Be Careful What You Wish For

Chapter Fourteen

1 "There's this self-storage facility in Sequim," Leah had told Demetri, as they'd boarded his rental car. "I've been renting a unit there, ever since I came back from college – you know, just lots of crap I don't want to throw away, stuff my family would like to get rid of for my own good."

He'd asked for the address, typed it into the GPS (a hero for the modern age: undead, but willing to ask for directions!), and had pulled out of the parking space. To be fair, he'd offered her the pilot's chair, so to speak, but she'd declined. Too much going through her head, she'd told him. She didn't feel like focussing on traffic, either, and he never got tired. It was a bit of a win-win deal, really.

About five minutes after they'd started driving, she'd dozed off. When she came to, it was getting dark. Yawning, she stretched, and said, "How long have I been out?"

He cast her a quick, sideways look. "An hour. We should be there in about thirty minutes. You can go back to sleep."

"No, thanks, I'm good," she said, running her fingers through her hair, trying to sort it out. "This has got to be the most bizarre day of my entire life."

"More bizarre than the day you found out you were a werewolf?" Like the good preppy boy he was, he kept his eyes on the road. There was a decent amount of traffic, but nothing overwhelming. The fine drizzle of earlier had turned into a verifiable downpour, however. Well, it wasn't as if he had to deal with limited visibility problems.

"Strangely enough, yeah," she said, tugged down on her sweater, leaned her head back, and started drumming on her jeans-clad thighs with her fingertips. "Being a shape-shifting, supernatural monster whose sole reason for being is killing vampires doesn't shock me as much as playing dynamic duo with one of the people I'm supposed to be killing."

"Makes you think, doesn't it?"

"I'm sure there's a valuable life-lesson in there, somewhere," she said, and looked out the passenger-side window. "This is all so strange. Tomorrow, I'll be walking onto a battlefield to stop a bunch of supernatural abominations from tearing each other to pieces. It won't work, of course, and I'll be forced to pick a side." She pressed her lips together and chewed on the inside of her cheek, exhaling deeply through her nostrils. "I'll be fighting my pack leader and my own brother. How did that even happen? I know I shouldn't feel sorry for myself, but I can't help but wonder if I shouldn't have stayed away from home."

A little silence ensued, during which all she heard was the sound of the rain pummelling the car, as well as the drone of traffic.

At length, he said, "Why did you do it?"

"What, come back?" She turned to the front again, crossed her arms, and shrugged. "I don't know. Sense of duty, I think. My mom said that the community needs me. I missed everyone, too. Whatever it was, it seemed like a good idea at the time."

"Then, the vampires happened."

"Yeah. Then, the vampires happened." She snorted derisively and shook her head, gnashing her teeth together. "You know, every time I start feeling sorry for all the dumb bastards being warped by the demon spawn, something reminds me of the fact that it's all their own damn fault. The kid is their fault. Bella's casualties are their fault. Jared and Embry..." She trailed off, shut her eyes, took a deep breath, waited until the pangs in her stomach subsided. "That's on them. Hell, all the collateral damage that their mere presence here caused? Us wolfing out? All that imprinting shit? That's all on them. Fuck 'em. I'm done feeling sorry for any of those assholes. They sure as hell don't give a damn about me."