Camp H.O.W.L. Read online

  Maybe Aaron didn’t need four shots, but Adrian most definitely did. He grunted out a noncommittal agreement and took it from her. He felt halfway to a heart attack anyway, so surely the coffee could only help.

  He’d been feverish when he woke up, and since then he’d swung back and forth between cold sweats and pins and needles all over his body. If he didn’t know better, he’d say he had a hangover between his pounding head and the way his stomach had roiled at the scent of breakfast. But he’d called it an early night after his run and relaxed in bed with a minibar snack that had definitely not included any sort of alcohol.

  Adrian took a sip of his coffee as he stopped at a crosswalk and waited for the light to change. He nearly heaved when the bitter liquid spilled across his tongue. He’d ordered this drink dozens of times, and it had always been sweet and smooth. Nothing like this awful concoction. The taste of burned coffee lingered in his mouth, held there by a syrupy residue he could feel like a weight against his tongue.

  He scraped his tongue against his teeth, trying to rid himself of the sensation. This entire day had been a nightmare, and he’d only been up for an hour. Even the hot shower he’d taken to try to loosen his tense muscles and ease his headache had been a disaster. The hotel must have been having water pressure problems because the rain showerhead had been anything but relaxing. The water had hit his skin like tiny missiles, leaving him feeling tender and raw afterward.

  The light changed, and Adrian moved across the wide street with the smattering of people who’d been waiting near him. The man closest to him must have had his Bluetooth headset turned up to eleven—Adrian could hear every word. He glanced over, surprised the nicely dressed businessman wasn’t more concerned about privacy. From what Adrian had heard, it sounded like the man was listening to an audiobook or podcast describing a sex scene in lurid detail. No one around them looked the slightest bit scandalized, which made Adrian reevaluate some of his assumptions about Indianapolis. The book would have raised some eyebrows even in his liberal hometown of Portland, but it got nary a sideways glance here in the Heartland. Adrian hadn’t felt this embarrassed about sex since the Werewolf Tribunal-mandated sex-ed class he’d had to take when he turned eighteen. All wolflings were required to take the class before the Turn, and it had been hell on earth squirming in discomfort as an eighty-year-old female werewolf droned on about the nuances of werewolf sex.

  Lost in thought, Adrian brought his foot down hard on the curb and almost went sprawling. The businessman he’d been watching grabbed him by the elbow and kept him on his feet, but Adrian’s satchel swung forward and slammed into the man and the impact knocked one of his earbuds out.

  Adrian’s face flamed when a long, loud moan split the air, but no one noticed. The businessman gave him a concerned glance once he’d steadied Adrian on the sidewalk, but Adrian waved him off with a quick thanks. The book continued to play, muted slightly when the man tucked the earbud back into place.

  The world seemed to slow, his vision reduced to sparkling dust motes and the swirl of exhaust from a passing bus. Adrian stumbled to a stop, slack-jawed. No one had heard. That’s why they hadn’t reacted. Because the man had been listening at normal volume, and even when the earbud had fallen out, no one had noticed because it hadn’t been audible.

  Except he’d heard.

  Adrian rubbed his hand across his face and stepped to the side to avoid the tide of people. What was going on? He was used to seeing his Packmates react to things outside the register he could process, but he’d obviously never experienced it himself.

  Had that been the problem at the hotel too? Maybe a herd of elephants hadn’t moved into the room above his. Maybe he’d just been hearing normal footsteps, amplified to an almost unbearable level for him.

  He’d never given much thought to what werewolf senses must be like. Sure, he’d seen his sister flinch when fire alarms went off, or noticed how irritable his family could get when they were in a loud, crowded restaurant. But mostly, the werewolves he knew adapted to their heightened senses. Most werewolves always carried earplugs with them and invested in fancy noise-canceling headphones to help them focus when they needed to. The walls in the house he grew up in had been soundproofed, as was standard in most werewolf households. And they avoided apartment buildings and condos like the plague.

  If he’d been experiencing enhanced werewolf hearing last night, he couldn’t blame the people on the next floor. His upstairs neighbors in his apartment at home sometimes drove him nuts with their high heels and vacuuming, but that was nothing like what he’d been tortured with last night.

  That couldn’t be what was happening, though. He didn’t know of anyone who had werewolf senses but lacked the ability to shift. Not that he personally knew anyone born to werewolf parents who was a human—like him.

  Young wolflings were essentially human—the hormones that prompted the shift weren’t produced until they went through their second puberty on the first full moon after their nineteenth birthday. Before that, they were vulnerable to human illnesses and needed human vaccinations. Blood tests revealed nothing spectacular about them. But after their second puberty, the Turn as they called it, the hormones that drove the shift were detectable in their blood.

  When he’d failed to Turn, Adrian had seen a parade of doctors. He’d had scores of tests and second and even third opinions. His mother had refused to accept the diagnosis until she’d hauled him to a werewolf endocrinologist. The results had been conclusive, and his family had been horrified. There was no room for doubt. Adrian’s blood had no traces of anything outside the norm. He was perfectly healthy—and 100 percent human.

  Adrian flexed his fingers and stared at the back of his hand. He wasn’t experiencing any kind of surge in strength—just the enhancement of his senses. Which could be explained by something much more mundane, like illness.

  He swallowed hard, fighting nausea from the scent of the cooling coffee he was still holding. His head continued to pound, and his muscles and joints ached. Surely he was coming down with the flu. That had to be it. Maybe he’d hallucinated the audiobook and the smell of the coffee. God knew he’d listened to his siblings complain about their super senses enough to be able to imagine it.

  Adrian was due to leave tomorrow, and he’d planned to spend today tweaking things at the office and meeting with staffers. But he wouldn’t be doing anyone any favors if he got them all sick. Maybe the better choice would be to retreat back to the hotel. He’d already extended his reservation through the full moon, but he could push it out a few more days. He certainly didn’t want to fly while he was feeling like this, whatever this was. A bus passed, and Adrian’s stomach roiled at the scent of the fumes. Decision made, he did an about-face and turned back to the stoplight. He’d head back to the hotel and take a nap. Maybe that would help. Adrian clenched his hands, recoiling when he felt the bite of sharp fingernails into his skin. The ferrous scent of blood made him gag. He shouldn’t be strong enough to break the skin so easily. And he definitely shouldn’t be able to smell such a small amount of blood. He couldn’t explain this away as the flu. He was definitely Turning.

  A wave of dizziness sent his head spinning as he crossed the street, but this time there wasn’t a kindly businessman nearby to stop his fall. Adrian went down hard, right in the middle of the crosswalk.

  Shit, he thought right before his head hit the pavement.

  Chapter Four

  “YOU’RE sure?”

  Tate tapped his foot impatiently, craning his neck over the desk in an attempt to see what the camp director was writing. He couldn’t read the woman’s scrawl under the best of circumstances, so he didn’t know why he’d even tried to decipher it upside down.

  He’d been annoyed when a breathless camper had barged into his session with another wolfling to deliver a summons to Anne Marie’s office. Tate might feel like he spent a lot of his time herding cattle, like a normal camp counselor would, but in reality, the bulk of his time was spen
t helping wolflings work through psychological issues that either impacted their shift or just weighed heavily on their minds. Most of these kids had never been away from home, and that led to a lot of homesickness and anxiety on top of the usual issues werewolf puberty brought on: an uptick in aggression, irritability, and the mental horror of dealing with an influx of new sensory inputs.

  Tate had assumed when the camper had burst in there must be an emergency. There was literally no other reason anyone would interrupt a counselor who was in session with a wolfling. He’d made his apologies to the camper and rushed over to the administration building, only to find himself shushed and made to wait by Anne Marie, who was in the middle of a phone call.

  Tate looked up when another counselor rushed in, looking as frazzled as he was sure he had a few minutes ago when he’d been the one to skid to a halt in Anne Marie’s office.

  “Evan said it was a code forty-five,” Harris said, his breath coming hard from his apparent run to the building. His offices were the farthest from the administration building. Tate had only had to dash across the quad, but Harris would have had to cover almost half a mile. Given that only seven minutes had passed since a camper had knocked on Tate’s door, Harris’s hustle was impressive.

  “A breach?” Tate’s eyebrows shot up. Had Ryan managed to find a way into town after all? He’d met with the kid this morning, and things had seemed okay. Not great, but he couldn’t expect miracles. The wolfling had at least seemed calmer and more focused on his classes.

  Harris shrugged and eyed Anne Marie warily. “That’s what Evan said. He didn’t know what it meant, thank God, but he’d overheard Anne Marie saying those words on the phone when she’d asked him to grab me.”

  Evan must have shifted to run with the message. Tate made a mental note to congratulate the kid on his control later. It would have been difficult to center himself enough to shift amid that kind of anxiety.

  Anne Marie hung up the phone before Tate could grill Harris for more information. They both turned to her, bodies tensed as they awaited instructions. There was a reason they had yearly training drills and protocols for situations like this one In the case of a shifted wolf on the loose in town, Harris was the go-to guy since he had trained as a volunteer forest ranger and had a good relationship with the forestry service in the area. If it was an unshifted teen out talking about wolves, any of the counselors had credentials they could flash at local authorities to take custody of the kids. On paper, Camp H.O.W.L. was a private juvenile detention and rehabilitation center for troubled teens.

  Which was actually true, after a fashion. They were just troubled by a furry change instead of legal or emotional problems. Even the camp name had a human cover story. The acronym stood for Honor, Obligation, Willpower, and Loyalty. All traits that would serve a miscreant human teenager and a werewolf equally well.

  “I need you two to drive up to Indianapolis to pick up a camper,” Anne Marie said, her irritation clear.

  Tate opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.

  “We have a werewolf who started the Turn last night but didn’t realize it,” she said. “He’s at Methodist Hospital in Indy, admitted for fever and delusions. He passed out in the middle of the street and was taken in by ambulance. Luckily he had his Alpha as his emergency contact in his phone, and she realized what was happening. She called me.”

  Tonight was the full moon, which meant the kid would complete his Turn a few minutes after moonrise. That absolutely could not happen in a hospital. Tate did some quick mental calculations. If they left now, they should make it back with time to spare, assuming the hospital would release the kid to him.

  “Why can’t his Alpha pick him up? Surely they have a safe room,” Harris said, his eyes narrowed.

  “I’m sure they do,” Anne Marie snapped. “But since his Pack is in Portland, that won’t do anyone much good.”

  Portland? What the hell kind of Alpha would let a wolfling travel across the country right before his Turn? There were rules against things like that. The Tribunal could bring the Alpha up on charges.

  Another piece of what Anne Marie had said fell into place, and Tate’s mouth dropped open. From the grim line of Anne Marie’s mouth, he could see she knew the significance as well. The head of the Tribunal was the Alpha of Portland. She was an outspoken advocate of protecting werewolf secrecy, and since she’d started her term, punishments for even minor infractions in the area had skyrocketed. This would be incredibly bad for her if it got out.

  “It’s her son,” Anne Marie said, her voice dropping. “So I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how important it is we handle this with discretion and tact.”

  “How could she—”

  Tate cut Harris’s outraged words off. “The Alpha of Portland only has three sons, and they’re all well over nineteen.”

  This wasn’t adding up. As a wolf without a Pack, he made it is his business to know the details about the governing Alphas and their policies. It could be dangerous for him to run afoul of an Alpha who had a vendetta against unaffiliated werewolves, so he made sure to know who those Alphas were.

  Anne Marie nodded grimly. “Adrian Rothschild turned twenty-seven yesterday. Before last night, he had never exhibited any signs of the Turn. His Pack had accepted the fact that he was human—until now.”

  Tate’s mind raced. Adrian was far from the first wolfborn who didn’t Turn. They were considered a genetic mutation, and it was rare enough that many werewolves might not ever meet someone afflicted with it. But he hadn’t known it was possible for them to Turn later in life.

  “Wait, so there’s a twenty-seven-year-old guy out there who didn’t realize what was happening? Really?” Harris’s tone was harsh.

  Anne Marie looked like she agreed, but she didn’t say anything.

  It was hard to believe, but it had to be a complete mindfuck for the poor guy. Yes, senses came online first and signaled the start of the Turn, but if you’d spent almost ten years convinced you were human, would you jump to the conclusion you were Turning? Probably not. The mind was a complicated thing. It could—and often did—warp people’s perceptions of feelings and events to make them fit reality as they knew it. The man likely thought he was getting sick. From what he’d heard, the early symptoms of the Turn were a lot like a human migraine. Maybe that’s what Adrian had figured was happening to him. There would have been no reason for him to think he was Turning. It would be like a man with stomach pains assuming he was in labor—it didn’t even register as a possibility.

  “But he knows what’s going on now, right?” Tate asked, finding his voice. “He’s not going to fight us when we show up to take him?”

  “No, he’s awake and aware,” Anne Marie said. “He’s listed as delusional because he’s reacting to noises that aren’t there—or rather, that are there, I imagine, but are outside normal human hearing.”

  That was good. Tate had worried when Anne Marie said he was hospitalized with delusions that Adrian had talked about the werewolf community or told the doctors he thought he was a werewolf. Thank God for small favors.

  Harris seemed to have worked past his disbelief and was now grabbing things they’d need for the drive from the supply closet outside Anne Marie’s office—bottles of water, phone chargers, heavy-duty restraints, and a syringe with enough tranquilizer to down an elephant.

  Tate sent up a quick, silent prayer to the universe that they would be able to get Adrian back to the camp before moonrise. He didn’t want to tranq him.

  Harris poked his head into the room, his arms full. “Are we going in officially, or will he be able to check himself out?”

  If the hospital put Adrian on a twenty-four-hour psych hold, it could be difficult to get him discharged, but since both Tate and Harris were board-certified clinical psychologists, they might be able to get the hospital to release him to their care. It would have to be arranged as an official transfer to Camp H.O.W.L., and while they’d done that b
efore in a few other cases, the camp was officially registered as a juvenile center, which would raise some eyebrows if anyone looked too closely at the paperwork. At twenty-seven, Adrian definitely wasn’t a kid.

  And that was a big part of the problem. There was no way to know how the Turn would affect him. This was new territory. Would he actually Turn and shift fully? Or would the heightened senses that had already manifested be the extent of his Turn? It was anyone’s guess, since to Tate’s knowledge, this kind of delayed Turn had never happened before.

  “I don’t know how messy the paperwork will be,” Anne Marie admitted. “His family has already called the hospital and listed Tate as his psychologist of record, so we can only hope the facility will release him to you without problem.”

  “He’s an adult, so there shouldn’t be a problem unless his behavior is registering as disturbed enough to merit a hold,” Tate said. He slung the bag full of water and snacks Harris handed him over his shoulder. Harris’s own bag was full of the restraints, gags, and other things Tate hoped they wouldn’t need. The soft restraints wouldn’t cause Adrian any pain, but Tate hated using them on anyone. They brought up too many unpleasant memories.

  “Since he’s an adult, what are we going to do with him when we get him here?” Harris asked, his face clouded.

  It wasn’t undue concern, Tate decided. Adrian would likely be bigger and stronger than their campers, which would make them unmatchable as far as any physical training together was concerned. And besides, having a twenty-seven-year-old man bunk down with a bunch of teenagers wasn’t appropriate.

  “We’ll deal with that when you get back,” Anne Marie said. “The important thing right now is getting to him before the moon rises and he outs us all by Turning in the middle of a hospital.”

  That would be a disaster. Public Turns had happened before, and Tate was sure they would happen again, but that didn’t make them an inconsequential thing. It took a lot of work to cover up something like that, and he had a feeling it would be a nearly impossible task if the location of the Turn was one of the busiest hospitals in a large city.