Charade (Heven and Hell #2)(5)
Author: Cambria Hebert

My heart softened a bit at hearing this because, really, I missed her too. “Me too.”

“Bye, then.”

“Wait! Mom?”

“Yes?”

“I’m really happy for you.”

“Thank you.” She sounded so happy.

I hit the END button on the phone and dropped it onto my bed. I stood there, numb, in the center of the room, until my toes felt ice cold. I looked down at myself, half dried, dressed in only a towel and a hysterical laugh bubbled out of my throat. It was just too much. My mother had a boyfriend.

I couldn’t help but wonder what the man would be like and if perhaps, my mother’s new-found happiness might sway her to sign the permission slip for me to go to Italy.

Chapter Two

Sam

The trees were dense this far into the woods, which I liked because it was better to conceal ourselves; we had more freedom to move without fear of being seen. It was dusk and since it had not been a clear day, the clouds in the sky made it darker than what it might have been. It was oddly gray outside and the trees looked black against the sky, making everything appear as though it was a scene from an old black-and-white postcard that has yellowed slightly from age.

I glanced over my shoulder at Logan, who was trailing a few paces behind me. He didn’t want to be here. I had to make him get in the truck and come. He needed this. I just wish he understood that. “I think we’re far enough in,” I said, stopping and turning around.

“Tell me again why we’re here,” Logan said, glancing around at the trees.

“We’re here because you need to get more comfortable with the hellhound inside you. You have to learn some more control and how to shift.”

“I don’t want to shift.” His eyes continued to look at everything but me.

“Yeah, I know.” I sighed. When Logan first arrived, I really thought that he had just been confused, that he was scared and freaked about everything that had happened to him. He had been all alone at fourteen with strange, unexplainable things happening to his body. But the longer he’s with me, the more that I see Logan’s issues went deeper than I realized.

“Why don’t you want to shift?”

His wandering eyes snapped to me. “I told you. I don’t want to be a hellhound. I don’t want to be a freak.”

“I get you don’t want to be a hound. But you aren’t a freak. You just have abilities that other people don’t have. I really think if you learn about them, about yourself, you won’t be so freaked out about who you are.” Logan lifted an eyebrow when I said “freaked.” I shoved at his shoulder, “I wasn’t calling you a freak. Not yet anyway.”

The side of his mouth tilted in a half smile. First smile I got out of him all night—I’d take what I could get.

“Let’s try something,” I said and the smile vanished from his face. “There’s a deer in here, in the woods. I smelled it on the way in; I can hear it too, shuffling around every few minutes. Tell me where it is.”

Logan began looking around.

“You won’t be able to see it. It’s too far away. You’re going to have to use your senses.”

He gave me a ‘yeah right’ look. “You have amplified scent and hearing, Logan. Come on and try.”

At first, I thought he would argue, but he didn’t. He closed his eyes and I could see the concentration on his face. Long, quiet moments passed as we both listened to the sounds in the night. Finally, he opened his eyes and looked at me. He cocked his head to the left and made a slight motioning with his hand. “Over there,” he said hushed.

I smiled. “Very good.”

Logan grinned.

“Let’s shift now and use our senses in hound form to find it. This time, though, we will sneak up on it. You’ll have to move quietly so it doesn’t hear us coming.” I pulled my shirt up over my head and tossed it on the ground. I reached for the button on my jeans, then stopped and looked at Logan who wasn’t moving. “I’m not wasting a perfectly good pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Come on, Logan. It will be fine; you’ll see.”

He nodded and we both stripped down. My body began to shake; the hound in me seemed anxious to get out. Then I was shifting; I was so used to it, I barely noted the way my bones and muscles seemed to stretch and re-align. The way my back arched up and my spine popped into place. It didn’t hurt like it had the first few times and it only took moments for the transformation to be complete.

I stretched out two midnight-colored paws in front of me and flexed my claws into the earth. It felt good to give in to the hound sometimes, especially when it was because I wanted to and not because I had to (like when a demon was trying to kill Heven). This is the feeling I thought if Logan could experience, he would understand—he would see that being this way isn’t the end of his world.

I stood up and looked at Logan, who still hadn’t shifted and had begun to sweat. It was trickling down his bare chest and beading on his upper lip. I couldn’t talk in this form so I tilted my head to the side, hoping he would understand I wanted to know what was wrong.

He was looking at me with fear in his eyes. I was standing in front of him, accepting who I am and exactly what he fought to ignore. Not knowing what else to do, I sat down and waited for him to shift. To my relief, I didn’t have to wait long. He dropped down onto hands and knees and began to shift.

It was horrifying.

His body seemed to break itself apart; his skin stretched paper-thin and his bones poked at it until I was sure they would puncture right through. The sounds that tore from his throat were gut-wrenching and not at all what I had been expecting. Sure, I knew that shifting might hurt him a little (especially since he fought it so much), but not even my first time had been like this.

He seemed to scream and groan all at once. Sometimes he sounded like a hurt little boy and others like a beast trying to claw its way out of Hell.

I was completely frozen.

I sat there in shock not knowing what to do, knowing there wasn’t anything I could do, and as his body writhed, I felt my instincts sharpen, to identify… a threat. I shut down that feeling immediately. Logan was not a threat to me.

He was my brother.

He let out another shriek, one that raised the hair along my back and I was sickened and mesmerized all at once because the way his skin stretched and bunched just made me think over and over that there was something inside him that wanted out.

And then it stopped.