Page 1 of Wolf Cursed
Chapter One
My muscles tensed until they hurt as I huddled on my sagging mattress. In the darkness of my tiny bedroom, every shadow cast felt like a threat. My thrift store dresser sat sadly against the far wall, taunting me with its larger-than-life silhouette. The secondhand mirror propped beside it offered a reflection of me that looked like something out of a horror movie looming up from my twin bed. Wild dark hair. Wide, worried eyes. But it wasn’t the dresser that scared me.
A car had parked outside our trailer.
The time on my phone read two in the morning.
Considering we rarely, if ever, had guests during the day, it couldn’t be a good thing to have anyone coming over this late at night. Dad would be beside himself with paranoia, and in this case, I couldn’t blame him. Years’ worth of his rants about “those people hunting us” had taught me it was best to keep him away from strangers.
Fat chance of that now.
The voices outside were loud as the uninvited visitors climbed out of their car and crossed the gravel drive toward our trailer. This place had thin walls to begin with, but after a lifetime of vigilance, I’d woken the moment the headlights had pointed through my window.
Already, my heart was threatening to beat right out of my chest. Dad was always going on and on about enemies everywhere. One long look from a shady stranger, and he’d declare it too dangerous. We’d moved fourteen times just in the last five years alone. No public school. No college either unless you counted that one class I took before we went broke again. No friends. Which was honestly just as impressive as it was pathetic for a nineteen-year-old to have literally zero friendships.
“Don’t let anyone get close enough toseeyou, Ash,” my dad had always warned me.
I was over it. Or I had been until strangers had driven up to our doorstep in the middle of the night.
What the hell did they want?
I crawled over and peeked out of the cracked blinds covering my window. Three men were making their way to our front door. I couldn’t make out their faces in the darkness, but something glinted, and I zeroed in on whatever object had reflected against the streetlight.
My breath caught.
One of them carried a metal bat.
I scrambled back, letting the blinds fall into place. This was bad.
Really,reallyfucking bad.
Footsteps sounded in the hall, and I knew from the slow, heavy rhythm they made it was my father emerging from his bedroom at the end of the hall. He stumbled once. The wall creaked underneath his weight as he caught himself.
Shit. He was drunk. As usual.
Outside, someone knocked, just a quick two-rap with a knuckle. But it sent my heart rate soaring.
“I’m comin’, asshole.” My dad’s gruff voice was easy to hear through our thin walls.
My hands fisted around my blanket at that. I wanted to scream at him to stop. To hide.
Whoever was out there at two in the morning couldn’t be friendly.
The fact that my father was actually going to answer the door was proof of how far he’d fallen.
It was all mom’s fault.
If she hadn’t left us seven years ago, Dad would never have gone off the deep end. He’d still be my protector. My safe place. Instead, it felt like I’d been the one protecting him these last few years. And now, he was about to open that door and invite the devil inside.
He was going to get us killed.
A pounding on the front door shook me loose of the frozen panic that gripped me. I got to my feet and rushed from my bedroom. I made it into the tiny living room just as my dad opened the front door. The smell of alcohol clung to him like a second skin, knocking me back a step.
“Whatever yer selling, we ain’t buyin,” he said in a sleepy, slurred voice.
Over my dad’s shoulder, I counted three figures standing on our sagging porch. The one carrying the bat stood at the very back, but none of them looked like they were selling so much asdemanding. A pair of beady eyes landed on mine. His hands were empty, but the man standing in front of the others didn’t need a weapon to convey his intentions. I rushed forward, pressing my palms against the back of the door as I slammed it closed again.
Securing the deadbolt, I whirled on my dad.
