The Innocent: Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Index

Chapter 3

Kyla

The thud that filled the room as my back hit the sparring mat was so heavy that Camille paused from her sit-ups. Luna was standing near my legs in the same spot she’d thrown me down from, so I kicked them up and wrapped them around her hips. I used that grip to bring her down, but the moment her shoulders hit the floor, she somersaulted backward. It maneuvered her from the grip of my legs so she could bounce back onto her feet, and I scrambled up before she could try and pin me.“That’s it,” Camille said, abandoning her exercise and standing. “I’m calling it. We’ll never run at this rate. You tied.”“You’re such a downer,” Luna complained, and I laughed because we had been sparring for a while. Matches between Luna and I could go on forever.While we settled out of our attack stances, there were footsteps from the door of the gym room in the Pack house. Will, Luna’s lanky blond boyfriend, stopped in the doorway in his workout clothes and with his headphones on. “Oh,” he mumbled, “never mind,” and immediately turned to leave.Camille looked from the empty exit to Luna, asking, “What was that about?” Luna mouthed a silent sentence like she didn’t want Will to hear. “What?” She mouthed it again. “Say it out loud.”“We got in a fight last night,” she repeated.“What about?” I asked, taking off my sparring gloves and throwing them into a corner.“College,” she answered, doing the same with her gloves. “He got his acceptance letter from MIT and I wouldn’t consider going to school somewhere nearby.”“Why not?” Camille asked.“Because I don’t want to,” she said, and lowered her voice in case he was still close enough to the room to hear, “it’s clear across the country and I’m not as invested as he is.”“So what’ll happen?” I asked. “You gonna break up?”Luna shrugged. “I told him he could decide. We can stay together till he leaves, but I don’t want a long distance thing.”“What’s the point of staying together then?” Camille asked.“Sex,” Luna said, an implied ‘duh’ in her expression.“You’re ruthless,” I laughed.She pointed a contradicting finger at me. “I’m honest. At least he knows what to expect.” She clapped her hands to change the subject. “Are we going out?”Before we could agree, my cellphone started ringing, and after checking the caller ID, I told Luna and Camille to hold on and strode a few feet away, even if they could still hear me. “You been too busy to call, or what?” I teased when I answered.“Me?” the deep voice quipped. “You’ve been all kinds of MIA on your school vacation.”I laughed, but said sincerely, “I’m glad you called.” It was my oldest brother, Jeremy. He was the only one in my family who knew the truth, who knew about me being turned and that I hadn’t truly run away from home, but left to learn to control my Changes. We talked fairly often on the phone, but it’d been a couple of weeks since we spoke last, and it was good to hear his voice. Our conversations and his updates about everything happening on my family’s farm kept me from feeling completely isolated from them, and helped me miss them a little less. “How you been?”“Same old,” he answered. “Working. You? You started school again, right?”“This week,” I confirmed. “Should be nice to start fresh this semester, without having missed a lot of it.”“That’s good. You’re smart, I bet you won’t have to work as hard this time around.”“Hopefully,” I chuckled.“How’s Camille?”“She’s good,” I said, and glanced over at her. Knowing who I was talking to, she waved. “She says hi.”“Well, I say hi too,” Jeremy replied.I nodded even though he couldn’t see, and hesitated for a while before asking what I was always scared to ask. “How’re Mom and Dad?”“They’re, uh, you know,” he paused and let out a heavy sigh, “they’re hanging in there.” Neither of us said anything, a tense silence hanging in the air before he asked, “When are you coming home?”And I never could tell if he meant for good. The truth was, I wasn’t planning on going home for good. I liked it here in Oregon, the freedom of being at this school, running and living with the Pack and with Camille, and Abby was here. Once I’d made things right, I’d go and see my family as often as I could, but I didn’t have the heart yet to tell Jeremy I wouldn’t be staying.“Soon,” I answered, trying to sound enthusiastic. “I was thinking I’ll come visit this summer, and stay for a couple of months if Mom and Dad ain’t too furious with me.”“That’s still a few months away,” Jeremy murmured. “It’s getting hard, talking to you and knowing you’re alright, and then seeing how torn up everyone else is and having to keep my mouth shut.”“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” I said, guilt flooding my chest, but I couldn’t go back yet. If I did, they could try and keep me there. Try and send me back to school in Tranquility and back to a psychiatrist, and they’d only be trying to help, but that wasn’t what I needed. I needed to be here, at this school that I liked, free to run without sneaking out of my bedroom window or having to sit through silent hours with a counselor. I needed Camille with me every night, and I needed to feel like I was doing something good with the new life I’d been given. “Please, Jer, I need you to be strong for me.” I held back the agony in my divided heart. “Just a bit longer, I promise.”“Yeah,” he said. He took in an audible breath, and tried to tease, “You owe me one damn good birthday present this year.”I laughed a little brokenly. “Whatever you want.”“Stay safe,” he said. “I love you.”"Love you too." I hung up, letting out a heavy sigh and taking a few moments to face Camille and Luna. Luna was giving a sympathetic half-smile, but Camille’s eyes were full of concern. “I’m fine,” I said, trudging over to her. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pressed a kiss to my forehead, and her affection was always soothing, but right now I needed something more. “I’m itching to Change.”“Let’s go,” Camille said, nodding.We left the gym and wandered through the house, Luna yelling as we did, “Anybody want to run?”It wasn’t moments after we reached the glass room, where we’d filter out to the backyard, that Wes came bounding in, his long brown hair bobbing with his stride and his gray eyes bright. “I heard someone say ‘run.’” He always went with us when we extended an offer. Truth be told, I’d never known him to turn one down.The waterproof box we stored our clothes in while we were out was at the side of the house, and after stripping and putting everything into it, we Changed. It always felt good to stretch my wolf limbs after being in human form for a few days, especially if I was stressed. It was like standing after sitting through an unbearably long class and getting to feel the blood rush back to your legs, and I was ready to let loose half a week’s worth of pent up energy.I was first to take off into the woods, but three other strides picked up behind me. Wes passed me in the matter of a minute, taking off ahead of us while Camille arrived at my side. Luna gained a burst of speed to try catching up with Wes, having drive enough that she wanted to sprint, so I sped up too. We raced through the trees, the lighter tones of Wes’s dappled coat giving us something to chase after in the moonlight.I warmed up quick, my legs settled into a rhythm and I let instinct carry me forward. I slipped around trees with a simple shift of my head. Sailed over shrubs without breaking the cadence of my run. Crashed through drifts of snow with the simple need to feel the wind in my fur. The only things I was paying attention to were the icy breeze and the sound of the metered strides around me. Until one of those strides stopped.Camille had halted without warning or explanation. I slowed, circling around to her to find out what was wrong. She kept her nose in the air, taking an occasional step off-course while she inhaled. I was following her, so she lowered her snout under mine, nudging it up to make me smell too, and I did like she wanted as Luna and Wes finally doubled back. Camille had a better sense of smell than anyone in the Pack, but it didn’t take much searching of the air for me to catch wind of what she had. It was new, and faint. It was fresh. It was death.All four of us crept toward the scent, navigating the darkness of the woods with our noses and night vision. The smell got stronger as we got closer, but we reached its source long before I expected to. The kill was fresher than I thought, the scent fainter than I’d predicted. But the rest was exactly what my nose told me it was. Human. Male.Each of us stopped mere feet away from the body, simply blinking at the unfounded abruptness of it. This spot of the woods was a familiar one. It was on the edge of the lake, and we passed it often on runs, sometimes hearing the raucous of partying teenagers and avoiding it in order to avoid being seen. I’d never heard of anyone dying here before.I inhaled a deep breath through my nose to see what else I could find. There wasn’t any blood in the snow, but the smell of it filled the still air. I could see why, too, and I immediately nudged both Camille and Luna with my muzzle, nodding toward the body. There were symbols. Occult looking symbols cut in the inside of his forearms and the tops of his feet, and they felt uncomfortably similar to the ones we’d seen at school the other day. Only, it seemed clear that this guy hadn’t done this to himself – there wasn’t a weapon, and there wasn’t any blood in the snow. There was blood across his forehead, a line of it with a dot above and below, but it didn’t even seem possible that he was killed here. Only left here for someone to find.I started taking a step forward, intent on seeing what other evidence I could discover, but Wes let out a low growl to stop me. He turned to head back the way we’d come, and Luna followed. I turned too, but didn’t get more than two paces away before there was a loud snap from behind me, like the breaking of a stick. Camille hadn’t moved, she was still facing the body and the noise, and she was the first to react.She took off in the direction of the sound, disappearing so fast into the woods that only her paw prints in the snow told me where to follow. I ran after her, hearing Luna and Wes right behind us as we bounded toward whoever or whatever had made that sound. It could’ve just been an animal. Or it could’ve been the killer.We weren’t chasing any longer than twenty seconds before there was a loud yelp in the dark, and an uncomfortable pressure in my lower jaw at the same time as I recognized a spike in the connection, one that let me know Camille was in pain. I sped up, sprinting as fast as I could toward the location of the cry, skidding to a halt while Camille struggled to regain her feet. She’d been hit hard by something, and she shook out her head while she stood, spots of blood flecking the snow beneath her. There was a deep gash in her lower jaw, and she was still in pain, but more apparent than both was a familiar burn of frustration because her target was lost. Whoever it had been was gone, and she wasn’t pleased.Wes let out another growl, an impatient one that let us know we should follow when he turned again. So we did. We ran all the way back to the Pack house, Phasing to human the moment we reached our storage container. My eyes immediately went to Camille as we began hurrying into our clothes.“Are you alright?” I asked her, stepping into my underwear and jeans at once.The cut was across the point of her human chin, deep enough that it was still seeping and blood was running down her neck. She touched the back of her hand beneath the wound, pulling it away to see how badly she was bleeding. “I’m fine.”Wes already had the bottom half of his clothing on, so he reached into the box and pulled out the first aid kit that was inside it. “Take care of it quick,” he said with urgency, rushing to retrieve a piece of gauze and some tape. “We need to go back out and cover our paw prints with boot tracks before we call the cops.”I tugged on my bra and shirt and then took the items Wes had given Camille, tossing the tape to Luna. “What happened?” I asked, ripping open the gauze package.“I was chasing someone,” she answered. “Someone fast. Shit they were fast.” I pressed the gauze down over the cut, and she reached up to hold it in place. “And strong, they disappeared for a second and the next thing I knew, I got hit.”“By what?” I asked, taking the first piece of tape Luna tore off for me.“A fist?” she said. “A stick? I don’t know. It hurt.”“I felt it,” I told her. “You were right, the connection’s getting stronger.” I stuck on another piece of tape, holding my hand out for a third.“Yeah?” she asked, managing a smile. “Did it hurt?”I shook my head. “Like you said, some pressure, but it’s hard to miss.” I put on the third strip of tape and prompted for another. “Did you get a scent?”“No.” There was a thick pause while I placed the final piece, and then she said, “They didn’t have one, they just smelled like blood.” My brow furrowed, and when I glanced over at Luna, she looked just as confused. There was always a scent. Even vampires had scents.“Hurry,” Wes reminded, handing me the alcohol wipe from the final package he’d just opened.I used it to clean the rest of the blood off Camille’s chin, neck, and hand, and once it was gone, she finally pulled on her shirt. We only went into the house long enough for Wes to tell Eli what happened and to grab our jackets, and then we were back out again. It was painstaking, making sure we stepped into every single paw print we’d made on our way to the body, and then past it. None of us said a thing while we walked. Camille was tense, and I was listening for any remaining sign of whoever it was that hit her. It felt like it took forever, but finally we turned all our paw prints into boot prints and agreed on the cover story that we were out stargazing, and Wes called the police from his cellphone while we started our trek back.The cops arrived at the Pack house with investigators and the coroner, and we showed them through the woods to the body. They asked us all kinds of questions like what we saw and where we went to school and why we were out in the woods in the middle of the night and if we were drinking or doing drugs, often asking the same question multiple times in different ways. It took even longer than covering our tracks did.“You sure you didn’t know him?” one of the cops asked me. Again. But this time he held up the plastic bag one of the investigators just gave him. It had the guy’s wallet in it, a student ID card from our school in the clear front flap. Devon Nealy. A senior.“No,” I answered. “I’m a junior.”He showed it to Luna and Camille, and they shook their heads. Then he motioned to the bloodstained gauze on Camille’s chin. “What happened?”“I ran into a tree branch,” she answered.His skeptical eyes locked onto the bandage. “You weren’t carrying a flashlight or anything like that? It looks pretty deep.”“I was,” she told him, “but I guess I got a little freaked out.”He hummed an acknowledgment, glancing around at each of us before offering Camille some medical attention. When she refused it, he finally told us that he didn’t need anything else. It was three in the morning by the time we got back to the house and Camille and I were in our bedroom, but my brain hadn’t been idle the last few hours. I had more questions than ever, and the moment the lights were off and we slipped into bed, I pulled up the Internet browser on my phone.“What are you doing?” Camille asked.“Researching.”She sighed, turning sideways onto her pillow to face me. “What are you even going to research? We don’t know anything.”“We know his name,” I told her. “Devon Nealy.”“Of course you were looking for that…” she mumbled.I typed the victim’s name into the search engine and hit enter, waiting for the results to load. The results popped up on my screen, and I hadn’t been expecting to get anything but social media accounts. What kind of other useful information could there possibly be about a high school senior? But a few links down was a news article. “Got him!”Camille perked up a bit, lifting onto her elbow so she could lean in and see my screen. The article wasn’t exactly about Devon, though. It was about another Tollbridge student found dead months ago.“Travis Prevost,” I read aloud, skimming through the information, “found dead in northern Mount Hood. Got to be the same spot we found the body tonight.”“Dead from what?” Camille asked.“Drowned in that lake,” I read. “Looks like he was drinking.”“What does this have to do with Devon?”I searched the rest of the article for the answer. “Here,” I said, reading, “Devon Nealy, a close friend of Travis Prevost, was the one to call the police. Reports say that Nealy had plans with Prevost, but when he got to the lake, found him dead in the water. Nealy dialed nine-one-one and waited for authorities. Investigators seemed unenthusiastic about Nealy’s story, as the place of death is a common party spot amongst local teenagers. However, they were unable to find any evidence linking a sober Nealy to cause of death.”Camille was quiet for a minute, taking in everything I’d read. “Prevost,” she repeated. “Like the kid found at school? Patrick Prevost?”“Seems like it,” I agreed. “Maybe they were brothers… You think Patrick didn’t believe Devon’s story either?”“It’s possible,” she said, and she thought for a few moments and then shook her head. “But Patrick died days ago, he couldn’t have killed Devon for revenge.”“We’re missing something,” I sighed.“We’re missing a lot of things,” Camille said. “We’re not going to figure anything else out tonight.” She settled onto her pillow again, but I closed the browser and pulled up the phone. “What are you doing now?”“Calling Abby.”“Kyla,” she protested, “it’s the middle of the night,” but the line was already ringing.It took a while, but then there was the click of it being answered, and Abby’s groggy voice asked, “Kyla? What’s wrong?”“We found another body.”There was a long pause. “What?”“In the woods,” I said. “Some guy named Devon Nealy, he had symbols carved in his skin and a connection to another dead student named Travis Prevost. I think Travis was Patrick Prevost’s brother.”Another long pause. “Okay, um,” her voice was raspy with exhaustion, “this is a lot to process right now… do you… you guys want me to come over? Are you and Camille okay?”“No, it’s alright,” I said. “We’re well off. But I want access to the morgue.” Camille did a double take at that, and she didn’t have to say it this time, I could see the protest on her face.“Yeah,” Abby slurred, “okay,” and there was the faint shifting of sheets from her end, like she was sitting up in bed. Her voice came through clearer, but was still heavy with sleep. “I can’t even get in until they’re done collecting evidence.” She paused again, taking in a heavy breath. “Um… we can go Friday morning.”“I can’t ditch,” I told her. I was focusing as much as I could on school, doing my best to get good grades and be responsible so when I finally went home to my parents I had something to show for all this time away.“Saturday?” Abby mumbled.“That’s good, thanks,” I answered. “Sorry I woke you.”She gave a tired hum, asking with as much humor as she could gather, “Does Camille condone this kind of behavior?”“Not exactly,” I said, glancing over at Camille. She was shaking her head like she was still in disbelief that I’d called. “I’m fixing to get scolded after this.”Abby laughed. “Tell her not to worry about it. I’ll see you both at school tomorrow.”“Night, Abs.” I hung up, setting my cellphone on the nightstand beside the bed and sinking down into the blankets, passing an innocent smile to Camille.“I can’t believe you called her this late,” she said, but I think Abby’s dismissal of it helped some, because she sounded kind of amused.“Why not?” I asked, turning onto my side to face her while I teased, “it ain’t like I could’ve just told her everything tomorrow…” Camille laughed, rolling her eyes because she didn’t know what else to say. I reached up with one hand, cupping her face and running my thumb along her jawline. “How’s your chin?”“Tender,” she admitted, “and I actually have a bit of a headache. Whatever hit me, it wasn’t human.” I could sense her discomfort in our connection, so I stretched forward to kiss her forehead. “Kyla?” she prompted, and I hummed in response. “Please be careful with this. We’re not cops, and we’re not Council, and relations are strained enough without us sticking our noses where they don’t belong.”I took my hand from her face and leaned away to look her in the eyes, feeling a bit hurt by her discouragement. “You want me to stop?”“No,” she answered, “I’m not saying that, I’m just asking you to be careful. These are murder cases. These are serious. We can’t draw attention to ourselves or the land around here without risking exposure, and I know the Council wouldn’t want us getting involved in this. If Eli knew how involved you were getting, I don’t think he’d like it either.”“So what do you want me to do?” I asked.She shrugged. “We’ll keep our heads down. Not talk about it too loudly here.” I nodded, but I think she could feel that I was disheartened. “Hey,” she said, taking my hand and bringing it up to her lips, “it’s okay that you want to help, and that you want to keep people safe. I’m just trying to keep you safe too.”Even though she wouldn’t try to stop me, it was clear that this wasn’t what she wanted to do. The risks weren’t worth it to her when she thought the Council had it handled, and I felt bad that she’d been hurt, but she wasn’t trying as hard as I needed her to. She wasn’t being as supportive as I needed her to. But it was late and the night was catching up to me, and with the sudden lack of enthusiasm I’d had only minutes ago, I didn’t have the energy to talk about it anymore. I nodded a final time and turned over, grabbing her arm to pull it around me and drift off to sleep.

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