Three wolves in jean jackets with matching black beards and identical blue bandanas had loaded about seven dollars worth of quarters in the jukebox and were singing loudly and triumphantly off key to Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places”.
Country music and drunk werewolves. This night couldn’t get any better.
On the other hand, when I looked past my bitterness, it was nice to see not everyone in Callum’s pack was a hateful racist like Hank. Werewolves, in that sense, were a lot like vampires. Who you were after the monster claimed you was the same person you were before, only the after picture had more fur or fangs. Hank had probably been raised by the nearest Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon or whatever, and once that kind of hate blackens your soul, it can’t be undone.
I had to wonder, if he hated me for associating with a half-black kid, how did he deal with having a black man in his own pack? It must have been a hard pill for Hank to swallow. I hoped like hell the African-American werewolf was higher ranked because it would serve Hank right to have to follow the orders of someone he would normally treat like garbage in the street.
I was all for that kind of metaphysical justice.
Nursing my Budweiser, I tried not to draw attention to how little I was drinking. If I’d turned down the booze in a crowd of hard drinkers this close to my wedding, the immediate assumption would be that a tiny werewolf pup was taking up refuge in my womb.
Fat chance on that one.
Truth was, I was the cheapest drunk this side of a group of sixteen-year-old girls with a four-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. My metabolism worked too fast, and I went from zero to drunk in as much time as it took to ask, “You wanna make it a double?” Sometimes it was great, but right now it was a huge nuisance.
So I sipped the shitty beer I’d been offered then held the nearly full bottle up every time someone new tried to get me one and said, “Sorry, so-and-so just got me a refill.”
Morgan and Jackson both appeared to be following my lead, because every time I looked over, Morgan’s whiskey was only half-empty, and Jackson’s beer bottle label was always torn in the same place. I was glad to see they weren’t immediately trusting our Southern hosts and were keeping their guards up.
Lucas, on the other hand, was taking on the task of fitting in with a certain gusto.
That is to say, he was hammered.
You can turn a twenty-seven-year-old man into a king, but you can’t take the twenty-seven-year-old out of the man. Desmond still played Xbox, and Lucas still drank with the gusto of a frat boy at social events. He was making merry with the locals like a pro.
Dominick sat beside me, using his bodyguard duties to avoid yielding to peer pressure. Too bad my pack-protector position didn’t give me a similar out. The slight blond had tipped his chair back, and his eyes were half-closed, giving him the appearance of being near sleep. I wasn’t fooled.
“He looks like he’s having fun, eh?” I asked.
“Eh.” Dominick laughed at me. “You had a wee Canadian slip-up there, McQueen.”
“Sure, sure. Watch yourself or I’ll aboot Chesterfield touque poutine.”
He dropped his chair back onto all fours and gaped at me, his cheeks flushed with amusement. “What just happened there?”
“Oh, sorry, you don’t speak Canadian.”
“Neither do you, apparently, because that wasn’t a sentence in any English dialect ever.”
“Sure it was.” I sipped my beer and smiled for real for the first time since we’d arrived in Louisiana. “I said I’ll beat your ass to a pulp if you ever insult my Canadianisms again.”
“Nonsense. Everyone knows Canadians are a peaceful people.” He was laughing now.
“Tell that to the White House circa 1812,” I told him.
“Oh? Why?”
“Because that’s the year the peace-loving Canadians burned it to the ground.”
Dominick grabbed an empty bottle and jumped onto his chair. The room got silent in an instant as everyone paused to look at him. “Cheers to 1812.” He lifted his empty bottle.
The whole room whooped and raised their full glasses, howling in unison.
I could barely hear over the sound of my own laughter.
After Morgan and Jackson were shown the way to the two-bedroom cabin they’d be sharing, the next stop on the Magnolia Plantation Tour was another dark path into the great unknown. Only this time I had a smashed werewolf king who was leaning on me as though a hundred and ninety pounds of muscle were easy for me to carry, and I no longer had Jackson’s help supporting Lucas’s weight. He was trying to sing me a song, but had come up with a weird mashup of “Endless Love” and “I Wanna Sex You Up”. It was endearing in the way really drunk romanticisms were, but I was too distracted by how heavy he was to appreciate it.
Magnolia interrupted his serenade with a “Here we are.” She and Dominick were doing an admirable job of ignoring the spectacle of a piss-drunk Lucas trying to be a smooth Casanova.
I wanted to defend him and explain that when he wasn’t eighty-percent whiskey, he was incredibly charming. But they didn’t care. He was royalty. He could shit in someone’s hand and they’d say thank you.
We had come to a stop in front of a single-level house built in the same style as The Den. It had been painted an antiqued turquoise color, giving it a fresh, beachy look, and had a porch swing hanging next to the door. I dumped my fiancé onto the swing, where he continued to sing loud and off key.
“I can give him the tour later,” I told Magnolia.
She nodded and opened the front door, letting me into a small but tidy cabin. Immediately inside the door was a kitchenette with a stovetop burner and a tiny bar fridge. To my left was a worn-looking couch sitting in front of a limestone fireplace. Throw rugs were scattered haphazardly across the hardwood floor.
“The wood can feel real cold in the morning,” Magnolia explained. “The fireplaces don’t work anymore. We had to seal them up when critters started coming in and ruining all the unused cabins.”
“It’s okay, I know all about the joys of ornamental fireplaces.”
Along the back wall were two doors. She pointed to the one on the left. “The bathroom.” Clearly it was not a stop on our tour because she steered us in the direction of the right-hand door. “And this is your bedroom.”
Inside, the walls had been painted white, and the exposed beams ran the length of the ceiling and into the main room, showing me that the bedroom wall didn’t go all the way to the top, as if the room divisions had been added later. If these had once been slave quarters, that made sense. Why divide a room for comfort when you could cram people in on top of each other like cattle?
A king-sized bed with a soft white duvet took up most of the room. The only touch of color was a painting of waves rolling off an angry ocean, which hung over the bed. The grays and blue greens tied the stark whiteness back into the seaside color scheme the rest of the cabin had been decorated with.
“Thank you so much, Magnolia.” I saw our bags piled beside the door, my yellow weekender looking extra cheeky amongst all the white. “Thank you.”
“Anything,” she repeated her promise from earlier. “Will His Royal Highness be okay?”
I snorted. “He’ll have a royal headache in the morning, but yes, he’ll be fine.”
“Very good.” She nodded and turned to go. “We’ll see you at breakfast.”
“Oh.” Shit, how was this going to work with so many strangers around? “I don’t know what Lucas or Callum told you, Mags, but I have a…condition.”
She looked puzzled. Well, hell, I’m sure I could come up with something that would be believable to an eighteen-year-old wolf.
“I was born a wolf.” Lucas had told me this was rare to the point of being considered impossible. Only babies who underwent severe trauma in the womb could activate their lycanthropy early. Typically they didn’t and died instead. I was an exception, but I couldn’t explain to them the reasons for it. “I… Because of that I’m more connected to the moon. I’m fully nocturnal.”
“Wow.” Her eyes were wide with wonder, absorbing my words.
Dominick held back near the door, listening to the web of half-truths I was weaving. I hoped he was committing them to memory because Lucas was going to have to maintain the lie for everyone when I didn’t show up to any daylight events.
“I mustn’t be disturbed during the day, do you understand?”
She nodded vigorously. “Of course.”
When she walked out of the cabin, I could hear her muttering, “A born wolf…” like I’d told her I was a unicorn.
Dominick didn’t like my idea of leaving Lucas to sleep off his drunken stupor on the porch. I didn’t like the idea of sharing a bed with a snoring, drooling mountain of inebriated werewolf. We compromised by dumping him on the couch in front of an imaginary fire. Dominick offered to sleep on the porch swing, which I didn’t love, but I couldn’t talk him out of it.
When I climbed under the duvet, there was still an hour before the early rays of dawn would drag me down into my daylight sleep. I was grateful the design of the cabin meant the bedroom had no windows, but it also made the space a little claustrophobic.
I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to stare at the walls and fantasize they were closing in on me.
A weight sank down beside me on the bed, making the springs groan.
“Managed to find your way off the couch?” I asked.
In response, the duvet lifted and a muscular body slipped against my back, spooning me perfectly. I arched my back towards him, our bodies molding together like they were meant to be paired this way.
“Maybe we left you outside too long,” I said with a smile. “For a werewolf, you’re downright freezing.”
Lips brushed my earlobe, and I could feel the curve of a smile. “Then warm me up,” he replied.
My eyes flew open, and I spun in the bed, still encased in the arms of a man who was decidedly not a werewolf, nor my fiancé.