The Loup Garou Society by Julie Steimle (romantic novels to read txt) 📕

Then Rick’s cellphone chimed. It was a text.

Meet us at this address instead. It is in the eighteenth district. You can take the Metro there. This is where Marie lives.

The address was entirely in French, which was expected. But he felt so stupid looking at it.

“Is that from your friend?” Audry asked, peering over his shoulder at the text.

He nodded. “Yeah. They’re going to run a distraction.”

She sighed.

They were soon at the elevator doors.

“Who was that woman?” Jenny, the blonde, asked.

Since they knew who he was, there was no way he could reveal the truth. His father had not given him permission for that, and it would cause an unnecessary scandal to say she was his sister. So he said, “A friend.”

“A girlfriend?” Jenny asked.

He laughed, shaking his head with a snort. “No. She’s like, eight years older than me.”

“Not into cougars?” Jenny teased. Her friend in braids looking on with enjoyment.

He rolled his eyes again. “She’s not that old. She’s just… we’re related.”

“Oh.” Jenny blinked, brightening.

The elevator doors opened.

They made sure Rick got on with their first group. The teacher hardly noticed him among them, staying with the upper half to make sure all the students got onto the elevator The wolf prowling up top didn’t even see him.

As they went down, while in the squeeze-close space Jenny whispered, “Are you looking for a girlfriend?”

He laughed, shaking his head. “I’m kinda… not exactly in a long distance relationship.”

“Ah…” Both Jenny and her friend in braids moaned, disappointed.

“There’s a girl I like who lives in California,” he explained. “But I hardly get to see her because I live in Massachusetts.”

“Was it some kind of summer fling?” Audry asked, her cynicism intact.

Shooting her a terse look, he said, “No. She’s a friend of a friend, actually. And I got to meet her. She’s amazing. But… she just wants to be friends.”

“Ah…” Jenny and her friend chimed in again, sharing hopeful looks, pretending to feel sorry for him. "Friend-zoned."

“Well that’s just too bad,” Jenny said.

“Maybe you’re interested in finding another girl, then,” her braided gal pal added.

He chuckled. A girl would have to be absolutely amazing to make him forget someone like Eve McAllister—even if Eve only ever wanted to be ‘just friends’.

Audry snickered. “Fat chance gals. A man who has dated that Selena Davenport wouldn’t even blink at a girl like us.”

He stared at her. “I wasn’t talking about Selena. Selena lives in Vermont. And she is dating my old roommate, Tom Brown.”

Audry raised her eyebrows at him. Her arms were folded.

They reached the bottom level where they let out. Rick sniffed the air for wolves on the ground when he stepped into the open air.

There were none.

“Hey, do you want to go out to lunch with us?” Jenny asked, seizing his wrist.

Her braided friend nudged him in the arm, “We can swap snapchat accounts.”

Audry rolled her eyes.

“I… I… I really gotta get going,” he stammered. “Uh, though, thank you for helping me get out of that mess.”

“Don’t leave yet. You’ve gotta be hungry,” The blonde said, grinned confidently at him. Slapping a hand to her chest, she smiled. “I am Jenny. This is my friend Cecily. And that is our friend Audry.”

He blushed, keeping an eye out for wolves. Eventually they would find him if he stayed in one place for long. “Thank you, but, I actually need to meet up with those other ladies at their friend’s place. They gave me an address, and I need to figure out how to get there.”

“Ah, come on,” Jenny begged. “Just for a sandwich or something. Our treat.”

He shook his head. “No, really. I can’t.”

“What address?” Audry stuck out her hand for his cell phone.

Though she was obnoxious, he handed her his phone and showed her the text.

“Where is it in the city? This is my first time in Paris, and my French is not that good,” he said.

“Really?” She raised her eyebrows at him.

“You know,” he said, “has anyone told you that your cynicism is extremely unhelpful?”

She paled. Cringing, she closed her eyes. “Sorry.”

He sighed, regaining his temper. “I didn’t mean to snap. I just… I’m freaked out. Ok? Can you please just help me find my way? And I won’t bother you anymore.”

“You aren’t bothering us,” Jenny snapped and shoved Audry in the side. “And we still want you to have lunch with us.”

Shaking his head, he said again, “I can’t. They’ll be waiting for me.”

“Can we at least take a selfie with you before you go?” Cecily in braids asked.

Chuckling, he nodded, relenting.

“Ok,” Audry said. “You need to get on this metro line here.” And then she pointed across the grass in the direction he had to go. “That’s over there. And you get off at this stop here.” She then seized his arm and wrote the stop name on it in ink. No one had ever done that to him before. It was startling, but not unpleasant. Most people didn’t treat him as one of the group. Being born wealthy, he mostly got special treatment—which he didn’t particularly like. This Audry treated him as an equal, whom she could push around. “Then you head north here. Do you have a map?”

He shook his head, staring at her. “Not a great one.”

She gave him hers. “Take it. I can get another one at the hotel. You really should get a good map if you intend to tour Paris.”

He nodded. He hadn’t really thought about touring Paris. It had been a business trip, after all. Then again, the Loup Garou had no intention of letting him tour anything, and they had provided the map.

“Thanks,” he said, tucking it into his backpack next to the skateboard. He started to walk off.

“Wait!” Jenny called out him. “Our photo!”

“Oh! Sorry.” He jogged back, blushing.

The girls found a place on the grass not far from their group so they could get a decent angle of the Eiffel Tower above their heads without getting into trouble.

“If you have snapchat I can send this to you,” Jenny said, with hope.

“Sorry.” He shrugged, backing away toward the metro stop. “I don’t do much on social media. Dad claims the government uses it to spy on people.”

Jenny and Cecily laughed incredulously. But Audry raised her eyebrows.

He waved, then hurried off.

“His dad sounds paranoid,” Jenny said.

“I know,” Cecily chimed in.

“Funny,” Audry remarked, cynicism gone. “My dad says the same thing as his.”

He found the metro easily. And he followed the directions that girl had written on his arm to the scrawling letter. He wondered if he had bruised under her pen. Because he was sure he was red under the writing. It made him resolve to never get a tattoo.

He got off at the stop and found himself in a not very nice neighborhood. Some of the buildings looked like they needed repair, and there was a lot of litter on the ground. Looking around, he realized that Margarete had sent him to a kind of ghetto. Would the Loup Garou put one of their own in a place like this? Yet thinking on it, Margarete had said the Loup Garou did put out-of-favor wolves into poorer homes as a kind of punishment. And Marie, like Genevieve and Margarete, was not obeying them like they wanted. Even worse, this neighborhood separated her from the rest of her family, making her isolated.

He followed the directions and looked for the address.

And he found it.

It was a small house with an enclosed yard. It wasn’t a nice street, but he could smell wolf. Margarete’s words from the night before went through his mind as he approached the house. His sister, Marie, might try to hurt him.

He hoped there weren’t many wolves around. Rick approached the house, hoping no one from the pack was a watching because that would end this escapade very quickly.

As he neared the gate, he saw a child playing within the yard. A little boy, perhaps five or six years old with wolf gray pattered hair, playing with one of those India red rubber balls they used in dodgeball. The boy’s ball bounced unevenly against a tile and rolled to the fence. Rick opened the gate and picked it up, handing it to him.

“Victor!” a mother’s voice called out. Then Rick saw her, a petite woman the same age as Margarete with wolf-gray patterned hair, braided back from her face in a long chain, and rich brown eyes. She rattled something in French to the little boy who immediately ran to her, carrying the ball with fearful looks back at Rick. Hopping out of the house, right on her heels was a girl about seven or eight years old with brown hair and amber eyes.

The woman stared at him, approaching Rick cautiously while keeping both of her children close. “Qui es-tu?”

He knew that one. It was ‘Who are you?’

Trying to remember his miniscule French, Rick said, “Je m’applle…” he shook his head. “I’m sorry. My French is bad. My name is Howard Richard Deacon the Third. Dad sent me to find you.”

Chapter Eight

“Where is he?” Louie demanded, on the verge of shaking Margarete by her arms. He wasn’t because people were watching.

“What nonsense!” Margarete kicked him in the shins, hitting him. “Stop thinking I have hidden my brother. Why don’t you just check the Seine?”

“Is he in the Seine?” the man-wolf shouted.

They were on the second level of the Eiffel Tower. Margarete and Genevieve had walked down all those stairs, exchanging information while trying not to feel entirely sore from the hike. Margarete could not understand where Rick got the stamina. She wished she could blame it on his more wild blood as a Deacon—he definitely was a wild creature—but she had the same amount of Deacon blood as he did. And she was more wolf, as his mother was human.

Genevieve rolled her eyes. “No. Though I wish I had found him so I could have pushed him into it.”

“We’re not asking you!” he snapped at her.

“She doesn’t know where he is either!” Genevieve shoved him off of Margarete, pushing between them. “You should stop blaming us for everything that goes wrong.”

“Where was she last night?” Louie growled.

“I was at a friend’s,” Margarete said.

“A wolf’s house?”

Margarete lifted her nose. “No.”

He snarled. “You spend too much time with humans, Margarete.”

She huffed, turning away. “Humans don’t threaten me or bully me. They help me find work. If I didn’t make friends with humans, I would starve.”

He growled more. “You should obey the law of the pack, and then you would not starve.”

“The law of the pack…” Margarete snarled back in disgust. “You mean the rules of the elders.”

“The same thing!”

She shook her head. “No. It isn’t.”

Genevieve raised her eyebrows, surprised. She didn’t say anything though.

“But for the record, I did meet him last night,” Margarete said.

Genevieve groaned, openly dismayed—though not revealing what was upsetting her. It was probably that their story about not meeting Rick was now changing, and she didn’t want to remember anything new.

Louie pulled back and shared a look with his partner.

“And he told me that real wolves don’t go around making rules for the pack the way the Loup Garou do,” Margarete said.

“He said that?” Genevieve asked, curious. And