Halloween Werewolf (The Holiday Shifter Mates Book 1) Page 7

“And Mateo?”

  “Mm?”

  “I think Gale is right about the hunters. Forget about them. You could get hurt if you don’t.”

  Mateo slowly shook his head. “I can’t. I’m not going to let them do what they want. I’m not going to let them kill anyone else.”

  Austin frowned, but he let it go for now. Maybe it wasn’t fair of him to ask that of Mateo, to ask him to put his own safety and life above others, but he couldn’t stand the thought of seeing Mateo as nothing more than a wolf pelt being flaunted in videos all over the internet by bloodthirsty killers. No, he couldn’t stand that at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS DARK. MATEO and Austin stood at the entrance to Glasglow’s biggest haunted corn maze, Gordon Callahan’s corn maze. That guy got really into Halloween. There was a sign at the entrance: Escape the terrors or get lost and die. Austin had held up fine until now. Mateo hated how pale his face was. He looked like he might pass out. He fiddled with his glasses, adjusting them over and over when they didn’t need adjusting.

  A chainsaw roared to life, accompanied by the screams of people already inside of the maze. Austin jumped like he intended to shoot all the way to the moon. Mateo put his hands on his shoulders to keep him on earth.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Mateo asked, eyebrow raised.

  “Yes,” Austin squeaked. He cleared his voice and said it again, lower this time. “Yes.”

  Mateo produced the tickets from his pocket and handed them to the bored-looking man standing at the entrance. “Enjoy the maze,” he said in an equally bored tone.

  Mateo held out his hand to Austin who didn’t need any coaxing. He took Mateo’s hand and did his best to squeeze the life out of it as they took the first few steps inside, turned right, and left the entrance behind. There was nothing but yellowed cornstalks and crickets chirping. The chainsaws hummed low farther inside, awaiting their next scare victim.

  In Mateo’s opinion, the whole thing was dumb, not scary. He wondered why he had asked Austin to come. Really, he didn’t care what they did. He just wanted to spend time with him. Lunch was much better because Austin had been comfortable then. He liked that Austin worked to overcome his shyness so he could be a teacher. Austin used to be too scared to dream about doing anything like that. Mateo was proud of him, respected him, but overcoming this kind of fear, for cheap thrills, didn’t seem all that important. But Austin could be stubborn. For whatever reason, he was set on doing this.

  When the sounds of chainsaws faded farther and farther into the maze, and they walked without incident, Austin loosened his grip so he wasn’t strangling Mateo’s hand—not that Mateo minded or that it hurt. Mateo made sure to keep Austin’s hand encased in his own to keep him warm. It was colder tonight. It might even snow, and Mateo was worried that Austin hadn’t brought any gloves.

  Austin looked up at the sky and smiled. “There’s not a cloud up there.”

  He was right. The sky was speckled with stars that could be seen clearly out here where there was little light pollution. It was nice enough, but it was nothing compared to what Mateo had grown used to. “Nothing like Alaska,” he said. “You should see the Northern Lights.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle that kind of cold,” Austin said.

  “I’d keep you warm.”

  “Are you asking me to move to Alaska with you?”

  Mateo shrugged. “At least visit.”

  Austin leaned against him, resting his head on Mateo’s shoulder. Then a chainsaw growled to the right, not too far away, and Austin jerked upright. His grip on Mateo’s hand went back to viper levels.

  “You have a stronger grip than I remember,” Mateo said.

  Austin adjusted his glasses again and released Mateo’s hand just to grab his arm. He leaned against him, grabbing his bicep instead. Then a chainsaw roared a few feet away from them. Austin screamed a scream that made the hairs on Mateo’s arms stand on end.

  A growl escaped Mateo’s lips, and he bared his teeth as a guy wearing a gruesome, blood-stained mask jumped through the cornstalks. The man swung his noisy chainless prop in his hands and cackled loudly. He was very into his role. Mateo wouldn’t have cared, but Austin’s reaction had him on edge, and it made chainsaw guy more aggressive. Mateo hid Austin behind him. White was clouding his vision. His eyes were flipping between brown and yellow. His wolf fangs were pushing their way through his gums. His joints ached with the need to change. And his growls were louder than the chainsaw. He was going to lay into this guy. He couldn’t see the man’s eyes, but he could hear his heartbeat and how its pace quickened with fear. The guy dropped his chainsaw and ran screaming through the cornstalks.

  Mateo howled. He dropped down to his hands and knees. His skin itched. He could feel it tearing. Everything in his vision had almost washed out to white. Then Austin was on his hands and knees in front of him. Austin took Mateo’s face in his hands and pressed his nose against Mateo’s. “Shhh. It’s okay,” he said. “I’m okay.” Somehow, Austin knew exactly what Mateo needed to hear.

  Mateo’s vision cleared. But there was an energy overload inside of him with nowhere to go. He squeezed his eyes shut and panted, digging his nails into the dirt and yellow detritus below. “Austin,” he gasped.

  “I’m here. What is it?” Austin closed his eyes as he gently rubbed his nose again Mateo’s. It helped a little bit.

  “I need your help,” Mateo gritted out. “Get me out of here before I shift.”

  Austin grabbed Mateo’s arm and guided him to his feet. Then Austin looped his arm around Mateo’s waist as Mateo let an arm drape over Austin’s shoulder. Austin was the only thing grounding him now. Mateo couldn’t get a clear image of what was going on around them, but he got smacked by a countless number of cornstalks, so he knew Austin was cheating their way out of the maze. When they were finally free of it all, they ended up on a deserted side of the farm, facing open nothingness, the last field of green grass before desert shrubs, rocks, and the next city miles down the road.

  “I gotta go,” Mateo said as he pushed away from Austin.

  “Where?”

  Mateo didn’t like the fear in Austin’s voice. It was a certain pitch his voice hit, punctuated by his quickening heart rate. Mateo’s tongue was lead. It was getting harder and harder to speak, harder to fight off the white bleaching his vision.

  “Run. Gotta run,” Mateo said. He shucked off his clothes, and his wolf rippled through his body. It was the quickest shift he had ever made. He just had to hand himself over to the body that suited him best at the moment. He missed the crackling of bones, the rearrangement of flesh. He was a wolf in mere seconds.

  Mateo sprang forward with powerful legs. He howled at the nearly full moon and gained speed. He ran and ran and ran. When he remembered to look back, he had left Austin far behind, no longer in view. He whined, a pitiful noise. He wanted to go back, but he wasn’t good at controlling his shift anymore. He shifted when he needed to. When he lived here as a kid, his mother made him shift with her every night in the forest, and this sort of sudden shift never happened. He never had to run out of class to shift somewhere at the demands of his wolf. There was a structure. It was the way they had to adapt in order to live among humans, but he hadn’t lived among humans for four years. He couldn’t stop himself when things spiraled out of his control.

  This desert landscape didn’t have much shelter, but there was no one out here either, so he kept running. He’d return to Austin when he was safe to be around again. After he had run his paws bloody and couldn’t run anymore. No matter what, he had to protect Austin. After he recorded that video and sent it off to those hunters. Austin didn’t want him to, but he had to. He had to. Austin would understand. He always did. He always tried more than anyone else. He never gave up on Mateo even after four years of no contact.

  Austin still loved him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE FOREST BROUGHT BACK memories of Mateo’s mom. His dad ran with them too,
but he had always had a closer relationship to his mom. They were cut from the same cloth, so to speak. She was the one he deferred to. While Dad was easygoing, Mom was a taskmaster, an alpha probably, though that sort of pack hierarchy was something that seemed to have died out in the bloodlines that made Mateo. He was maybe alpha too, as far as strength went, but he wasn’t leader material. He didn’t know. He just knew he almost killed Weston, would have if his head hadn’t cleared from the pain and rage when it had. Yuri’s situation had really fucked him up.

  How could he fix him?

  He couldn’t.

  The thoughts didn’t connect.

  It didn’t make sense.

  What good was being if you couldn’t do something about… anything?

  Mateo’s brain hurt.

  Before coming out to the forest, Mateo, paws bloodied and raw, had checked the place he left Austin hours before. Austin had had the foresight to leave Mateo’s clothes there, just within the cornstalks so nobody would notice. Mateo’s phone was still in his pants pocket. Relieved, and after double-checking he was alone, he shifted and equipped himself to look human. Things would be quicker this way since he could cut through the city. And being in his human form gave him time to clear his head before reaching his destination.

  But, before he left, he saw something, a message, carved into the soft dirt near the cornstalks: I’m waiting for my heart. Come home soon, Mateo.

  Mateo never considered himself a good judge of words, but he loved the way Austin used them. Austin was waiting for him. Austin wanted him to come home. He couldn’t explain why his heart hurt with that knowledge. So, he ran until he hit a denser part of the city, when someone could look out their window and see him in his light clothes, braving the below-freezing night. He didn’t wear his hood. It was quiet. There was no need to.

  He thought best at night when the moon was full and watching over him. Wolf shifters with packs had to pledge to their Alpha on a full moon—or so Mateo learned. Weston had a pack that renewed Pack Vows on a full moon—Full Moon—but Mateo never had any interest in pledging, and Weston never made him. Pack. Family. Those two things were the same in Mateo’s eyes, and they didn’t require some ritual under a full moon. Gale and Ike were pack. Yuri and Lance were pack.

  When Mateo was deep in the forest on the mountain and satisfied with the moonlight as his guide and the coverage of pines, autumn-colored trees, and brush, he did his best to wipe the blood off his tender, cut-up hands and took out his phone. He tested propping it against a tree trunk, a rock, and filmed himself from several different angles before deciding on one that would catch him fine without getting a clear image of his face. Then he stripped and recorded the video for real. He shifted violently and with a purpose, energy crawling back into his system when he remembered the importance of this. He had to convince the hunters to come. He had to.

  His bones cracked and snapped, reshaping and sliding into new homes. His skin tore, stretched and shrunk. His ears decorated the top of his head. He grew a long snout full of deadly, sharp teeth. His claws dug into the earth, and he leaped out of the brush and shadows concealing him and ran, pretending he hadn’t known the camera was there. He had no idea if he was doing this right. He was no actor, but it had to work.

  It had to.

  Once he had shifted back and dressed, he stopped the recording and watched the video. It looked fine to him. He wondered if he could cut off that long tail though. Luckily, the recording app had a built-in editor that wasn’t complicated, just a matter of moving a start and an end point. When he got to the part where he had to email the video to “Jane and Clyde,” he had some trouble with attaching the video. A message came back telling him the file was too big to attach. He messed with it for a moment longer, even walked back toward the city and made sure he had full bars, before getting fed up and agitated all at once. He called Lance.

  “Hey,” the tiger shifter answered immediately.

  “How do you always have service when I call you?” Mateo asked. “I thought Eurio was basically a dead zone for cell phones, patchy at best.”

  “In Fairbanks again. You just catch me at the right times.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yeah, been busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Research.”

  Mateo didn’t need to ask more about that. He knew it had something to do with Yuri.

  “He’s okay,” Lance said like he could read Mateo’s mind. “Why’d you call?”

  “Trying to email a video, but it’s too big.”

  “Just upload it to some online file hosting service and share the link. Wait. What video?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just tell me what to do.”

  “Not until you tell me what it is.”

  Mateo growled. “It’s video of me shifting, okay? Gotta lure the bastards out here somehow.”

  “The hell you did. You really recorded yourself shifting? Delete that shit pronto. Fuck.”

  “It’s fine. I made sure you can’t see my face.”

  “Didn’t I tell you not to die?”

  “I’m not going to die. Trust me.”

  “I do trust you. I don’t trust them.”

  “Lance.”

  Lance growled. “Gale is on his way. That’s why I’m in Fairbanks. I followed him since he wouldn’t tell me straight out and hid his flight details, but he’s definitely coming for you.”

  “Damn it.”

  “But this works out in your favor. I wouldn’t help you if he wasn’t coming. At least now I know you’ll have support. So, let’s just get that stupid fucking video uploaded and finish this shit, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Mateo agreed, relieved.

  Lance went on and on about how this was a bad idea and how the video could get saved and spread everywhere. Mateo said people would probably just think it was a prank. It wasn’t that good of a video. Lance had demanded to see it before going any further. After verifying that, yeah, people probably would write it off as nothing more than a prank, a giant hoax, some bad special effects by a film student (he kept going), he finally relented.

  He walked Mateo through the final steps and told him to upload the video and be done with it. Lance was stressed. Mateo could hear it in the grating frequencies his voice had maintained while begrudgingly assisting Mateo in “shifter suicide.” Mateo emailed his cell’s number too. He wanted to avoid this before but had decided it was inevitable—and he asked the hunters to call him so he could give them more information and take them to the place he saw the “werewolf.” He wouldn’t have to hunt them down that way. He couldn’t miss them. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance, and if that put hunters on his ass, he’d deal with it. It would be over soon enough.

  “Okay, man. I’m done,” Lance said. “Nerves are fried. Nothing has scared me in a long time, so good job. Thank you, asshole.”

  “No problem.” Mateo thought about hanging up, but then he thought about Austin. He thought about how he left Austin behind, about how Austin said he loved Mateo, about how he kept waiting even though Mateo was impossible, and then Mateo asked, “Have you ever been in love, Lance?”

  “Have you met me? No, Mateo. I’ve never been in love. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Don’t do that shit.”

  Mateo cocked his head, though Lance couldn’t see him. “Austin. He’s still here. I want him to be mine.”

  “Austin? An old friend or boyfriend from Glasglow or something? You never talked about him. But that’s kind of what Eurio is all about, right? None of us really talk about what came before. Sort of an unspoken rule.”

  Mateo stared straight up at the sky dotted with shining stars, with the nearly full moon as the center point. The light washed over him, stuck to his skin. It was a feeling he couldn’t explain or maybe something his head made up, but nights like this felt so damn good. Free. They felt limitless, like anything could happen.

  “The past doesn’t matter,” M
ateo said.

  “That’s the motto, but it does matter. It’s over and done, but it shaped us into what we are. The past is the reason shifters like you, Yuri, and me end up in Eurio.”

  “I love him.”

  Lance didn’t miss a beat. “I never took you for the romantic type.”

  “I’m not, but Austin… Austin’s special. He says love has no rules. He says he loves me back. I want to bite him and keep him forever.”

  “Hey, this has nothing to do with me. So figure it out.”

  “Should I do it?” Mateo asked. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt Austin, but he had apparently already done a good job of it. He had seen a hurt look on his face—tears—more than once since this all started again, since he learned Austin was still in Glasglow.

  “Like I said, nothing to do with me,” Lance asserted. “If you really love each other and he wants it, do it. You’re good enough, Mateo. You think you have an explosive temper, that you’re dangerous to us and everyone else, but you’re not. You didn’t ask me about Weston when I said he was okay, but you should know his wounds weren’t deep at all. He passed out because he’s getting old and couldn’t keep up with you. Even when you say everything goes white, your senses seem to stay behind. Your instinct is intact. You stopped when you did because you were worried about that old wolf. You’d never kill anyone on accident. I know that much. You’d have to mean it, want it.”

  Mateo squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingers into a point on his head that throbbed like a nail had been jammed in there. He wanted to bury his fingers inside his skull and pull the thing out. “But what if I hurt Austin like that?”

  “Have you ever even wanted to wrestle with him?”

  “No… Not like that.”

  “My point. Trust yourself. The rest of us do.”

  “What about Yuri? What if us fighting is the reason—”

  “Shut up, Mateo. You didn’t cause Yuri’s latest seizure, okay? God, not everything bad that happens is your fault. Everyone just writes you off as a hard-ass, but you’re so fucking soft, man, at your center.”