Her Perilous Wolf by Julie Steimle (free e books to read .txt) 📖

she had broken up with Hogan Orwell, her scum-bag, no-good, ex-fiancé. Audry finished the tale with the somewhat climactic part where she had just returned from her brief stint in Tanzania to clean out her apartment with Vincent, and had stumbled upon Silvia and Randon who were there to do the same thing.

“…So it was storming outside. A real downpour with lightning and all that. And the lights were flickering on and off. At that moment, I decided to get my rescue supplies out of the ottoman. That’s where I kept my tranquilizer guns and other stuff. I took out the pistol, and checked to see if it was loaded, as sometimes I have one in the chamber and I forget. I also went to see if I had left my solar powered flashlights in the window sills. The next thing I know, the lights go on and off again—and I swear, just like in a horror movie, that Horror-Flick-Killer Witch suddenly appeared in the doorway where it just empty a second ago.”

Breaths held in. Audry shook her head as she recalled the story in more detail. Maris and Skyler listened, rapt with attention and quite the opposite as the last time she told the tale at the campfire. But back then she had not wanted to scare them.

“She screamed something at Silvia, I don’t remember what,” Audry said. “Then raised this freaky knife and ran at us. So I did what I would have instinctually done if an animal ran at me. I shot her with my trank gun.”

Vincent nodded, remembering.

“And she fell flat on her face in our kitchen.” Audry sighed, done with the tale, letting silence and pops of the fire reign.

“And then what?” Vanessa asked, on the edge of her seat, Owen snuggling up with her.

“We called the police,” Audry said with an anticlimactic shrug. She took her toasted marshmallow off her wire stick, putting it between graham crackers and chocolate pieces without another thought to the story.

Vincent nodded, raising a hand. “Randon called the police.”

“Randon? That guy who was looking for Audry earlier?” Vicky glanced to her cousin.

“He’s Silvia’s husband now.” Audry shrugged, squishing her s’more together to get the chocolate to melt. “She was moving in with him at the time.”

“Moving in with him?” Her mother lifted her eyebrows. It bothered her since she was socially conservative when it came to physically intimate relationships. She was never quite happy with Audry’s various trouble-making boyfriends over the years, always suspecting they had persuaded Audry to do things she would have considered ‘naughty’.

“They were eloping,” Audry explained to her mother with a nod.

Vincent nodded also to confirm it. “He told me upstairs back then when we were taking apart the furniture that he was planning on eloping with Silvia to Vegas.”

Audry’s mother shook her head, sighing with a pointed glance at Audry. “I hope you don’t do that.”

Painfully laughing, Audry replied, “Mom, considering my luck with men, I probably should never get married. I’d probably hook up with Jack the Ripper next.”

Clover Bruchenhaus gazed at her daughter, her eyes sad. She was inclined to reach out and hug her daughter and the many heartbreaks that were spoken of in that sentence. But she didn’t. She could tell Audry did not want the attention.

“Well, what’s wrong with your friend Rick?” Vicky asked perkily. “I mean, if he really is who you said he was—H. Richard Deacon the Third—Gran would be thrilled. You and him. The Deacons may be new money, but they are money—and the rest of Bruchenhauses would respect that. And the Bushe-Waites on Aunt Clover’s side.”

Vincent’s face paled. He peeked to Audry, hoping she was not considering it. Not that Audry cared about wealth. Both of their families had stayed well out of the social pressures of their affluent relatives for plenty of good reasons. But it had always been a joke that if one of them married into wealth they would be forgiven. Their Bruchenhaus cousins considered the Williams family too middle class, and they considered Zachary’s branch of the Bruchenhauses utterly hippie-dippy—and therefore both embarrassments. Vincent was the only one of them with one foot in the financial realm of the well-to-do, and that was because Grandpa Bruchenhaus thought Vincent was his only grandson who was not a total nitwit. Therefore he had entrusted Vincent with work on his behalf. All the other Bruchenhaus ‘heirs’ were jealous.

Audry closed her eyes, stuffing her s’more into her mouth and shaking her head, as her mind had gone in a different direction. She definitely not care about the wealth. She was too hippy-dippy, and she disliked her wealthy relatives as much as they disliked her—her grandparents excluded (they weren’t so bad). Fact was, she thought as she licked the chocolate and marshmallow from her lips, it was the main reason she had disliked Rick in the first place. He was too rich. The werewolf thing was something else entirely.

“His real name starts with an H,” Skyler called out, laughing.

“You, be quiet.” Audry rose up to get another marshmallow, wiping the corners of her mouth.

But her cousins lifted their heads, watching her. “What’s this?” Vivian asked.

Doug chuckled, breaking open the foil on another chocolate bar, passing Maris some for her s’more, then to Skyler. “Just a joke.”

“The kids think Aunt Audry is attracted to dangerous men whose first name starts with H,” Jean supplied with an amused smile.

Audry inwardly moaned more, pulling out two marshmallows from the bag. She was tired of her love life being the topic of discussion all the time.

“H?” Vivian exchanged a look with Vanessa. “His name starts with an H?”

“H. Richard,” James reminded her, Vicky nodding.

Owen nodded smirking.

“Harvey?” Vanessa guessed.

“Harry?” Aunt Helena guessed.

Skyler and Maris giggled when their great uncle Fredrick Williams guessed, “Hubert.”

Audry moaned.

Doug smirked knowingly. “Think a bit. What’s his father’s name?”

“He is H. Richard Deacon the Third,” their father, Zachary, hinted.

Vincent kept a tight lip, peeking to Audry whose cheeks were pink, though it was too dark to tell.

“Howard?” Vicky said, wrinkling up her nose. “His name is Howard?”

“If it’s any consolation,” Vincent declared, “He went by Howie as a kid.”

They looked to him. “You knew?”

He shrugged. “We’ve talked. I’ve met him.”

“I’ve only see him asleep in the hospital,” Doug muttered. “I’ve spoken with his father, though. You know, he’s got really toxic blood?”

“Yes,” Audry said, sitting back down next to him with three marshmallows. “And tons of allergies, and people shooting at him because they think he’s…” She lost her breath. They were shooting at him because he was a werewolf. They didn’t think it. They knew it.

“They think he’s what?” James asked, picking up on that.

Doug snorted. “They think he’s a werewolf.”

Nearly all the Williamses exploded into laughter. Vincent forced a chuckle so as not to stand out, while the other Bruchenhauses snickered with amusement—except for Audry who couldn’t.

Her father picked up on that and quieted first. It clicked in his head that it bothered her. As he angled it to the side, he said, “People really shoot at him?”

Audry nodded in earnest. “Yeah. He’s got bullet wounds and… lots of scars.”

Doug nodded about the scars. He had seen them as well.

Everyone hushed up immediately, appropriately speechless.

Viviane mustered, “You saw them?”

Audry nodded. “Yeah. He showed them to me… uh, at the beach. Yesterday.”

Vincent knew that was a lie. But he chimed in, “Yeah. He wanted to clear some things up. He wanted to warn Audry that those folk who, uh, think he is a monster might try to hurt her… you know, if they thought they were friends.”

Everyone drew in breaths.

“Audry…” Her mother reached out and rubbed her hand against Audry’s back. “I didn’t know. Are you ok?”

Tears cresting in her eyes, Audry shook her head. “No. I mean, I knew people were shooting at him. But he was just saying that there are dangerous people out there who are… just delusional. You know, like those crazy ladies who think they are witches. But he’s afraid I would get hurt in the crossfire. We have to distance ourselves from him and his friends. That’s what he was telling me.” She looked to Doug. “You should not mention his friend Troy or Randon in public. It puts you at risk.”

Doug rolled his eyes. Digging into the graham cracker box for another big rectangle, he said, “You’re just being paranoid.”

“I’m not,” Audry snapped. She looked to Maris and Skyler, then Jean. “All those guys from Gulinger Private Academy went to that school for protection. It wasn’t an elite academy for education. It was a school for kids at risk.”

“Including Selena Davenport?” Vicky said, smirking.

That stumped her. What could she say? Audry guessed Selena went there due to her supernatural gifts, to put her in a place where she could learn to control them without harming ‘normies’, as Matthew put it. But what could she tell her cousins?

“And why did Rick Deacon go there?” Vivian asked.

“I know that one,” Vincent said, raising a finger.

They looked to him.

He said, “His parents had just divorced and his father was traveling. Rick said his father trusted him at a private school rather than at home ‘wreaking havoc’, as he put it.”

Chuckling, Audry nodded to herself. That’s right. Rick had been a hellion thirteen-year-old before his parent’s divorce. But then she recalled that they had divorced because Rick had turned into a wolf—clearly for the first time in his life.

“And his town is full of witches….” Audry murmured.

They all stared at her.

She blinked back, realizing she had said that out loud.

“You made that up,” Doug said.

Audry shrugged, deciding to let them believe it.

Only Vincent was not convinced. His mind seemed to go into overdrive as he added up a number of things from the past together with the recent events. He was staring at the fire as if he were having an enormous epiphany moment. When he looked to Audrey again, he mouthed, ‘Silvia’s coven?’

Audry nodded back with the tiniest movement, meeting his gaze.

“How about somebody else tell a story?” her father, Zachary, called out. He looked to his sister. “Helena, how about you?”

Grinning, Helena settled in her seat as her marshmallows toasted near the fire coals. “How about I tell you about the time we went to the Grand Canyon and heard the story about the Egyptian caves with mummies in them? Have you heard that one?”

“Yes,” Vicky said scooting closer, “But tell it again. I don’t think everyone has heard it, and it is way cool.”

Several of them leaned in to listen. But Audry couldn’t. And Vincent had heard that one already. On vacation years ago, his family had gone to a place in Arizona where someone had a ‘mummy’ locked away where you could pay a fee to see it. It was back when he was in high school, and he had been only mildly impressed. He thought the story itself was hokey, though. He whispered to Audry, “Do you want me to help keep Doug away from—”

Audry shook her head and whispered back, “Rick will manage it. He was concerned. And knowing him, he’ll do his best to protect Doug from all that.”

Vincent raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

Nodding, Audry sighed as she met her cousin’s gaze. “It is one thing I know for certain about him. If he wants you safe, he will do everything in his power to keep you safe.”

He stared at her.

“He got me two new apartments, and he was trying to get me to accept a new car.” Audry shook her head. “He wasn’t doing any of it for Silvia. He didn’t really even like her. He did it for Daniel, her brother, but not for her. She annoyed him. She teased him every time she saw him. And she shipped him and me all the time…”

Vincent drew in a breath. He got closer and whispered, “Do you like him?”

Shooting him a dirty look, Audry got up. It was a stupid question. He should have known better. The only thing that changed in her feelings