Ravensong (Green Creek 2)

He was older than me by three years.

He was nine and I was six when he spoke to me for the first time.

He said, “You smell weird.”

I scowled at him. “I do not.”

He grimaced and looked down at the ground. “A little. It’s like… the earth. Like dirt and leaves and rain—”

I hated him more than anything in the world.

“HE’S FOLLOWING us again,” Rico said, sounding amused. We were walking to the video store. Rico said he knew the guy working behind the counter and that he’d rent us an R-rated movie and not tell anyone. If we found the right movie, Rico told us that we could see some tits. I didn’t know how I felt about that.

I sighed as I glanced over my shoulder. I was eleven, and I was supposed to be a witch, but I didn’t have time for wolves right then. I needed to see if tits were something I liked.

Mark was there on the other side of the street, standing near Marty’s auto shop. He was pretending he wasn’t looking at us, but he wasn’t doing a very good job.

“Why does he do that?” Chris asked. “Doesn’t he know it’s weird?”

“Gordo’s weird,” Tanner reminded him. “His whole family is weird.”

“Screw you,” I muttered. “Just—just wait here. I’ll deal with this.”

I heard them laughing at me as I stalked away, Rico making kissing noises. I hated all of them, but they weren’t wrong. My family was weird to everyone who didn’t know about us. We weren’t Bennetts, but we might as well have been. We were lumped in with them when people whispered about us. The Bennetts were rich, though no one knew how. They lived in a pair of houses in the middle of the woods that many outsiders came to from all around. Some people said they were a cult. Others said they were the mafia. No one knew about the wolves that crawled just underneath their skin.

Mark’s eyes widened as he saw me approaching. He looked around like he was plotting his escape. “You stay right there,” I growled at him.

And he did. He was bigger than me, and the impossible age of fourteen. He didn’t look like his brother or father. They were muscled and larger than life, with short black hair and dark eyes. Mark had light brown hair and big eyebrows. He was tall and thin and seemed nervous whenever I was around. His eyes were ice, and I thought about them sometimes when I couldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t know why.

“I can stand here if I want to,” he said with a scowl. His eyes shifted to the left, then back to me. The corners of his mouth went down even farther. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

“You’re following me,” I told him. “Again. My friends think you’re weird.”

“I am weird. I’m a werewolf.”

I frowned. “Well. Yeah. But—that’s not—ugh. Look, what do you want?”

“Where are you going?”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“To the video store. We’re going to see some tits.”

He blushed furiously. I felt a strange satisfaction at that.

“You can’t tell anyone.”

“I’m not going to. But why do you want to—never mind. I’m not following you.”

I waited, because my father said wolves weren’t as smart as us and sometimes needed a little time to work things out.

He sighed. “Okay. Maybe I was, but only a little bit.”

“How can you follow someone only a little—”

“I’m making sure you’re safe.”