Page 75 of Wind with a Chance of Wolfsbane

Hanging his head in defeat, Jonathan released an agonizing cry that quickly turned into a howl as he lost control and began to shift forms.

PartIII

Now

“There is a reason why all things are as they are.”—Bram Stoker,Dracula, 1897

ChapterTwenty-Two

Willa

Grimm Cove,South Carolina, present day…

I sat in my SUV, which was parked off to the side of the road, in front of a huge sign welcoming people to the town of Grimm Cove. I’d been doing as much for the past ten minutes, trying but failing to gather the courage to proceed over the town’s border. The last time I’d been within the city limits had been eighteen years ago when I’d been in college.

Back when I’d foolishly believed Mina and I had made it through the worst years of our lives and were starting anew. That we were building a foundation for our future. I’d had no way of knowing those years, while hard, were only the beginning.

A strange mix of anxiety and excitement filled me. The last time Mina and I had been in Grimm Cove, it had ended with us basically being beamed away by some strange white light right before we ended up in a tiny town about an hour from Chicago. We still weren’t sure what had happened or how it was that we’d been whisked off in an instant to an entirely new location, but our lives had been anything but normal, so we understood anything was possible.

After the incident that Mina and I had taken to calling Grimm Cove Armageddon, we’d tried multiple times to come back to town, but each attempt ended in disaster. It was as if Fate was mocking us, all while making sure we didn’t set foot within the city limits.

Heck. Entering the state of South Carolina had even proven to be an issue.

Whatever had been preventing us from returning to the state had obviously run its course, seeing as how I was in South Carolina now. I could only hope that entering Grimm Cove would be as easy.

My chest had been tight for the past sixteen hours. It had started when I’d been in New Haven, Connecticut, in the shower at the hotel, minding my own business, and a random vision had struck me. The last time I’d had a vision had been twenty-two years ago, on the night I’d been turned into a werewolf.

The new vision was of the house that Mina and I had lived in while we’d been in college. Images of the old Victorian that had once been a funeral home had come to me so fast and so vividly that I’d fallen to the floor and lay there with water hitting me as I shook.

Flashes of the home and horrific events happening in it, as well as near it, had besieged me. Like before, when I’d had the vision in the cave, the vision had come with sound effects. I could hear snarls, shouts, and screams, as well as smell what could only be described as roadkill.

It had felt real and had scared the hell out of me.

It was a warning. I just hoped that I wasn’t too late to help a woman I’d seen as family at one point in my life.

Astria Franks.

The very same roommate Mina and I had planned to reveal our secrets to in college. I’d seen her in the vision, but not as she’d been—in her early twenties with short purple hair. No. This vision had shown me Astria, older with long, dark hair and tattoos covering her arms. If that wasn’t enough of a change, the vision showed her battling the same stitched-together zombie-like creatures I’d seen eighteen years ago in Grimm Cove. The monsters had been swarming around her.

There had been a plasma ball of light, and in the center of it had been someone I’d met a few times while in college, Astria’s cousin Demi. She, too, was older in the vision. Some guy who was jacked, with a clean-shaven head and symbols tattooed and burned into his skin, was hurting her with what looked like purple electricity. I’d even seen Astria’s aunt in the vision as well. Rachael had been kicking ass and taking names.

That wasn’t all I’d seen, but it was all I’d told my sister about when she’d found me on the shower floor, jerking in pain, my wolf trying to break free as pain consumed me.

Had Mina heard everything I’d seen in the vision, she would have panicked and done something rash. Kind of like jumping in the car and driving straight here the minute she had been left alone in the hotel room to rest—as I’d done.

I’d seen far more than just stitched-together monsters in my vision. I’d seen wolves, vampires, zombie-like things, ghouls, and the same monks in robes with symbols on their heads that we’d encountered more than once in our lives. As if that wasn’t all bad enough, I’d seen other people too. Ones we’d hoped never to see again.

Helen, Lester, and the black wolf from Romania.

My hands shook as I lifted them from the wheel and tried to muster the courage to start the car and cross the border into Grimm Cove. I didn’t know what the vision meant, but I was unwilling to believe that whatever it was that caused it to start with would show me that I’d be powerless to stop it. Something that, by this point, might have already happened.

“No,” I said, shaking my head and gripping the wheel once more. “Astria is alive. She’s okay.”

Saying the words out loud did nothing to alleviate the panic welling up in me.

After I’d told Mina about Astria and the monsters, she’d tried to rationalize it away, at first blaming the vision on stress and then on a lack of sleep on my part. Then she’d done her absolute best to explain it away because we’d been in New Haven to visit Yale University.

Mina was under the belief that being near another university and under a lot of stress had been too much for my system. She was quick to point out the fact that my wolf had been giving me issues for months now. That I’d gone from finally having control over the beast to struggling with it seemingly daily anymore, and I’d had the perfect storm of events to trigger ahallucination.

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