Ascension by Kelley Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page B

and sampling his brandy, we headed up to my room to sleep. I waited until Nick drifted off, then slipped from bed, took my flashlight and sat in the corner to read. With Jeremy gone, I was the man of the house, and I didn’t feel right falling asleep on the job. Anything could happen. And that night, something did.
    When the clock downstairs struck midnight, a wolf’s howl echoed the last few gongs. I leapt up, dropping my book and flashlight, and opened my window. The howl came again, from deep in our back woods. I knew that it was a mutt, not because I didn’t recognize the voice, but because it was a howl of challenge, the call of a wolf who has ventured onto another’s territory and dares him to do anything about it.
    I knew I had to act fast. Jeremy and Antonio would be home any moment now. If they heard the howl, our weekend would be ruined. Antonio would insist on handling it, Jeremy would insist on defending his own territory, and any way that it ended, no one would be happy. Better for me to take care of it first.
    Two things told me I was relatively safe taking on this challenge alone. First, the wolf’s cry held a quaver that said he was getting on in years. Second, coming at
midnight
and howling in the woods rather than appearing at our front door meant he wasn’t all that sure he wanted anyone to answer his challenge. This was an old wolf making his last stand, maybe ill or otherwise close to death, hoping to die doing something he’d never dared do in life—take on a Pack wolf.
    So I leapt out the window, raced into the forest and Changed. Then I tracked him and killed him. It was, as I’d suspected, not a difficult task, and not one that requires any further detail. I killed him, I buried his body, and I went back to bed.
     
    That winter, I killed my second mutt. This time, the mutt presented himself at our door, so I couldn’t intercede before Jeremy found out. As usual, Jeremy gave him until
midnight
to leave town. The mutt only laughed and said he’d be in the back forest, ready whenever Jeremy got up the nerve to take him on. I knew he wouldn’t leave. And I knew Jeremy would give him until
midnight
. So, on pretense of working out, I went down to the basement, then climbed out a window and zipped to the forest. I Changed, lured the mutt away from the place he’d promised to meet Jeremy, and killed him. This time wasn’t nearly as easy as the last, but I managed it. I stashed his body far from the assigned meeting place, and downwind so Jeremy wouldn’t find it, then hurried back to the house. Late that night, long after Jeremy had decided the mutt had fled, I returned and buried the corpse.
    Two mutts within six months was unusual. Normally, we saw an average of one per year. A third one showed up just a few months after the second. This one, fortunately, did take Jeremy’s advice and left town. But that still meant three mutts in a year. Something was wrong. Yet because Jeremy knew nothing of the first one, he thought we’d only had two mutts in just over a year, both of whom had left without a fight, so he saw no cause for alarm.
     
    When I hit sixteen, puberty finally kicked in, bringing with it a problem far more complicated than the killing of trespassing mutts. I began to feel the first tugs of sexual desire, and while that’s probably confusing for any kid, my situation only made it ten times worse. With no females of my own species, my body fixed those desires on the nearest approximation it could find—human girls. And that might have been fine, had my wolf-brain not jumped in with demands of its own. On the matter of sex, the wolf in me was clear: I needed to find—not a casual sexual partner—but a life partner, a mate. I would accept a human mate, since it seemed I had little choice in the matter, but it had to be someone I wanted to spend my life with. Yet there were few humans I could envision spending an entire weekend with, let alone a lifetime. So here I was stuck.