How to Flirt With a Naked Werewolf - Molly Harper [68]
I didn’t help my maternal guilt issues when the day after the search party returned empty-handed, the parents of Craig Ryan and Jacob Bennett arrived at the saloon with stacks of neon-yellow fliers that screamed, “Have You Seen These Boys?” Evie and Buzz readily agreed to display them at the bar, although the fliers were already plastered on every available surface. They were just kids, really, nineteen years old, with braces-perfect teeth and a sprinkling of acne across their cheeks. Their photos smiled out from the flier with the invincible confidence of the young.
“They were here, weren’t they?” Mrs. Bennett demanded of Buzz, her voice skating that hysterical edge between shouting and shrieking. She was a thin, fine-boned woman, who was probably very pretty when she wasn’t wracked by despair. “You spoke to them? How were they? Did they seem like they were all right?”
Evie shook her head, choosing to gloss over the fake-ID story for obvious reasons. “We didn’t get to spend a lot of time with them—”
“Did they seem like they were OK or not?” Mr. Ryan shouted, plunging the already quiet dining room into silence.
“They were fine,” Buzz said gently. “Just a couple of kids, glad to be heading out on the trail. Happy to be out of school.”
Mrs. Ryan’s lip trembled. “So they were happy?”
Faced with their wild-eyed, hopeless grief, I took the coward’s way out. I hovered in the kitchen. Knowing that it was possible that I knew something about their sons’ death, that I could speak up, and that I wasn’t made me feel guilty and useless. Then again, what would I say? “Hi, I think it’s possible your children were eaten by werewolves”? How would that help them?
I told myself it was sympathy for the parents that kept me from sleeping, because it felt criminally self-indulgent to think about an absent lover when people were missing their children. Still, I tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, tangled in sheets that smelled like Cooper. I stripped the bed, but the clean sheets left me unable to sleep and missing his scent. So I ended up putting the Cooper sheets back on.
I was not proud.
Instead of sleeping, I searched the Internet for stories of wolf attacks in our area, but the last proven mauling within one hundred miles was in 1987. And it involved a hunter who tried to chase a hungry wolf off the elk he’d just shot. It didn’t exactly fit with our wolf’s pattern. It was far more common for campers to be injured by bears or moose. I read about the various species of wolves living in the state but couldn’t find anything that looked like Cooper, who seemed to be a cross between a black-furred wolf and a common gray. I read about their diet, scent marking (ew), and body language, hoping to be able to decipher Cooper’s moods better when he was in wolf form. For instance, I learned that if Cooper folded his ears back and ducked his head, he was scared. And even if he was scared—which would be an indicator of something pretty bad, since he was an apex predator and all—I shouldn’t run like hell. If we were facing another wolf, running would decrease my chance of survival. I didn’t find this to be very helpful information.
Unable to channel my energy elsewhere, I was eager to get to work every morning, hoping it would help spin out the hours, but everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. I threw myself into cooking, hopping on every ticket the minute it came through the window. I practically launched the plates out of the serving pass for Evie. But I’d look up at the clock and only a few minutes had gone by.
At least, I could count on Abner to keep me entertained. On the fourth and final day of Cooper’s trip, Abner smiled broadly as I slid the plate in front of him. He inhaled the fragrance of home cooking, took my hand in his, and pressed it against his bony, flannel-covered chest. “OK, gal, this is my final offer. Come live with me and cook like this every day. You’ll get a toilet seat that’s always down, warm feet, color TV, and I’ll even install central heat.”
I giggled. “Abner, I’m holding