Page 17 of Scapegoat

So this was what a party was like.

People talked about them all the time at school, but I was only ever allowed to go when Anna was in tow, so I’d never experienced this. Drinks brought over for me when I finished mine, then plates of food. Then when I was done with that, another set of hands dragging me up onto the dance floor, the couple of beers I’d had helping me to lose my inhibitions. I felt like I was caught up in the bubble of happiness, one that would never pop.

“I need to go to the loo,” I told Jayden as the last song ended.

“Kaia, wait…”

I just tossed him a smile over my shoulder, then made a beeline for the Portaloos that had been set up on one end of the paddock. I strode across the grass towards it, every step feeling I was light as a feather, and found that as I walked up there wasn’t even a line. The portable toilet I went into was clean, had toilet paper and everything, so I was thinking my luck was up when I stepped outside.

Then I ran into them.

“Hey, baby…”

Stanthorpe girls didn’t mix with human boys. Not all of us would end up in relationships with more than one man, but it happened often enough that we kept away from humans. They didn’t understand our wolves, the fact we were drawn to one or more people who were our fated mates. They didn’t get that our love was written in the stars, instead they judged us and thought us ‘easy’.

“Seems like you’re real popular with those boys,” the guy said with a sneer on his face as he looked me up and down, his buddies cackling like a pack of hyenas. “If you’re gonna spread the love around, you can send some of it over here.”

The wolf flexed inside me. She was close, so close. In her mind, these monkey-brained idiots didn’t stand a chance against us and she was right. Or she would have been if I had gone through my first shift already. Shifting with humans around was strenuously discouraged, but if our backs were against the wall… But I hadn’t had my first shift yet, and that’s when I realised why we’d been warned about human towns, about human boys. They looked me over right now like I was a piece of meat, one for them to tear apart. They didn’t know me or my family. I had no value to them apart from what they could do to me. So they shifted closer—

“And what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Jayden’s voice was a low growl, full of threat. In Stanthorpe, anyone else would’ve stood down, backed the fuck off, knowing what was coming if they didn’t. But these boys? They didn’t have the sense god gave a cat, so they kept on coming, facing Jay off like a pack of aggressive dogs.

But Jayden was no dog.

I saw their sneers falter when they saw the silver flash of Jay’s eyes, knowing somehow, deep inside, that what they faced wasn’t another guy. No, he was the thing that lurked in the dark, setting their teeth on edge, sure that something was tracking them from the shadows, even if they couldn’t see it.

“Don’t want to share your little slut?” the leader asked and that was his first mistake. He might’ve got somewhere with Xavier, maybe even Atlas, but not Jay. He was an act first, think later kind of guy and that was exactly what he did.

The choked off sound of a man’s windpipe being squeezed was evidence of the guy’s second mistake. He wasn’t fast enough to see Jay’s strike coming, so he had no way to deflect it. Instead his hands clawed uselessly at the fingers that closed tighter around his throat.

“Jay—” I said.

“Don’t go making the mistake in thinking the three of you can take me on,” he told the other guys who milled around, torn between the idea of attacking or running the fuck away. Jay threw the first guy away so violently he went sailing through the air, to land like a sack of potatoes some distance away. “I can take you all out, no problems.”

“And he’s got two brothers at his back.”

We turned around to find Xavier and Atlas standing there, staring the remaining guys down.

“Fucking Stanthorpe pricks,” one of them spat.

“Fucking Granville mouth breathers,” Xavier shot back with a cock of his eyebrow. “So you gonna have a go, now the numbers are more even, or what?”

Atlas suddenly lunged forward a step at the Granville guys, chuckling as he psyched them out, making them totally lose their cool bro stances. But that seemed enough to derail the stand-off, and they all turned tail, muttering between themselves as they grabbed their buddy and hauled him to his feet.

“I thought I said eyes on Kaia all night,” Xavier growled at Jayden.

“She just went to the toilet,” he explained. “I was talking to Jacko and…” Jay sighed, then turned to me. “Sorry, Kai.”

I flung myself at Jay, not seeing if he was going to catch me, but somehow knowing he would. My arms went around his neck and he pulled me to him, holding me tight, keeping me close, and then his lips brushed my ear.

“What brought this on?” he asked, his voice a low buzz in my ear. “Because whatever it was, I’d have done it a long time ago if it got me this.”

I pressed my lips to his to shut him up, but as soon as our mouths touched, something else took over. A frank need to explore every inch of his lips, his tongue, to dig my fingers into the nape of his neck before Xavier pulled his brother away.

“Do we all get kisses like that?” he asked in a teasing voice, but there was a glittering intensity to his eyes that made it seem like it wasn’t a joke. “No? Well, how about a triple chocolate sundae from Melva’s?”

I groaned then. Melva’s was a twenty-four-hour truck stop in Granville, but unlike a lot of places like that, it wasn’t to serve pies that had just been sitting in the bain-marie for way too long, breeding bacteria. Melva was a well-rounded older woman who prided herself on the quality of her food. If I was with the guys, we always dropped in when we were going through town.

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