Wolves among men (4 page)

“
I promise.” I could tell that she
didn’t want to but it meant a lot to me that she had. I took a deep
breath and yawned.

“
Come on you, let’s get some
sleep. We’ll head north in the morning.”

“
Why north?” She asked as she
turned down the covers and crawled underneath. I climbed into bed
next to her and closed my eyes just as soon as my head hit the
pillow.

“
I don’t know, I guess it’s just a
feeling,” I groaned through my tired haze. I settled myself in and
for a moment my mind was quiet. It wasn’t long before a string of
doubts and fears kicked making it hard to feel like this was the
right thing to do but it wasn’t like I had a choice.

I felt the hold of sleep beginning to wash
over me as the sound of her soft snoring filled the room and
somewhere in the middle of it, my world went dark, giving way to
the nightmares that consumed my dreams.

Chapter Three

I woke to the sound of a strange tapping next
to me. I couldn’t place it and my eyes argued as I forced them to
adjust to the room around me. Rolling onto my back, I rubbed my
eyes and looked over at Cordillia as she sat cross legged on the
bed next to me and typed away on a small black laptop.

She stared intently at the flickering screen,
her eyes filled with wonder and confusion as she surfed quickly
from one page to the next. Images of monsters and pages full of
text filled her screen. I didn’t need a second glance to figure out
what it was that she was researching.

“
Morning sunshine.” She smirked
without even looking at me. I grumbled in response and sat up as
she continued her work.

“
Find anything interesting?” I
asked quietly as I stretched. My body ached in all the wrong places
but I had high hopes that a shower would fix that as it always did.
She shook her head and reached down, lifting a large paper cup and
handing it to me without so much as a glance. I hoped she was just
engrossed in her research as I took it from her and shot her a
questioning look.

“
I didn’t poison it.” She smiled,
looking over at me quickly. “It’s just coffee, I thought you might
want one.” she added as she reached down and grabbed her own. I
took in the smell as I pulled off the lid and took my fist sip, it
was enough to coax me out of sleep and bring me further into the
land of the living.

“
When did you leave?” I asked as
she returned her attention to a web page splattered with images of
various monsters.

“
I got back about twenty minutes
ago.” She shrugged. “I found your key near the broken table. By the
way,” She turned to me and took a sip from her own cup. “What are
we gonna tell the owner about that?” I thought for a moment and
smiled.

“He’ll figure it out on his own.”

“Really?”

“What?” I chuckled. “I’ll tip him.” She eyed
me for a second and shrugged.

“Setting a great example here,
Ethan.”

“Hey, you said yourself that you’re an adult.”
I smiled over the rim of my cup as I took another sip.

“So?” She smiled.

“So you should know better than to follow my
example.” Cordillia chuckled lightly and shook her head a she
placed her cup back down on the floor and went back to
work.

“How long was I out?” I asked curiously as I
leaned over to get a better look at what had her
attention.

“Mmmm...” She mulled for a second and looked
down to her laptop. “It’s about ten now so seven hours or
so.”

I nodded as I crossed my legs in front of me.
It was a little later in the day than I liked but it wasn’t like we
were in any kind of hurry. I couldn’t even explain why I was headed
north in the first place. Something just told me that I would find
others there, people who could help me.

“So why are we headed up north?” she asked
just as the thought had crossed my mind. “I can’t find anything
that suggests there are others like you there?”

“No werewolf match dot com then?” I smirked.
She smacked me in the arm and glared through a smile.

“Real funny, jackass, you know what I mean.”
she ended with a chuckle. She leaned down and grabbed her cup from
the floor and took a sip as she waited for me to give her an
answer.

“I can’t really tell you, I’m not sure myself.
I guess it’s just instinct.” She raised an eyebrow as she watched
me.

“So you’re telling me that we are headed on a
three day drive based on your instinct?” She stared at me for a
moment, placed her cup back down on the floor and turned her
attention back to the flickering screen in front of her.

“I guess that’s not the strangest thing that
has happened in the last little while then. My brother turning into
a creature right out of a horror movie takes the cake on that one,”
she spoke sarcastically as she typed away at the
keyboard.

“Hey,” I nudged her side. “Ouch.”

“What?” She smiled. “It’s true.” I shrugged as
I placed my cup on the floor and leaned toward her.

“What are you doing?” I asked as she continued
flipping through page after page.

“Well I figured that there has to be someone
out there who knows something. I mean, we know werewolves,” I
winced. I didn’t like that word, it sounded too Hollywood for my
tastes. “Sorry,” she added as she saw my reaction.

“It’s okay, its right isn’t it,” I stated more
than asked.

She shrugged and continued her theory, “Well
we know at this point that they exist, we can’t deny that. So there
has to be some information somewhere.” She placed her chin in her
hand and tapped a finger over her lips as she read a blue page on
the screen.

“How opposed are you to making a stop in
Oregon?” she asked without taking her eyes from the
page.

“I guess I’m not opposed to stopping anywhere.
It’s not like I’m in a rush.”

“Good!” She smiled before I even had the
chance to think. “There’s an Indian reservation there. They have a
lot of legends about what they call skin walkers maybe we can get
some information. Even if its legend it can’t hurt to know right?”
it took me a moment to realize that she was asking me a
question.

“Um, sure I guess you’re right,” I added
skeptically. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But she was clever,
more so than I gave her credit for and maybe just maybe she was
onto something. I could see the perks of having her with me
already. “Did you find anything else interesting?”

“Not really, just that there have been stories
of werewolves told all over the world for hundreds of years. But
they vary so much from decade to decade and country to country that
it’s kind of hard to find anything reliable.” I smirked.

“You’re looking for truth in bedtime
stories?”

“They’re not bedtime stories, Ethan. What
happened to you is real. You can’t tell me that we both had the
same hallucination about you turning into a six foot tall creature
of myth.”

“No I guess not.” I smiled and looked down as
I shook my head.

“You guess?”

“Alright, smart ass.” I smirked. “Go on, what
else did you find?”

“Well,” She sighed as she opened up a web page
and turned the computer toward me. “I found that back in the day,
like way back when, people used to hunt werewolves
regularly.”

“Let me guess, they were really just hunting
wolves?”

“Kind of.” There was a cringe in her words as
she reached down and grabbed her coffee cup from the floor as I
peered over the page in front of me. “Sometimes the hunters would
come back with wolf heads sometimes they would have the head of a
person.” I cringed slightly. “I know right.” She smiled as she saw
my reaction. “And it wasn’t limited to werewolves. Vampires,
ghouls, witches, basically anything that a culture or town couldn’t
understand they blamed on something monstrous and most of the time
they killed it for good measure or as a warning to others like
them.”

“That’s barbaric.” I shook my head.

“You know I thought so too but if you think
about it we kind of do the same thing now.”

“Okay now I can honestly say I don’t know what
you’re talking about.” I chuckled. “But I’ve never seen a group of
witch hunters in California.”

“Okay maybe it’s not the same way but people
still get killed for being supposed witches and we put serial
killers to death on a daily basis, maybe it was no different back
then they just had a different way of explaining why someone would
commit cannibalism or kill like fifty people for no reason. Each
culture has their own way of defining things.”

“Why are you not in college?” I smirked as she
finished her lecture.

“Because I’m busy helping my werewolf brother
keep his ass out of trouble.” I laughed loudly and leaned back
against the headboard.

“You seem to be taking this rather well,” I
added as I made myself comfortable.

“Really?” she snapped as she slammed her
laptop shut and placed it on the ground. “You think I’m taking this
well?”

“I’m about to get lectured aren’t
I?”

“Oh yeah,” She nodded as she turned herself to
face me. “First of all, the last month has been horrid, Ethan. You
took off without any kind of explanation and left me in the dark,
then I find out you’re holding up in some seedy hotel halfway out
of California and if that wasn’t a bad enough way to find out you
were telling the truth about leaving, I get here and you turn into
this....” She motioned wildly toward me before stopping to shake
her head. “this thing that shouldn’t even exist and now I don’t
know what to think.” I lowered my eyes and nodded
slightly.

“I don’t know how to take this, I don’t know
what to think all I know is that something really messed up
happened to you and I want to help you get to the bottom of
it.”

“I really appreciate that,” I
muttered.

“You would do the same for me.”

“Yeah.” I smirked. “I guess I would, wouldn’t
I.” I looked over at the clock and groaned, I wasn’t in a hurry but
my stomach was beginning to make itself known.

Reaching over, I ruffled her hair. “Don’t do
that,” she grumbled as she brushed my hand away and smoothed her
hair back down. I crawled off of the bed and my body groaned as I
stretched and cracked my back loudly. I walked over to the broken
table near the door, grabbed my bag out of the rubble and shuffled
through it until I found my wallet and began counting the money
that I had left.

“What are you doing?” she asked curiously as
she watched me from the foot of the bed.

“Counting my cash.”

“I can see that,” she mocked me. “Do you have
enough?”

“I should.” I shrugged and tossed my bag to
the ground. “Why?”

“If you don’t, I have some stashed away. I
brought my bank card just in case.” I smirked and shook my head.
It’s not like I didn’t deserve it but she gave me so little credit
sometimes.

“Come on, Cordy,” She glared at me. I wouldn’t
feel bad this time. She had it coming, “Give me a little credit at
least. I took care of you for four years by myself. I saved
whatever I could for you.” She blushed and smiled
apologetically.

“Alright and thank you. You didn’t have to do
that for me.” She stood up and trotted over to me, wrapping her
arms around my waist and pulling me tight. I hugged her back and
smiled as she let go and grabbed her bag from the floor, tossing it
onto the bed.

“I may be retarded sometimes but I try to make
sure I’m the only one that suffers for it,” I added as I finished
counting what I had.

“That’s why I love you.” She smiled as she
began pulling handfuls of clothes from her backpack and sifted
through them. She took a few pieces into the bathroom without
saying a word and shut the door gently behind her so I took the
opportunity to change myself. I pulled a clean shirt over my head
and wrestled it into place before making my way over to the large
oval mirror that sat just on top of the old oak dresser to smooth
out the rest of my appearance. Monster or not, it was no excuse to
stop caring about the little things that made someone
human.

I did the best I could to fix the tangled mess
of bedhead that covered my eyes and proudly gave up when it made no
attempt at cooperating with me. It wasn’t long before Cordillia
skipped out of the bathroom and back to her laptop. I glanced over
at her as I went to take my turn. She had traded her pink pajamas
for a yellow tank top and jeans. Her hair was once again tied back
into a ponytail and a subtle hint of light makeup lined her
face.