2. Willow

TWO

Willow

After locking up the store around four, I began the walk home. I’d always managed my illness well, or so I thought. But since meeting Caleb and being introduced to Doc, I’d adopted a more, shall we say, structured approach to my health.

Doc had more or less replaced my physician, which was great on one hand for costs, but on the other, he was way more involved than what I was used to. I had meal plans, workout regimes, including minimum exercise minutes per day, a sleep journal… It was a lot.

I couldn’t really complain—though clearly I was since I was complaining right now—because, in truth, I did feel better. Doc wasn’t an imposing man. He was almost fully human; he didn’t have the bulging muscles or the solid look about him like the others. He was lean, average height, and could blend easily in a crowd. However, when the crowd was one of shifters, I bet he stood out.

No, Doc wasn’t like them—and yet somehow, I followed his health plan religiously. He didn’t scare me. I didn’t know him well enough to disappoint him. Yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would get punishment if I didn’t stick to his plan. He reminded me of a stern headmaster. Content when I was compliant, but one foot wrong and I would be writing lines until the end of time.

Lily had taken note of the change in my health plan, and while she hadn’t said much, she obviously approved.

In truth, so did I. I noticed a difference in my energy levels. I had an appetite, and with the exercise and calorie management, I was actually gaining some weight and strength. My normal walk home, which used to take about thirty minutes, was now carried out in twenty. More importantly, I could walk home and back without overdoing it.

I’d had a few spells of ME since my return because, while Doc could tell me what to do and when to eat, he couldn’t control my sleep pattern. He couldn’t stop me from seeing what I saw when I closed my eyes.

He couldn’t put an end to the insights I had into his world.

Once more, my mind had come back to Caleb.

Always, always Caleb.

He wasn’t even that good-looking. Liar .

He was grumpy. True .

He was a terrible conversationalist. Not true, he just kept certain things from you .

He was a liar.

That one I didn’t need my internal monologue to repeat, which I already knew. Caleb had told me himself that he lied. He’d warned me. Repeated it several times throughout our time traveling to meet Cannon and the others.

Our short time together had been fraught with nothing but adversity, with a few scatterings of amicable times. Caleb Foster was not someone I should miss, but I did.

A lot.

I also worried about him, because although Cannon or the shaman would tell me where he had gone, they didn’t tell me why . I knew that they knew. I knew it was bad. I knew that his being alone was not good for him. They hadn’t needed to tell me that—I drew it every day, sometimes more than once, just like I had the afternoon that Doc put the sketchbook in my hands and told me to show them.

He was on a mountain. I didn’t know which one that was called Shadowridge Peak. I had googled it, but I wasn’t surprised to find no search results. I assumed it was a mountain with a peak. Didn’t all mountains have peaks? I knew it wasn’t near them, but I thought it was still in Colorado. Maybe. Or Wyoming, or Idaho, or Montana…or any of the states that housed the Rockies.

If he was even still in the Rockies. Or in America.

My head hurt thinking about it. About him. But how could I not? The need to draw him, to catch glimpses of him, to know that he was safe, it was constant.

The other constant thing was the darkness descending on him.

Don’t get me wrong. No one would ever describe Caleb as fluffy or light—the thought alone made me giggle—but he wasn’t exactly dark either. He was still approachable. Kind of. He wouldn’t hurt you. Much. Chewing my lip, I tried to stop my negativity. But it was so hard because I was severely pissed off with him.

I could still see him walking away and never looking back .

I wanted to lie, even to myself, and say that I didn’t remember everything in the chaos that ensued, but I did. I remembered it all. Running to the door, screaming into the emptiness for him, and silence was my only answer. After I went back into the room, a sketchbook was thrust into my hands, and I was told to draw.

And I had.

I had drawn it all.

“Show us, Willow,” Doc told me. “Show us what we’ve done.”

I hadn’t been able to keep hold of the pen. I’d dropped it, and then after the second or third sketch, I wished I’d been able to drop it again, but my grip had been firm, and there was a better chance of Caleb coming back than me letting go of that pen.

The sketches were full of pain. Brimming with anger. Saturated in hate.

Scenes of death, human and wolf alike. Caleb was featured in them all, appearing as I had never seen him.

Savage and brutal.

In others, he was a wolf. I had never seen him when he was shifted, but as I sketched, I knew the gray wolf was him. Blood dripped from his maw, his eyes narrowed in a mix of anger and loathing.

Was it self-loathing? Had he been attacked? The casualties were high, and though I knew little of their world, I doubted it was so densely populated that they could afford such losses.

The men who witnessed my drawing were silent as Doc took scene after scene off me. The shaman had seen as much as he could, and once during my frenzied production, he had requested to taste my blood. He’d asked again before he left, and by then, I was too spent to protest.

Or ask what my blood told him that my sketches could not.

No one answered that question when I asked it the next day. There was a lot that Cannon and his men didn’t say.

Maybe they couldn’t? Maybe they didn’t know? But I didn’t believe that. The alpha, Cannon, knew. I saw the truth in his eyes, and I was certain he knew everything—he just chose not to tell me.

Which left me with notebooks, sketch pads, canvases—anything I could draw on—filled with scenes that offered no answers, only adding to my growing list of unanswered questions.

I’d also learned not to ask. I wasn’t scared of them. I thought of the large alpha, who had stepped in front of me and told Caleb to go. Cannon was definitely intimidating. Like I had with the shaman, once I opened my eyes and paid attention to what was in front of me, I could sense the power of the alpha.

Doc had told me it was something they called Will. Apparently, an alpha could use their Will and make a shifter do something. Like compulsion but without the brainwashing, although they did remove the element of free will. Which was kind of freaking terrifying, but I’d kept my thoughts to myself on that one.

Despite that though, I didn’t feel fear with them. I was slightly uncomfortable, I wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t there against my will.

I’d reached home, and checking my watch, I grinned at my straight-up twenty minutes. Yeah, I could say what I wanted about the shifters or Doc, but without him, I wouldn’t have been walking home in twenty minutes and still feel fresh and fit enough to turn right around and walk back.

As I opened my front door, the thought of turning around and walking back was exactly what I wanted to do. Instead, I took a step into the chaos that used to be my home.

The sound of the door snicking on the latch made me jump, but it didn’t have the power to tear my eyes from the broken and torn furniture in my living room.

Walking a few steps broke my trance, and I pulled my phone from the back pocket of my jeans. Unwrapping my scarf from around my neck, I dialed 9-1-1 and immediately hung up. I didn’t know anyone who would do this. I knew that wasn’t the point, but given what I had been drawing recently, I was already picking my way carefully over the mess to my studio.

A part of me wished I hadn’t. Everything was destroyed. Sketchbooks were ripped and torn, and canvases had been sliced viciously with knives.

Or claws .

With trembling fingers, I pressed the contact button on Royce’s name.

“Willow?”

“My house has been broken into.” Saying it out loud made it real, and I felt the tears spill over. “Everything”—my breath hitched—“everything is ripped, torn or broken. I haven’t been into my bedroom,” I admitted in a whisper.

“You haven’t checked every room?” he demanded roughly, and I understood what he had just implied—they could still be here. I heard him speak to someone else, Ned probably. They wouldn’t be home yet. I couldn’t hear what he said over the thudding in my ears. My heart was close to bursting with fear.

“My bedroom and the bathrooms,” I suddenly remembered to speak. I was pretty sure Royce asked me what rooms I hadn’t been in.

“Luna, Willow!” he scolded. “That’s half your house!”

I was nodding in agreement, pointless because he couldn’t see me, but I was completely numb. “I’m calling Caleb.”

“Will—”

I cut him off when I hung up. Still unmoving, I searched for his name and pressed the call button.

When the automated voice told me the number was no longer in service, I hung up and dialed again. I did it three more times before my brain finally sent the message to my fingers to stop wasting my time.

Part of me knew I needed to open the bedroom door and see what they had done to it. Part of me knew that I would never unsee it, and I wasn’t sure that I could handle it.

So I checked the bathroom first. Thankfully, my cabinet and my shower curtain were the only things damaged. The cabinet wasn’t even damaged, it was only my guest towels and toilet paper that were strewn about.

Closing the mirrored cabinet door, I caught sight of my reflection. What a difference a home invasion made. I’d been smiling, confident, happy with myself when I walked home. Now I looked haggard. My eyes were wide with fear, my skin whiter than pale.

The sudden ringing of my phone made me scream in fright, and it clattered into the sink as I dropped it. Scooping it back out, it took me two attempts to answer it .

“Royce?” I stared at my reflection as I answered the call.

I heard his huff of relief. “Is the house clear?” he demanded.

“I haven’t gone into my bedroom.”

“Why hav—” I heard him cut himself off as he took a deep breath. “Willow, are you armed?”

I saw the surprise on my face as he asked the question. If I’d ever wondered in the past how I would react in a stressful situation, the answer seemed to be stares at herself in the mirror .

“Willow?”

His sharp voice brought me back to the present. Again. “No!” I lowered my voice. Stupid really. If they were still here, they heard me the moment I came home. “I don’t…don’t have a gun.”

“That’s fine. I wouldn’t expect you to. Get a knife.”

A knife? That meant I would need to be close to them. Suddenly a gun seemed more appealing, and now I knew I had lost any sense of normality because I was considering the benefits of buying a gun.

“Willow, go to the kitchen and pick up the biggest knife you can.” His tone was calm and patient. It made me feel normal. Caleb would have shouted, which would have also been welcome.

“Okay.”

Once I was armed, Royce asked me if the back door was broken or damaged, and when I told him no, I could almost hear the look he would have shared with Ned.

“This wasn’t Caleb,” I told them, walking to my bedroom door.

“Willow— ”

“I know him.” It was my turn to talk over Royce. “I know when he’s been here. This isn’t him. I’d feel it.”

“Or she’s delusional because she’s in love with him.” Ned’s snort of contempt and low murmur probably wasn’t meant for me to hear, but that didn’t mean I didn’t.

“I’m not in love with him.” I was outside my closed bedroom door. “Do I open it?”

“Yes.” Royce hadn’t become distracted from the situation at hand. “Don’t be a hero,” he added.

If that was his advice, I should have gone back outside and called the police. Not gone and got a knife and then lingered in my hallway, bracing myself for whatever, or whoever , was inside my bedroom.

“I’ll never be the hero,” I whispered, realizing I needed a hand to open the door, and my options were to let go of either the phone or the knife. I stared at the chef’s blade in my hand and could hear Caleb in my head, telling me that I was more likely to cut myself with it than anyone else.

Bending low, I placed the knife on the floor.

Straightening, I put my phone in my back pocket, still on the call to Royce. My door swung open slowly, and had I not been in this moment, I would have remarked on the added dramatic effect. However, right now, it only added to the building anticipation that there was someone in my house waiting to kill me behind this door.

There wasn’t.

There was, however, a clear indication of how they had gained access to my house, because my bedroom window was open as far as it would go. Like my studio, everything was shredded. Literally shredded in this room. Feathers from my duvet still floated in the air, and I knew that it was because I’d just opened the door.

I didn’t check my bathroom because I knew I was alone. I wished I’d known that before I called for help. I would have still called, but I wouldn’t have had to admit I hadn’t checked my house first. But then curiosity got the better of me to see if they had done anything in here. The bathroom cabinet hung off the wall, it had my hygiene products in it. Tylenol and tampons covered the floor I wasn’t sure what my sanitary products could have possibly been hiding, but I stooped to pick up the discarded tampons from the floor.

Remembering they were waiting for me to confirm my situation, I fished the phone out of my pocket. “There’s no one here.”

“You need to call the police.”

“You don’t want to come here? See it?” I felt weirdly disappointed.

“We’re coming,” Royce confirmed. “But you need to call the police and report this.” He let that sink in. “Have they taken anything?”

The only thing I had of value was my laptop, and it was with me, as it was the one I used for work. The only other thing of value that I owned that had a monetary worth was the paintings they’d destroyed.

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay. Call the police. Then wait for us. We’re on our way back.”

“Okay.”

I don’t remember much of my phone call with the police. Whispering Pines had a small police department. I wouldn’t even have been able to say which officer I spoke to, but I didn’t think they asked me anything too strenuous.

They told me not to touch anything, and despite knowing better because I lived in this town, I felt a pang of disappointment when no CSI arrived at the crime scene.

Royce and Ned arrived just before the cops were leaving, and I sighed with relief when I saw them. They didn’t stop, merely circled my block. When the police were gone, I opened the back door to my two visitors.

Royce walked past me, Ned close on his heels, and I dutifully followed them to the studio.

“I’d taken everything to the store,” I informed them. “There was nothing of danger here.”

Royce looked relieved, but Ned was still watching me. “ All your drawings of Caleb were at the store?”

It’s amazing how quickly you could go off someone. “No.” There was no point in lying.

Ned nodded, brushing past me on his way to my bedroom. He saw the knife on the floor, but despite the look that told me he knew exactly what I had done, he didn’t comment.

He took one look at the bedroom and turned to ask me a question that I hadn’t even thought of.

“Have you checked the store?”