Shredding the Veil

Chapter Two

If she closed her eyes, she saw red ones boring into her.

"That's good."

"Honey, it's Saturday, everyone had finals last week and you have a couple days to rest before school starts back up for the second semester, okay? Just use them. I'll take care of everything with dad. Hell, I promise when you're better we'll take a weekend trip to San Diego, shop until even you drop."

She forced herself to smile, even if she was usually colder to her mother. Lydia liked her mom fine; she just wasn't effusive with emotion. It wasn't in her natures except sometimes with Jackson.

"Mom, that'd be okay but it has to be a real store. I'm talking Neiman Marcus not Macy's."

"That's my girl. I have an emergency client meeting today though. Is that a problem?"

"You're in PR, not a doctor."

"You should see what Bob King of King's auto managed to do at the mayor's ball last night. He's gonna need all the PR he can get, stat."

She laughed and shook her head. "You owe me a story, but, yeah, I'll be fine. Just me, my pj's and eventually I'll call Allison. No problem."

Her mom sighed. "Honey, Allison's busy right now. Her...I hate to be the one to break you in on everything."

"But?"

"Her extended family's still in town."

"For what and since when?"

"Since the animal that attacked you also managed to kill her Aunt Kate."

***

Five separate messages in six hours.

Five .

Allison was screening her. Lydia could understand. Having your aunt, who was really more like a cool older sister, be murdered would weigh on anyone. Clearly, Allison's tight knit family wasn't taking it well. Still, Lydia was back and Allison was her friend, probably her only good one who wasn't just hanging out with her to jockey for position or have bounce off popularity. She'd go over to the Argents tomorrow regardless of if Allison was in a friend mood.

Damn it.

She was Allison's best friend and now was one of those times when you'd need a BFF by your side. That said, Lydia wasn't sure what to say. There was no way Allison could know that her aunt had been killed by a werewolf and not by a random wild animal. There certainly was no way for Lydia to explain that or why she knew it was true. It just made her sound insane.

Lydia sat on her bed, her small giraffe cuddled on her knee. She'd already spent the bulk of morning tracking down information on werewolves. Finding information wasn't her problem. The internet was full of it. The problem was the internet had information on everything. For every site that said Wolf's Bane was fatal, there was another that said that silver was the only way to kill werewolves. For each site that swore werewolves were only humanoid and bipedal under the full moon, there was a different one that claimed they were always just larger wolves, four paws and all.

Some sites promised a cure and others swore it was impossible.

The cure was what Lydia was most interested in. She wasn't going to grow paws and a tail and start killing people. She was Lydia Martin, Goddamn it, control incarnate. She wasn't going to become some snarling beast, put her mom and her friends in trouble.

What little there was about a cure---and even on the internet there wasn't much---insisted that there was nothing one could do to cure a born lycanthrope. If you were born with the curse, it was too ingrained in your nature to get rid of. Bitten wolves, however, at least on some sites, could be cured if they murdered the wolf who'd made them. They had to do that and eat their heart.