Need (19 page)

His voice comes out husky. “I’m going to kiss you now, okay?”

I don’t think I can speak anymore so I just nod.

“Okay.”

His lips warm against mine. My arms wrap around his shoulders and he presses me to him. I am warm here, safe. The backs of my knees tingle and I feel absolutely the opposite of empty. I feel like my life will burst open with good.

Finally I say, “I can’t believe you’re kissing me.”

He leans back and tucks his big hand along the side of my face. “What? Aren’t you kissing me back?”

I shrug. “I just thought…”

“Thought what?”

“That maybe you… Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t kiss girls. Do [_not _]get mad. That’s what Issie and Devyn said.”

“That I didn’t kiss girls?”

“Yeah. I thought it was because you were a pixie maybe. I saw gold dust on your jacket.”

“You what?” There’s an edge to his voice.

“I didn’t really think. I just sort of thought it.” I snuggle in, try to calm him down.

“When was there dust on my jacket?”

“After you helped me with my car.”

He nods. “That was after I went through the woods searching for him. I dropped my jacket before I turned. I probably picked it up then. I can’t believe you thought I was a pixie.”

“Only a little.” We sit there for a minute. “I think we should call Issie and Devyn and tell them.”

“That we made out?”

I elbow him. “No. The pixie/were stuff.”

I haul myself up off the couch and grab the phone off the brick hearth. It’s warm. I start pushing in numbers. “And then maybe we should all go out looking for Jay.”

The phone makes a funny noise. The display reads “no signal.”

“Great,” I say.

Nick gets up and grabs the other phone, listens. “The lines are out.”

I flip open the cell. “No signal.”

I pocket the phone.

Nick points outside. Blue lights fill the windows, flash through the windows. “The police are here.”

Two cops come to the door, both sheriffs deputies. Their hands are on their guns, like they’re ready for action.

“You Zara?” the taller one with the beard asks. His hair is red and short.

I nod.

“Sergeant Fahey,” he says, taking his hand off his gun and reaching out to shake mine. He sees Nick behind me and lets himself smile. “Hey, Nick.”

Nick nods and smiles.

“So, you found your way back,” Sergeant Fahey says, taking in the blanket around Nick’s waist. He nods to the other officer, who is beardless and really young looking. “Safe and sound. So… Deputy Clark and I don’t have to go searching.”

“Nope,” Nick says. “Sorry about that.”

“Sorry? It’s a good thing,” Deputy Clark says. Then he shivers in the cold.

“Oh, do you guys want to come in?” I ask.

“Nope. Thanks,” Sergeant Fahey says, all straight-backed and official, which makes Officer Clark grimace. “But your grandmother told us you heard a man in the woods saying your name?”

I nod. “And he tried to attack Nick.”

Sergeant Fahey’s eyes grow all big. “Really?”

Nick glares at me and then I realize that there’s no proof. His wound’s already healing. “It was nothing. I ran away.”

His mouth twitches. Running away is so the opposite of who he is. That lie is costing him.

Deputy Clark whips out a pad. “Can you describe him?”

Nick does. They come inside, sit on the couch, and ask questions. Deputy Clark asks a lot of questions, mostly I think because he doesn’t want to go back outside into the cold. Then they get up and head into the woods with these supercharged flashlights looking for the man.

We stand at the windows and watch the light flash through the darkness, searching.

“They’ll never find him,” Nick says.

“You don’t know that.”

“He doesn’t leave a trail.” Nick turns away and sits back on the couch.

I don’t join him. I just keep staring out at the night and the officers. My voice hitches inside my throat. “I thought you were gone.”

“I’m tougher than that.”

“Because you’re a were?” I close the curtain again.

“Yeah.”

“You got hurt even though you’re a were.” I turn around and look at him, so solid and healthy on the couch, so normal looking, in a ridiculously good-looking human kind of way.

“But you read what it said on that Web site. We’re the natural enemy of pixies.”

“Did you even know pixies existed until this week?”

He cringes, touches his shoulder. “No. But for the last month or so Devyn and I knew there was something out there, something bad. Issie too. We told Issie.”

“Your parents are weres too, right? But they’re out on some photo shoot somewhere.”

“Making a documentary.”

“And they just left you here alone. I thought wolves were pack animals, that they hang together.”

“They do, but my parents… We’ve got some interesting family dynamics going on.”

“How do you mean?”

“When the son of an alpha wolf, the leader, grows, he matures into alpha himself, and then there’s some tension because there’s just this genetic need to be alpha.”

“To be the one in charge. The hero.”

“Basically. But there can only be one alpha, so my parents have been taking an extended trip this year, and next year too, until I go to college. That way my dad and I don’t rip each other apart.”

“Because you’re both alpha?”

He nods.

“Wow. That’s weird.”

A truck rumbles into the driveway. I watch the police walk out of the woods and talk to Betty by her truck. Then they leave and she comes inside, all business.

She points at Nick. “Take off your shirt.”

He does.

“Why are you making him take off-,” I start to ask.

“She knows,” Nick interrupts. “She knows I’m a were.”

Betty nods, peers at the almost invisible wound. “Did you tell her?”

“That you’re a were too?” I flop down in the green leather chair by the door. “Yeah, he told me.”

“How is she taking it?” Betty asks Nick.

“Not well.”

She laughs. “Your wound looks fine. You did a good job, Zara.”

I manage to nod.

“The police haven’t found anything,” Betty says, putting some wood into the stove. It crackles. “But I didn’t expect them to. You can always hope, though.”

“We think he’s a pixie, Gram,” I sputter it out.

She nods. “You think right. Where’s the poker?”

I find it by the front door. “I took it, um, as a weapon.”

“Good idea,” she says, taking it from me and using it to shift the logs. A couple of embers fly into the room and wisp out. “I’ve called your mother. She wants you to come back home. She thinks it was a mistake to send you here.”

My throat tightens up and I flip my feet up under me, studying her face in the shadowy light of the fire. “What do you think?”

Nick answers for her. “It might be safer for you to go away.”

“I’m not going to run,” I say. “He’d find me anyway, right? He found me in Charleston. And he hasn’t attacked me or anything, not even when I was out there in the woods. It’s not like I’m in danger.”

“You don’t know that, Zara,” Betty says.

“But she sent me here because she thought I’d be safer, safer with you,” I say to Betty. “Because you’re a were. And if Nick’s a were too I must be doubly safe, right?”

“Hopefully,” she says.

“I’m not going.” I stand up and walk next to her, look up at her. “You won’t make me go back.”

“No,” she says. “I won’t. But it’s dangerous here. We don’t know how to stop him.”

Nick stands up, puts his arm around me. “We’ll figure something out.”

Nick stays the night. There’s no school the next morning, and when I wake up it’s already day and white snow light fills up the room. Everything seems so much safer, less scary.

Nick walks down the hall, peeks in, and realizes I’m awake. He smiles. “You sleep forever.”

“I was tired,” I say, stretching and worrying about my hair and my breath and if there’s crud in my eyes.

Then I notice something. “You have pants on.”

“I keep an extra pair in the
MINI
.” He comes in and sits on the edge of my bed. “Disappointed?”

“A little.”

I sit up against the headboard and rub my eyes. “What’ve you been doing?”

“I called Devyn and Issie. They’re trying to figure out if they can come over. Devyn’s parents have a snowmobile but they don’t want him on it because of the whole injury thing. Betty went in to work in that kick-ass truck of hers.”

“Kick ass?”

“It is. Have you looked at her tires?”

“You have a
MINI
Cooper.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good truck.” He smiles and scruffs my hair like he’s my big brother or something, which is not cool. “Anyway, I made pancakes. There’s some in the oven, and I’ve been reading old Stephen King books.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea, scaring yourself more?”

“I’m hard to scare.”

“So tough.”

He laughs. I laugh too and then I smile. “Did you really make pancakes?”

He grabs my hand and yanks me out of bed. “Come on.”

“Wow, you can really wolf it down,” I say.

His fork pauses in midair. “That’s original.”

I start giggling. “I thought so.”

His dimples show. “You’re sure putting it away.”

“You make good pancakes.”

“Thank you.”

“I think you should move in with us and just make pancakes all the time.”

“Is Betty that bad a cook?”

“Yeah, and I’m not that much better.”

“Maybe I should stay here until, you know, things settle down or-”

My stomach pierces me and I cut the pancake without looking up at him. “I’m not going back to Charleston.”

“It would be safer.”

“Only for me. He’d be picking off guys until he got a queen. I can’t let that happen.”

“It’s not your battle.”

“Right.” I bring my fork to my mouth, let it hover there, and really look at him. He is so charged up, so strong, but he’s still made of skin and muscle. He can still get hurt. “Then whose battle is it? Just yours? Because that is not going to happen. You are not Mr. Save the World Solo Style, okay?”

He dumps some more syrup on his pancakes and then cringes, like talking is painful. “Okay. Fine. It’s our battle. All of us.”

“The syrup’s dripping on the book.” I reach out and move the syrup. That’s when I see the cover. _”Skeleton Crew _?”

“Stephen King.”

My heart stops beating and my brain makes a connection that a good brain should have made ages ago. “I know it’s Stephen King. It’s just… There’s a story in here.”

l flip to it and stop, just staring at the title.

“What?”

” ‘Here There Be Tygers.’ ”

He pulls his chair closer to the table, closer to me, and leans forward, waiting.

“My dad wrote that in the library book: ‘Don’t fear. Here there be tygers, I57.’ ”

“I remember. I thought Devyn or Betty or someone said it was some science fiction guy’s short story. He didn’t say Stephen King, did he?” Nick’s words fly against my neck skin with his breath. It’s so hard to concentrate.

“It was Ray Bradbury, I think. And no. But two people could have used the title.” I get to page I57.

“Zara?”

I twist the book around so we are both reading it at ninety degrees. “Look.”

“He wrote in it,” Nick says squinting. Maple syrup smell hits my cheek. “Can you read it?”

“It’s faded.”

“Why did he use pencil?”

“He always used pencil. He was quirky,” I say. I lift the book closer to my face. “It says: [_Defenses: Weres, Iron. Prob-lem: If the need becomes too great, they feed in daytime. Christine. _]Great. Nice and cryptic, Dad. And he underlined this line in the story all about tigers looking hungry and vicious.”

“Who is Christine?”

“Another Stephen King book. The one about the car, I think.”

Nick slams his chair back. “Read it again. I saw that book upstairs.”

I read it again, yelling it so he can hear me. He’s fast, werewolf fast, and he’s up and down the stairs in a couple of blinks, holding another Stephen King book in his hand.

“He says they can come in the daytime when the need gets too great,” he says. “We should call Betty.”

“Let me see that book first.” I reach out. He gives it to me. I flip it open and a piece of paper falls to the floor.

Nick scoops it up and hands it to me before I can react. My hands shake as I unfold it. “It could be nothing, a report card or a note to my mom…”

“Read it, Zara,” Nick’s voice gentles out in the kitchen. It feels like even the air waits.

I read.

[_”If you have found this it means that the need is back. He says he doesn’t want the need. He says he fights against it and I’d like to believe it, but does it even matter? When he loses control over his need he loses control over his court, and they demand blood and soul to satisfy their cravings, cravings they have when the king comes of age and needs a queen. Mom, you know why we ran. I could only let her sacrifice so much and his anger at our deal was so great. We were afraid to trust. I am so sorry it was not enough _].” I look up at Nick. “Do you know what this means?”

“Not really. Is that all?”

“No, there are a couple more lines,” I say and keep reading. “
You’ve got to be warned that when the desire becomes too great, nighttime does not contain him. He will prowl in the sun like the others. Iron makes them weak. They are fast, but we are faster, and we too can kill. That’s our only hope. Other Shining Ones are our only hope.”

I fold the paper back up and place it next to my fork. Then I think better of it and tuck it into my sweatshirt. “My father wrote that.”

Nick nods. “They can come in the day.”

“If the need is great.”

“I’m not taking chances about that,” he says. “I’m calling Betty.”

I grab his arm, stop him. “Nick?”

He brings his face down to my level. His eyes are all concerned and sweet. “What?”

“I feel funny.”

“It’s okay to be scared, Zara. But I’ll call Betty and we’ll keep you safe. It’s okay.”