Howler's Night Read Online Free Page A

I followed the well-worn path straight to a blacktop road.
    Roads led to freedom.
    There was something back in the woods, something malevolent and twisted. I felt it clinging to me like wet leeches, and the further I moved away from it the easier it got to breathe. So I kept moving.
    The road was empty. I kept hoping for a car, a truck, anything, so I could hitch a ride, but no one came.
    This was the highway to Hell .
    I stopped running the moment I thought that. Staring down at my feet, I saw they were bloody and raw. But it barely fazed me; it was just more pain. The manacles on my wrists seemed to mock me; there was a story there. I knew there was, but I didn’t know what it was. The more I tried to find it, the emptier my head became. I saw nothing but shadow and darkness when I tried to think, so I stopped thinking.
    The loud chirp of a bird finally tore me from my thoughts. I must have stood there dazed for hours because the sky was gray, and it could be nighttime, or it could be rain.
    I sniffed.
    What was rain? Was it red? That seemed to make sense.
    I could hardly remember. But I smelled the minerals in the air, and I thought that maybe that was rain.
    Until a wet drop landed on my nose. And then another. And then another. Until it wasn’t just drops, but a sheet of water pouring down on me from the heavens. Lightning flashed and thunder clapped, and I should have been scared, but I couldn’t stop laughing.
    I held my hands up, tipped my chin forward, and soaked it in, and smiled.
    Only once I began to shiver did I remember that I couldn’t stop, that I had to keep going, had to get away.
    The sky was a deep shade of navy blue when I finally spied my first glimpse of humanity in the form of a blinking neon roadside bar sign that read The Twilight House.
    I didn’t stop to consider whether I should go in looking as I did. I was shivering, I was cold, and I was soaked. The bar wasn’t much of a building, really more of a powder blue wood-paneled shack with a rusted tin roof. The entire structure looked worn, except for the neon sign. In fact, it seemed to beckon me inside.
    I knew that idea was bizarre, but I swear each flash of light called to my soul, and the panic that’d spread like a riled hornets nest when I’d woken up started to calm.
    With trembling fingers, I lifted my hand, gazing around at the gravel lot full of black motorcycles. I was driven solely by instinct at that point. Normally I would never go someplace where I didn’t know what I was walking into, but as broken as I felt, I still trusted that gentle whisper inside me enough to push open the door. The second I did, it almost felt like I’d stepped into an alternate dimension.
    The inside of the place was dimly lit, as these hole-in-the-wall places generally tended to be. There wasn’t much in the way of décor, just metal tables lined up along the wall, two pool tables to the side, a dart board on the wall, and a bar to the front that gleamed silver. A group of men crowded around the pool tables.
    Several heads whipped up when I walked in and stared at me with flat, black eyes. My skin prickled as I sensed power rippling like hot asphalt beneath their flesh.
    The scent of predators blasted over me, and I shivered. All the males, and even the few females, wore the same odor; it was a mix of damp earth, sex, and musk. I realized it was a pheromone they were leaking, and I knew—though I didn’t know how—that none of them were human.
    Just like I wasn’t human.
    That reality should have come as a shock to me, but it didn’t. Whatever malaise had gripped me back in the woods seemed to be slowly fading. I could now remember my name—it was Ya-El.
    I looked at the people in the bar. They wore the skins of humans. They were toned and in varying shades of black—from light tan to darkest ebony, with cat-like eyes that ranged from emerald green to icy blue. Their features bore a feline aesthetic. Each of them had long, shaggy dreds that