Her Perilous Wolf by Julie Steimle (best e book reader TXT) 📕

reaching out her tiny hand, petting his nose. Darth closed his eyes, practically smiling. He licked at Ivy’s fingers.

“Good dog,” Audry patted him on the head. She loosened his leash a bit more. Looking to Jessica who was watching her intently, she took another breath and said, “I really need some advice.”

Jessica nodded, watching Audry’s expressions. But she waited for Audry to initiate. However, even then she said, to her ‘nanny/help’, “Have you introduced yourself?”

The woman shook her head, with a look to Audry. “No. I’m sorry.” She looked to Audry. “I’m Deidre Johnson. Nice to meet you finally.”

Audry raised her eyebrows. “Finally?” She looked to Jessica. “Are you talking about me?”

Laughing, a little speechless, Jessica shot Deidre a chastening look for teasing her, as Deidre said, “Everybody has mentioned you.” And then she went into the kitchen, apparently fetching juice from the refrigerator. 

“Everybody as in who?” Audry blushed, watching this odd woman.

“She knows nearly everybody I know,” Jessica whispered. “So don’t worry about Deidre. I keep no secrets from her.”

Turning, one eye still on the French Noir girl with the haunted feel about her, Audry murmured, “But you kept some from me.”

Jessica stiffened.

With another peek to Deidre, Audry carefully said, “Rick, um, showed me… everything. I found out what he really was—the truth about the wolf.”

Deidre and Jessica both drew in a breath. Jessica brightened, but Deidre looked concerned, her brows knitting together. That was at least proof that Deidre indeed knew the secret.

“When?” Jessica asked eagerly, leaning closer to her.

Deidre came back with the juice, setting it on the coffee table, then reached out to take Ivy so they could seriously talk. Jessica let her. Darth followed them, interested in Ivy more than anything at the moment. Those three went to the side sofa, allowing Audry and Jessica to talk more personally.  

“About half a month ago?” Audry then immediately explained how it had happened, from Vincent and Maris spying on the Gulinger beach party, to the invitation to the evening party, then the party itself and what Rick had showed her, all the way to after when she was in Idaho, then Africa. She then told Jessica about everything she saw and experienced on that trip to and in Africa, finally getting to how she became deathly ill, then being saved by this dream of Eve McAllister.

Jessica gasped out loud at this point rising from her seat. “You saw Eve!”

Audry nodded, noticing Deidre also went pale and breathless. Apparently she knew Eve also.

Shivers went through Jessica as she said, “That means you were on the verge of death! You almost died!”

Nodding again, Audry shrugged. “Yes. There were, I guess, angels arguing over it too. They were angry that she had spared me.”

She watched Jessica set a hand to her forehead, staring into space. “This is… bad. A demon attacked you because you knew Rick. You have got to stop telling people you know him.”

“Demon?” Audry rose. “Was that what it truly was?”

Jessica nodded while sweating “Yeah.”

“How do you know all this?” Audry asked. “Be honest with me.”

Closing one eye, Jessica said, “The last time I tried to talk to you about this stuff, you got overwhelmed. And I don’t want to cause you more trouble.”

“It’s too late,” Audry retorted, hanging her shoulders. She stared at the couch cushions. “I am already drowning in it. I am seeing supernatural things everywhere now. That gremlin. That freaky guy on the plane, that witch, those amazimu—”

“Ok. Ok. You have a point.” Jessica nodded, staring ahead, thinking frantically.  “Um… let’s sit down again, so I can explain.”

They did. Deidre carried Ivy back to the kitchen where she put her in the hanging jumper sling then started to put together food for supper. Darth followed Ivy as she bounced, making baby noises. He bounced next to her, which made her giggle with glee.

“First thing first,” Jessica said, ignoring the noise “How are you with Rick being a werewolf?”

Audry shrugged, looking to his picture on that tee shirt which was on the wall. “I… I don’t know.”

Jessica sighed.

“I mean, I like the wolf,” Audry murmured on, thinking more about it. “And… the man is a good man. I’ve judged him so wrong.”

A kind smile rested on Jessica’s face. She angled her head, leaning back into the sofa back.

“But he is right, in that people have tried to kill me because I know him.” Audry shook her head. “And I know what happened to his grandmother, his grandfather, his family steward—to Jordan Hague and Rhett Williams…. I… I know about Daisy. I know what happened between them. I know why. I also now know what she was. I’ve met her pack, for pity’s sake, though I did not understand what they were at the time. But they had harassed us, me, at a conference just because I was selling those tee shirts. We would not have gotten out of it if it weren’t for Tom Brown.”

Jessica cringed. Closing her eyes, she nodded.

“People die around him, even though it’s not his fault,” Audry murmured. “So I am fully aware it is dangerous for me to associate with him, even on an ignorant ‘friend’ basis like Jordan and Rhett. And I know the SRA are tracking him. I’ve been to their website. The guy can’t catch a break.”

“Yeah…” Jessica heaved a sigh, yet looked glad Audry understood enough not to hold it against Rick.

“Regardless of what he said to me about forgetting all this, I don’t think I will be able to un-see things now,” Audry moaned. Her gaze rested hard on Jessica. “What do I do? How do you handle it? How do you live knowing supernatural things are real?”

After a look between her and Deidre in the kitchen—the rich warm smells of supper wafting towards them, probably soup—Jessica said, “Alright. Um, first off, I think I need to explain about Eve before I get to answering that question. You saw her, so you know what she looks like. Eve is a demon—but a good demon.” Jessica added that last part hastily.

Audry drew in a breath. All this time, the famous Eve was a demon?

“She is, right now, in a state of purgatory, so-to-speak, currently working as an angel of death.” Jessica shook her head. “Of course she would save your life. It is how she is. And I am grateful you have told us where she is. That means we can tell Hanz where she is—”

“She had mentioned Hanz,” Audry cut in, nodding gravely. “I was supposed to give him a message—to tell him that she loves him.”

Jessica’s eyes welled up. She sniffed away a tear. “Yeah. I’ll give you your chance to do that.” Wiping another tear away with her wrist, taking a breath, then another one to regain composure, Jessica continued, “So, anyway, how did I become so comfortable with the supernatural? Well, that is a very long story. I hope you have the time.”

Audry looked around herself in the room. “I have all the time right now. I need to know.”

She watched Jessica exchange a look with Deidre before continuing. Audry wondered what Deidre’s connection to all this was. It was growing clearer that Deidre knew things about all of this, but was guarding secrets.

“Ok, it all started when my parents got divorced and my mother moved us to Middleton Village Massachusetts….”

Jessica’s story involved her starting off in life as a skeptic, just like Audry. She put out all the disclaimers that she had not been the type of person to believe in magic—mostly because her father was performing magician/thief/con-artist, and her mother a pragmatist who also happened to work for Deacon Enterprises as a translator in the LA branch of the company. The world had made sense before she had moved to that witch-run Massachusetts town. Jessica had been told all about the curses on the town before she arrived, but had not believed one of them. Not the one about a coven of witches running it. Not the one about no one being able to go in or out without serious consequences. Not the one about the cursed library where boys vanished. And not the one about there being werewolves in the woods—the Deacons being werewolves themselves. However, not long after the move, one by one each curse had been proven true to Jessica.

“It started with the library curse,” Jessica explained. She then extended her hand, showing Audry the scar on her palm—one Audry had seen hundreds of times. “You know that cult that I said had kidnapped us?”

Audry nodded, noticing Deidre suddenly busier with cooking. This time she was assembling sandwiches. She was clearly keeping out of it.

“It’s a lie.”

Audry stared at Jessica. “What?”

“No cult kidnapped us,” Jessica explained, her shoulder scrunching up with an abashed shrug. “We made it up because no one would believe what really happened to us.”

Staring more, Audry leaned in. “Then what really happened?”

Breathing in the now savory smelling air, Jessica explained. “We were spirited away into another world.”

Immediately, Jessica went into a long story about a book which was a portal to another world, a parallel dimension, as it were. She explained her scar was a remnant from that experience. Then she went into more detail, describing how time moved faster there, how it messed with her memory, how that world was full of monsters, dragons, elves, dwarves and writing clichés for fantasy novels. The long and the short of it was that the library curse was the boys getting sucked into that parallel world and dying there. She and nine others had escaped that world. She had been the first girl from that town to actually go there, and likewise, the last. Two of the nine boys who had returned did not really have the mark like the rest of them, or see magical things since—but they were also older men and wanted to forget. However, the rest of them had started to have supernatural encounters. Also, they were unable to forget their old lives in that other world. Most of them were mentally no longer children, but veteran adults with decades of life experiences behind them, including PTSD from war.

“We were all changed,” Jessica explained. She then extended her scarred hand again. This time, the mark glowed a white light from her palm. “We were now connected to the supernatural forever.”

“Oh my…” Audry leaned back from it. The light was bright, as if from a sun. There were even flickers of flames rising from it. Audry recalled that Daniel, Silvia’s brother, was able to light candles without matches—though she had always assumed he had used a lighter. This had been his lighter.

Jessica quickly extinguished the flames and light, peeking once more to Deidre who was now putting the sandwiches on to a plate. “The thing is, after that one, each curse on the town proved to be true. You know about the Middleton Village witches, so I don’t need to tell you about that.”

Audry nodded, growing dazed. She knew all about the witches from Silvia. She had met three for pity’s sake. They were real. And they were scary.

“As for who can go in and go out, it was the witches who hurt people and controlled the borders of the town.” Jessica shook her head, drawing up a sleeve and showing the long scar on her arm, which Audry was also familiar with. “They first tried to recruit me, but then they tried to sacrifice me when they failed. And as for the last curse, well… you now know it’s true.”

Yes. Rick and his father were werewolves. That story which she had always thought was made up slander just to harass a decent businessman, was real.

“But how do you cope?” Audry murmured over it.

“Well…” Jessica shrugged again, looking a little hungry now. She peeked once more from the kitchen. “The thing is, sometime before I met Rick and found out he was a werewolf like all the rumors said, a man came to our town and changed everything for us.