Page 34 of Wind with a Chance of Wolfsbane

“Yes,” said Jonathan, a strange sense of dread starting in the pit of his stomach. The feeling had come out of nowhere and was so jarring that, for a moment, he expected the enemy to come bursting through the door. When that didn’t happen, he composed himself, remembering he’d been talking to Dwayne about Marjorie. “You do need to fix things with your wife. Perhaps some flowers and maybe a necklace?”

Reggie and Leo began to offer ideas as to how Dwayne could get back into his mate’s good graces. Dwayne spoke with them briefly and then left the conference room. The men continued to talk about ways to get back into a woman’s good graces as if any of them were actually mated to know.

ChapterTen

Willa

“Mina,we should head back to the inn,” I uttered in a hushed murmur, uncertain of what lurked in the vicinity of my voice. My glasses kept sliding down my nose, and each time I pushed them back up, the broken arm wobbled and threatened to give out. “I think the map might be bogus.”

I resisted the urge to also point out the fact that she was the worst map reader ever. She’d walked us in circles more than once.

“So bogus that it’s drawn in your sacred book?” she countered.

“My book isn’t sacred,” I shot back as we walked deeper into the woods, no longer on an actual path. At this point, we were simply walking where Mother Nature permitted. And so far, Mother Nature had let me walk through not one but two massive spiderwebs. I’d had to take ten-minute breaks to scream and spin around, convinced spiders were on me, only for Mina to assure me they weren’t.

Knowing her, she lied, and I had two spiders roaming over my body. I was less than thrilled with her and the entire hunt. “And I don’t mean the map isn’t real, I just don’t think it leads to anything amazing.”

We had yet to check the area on the map circled in my book. It was the farthest from the inn, and we’d been steadily working our way in that direction for hours. What was in our flashlights was all that was left of the batteries Mina had packed. She had matches, and we could probably put together some sort of torch, if need be, but the whole idea of wandering through a dark forest, at night, with a torch as a guiding light made the novel that I’d crammed into Mina’s backpack of doom for safekeeping seem a bit too real.

Did I want to bump into a hot guy in my dreams that my subconscious invented and who represented Jonathan Harker?

Yes.

Did I want to bump into monsters?

Nope.

That was Mina’s deepest wish. Not mine.

My flashlight sputtered. I slapped it against the palm of my hand, and it came on fully once more. It only had to last a bit longer because the sun would be up soon. We’d been walking for that many hours.

As much as I really did want to see what might be there, the dread that continued to fill me with each step we took was fast winning out. “Let’s head back to the inn.”

“Murrays aren’t quitters, Willa,” Mina snapped.

Oh yay. Helen’s influence was showing in my sister again.

“There is only one circle left on the map. The one that lines up with your book,” she said, her voice low as if she was worried about what might be lurking in the shadows.

It wasn’t as if we’d see a threat coming. The forest’s thick canopy of trees blotted out the moonlight. Our flashlights were basically useless, as they tried but failed to make a dent in the blanket of darkness all around us.

I really thought I was conditioned for creepy. The forest in Romania was making me rethink that. The place was downright eerie. The trees had twisted, knotted trunks that stretched up from the shadowy depths of the forest floor. Their spindly limbs extended skyward as if to block out the moonlight.

Super creepy.

I wasn’t sure if I was more scared that there might really be demons or other supernaturals out here or if the very real threat of bears living in the area was causing me to panic. Nowhere in Mina’s backpack of doom was bear spray. Somehow, I didn’t think holy water or a wooden stake would do much to repel a bear. It would make a vampire think twice, but a huge brown bear, nope.

My backpack, which was a quarter of the size of hers, held some scrap pieces of paper I’d been writing on, the pocket watch I’d ended up with, and my copy ofDracula. That was hardly going to do anything to keep us safe.

At the start of the expedition, I’d walked a few feet behind Mina, grumbling the entire way about wanting to be in bed, not traipsing around the woods at night. But as we’d progressed deeper into the forest, and as each red circle on the map managed to be more off-putting than the last, I’d found myself closing the gap between us, walking nearly arm-in-arm with her.

She’d not protested, almost as if she, too, felt a sense of impending doom. More than once, she’d snatched hold of my hand, which didn’t exactly bode well for the whole wanting-to-be-a-demon-hunter thing. I refrained from commenting.

Something creaked and then cracked off to our right.

We grabbed for one another, each aiming our flashlights in the direction the noise had originated from. My anxiety levels were through the roof as my mind conjured images and scenarios involving all the horrible ways in which we could meet our end.

Howls cut through the night, causing Mina and me to slam into each other in an attempt to get even closer. We had no business being out at night in a region where trained professional hunters had been looking for something supernatural and evil. We should have stayed at the crappy inn and not gone off on our own. We had nothing to prove to anyone. So what if my book had the same map in it? It wasn’t worth dying over.

---