Page 4 of When Storms Awaken

My best bet was to wait until the last possible minute to tell my mom I was going out again. I didn’t want to give her time to think about it, or to say no before Tess and I were able to make it out the door.

“Be at my house in an hour and we can take my car,” I offered. I could hear the light padding of my mother’s footsteps on the carpeted stairs right outside my door.

“Gotcha, see ya then!” Tess hung up with a click.

I put my phone back on the nightstand and quickly grabbed the closest book to me and flipped it to a random page. The door to my bedroom creaked open as my mom nudged it open with her back, a laundry bin in her hands.

“What are you up to?” she questioned, reading the expression on my face. I sat cross-legged, the book resting between my legs, my tangled hair falling in a mess down my back.

“Oh.” I paused. “Nothing,” I claimed innocently, wiggling the book in my hands to indicate I was busy reading.

“That’s got to be the millionth time you’ve read that one.” She laughed, bending down behind my door to grab the bin of dirty clothes I had left.

I flipped the front of the book over to check the cover and laughed to myself. I had to have read this one more than a million times.

“You know…I would read different books if I could buy more,” I teased, throwing a pleading look in her direction.

“Clean out that bookshelf of yours and who knows…” She gestured towards the messy array of books, big and small, resting in my private library against the wall.

“Yeah…we’ll see,” I said, pretending to return to my book. With a toss of her dirty blonde hair, she left, her slight figure pulling the door half closed with a foot as she went. I tossed the book back onto the nightstand atop a pile of other knickknacks and papers. I needed to clean this place up before the clutter swallowed me whole, but I was much more interested in picking up the book I’d been reading on the mountaintop this morning.

I pulled the book out and spent the last hour before Tess arrived sprawled across my duvet, picking up right where I had left off.

The doorbell rang, and I sprang up from my bed, abandoning the book across my comforter as I ran down the stairs and flung the door open.

“Tess!”

“We havesomuch to talk about!“ she said, pushing her way into the foyer.

She led the way, leaping up the steps two at a time with her long skinny legs, and closed the door of my room behind us. We sat across from each other on the bed, Tess shucking her jacket off.

“Are we actually going to search for this wolf?” she asked.

“Yes, we are. I need you to see this thing with your own eyes. You’ll never believe me otherwise.”

Tess appeared apprehensive, biting her lower lip and folding her hands into her lap.

“Wait a second,” she said, holding her hands out as if to stop me. “What exactly are we going to do if we see this thing?”

“I don’t know, Tess. Take a picture of it or something? You should have seen the sheer size of it. It has to be some kind of genetic mutation or something,” I told her.

I reached over to the nightstand and picked up my DSLR camera from among the clutter. I grabbed the pocketknife, a present from my father, out of the nightstand drawer and slid it into my jeans pocket. I had no intentions of using it, but better to havesomething, even if it was dinky and possibly useless for protection against a wolf.

“Ok, but we stay close to the car and don’t venture into the woods, got it?” she asked, slightly less anxious.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I told her, opening the bedroom door and peering into the hallway. “We will stay out of the woods, and I promise we’ll stay near the car. There are probably paw prints from this morning. What are the chances the wolf is even still there?” I assured her.

“You’re right,” she agreed, getting up from the bed and squeezing back into her winter coat.

Tess quietly followed me down the stairs, and as I reached for the door handle, the inevitable voice of warning came out of nowhere.

“Where are you off to?” my mom asked as she appeared in the mouth of the living room hallway, a dishtowel in her hands.

“We are going to check out that new bakery downtown. They recently opened,” I replied.

I couldn’t positively tell one way or the other if the look in her eyes was speculation or not, but I’m pretty sure it was.

“Ok.” She hesitated. “No going back into the woods under any circumstances, do you understand? I don’t need you two getting hurt.”

---