Page 12 of Werewolves Don't Howl
He frowned and then stole the half-eaten brownie out of my hand and took another bite out of it.
I gasped. “What are you doing? You can’t eat something I’ve had my mouth on! Do you want to become a furry, vicious monster?” I lunged for the brownie, but he side-stepped, blocking me with one forearm. His forearm was very well-muscled.
“Do you consider yourself a member of the pack?” he asked, ignoring my outrage.
“I consider you a lunatic. Give that back! I’ll give you a nice new one, okay?”
He glanced down at the brownie as I lunged for it. He blocked me almost negligently, putting his hand on my face like that was civilized. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Yes,” I snarled, pulling back and scowling at him, at the brownie, at his mouth, all of those things pinging against my werewolf nerves like a rubber band. “I’m part of the Singsong pack. I go to some of the potlucks. Max insisted that I have good relations with the wolves.”
“Not the runs?” he asked, holding the dangerous brownie negligently in two graceful fingers.
“No. I’ve never shifted in front of them.” I moved as fast as I could, channeling the werewolf in order to snatch it, but instead of a brownie, I caught his fingers. He’d stuck the whole thing in his mouth like a completely careless imbecile.
I sputtered as I stared at him, watching him chew for an eternity, while my heart raced from horror and excitement. It would be nice to have a werewolf elf in Singsong. I’d never met one before. But what if elves were almost as difficult to turn as Gnomes? Also, it would ruin his life, his ambitious goals, his destiny.
He smiled without a trace of chocolate in his teeth. “Interesting. Why don’t you want anyone to see your wolf?”
I wrung my hands and stared at him, half-expecting him to sprout furry ears. “You shouldn’t be so careless with your happiness and well-being.” I wanted to howl. I was so upset about the idea of him losing his whole world like I had done. Why didn’t he care?
“That was an evasion.”
I said, “No, it’s called having the proper perspective. Asking about silly things instead of being careful with your health is absolutely horrifying. You need to be properly horrified at the thought of turning. It’s like you’ve read a romance novel about shifters and now have no sense of the very real danger it poses to your life. As a werewolf, you’d lose everything you have and become something completely different. All of your friends, family, you’d lose them all. Elves don’t exactly favor werewolves.”
“No? I believe you are under seriously strange misapprehension. You clearly don’t mingle with your kind at all,” he said, giving me a look that was more than slightly disapproving.
“Elves aren’t my kind,” I said, crossing my arms and feeling like a teenager. But he was so frustrating! “Aren’t you worried about being turned?”
He shook his head. “No. I’d be very difficult to turn. Also, people don’t get turned from eating brownies, or even kissing a werewolf. It has to be a bite, usually more than a few. Are you close to biting me?”
“As a matter-of-fact, yes. I’d like to bite you for being so stupid. I wasn’t ever bitten, but I still got infected. You think you know so much about werewolves when you have no idea.”
He studied me. “I’ve worked with a few. Were you infected from eating something a werewolf had bitten?”
“I don’t know. Probably not, but that doesn’t mean…”
He put a brownie in my mouth and then turned towards the fridge to get out a lumpy disgusting shake the color of rotting produce and pour it into his glass while I chewed. Mm. Minty. “Libby wouldn’t have brought you here if she didn’t think I could handle it.”
“But Libby didn’t know I was a werewolf,” I mumbled.
“No? Are you sure? Why else would you want to know about werewolf law?”
He was probably right. How many other people knew what I was but were too polite to mention anything? Well, that was actually really encouraging. If people were kind and polite, what did I have to be worried about? Other than my parents? And Max. And now the Alta. Sigh.
“Are you sure you weren’t bitten? Do you remember what happened before you turned?” he asked before taking a long swallow of his disgusting lumpy shake.
I frowned, recalling the night before everything had gone to pieces. It had been a college party where all my friends were decompressing from the last week of finals. At the Songbird Academy for Fine Arts and Sciences, they had the most beautiful parties, filled with elves and fairies, with humans in the mix. It took place in the green, surrounded by flowers and lit with sparkling magic, while they crafted the food to make all of your worries disappear. My mother wouldn’t ever have allowed me to go to a college with werewolves. Not that they were forbidden, but the application process weeded out anyone who wouldn’t flourish, which included everyone on the dark side of the spectrum. Like me now.
I shook my head. “There weren’t any werewolves at the school. The only people at the party were elves and fairies. I must have gotten infected during the previous week, but I was busy taking tests. I did fall asleep in the woods one afternoon. That must have been when I got infected by a random, passing feral werewolf.” I frowned, because to sleep through being bitten by a werewolf sounded impossible.
“It sounds like a great mystery. Tell me about the party.”
I eyed him. He looked like a sculpture, studying me with those soulful eyes, cupping his glass of noxious health while he waited for me to explain. “The party was beautiful.” Like him. “Elves were there from all around the country. My friends Forsythia and Nala left me at the desserts table. I was trying to find them when my stomach started cramping, the music became impossibly loud, and the people incredibly irritating.”
“You don’t remember any specifics between your friends abandoning you and your illness?”
I shrugged. “I asked some people if they’d seen my friends. Mr. Clay was there, and he said that he’d seen them at the light drinks bar flirting with a very handsome elf, but when I asked that elf, he hadn’t seen them. After that is when I got sick. Right. Because the pretty elf grabbed my arm and asked if I was all right.” He’d been very pretty, and I’d been so embarrassed at the thought of throwing up on him in the middle of all that perfect beauty.
