Shadows of the Past

Eight

The next morning was a rush of throwing clothes into my backpack, making sure I had my toothbrush and everything I would need packed in there and then meeting my parents in the kitchen. Mom handed me a smoothie—which I still had to drink through a straw with a left-tilted head for the most comfort—while Dad informed the enforcers he had last-minute decided to bring along what they might be getting themselves into should the meetings go wrong. Cole, as head enforcer, was also joining us. Sydney would stay home because of their sons, and Jaycee and Dexter would run the pack for the weekend.  Everyone would be on alert should Dad send for backup. We all prayed it wouldn't come to that, though. Suddenly I was a little more anxious about going along, but I couldn't let it show. Not after all the effort I had put into convincing Dad to bring me along.

We collected into vehicles. Dad, Mom, Cole, and me in Dad's truck, and other enforcers picked whose vehicles to drive down, filling them full. Mom turned our radio on before we even left the property.

She liked slower, softer music. I think it was calming for her for whatever reason. I preferred the numbing, popular pop songs blasting through my ears. So, I connected my headphones to my phone and shut myself off from any conversation with the three of them. We settled in for the long drive ahead of us.

I slept on and off, which might have been a bad idea considering we were pulling onto the gravel drive of the Rising Moon Pack after eight and a half hours in the car. Just in time to have dinner. Sleeping the afternoon away could make it extremely difficult to fall asleep later, but I'd deal with those consequences.

The crunching of the rocks underneath our truck's tires intensified as we climbed the slight incline of the road. Dad turned the wheel sharply to the left and then we came to an abrupt stop, the vehicle parallel to the pack house outside.

It was beautiful. It was unique.

While I hadn't been to many other packs before, I knew just at the first look that this one was different. Most packs preferred to live together in a mansion-type estate, such as ours. They were big on the outside and the inside, with a lot of land and gorgeous architecture.

This pack house had a lot of land, I could tell—the woods enclosed us from all sides and through the branches, the ground sloped and curved to create the foothills of this section of the Appalachian Mountains—but the house itself gave more of a cabin-in-the-woods vibe to it.

The stretch of greening grass between the gravel drive and the layered slabs of stone that formed the steps of the front porch was short. There were two sets of stairs that framed the middle of the house, the slabs climbing on either side of the top steps, creating four short towers. Posted on the top slab of each tower was a wood post, rounded with its bark still attached, making it look like the posts were actually trees. Maybe they were.

All along the porch were these slim tree trunks, attached to the deck at the bottom and to the roof at the top. Like a cabin version of columns that held the ceiling up. Slimmer posts jutted out of the trunks diagonally near the top as support beams, and they looked like little tree branches forming a Y shape to hold onto the roof—little arms to the trunks.

From where I was in the car, there were two sets of French doors that marked the entrances to the house. I wasn't sure why they needed two front doors, but maybe the pack used them for separate purposes. I wondered which side we would be invited in.

Above the porch's roof stood the second story of the building. Giant windows lined the entire front, the middle one with an arched attachment window where the roof peaked above it. The siding of the house was brown, and the roof was brown—only a slight shade darker. From this view, three chimneys could be spotted poking up, contrasting the roof with their lightly colored stone tiles.