Page 63 of Wind with a Chance of Wolfsbane

I would have protested, but she was right. The guy was attractive. “Go on. Tell me more.”

She snorted. “Anyway, things got a little hot and heavy, and from my angle on my back on the big rock, I noticed the cave opening.”

My ability to refrain from judgment faded quickly. “From your angle on your back?”

“Sue me for being horny later,” she snapped. “Be happy about the spot I found now.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t be boring, Willa,” she retorted.

“Yes, because not making out with a guy who is a douchebag in a secluded area of the woods, miles from people, on a big rock is totally boring,” I returned.

She nodded. “Glad you’re finally getting it.”

Something ran across my foot, and I looked down quickly to see a large black bug. I proceeded to leap away from it and do a full-body shudder at the idea that it had been on me.

Mina stomped on it and grunted before she headed farther into the cave, leaving me no choice but to follow. “Relax. It was a cricket.”

“Excuse me if I hate bugs and am still a little jumpy about being in caves,” I said with a groan as I stepped over a spider that was running in the direction of the opening of the cave. Made me wonder if the insects knew something we didn’t and if we should be going in that direction too. “Our history with caves is stellar.”

Mina glanced over her shoulder at me as she went deeper into the cave. “Yeah, I’m aware of how non-stellar our history with caves has been, and it’s hard to forget how much you hate bugs when you scream bloody murder whenever one is near you. I’d have thought a badass wolf-shifter wouldn’t freak out over a cricket.”

A smile touched my lips. “If we meet a badass wolf-shifter, we can ask their thoughts on crickets.”

“Willa, you are totally badass,” she said. “And you can shapeshift into a wolf.”

“We really need to work on what you see as badass,” I supplied, knowing she was trying to hype me up. “I don’t really call needing to be shackled several nights a month being a badass. I call it being weak.”

“Willa,” she said with a grunt.

While the ordeal in Romania had left her with superstrength, speed, and agility, it left me needing a flea and tick treatment. “I have zero control over my shifting. If I get angry or too worked up, I change. When it’s close to the full moon, I change. That isn’t badass. It’s scary.”

That was why we were in the cave to start with. The full moon was tomorrow, and we needed to be sure I was secured for the next few nights to avoid something bad happening—like me eating people. I needed to be tucked away from the general public in a spot where they wouldn’t easily hear or see me.

Mina had spent the last several years doing everything she could to help me learn to control what now lived in me. She’d put her life on hold for me, and no amount of me telling her to stop was going to change that. I knew her actions were born out of a mix of guilt and love. She blamed herself for what happened to me.

Like she’d been the one to bite me and turn me into a monster.

I hated seeing her beat herself up over something that couldn’t be changed. There was no way to turn back the hands of time, and even if we could, Helen would have found another way to try to get rid of us. That way might have worked. Who knows? We might have actually gotten lucky, considering the alternative was death.

“Hey, thanks for finding this for me,” I said as I touched her arm, patting it lightly. I knew our options for places to put me for the night were limited. The last thing she wanted to do was stick me in a cave, but with the full moon fast approaching, we had little choice.

We were out of good places to secure me that were far enough from people that I wouldn’t be heard and where no one would accidentally wander in. Happening upon me while I was in wolf form would put the person on the menu.

The knowledge that I’d eaten some sweet, furry little woodland creature had already been more than I could handle. Eating a person?

Nope.

I could not deal with that.

ChapterEighteen

Jonathan

Kellan glancedaround before speaking again. “Jonathan, I know you’ve already told us all that Stoker’s book took a lot of liberties with the truth, but in the book, it mentions you with the three brides of Dracula.”

Jonathan’s throat constricted, and his lightheartedness faded away. He coughed and cleared his throat. So far, his stroll through campus with Kellan had dredged up nearly every painful event from his past. First his brothers, and now the Weird Sisters. “Actually, in the book, Stoker never calls them Dracula’s brides. No one does. And they don’t call themselves that either.”

---