bathroom, you know. I could show you to it, if you'd like. Then you
won't have to wait around for Princess Jynxxie to get out of the
shower. And you'll gain the added perk of actually having some hot
water left, too." He added the last with a chuckle.

Every instinct in my body said it wasn't a good idea.
But I felt goddamned disgusting, and smelled even worse. And maybe
I was just letting his contacts creep me out more than I should
have. Everyone deserved a chance to prove that they weren’t a
serial killer, right? Right.

So what did I say at the prospect of a nice long, hot
shower? "Oh, God... That would be amazing."

Teigan shot a glare in Gavin’s direction, but said
nothing. He seemed like a cool customer, so I felt that his being
bothered by Gavin’s offer should have freaked me out at as well.
But before I had time to retract my previous statement, he hopped
from his seat on the back of the couch and tipped his head back
towards the hallway behind him, those cherry red curls of his
falling back perfectly into place. "Follow me, milady."

Chapter 13

The house was apparently much bigger than it had
appeared from the outside. It had looked sizable, but damn. This
place was easily an eight bedroom house, if not more. And there was
probably an attic and basement, to boot.

“This place was a falling down old multiple rental
when we got our hands on it,” Gavin said as he led me through the
dim hallways to a set of stairs. “We’ve got three half baths, but
only two full bathrooms,” he said back over his shoulder as he
walked up ahead of me.

I put my hand on the thick railing as I familiarized
myself with the distance between steps, glancing down at my feet so
I didn’t trip and fall up the stairs. Bashing your face off the
steps above you is never a picnic, no matter which way you look at
it. As we neared the top of the stairs, I saw that there weren’t
any windows in this part of the hallway. I have decent night
vision, nothing compared to the way I could see when I was looking
through Skadhi’s eyes, but it was almost pitch black up here and I
could barely see my hand a few inches in front of my face.

I knew Gavin wasn’t too far ahead of me because I
could still smell his cologne, something sweet and sugary and
almost feminine. In my distraction by the tasty confectionary scent
coming from the young man ahead of me, I missed a step and
scrabbled vainly trying to grab onto the railing to keep from
falling backwards. But, since Fate seems to have this deep seated
hatred for me, I started to totter backwards and saw in my mind’s
eye how much it was going to hurt and how much it would suck to
have my brains ooze all over that pretty hard wood floor
downstairs.

Gavin’s big hand grabbed my wrist and stopped my fall
just before my head could make that first crack like the shell of
an egg on the stairs. He righted me and pulled me up to stand on
the level floor at the top with him, yanking me up so quickly that
I stumbled into him. I bounced off his chest and his arm wrapped
around me before I could fall again. He was shorter than Jynxx, but
just as solid, if not more so because he wasn’t as tall. I
stiffened and froze, his laughter practically a purr against
me.

“You sure are an accident prone little thing, aren’t
you?”

My pride was wounded by that statement. “I’m not that
much shorter than you are, ya know.”

That smirk again, coupled with the glimmer of his red
eyes in the dark, made me want to jump down the stairs and take my
chances with permanent brain damage and likely more permanent
death. His voice was low and soft as he leaned in close enough that
his breath felt hot on my ear as he said, “Your heart’s hammering
in your chest like a bird trapped in a cage, Kacea… Do I frighten
you?”

Many responses came to mind. I settled for the truth.
“I’ve got a feeling you get off on fear, so we’re gonna lie and go
with a ‘no’ on that one, Gav. Mind showing me to that bathroom,
now?” My arms trembled ever so slightly in his embrace, but I
managed to keep the tremor from my voice.

His arm slid down around my waist, so smoothly it
shouldn’t have been possible, and he walked me to the room near the
end of the hall, reaching inside and flipping on the light switch.
The sudden brightness to my dilated pupils was like needles
stabbing through my retinas, and I almost hissed at it like a movie
vampire.

Gavin let go of me and I stepped into the now
tolerable light, seeing that there were already several towels and
a variety of soaps and shampoos and whatnot inside. I turned to
look back at him and he was leaned casually against the door frame,
one arm above his head like he was posing for a photo shoot. All
those cherry red curls fell fetchingly around his face, in such
stark contrast to his skin that was as white as Jynxx’s. If demons
were models, then sinners would ride.

“Can I help you? Or are you gonna scram so I can get
this blood off of me?”

“You sure you don’t want me to wash your back?” he
teased, no longer threatening but still trying to get a rise out of
me.

“Positive,” I said simply, and closed the door in his
face.

It was silent in the bathroom as I went to the tub,
cranking the faucet over to as hot as I thought I could bear.
Sighing, I wriggled and shimmied out of my grossly saturated and
sticky clothes. There probably wasn't any saving them, and I
realized I should have asked someone for something to wear once I
got out. Defeated the purpose and seemed a bit counter-productive
if all I did was get clean and change back into disgustingly filthy
clothes.

"What the hell ever..." I murmured to myself,
listening anxiously to the water spattering against the tile of the
rather fancy shower. It was done in some darkly green stone with
red flecks running through it. Pretty.