chapter 6
Come on, get your coat,” I said, grabbing my own and my bag.
“Why?”
“We’re going out. Quietly—don’t wake up Cormac.”
He went to the bedroom and came back with a jacket. He looked sullen, but didn’t argue. That
scared me a little. Was he really buying into the whole alpha female thing? I thought I’d been bluffing.
“Where are we going?” he finally asked when we were on the road.
“Into town to buy groceries. You guys are eating all my food.” That wasn’t all; I’d put the bag of barbed-wire crosses in the car. I planned on getting rid of them.
“Why do I have to come along?”
“Because part of being a werewolf is learning how to function in the real world. It’s a little freaky at first. McDonald’s will never smell the same.”
He wrinkled his nose and made a grunt of disgust.
“Also, I’m not going to leave you alone and let you kill yourself just to spite me.”
“I made a deal with Cormac. I’ll stick it out through the full moon. I won’t go back on that.”
I sighed. “You’re doing it again. You’ll stick it out for Cormac, but not for me. I think you just don’t like me.”
He paused to consider. “You know you’re crazy?”
“I’m not the one who wants my best friend to shoot me in the head!”
He turned away to stare out the window.
I’d been through what he was going through now. I’d awakened after being attacked by a werewolf, with my whole world turned upside down, and I hadn’t wanted to die. I hadn’t even thought about it beyond the vague, unserious half urges that came with depression. I had a life and I wanted to keep it, lycanthropy or no. What was wrong with Ben?
Nothing was wrong with Ben. He was right to be afraid, to want to avoid it. This was about me. I was the problem. Ben knew what was coming, because he’d seen what it did to me. I couldn’t blame him at all.
I said, “I’m a werewolf—am I so terrible that you’d rather kill yourself than be that?”
“No.” He glanced at me, and his look was sad. “You’re not terrible at all. You’re…” He turned back to the window without finishing.
I’m what? I almost yelled at him to make him finish. But what would that get me? An answer I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. You’re not terrible, you’re… confused.
I pulled into the driveway of Joe and Alice’s store and parked. It was midday, but we were the only ones there. Small favors. I’d already gotten out of the car when Ben said, “I’ll just wait here.”
I put my hands on my hips. “That defeats the whole point of you coming along. And I need you to help carry groceries.”
He lurched out of the car, slouching in his coat like a sullen teenager, his hands shoved in the pockets. I walked across the dirt parking lot, and Ben fell into step beside me. Halfway to the front door, though, he paused and looked up, turning his nose into the faint breeze. His brow furrowed, faintly worried, faintly curious.
I could filter it all out, the hundred smells that I encountered every day: spilled oil, gasoline, asphalt, the garbage Dumpster, drying paint from the shed around the corner, somebody’s loose dog, a feral cat, the earth and trees from the edge of the woods. A normal human wouldn’t be able to differentiate them at all. Ben was smelling it all for the first time.
“You okay?” I asked.
After a moment, he nodded. Then he said, “What do I smell like to you?”
I shrugged. I’d never tried to describe it before. “Now? You smell like a werewolf. Human with a little bit of fur and wild thrown in.”
He nodded, like that sounded familiar—he could smell me now, after all. Then he said, “And before?”