Hidden in Sheridan (Tainted Series: Book 1)

Moon: FIRST QUARTER

Levi - It was the same high school I had attended for two whole years. With the same annoying, dysfunctional, crazy teenage anxiety and angst that has always been here. Absolutely nothing new and yet here I stand. In wrangler jeans and a blue hoodie, frozen in the parking lot watching the building itself with zero desire to enter.

I grab the soft cotton of my hood and pull it over my head then tighten the drawstrings until only my nose sticks out. This urge to hide wasn’t entirely fear. I recognize the heat pulsing beneath my skin, someone inside that building had caused this. I want to rip through the entire building and find out who had done this to me. Ask them why they did and then demand they undo it! But, I also want to do it without looking like a lunatic.

I am only a sophomore which means I have survive two more years of school here.

Sterling brushes past me heading for the doors but he pauses when he notices my hesitation. Pivoting, he approaches cautiously.

“You don’t have to go in,” he assures me, “you can go home and sleep. You look exhausted and might not get much sleep tonight.“ His volume dropped as he spoke. His brown eyes shift around the parking lot to see if someone else had heard.

I consider it. The offer is appealing, my muscles ache and my feet hurt. I try to remember falling asleep the previous night but all I remember is the pain.

My body shutters.

We’d stopped by home to get changed. Mom hadn’t been there, which I count as a blessing. I found her note that said to call her after school, so I made a mental note to call her during lunch hour. I could tell from her hand writing she was worried, so the sooner we talked the better.

Until then …

“You said I was bit by someone who might be in that school, right?” I say through the opening of my bunched up hood.

“And if he is, Rory and I can find him.” Sterling answers. “You really don’t have to be here.”

I shake my head pulling open the hood until it hung loose around my face. “Maybe I’ll have a better chance of finding him.” I didn’t want to say I might have a connection to him, but after feeling Mrs. Wolfe’s ‘wolf’ command, I had this distinct feeling I was underestimating my instincts.

For some reason the thought leaves a sour taste in my brain… if that’s possible.

“Okay,” Sterling eyes me carefully. “Our kind has an ability to hide our scent. It’s a very difficult thing to do but now that we know what we’re looking for we should be able to catch him off guard.”

I square my shoulders, remove the hood from my short curly hair and flatten the wrinkles from the front of my hoodie, all while taking a deep deliberate breaths.

“Then tell me what to look for?”

Sterling starts to protest but I brush him off by walking straight for the doors. I can hear him roll his eyes before he falls into step beside me.

Lowering his voice to a whisper Sterling explains, “It won’t be an actual smell. You remember what you smelled in the basement?”

“Fear, desperation?” I state with vivd recollection.

“Emotion,” he says. “It’ll be a dark feeling, a dark smell, just like you know he’s hiding something.”

I try to laugh, it’s hallow. “This is High School. Everybody is hiding something.”

“True, and you’ll smell that too. But I’m hoping this one will smell different. More canine …”

“That dog smell covers your house?”

“Shut up. You’re becoming one of those dogs now.” Sterling’s weak play at being offended releases the knot in my stomach and an actual laugh bubbles out of my chest.

My first real laugh in hours.

It is kind of funny. Was I turning into a werewolf? Was it the bite that’s killing me from the inside out? With my luck, I’m going to die and then they’ll discover I was poisoned by some common drug that had nothing to do with the bite, but we were too busy looking into the supernatural to draw such a basic conclusion.

I reach out and pull open one of the large blue doors. It’s lighter than usual. I let Sterling in first, then I step inside. When the door latches behind us the sound echos in my ears, hurting both sides of my head.

My eyes focus. The hallway opens up to a large entrance, two halls shooting off in opposite directions and a staircase beyond those. It’s already flooded with students.

My laugh stops, the knot in my stomach returns and I know this is going to be a very long day.

***

Sterlings tray clangs as he drops it in front of me. The contents; A baked potato, with as many bacon bits as possible. His usual on potato bar day.

“There’s a serious lack of meat,” he grumbles, also a common complaint of his but now it makes complete sense. Meat, being his main source of nutrition.

“Okay. Now I understand why you’re always hangry.” I say, “But bright side, you could live in a part of the nation where vegetarians have already taken over the world.”

“God, bless Wyoming!” He agrees taking a bite filled with bacon.

“Have you found anything?” I ask, he groaned his answer not in words but in emotion. The smell is bitter and seems to pull down on both my shoulders at the same time.

Safe to bet that means ‘no’. So I change the subject, “Have you seen Ity today?”

“Stalking her is pretty low on todays To Do List, don’t you think?”

I shrug. I know he’s right, life and death are hanging in the balance, but, “Still, you haven’t seen her?”

He glares and the taste of irritation coats the air between us. “Why are you even fascinated by her? She can’t even talk, Levi. You two can barely have a conversation and it’s obvious she’s noting you.”

I shrug, “I had a full conversation with her before all this. She was easy enough to understand. Plus her efforts to blend in and not be seen, totally make her easy to like.”

“Like but not stalk.” Sterling mutters, eventually giving into me. “I know her smell, she hasn’t been here all day.”

“You know her smell?” I question, searching Sterlings face, but he refuses eye contact and shrugs.

“Maybe she’s sick,” He offers.

“Oh thanks wishing my girlfriend is sick …”

His eyes squint as he laughs, “Girlfriend? Does she know you’re dating?”

Irritation bubbled up in my stomach, my hand clamp down on the tables edge beside my tray. I held tight actively pushing away the urge to jump over the table and tackle Sterling to the ground. He felt it too. Spork between his teeth, Sterling was on his feet backing away three steps.

He waits a few minutes glancing around at the continued commotion of high schoolers. Nobody seems to notice. Though that didn’t keep the heat from rising to my cheeks. The bubbling sensation settled and I manage to release the table.

Sterling slowly returns to his seat. “I’ll stop teasing. Just be careful around her. She’s a good friend and if you don’t want to ruin that, you might want to back off for a while.”

Considering my impending doom, his words are logical but I also know I hadn’t intended on calling her my girlfriend. “I don’t know why I called her my girlfriend.”

Sterling shifts awkwardly, leaning close. “Human hormones are hard enough but mixing them with wolf hormones … the moon tends to make us a little bit more aggressive, overconfident and then we come down from the high and realize we did a lot of stupid things.”

“So you do think I’m changing …”

“I’m not as quick to rule it out like my Mother.” A group of Juniors fill the seats at the end of our empty rectangle table. “What you’re going through is already hard enough. If you add hormones to it then you’re doomed.”

“Last Halloween?” I ask. Recalling Sterling’s Zombie costume as he dominated every game at the town carnival, and proceeded to rub it into everyone’s faces. Specifically the seniors in charge of the corn hole booth. I ran for my life that night.

“I - I really should have stayed home,” Sterling nods, “but to be clear I won those games fair and square I just shouldn’t have …” He allows his last words to trail off, his eyes darting around behind me. I don’t look, I wait, watching his expression. His eyes still as he finds what he’s looking for in the distance, his eyebrows pull together in deep concern.

“What is it?” I ask my mouth full of potato, which I have never regretted before, but the melted butter and sour cream no longer taste appealing.

“Smell.” He says.

First, I spit my potato into the thin piece of tissue paper that passes for a napkin. I start to turn to see and Sterling’s hand rushes up, like he’s about to shove my face into my tray. Which has happened in the past. This time my reflexes were … well, they existed. My hand grips his wrist and pulls it down hard onto the table top.

He winces and yanks his hand free. It did feel nice to have the upper hand for once, so I can’t help but smile. “I wasn’t going to do that. I just meant without turning around, can you smell it?”

I take a short breath and ran through the smells I could identify. Axe Body spray, but humans can smell that atrocity from miles away. The usual cafeteria smells, and a few extra burnt potatoes floating from the kitchen. The girls smell like … well girls.

The heat rises to my face, as a familiar sweet smell finally hit me. Strawberries combined with wildflowers and Cool Winter Ice bubblegum. I used to only catch that combination when she stood near me, but now it was so strong and she was still in the back of the gym beside the door. The cool winter breeze at her back swirls the smells from each additional girl as they flock around her.

My face must have lit up because Sterling’s head shakes, “Yes she’s here, but can you smell something else?”

A bit drunk from the smell and I shake my head no, until the stench of a familiar dog sat down beside me.

Rory. Wearing the rough jacket and hole covered jeans he’d left in this morning, lands in the seat beside me.

“Stalker, isn’t that your obsession?” Rory asks. I open my mouth to protest but I suddenly realized something,

“Why are you both fixated on Ity?”

Looking me straight in the eyes Rory asks, “You don’t smell it?”

The repeat of that question sent an irritated ripple down my spine, “No,” I look back over my shoulder. Ity is smiling as everyone around her is laughing, though it did look forced I still recognized it. She was her. She was Ity. Then the smell they’d both mentioned, catches up to me.

It’s exactly how Sterling had explained. A smell that brings on a feeling of darkness. Like she too had been trapped in a moist basement unable to escape.

Shaking my head, I turn back to them. “No. No. No, It’s not her. You said it was a guy. A guy wolf.”

However, Sterling doesn’t look so sure anymore.

“He can’t tell the difference.” Rory says in his naturally insensitive way. Sterling muffles the growl that rolls around his throat. Heat rises from my own gut, I want to growl too. I want to shut Rory up for teasing my friend and Rory senses this.

Ignoring his brother, Rory’s eyebrows raise at me and he leans in. “You challenging me?”

My lips pull back into a snarl until Sterling’s boot kicks me under the table. “No challenge!” Sterling insists.

Amused, Rory sits back and tosses some bacon chunks into his mouth. “Maybe you are turning into a wolf.” I look down to see my own pile of bacon is gone, “But not a very clever one.”

“It’s not her.” I insist again, keeping my eyes on my unappetizing lunch tray.

CHAPTER END