LONE WOLF - The first excerpt

Here's the video edition where I read it aloud for you.

Scroll down for the text edition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDRl1LHeWjc

• Below is the first chapter of Lone Wolf. Above is the official trailer, wide version. There's a vertical video too. I would love for you to share these videos with your reading friends.

  
  

• Lone Wolf will be available in paperback wherever books are sold, and in ebook on Kindle.

  
  

• Kindle pre-order is available now. Paperback pre-orders will be coming soon.

  
  

• Also of note, we have a plethora of guest authors coming to visit and chat here at the Coffee House blog beginning next week if all goes to plan!

LONE WOLF

CHAPTER 1

His mother was dying and she was only forty-four. She looked far older though, ravaged by cancer. She wasn’t going to recover and get out of the hospital. Not this time. And her nurses had told him it was close, so he’d stopped going in to work at all this week. He came in the morning, took a break at midday when she was usually sleeping, then headed back for the evening visiting hours.

He sat by her bedside and held her hand. She opened her eyes and looked into his, her gaze direct and clear. He hadn’t seen that in a while. She said, “I’m too weak…to talk as much…as I should.”

“You don’t have to talk, Ma. I can do all the talking.” He leaned over, holding her hand. Her copper red curls had faded to the shade of ground ginger, and the roses had fled her cheeks.

“I thought I’d have…more time.”

“I did too, Mom. A lot more.”

She smiled at him, but it was weak, and her poor lips were so chapped it probably hurt. He quickly grabbed the lip balm from her bedside stand and went to put it on, but she held up a hand, bending her eyebrows. “No. Listen.”

He lowered his hand, startled. Cilla had never snapped at him like that.

She took a breath, like getting mad had taken it out of her. Her eyes drooped, but she popped them open again. “You’ll have to read the journals, I guess.”

“What?”

“Too weak,” she said, her voice becoming a whisper. “But you need to know.”

“I need to know what?”

She muttered, “loose board” and “linen closet” before falling asleep.

He could tell she was down for the time being, so he kissed her forehead, tucked her blankets around her, uncovered her feet the way she liked, and then he went home, sure to his bones there would be no loose boards or hidden diaries to find in the linen closet. Morphine and dying did odd things to people. She said a lot of crazy things in the increasingly rare moments when she was awake.

And yet an hour later, he was standing in front of the linen closet on the second floor of their small, simple house. A section of paneling was leaning on the open closet door. Its shelves were on the hallway floor, towels and sheets and all, still folded. He’d moved them with care. No point making a mess.

He didn’t even know his mother had kept journals. And why the hell would she hide them so thoroughly?

He was surprised when he found two small books behind the wall panel and took them both out. The top one’s cardboard covers were wrapped in peeling red fake leather. The second one was yellow with daisies. He untied the first diary’s pink ribbon and opened the small book. The date inside was a few months older than he was.

Then he looked at his watch. He had to grab a sandwich, then help his boss for just a few hours. He could still make it back for late visiting hours with his mom.

He took the little red book with him to read later, by his mother’s bedside during her intermittent naps.

***

Cilla Travail

August 10

I had a Greek mythology book in my backpack and seventy-five dollars in the pocket of my jeans-jacket when I rode my bike home from babysitting for the Belmonts today. It was seven p.m.

I used to keep my babysitting money in my music box. It was white with a ballerina inside, and it played Beethoven’s “Fur Elise,” cause I like the music so much. Stepdaddydearest keeps borrowing my babysitting money. Always promises to pay me back double, but he never pays me back at all.

Last time he asked, I told him I already spent it. Man, he lost his mind. Trashed my room, broke the lid off my jewelry box and found the money. Then he backhanded me for lying and lectured me for an hour about being a selfish little brat who didn’t want to help my family.

So this time I kept my cash on me, like I do this diary. It didn’t matter though. Cause when I pedaled into my driveway, mom’s car wasn’t there. I don’t like being home alone with my old man. He’s always groping me when nobody else is around. Been doing that shit since I was eleven. Hands on my boobs, hands on my butt, hands on my crotch. It’s worse when he puts his hands inside my pants, because then it hurts. Sometimes he just pulls me close and presses himself against me and breathes his stupid cigarette breath all over me. It’s gross and I hate it, but he says he’ll kill me if I tell, and that mom will never believe me anyway and hate me forever.

That part scares me most. That my mom will hate me. I feel so guilty for what he does to me that I bet it’s probably true; she will hate me if she ever knows.

Mostly I just avoid him and pretend my life is normal. But I know better. I am not normal. When I’m around other kids my age, I feel like a freak, as if everyone can see it. I’m not the same as them, I don’t fit in, I’m…weird.

So I got to the edge of our driveway, balanced the bike with one foot on the ground, about to pedal off and stay away until Mom got back, when Dad opened the front door and asked me why I was standing out there like an idiot, loud enough for every neighbor to hear.

I told him I was going to Shelly’s but that didn’t work. He ordered me inside and asked if I got paid. I tried out my lie and it worked. He let the door bang closed and went back in.

I got off the bike, rolled it out of the driveway onto the grass, and walked inside about as slow as I could. When I got in though, he wasn’t there waiting to grope me. He went straight to the family room in back where he spent most of his free time in his reclining chair with the window open, winter or summer, smoking cigarettes and watching television.

A vehicle pulled in and I sighed in relief. I thought mom was home. He never touched me when Mom was home—except in the middle of the night, sometimes.

I was expecting Mom to walk in all smiles and rosy cheeks and cluelessness, but instead, someone on the other side knocked.

So I opened the door.

Two men stood there, white guys. They didn’t say anything for a second, but they looked at me in a way that felt weird. And then they looked at each other and grinned, and I got chills and didn’t know why.

They asked if my dad was home, said he was expecting them but before I could point the way, stepdaddydearest bellowed, “Back here, guys. You, too, Priscilla.

I don’t know how to explain this in words, but it was like my feet were glued to the floor. I felt like I was gonna throw up. The men started back, but I stayed where I was with my hand on the still-open door. I couldn’t seem to close it. There was something bubbling, something like, Get out of here. Get out of here right now, but I couldn’t figure out why. I couldn’t ignore it, though. I didn’t really even think about it until later, when I had the time, finally, to sit still and write all this down. It was just like…I had to leave. I couldn’t not leave. It was weird like that.

I looked around feeling panic bubble up for no reason, and I noticed the rack beside the wood stove with only two logs in it, and I said loudly that Dad would kick my ass if I didn’t get some firewood in here.

Then I was out the front door. I didn’t go to the woodpile but straight past it to my bike. I almost took off right then. But I was still arguing with myself for this sudden urge to piss off my old man in a way that was bound to have consequences I wouldn’t like. And I was curious, I guess.

Miz O’Connor, my English teacher, says I have an inquisitive mind. My French teacher wants to send me to France next year as a foreign exchange student, but all Mom said when I told her was that the school must think parents are made of money and then asked what the hell I’d do in France.

Dad said what Dad always says. “No.”

I hate him so much.

I pushed my bike around behind the house to that always-open window and laid it down real quiet in in the grass, then I went closer but stayed down low out of sight, and listened.

One of the strangers asked how old I was, and Dad said fourteen, and then the other guy asked if I was a virgin. Dad said “fuck if I know” and the stranger said a number. Two thousand.

I gasped, then clapped my hand over my mouth and froze, I was so sure they’d heard me in there.

Dad haggled, asked for five, and said he was gonna have to go to all the trouble of convincing Mom I ran away, and it was worth five, and the other guy said he couldn’t go higher than four and Dad said okay.

My blood felt like it had frozen. I shivered, but besides that, I was paralyzed.

Dad bellowed for me to get my ass in there, and I finally managed to move again.

I grabbed my bike and pedaled through the next three backyards fast as I could. I felt like I was being chased the whole time. I couldn’t stop shivering, but I wasn’t cold.

I veered into the little woodlot with the shortcut path everyone always takes to school. But I didn’t stop at school, either. I just kept pedaling and thinking my stepdad just tried to sell me. To sell me! I don’t even know what for. But I had to get away, as far away as I could go, I knew that for sure. Mom would never believe me if I told her. Nobody would.

After an hour of pedaling, I’d made it to the truck stop out near the highway exit, fifteen miles from home. There were lots of rigs, big and small, filling the parking lot, coming and going non-stop. The smells coming from the deep fryer pulled me in that direction and my stomach growled. I had enough money to eat, but I was still too close to home to be seen or to even stop riding. Or at least to stop for very long. My old man would be out looking for me. So would Mom.

Poor Mom.

I pedaled into the parking lot. I didn’t think I could ride my bike on the highway without getting caught, once everyone was out looking for me, and I had no idea where I was going. I wanted a map. And some of those fries that smelled so darn good.

But I didn’t get either. I came upon a small truck with a bed full of cargo entirely covered by a blue tarp. The truck had Texas plates. I was in Binghamton, New York. Texas seemed like it would be far enough.

It was dark, and the closest parking lot light was busted out. So I got off my bike, rolled it closer, and took a look underneath the tarp. Just boxes, mostly cardboard, some wooden, all sealed. “Murray Sporting Goods” was stamped on some of them, and there was room in between. Two men were walking out of the diner, heading for their rigs. Another handful had just arrived, and the sound of big rig air brakes gusted as another one pulled in, his headlights spilling over me.

I crouched and pretended to fiddle with my bike chain until the parking lot was quiet again. Then I picked up my bike and shoved it underneath the tarp. I climbed in behind it, my heart pounding so hard I could hear it. I pulled the tarp back down and found a more or less comfortable spot to curl up and wait, and tried to move some of the boxes around in front of me in case the driver looked. I couldn’t hide the bike, though.

It didn’t take long before I heard the truck’s door open, and felt it sink with the driver’s weight as he got in. The door slammed, the engine cranked, and a few minutes later, the truck was pulling out onto the highway and picking up speed. And I got my diary out of my backpack, so I could write all this down.

My life kind of ended tonight, I think.

Priscilla Marie Bishop is dead.

From now on I’m Cilla Travail, born in the back of a truck in Broome County New York, fully grown at fourteen and three-quarters years old.

***

Wolf

Wolf sucked in a breath, looking up from the journal at his mother in the hospital bed. She’d slept through his entire evening visit, this time, but now he had questions.

“Ma,” he said, leaning over the bed so his dark hair fell forward and touched her face. “I need you to wake up. Visiting hours are almost over.”

He’d been shocked to his bones—realizing that he’d never even known his mother’s real name.

Nor, apparently, his own.

“What the hell, Ma? What the hell?”

There came three gentle taps on the door. That was Kate, one of his mom’s nurses. She didn’t even bother sticking her head in anymore, just tapped three times to tell him time was up.

He closed his mother’s diary, straightened and turned around to pick up his backpack from the reclining chair Nurse Mindy had brought in for him. He’d come to believe over the past seventeen days that nurses were the best human beings on the planet. He didn’t even mind that they made him leave when visiting hours ended every night. He was pretty sure they enforced the rules more for his sake than theirs.

He glanced at the clock on the wall, a round black one with a white face. 8:57. His mother, or rather her diary, had just dropped the bombshell of a lifetime on him, and now there was a forced intermission before he could learn anything else—if there was even anything else in the diary to learn.

He leaned down to kiss her cheek, as he did every night.

His mom was pale. She’d always been pale, but now she was white and her face was thin and drawn. She was only forty-four, fourteen years older than he was. The cancer had aged her so much you’d never know.

He’d put a recent photo of her on the bulletin board—skin like Irish cream, freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks, orange-red curls framing her face.

Even her hair was losing its color. She was fading before his eyes like a watercolor in the rain.

And he’d never even known her real name. He knew the rest––that she’d been a runaway teen when he was born, that she’d raised him with help from Grandma Sage. It had been just the three of them for as long as he could remember, until Grandma had died in her sleep without warning or fuss twelve years ago, and just the two of them ever since.

“Priscilla Maria Bishop,” he whispered. And he covered her papery, frail hand with his brown one. “I love you, Ma.”

She didn’t respond. She’d been sleeping all afternoon. The nurses had warned him she’d start sleeping more, waking less, until eventually she wouldn’t wake at all.

Straightening, he slid the strap of his canvas bag up over his shoulder, tucked the diary inside, rubbed the small of his back with his free hand, and walked quietly out of the room. He waved to Mindy and Kate at the nurses’ desk, and they returned sad smiles that tried to convey comfort.

And then he headed out to his 1977 Ford truck. The front was still the original light blue, but had faded to powder-with-rust. He turned the key to crank her up. She coughed a few times, but she started, and he patted the dash and said, “‘atta girl.”

Snowflakes filled his headlight beams all the way back to their simple house in Hobbsville, about fifteen miles north or Borger, Texas, almost to the Oklahoma panhandle. They got a few inches every winter, but it always came as a surprise, all the same. It was only November.

His head was full of questions. If his mother’s name wasn’t Travail, then neither was his. Was he a Bishop, then?

What about her piece-of-shit stepfather? Was he still around?

He stepped through the front door and looked around the house they’d shared for more than a decade. They’d moved around constantly when he was growing up, and he’d changed schools at least once a year. But once he’d landed a job on a union construction crew, they’d been able to buy a place of their own, a fixer-upper.

His truck was a fixer-upper, too.

Hell, so was his life.

He wanted answers. And pouring through his mother’s journals didn’t seem likely to give those answers fast enough. So he went to her bedroom.

When he opened the door, he realized he hadn’t been in there since the night he’d taken her to the ER. She hadn’t told him she was terminal. That job had fallen to a stranger, a doctor who knew more about his mother than he did.

It turned out keeping secrets had been a way of life for her, hadn’t it?

Her bed was unmade, just the way it had been when he’d scooped her out of it, taking the blanket with them, wrapping her up along the way to the truck. He looked around, wondering where her secrets might be hidden—besides the diaries, which would take days to read.

Not many options for hiding places in the bedroom. It had been a den, but when she got too weak for the stairs, they’d made it her bedroom. Then later, they’d added the hospital bed, and later the commode and the IV pole.

He searched under the bed, inside the drawers of her dresser, the nightstand, and the closet. He checked the insides and bottoms of drawers and under the mattress. He felt for loose floorboards and false doors in the walls. He was wondering whether to slice open the mattress when someone knocked at his front door.

The intrusion startled him. When someone came around unexpectedly, it made him nervous. He’d never thought too much about that, but now that he was questioning everything about himself, he realized he’d been raised to be suspicious of strangers by a woman who had something to hide.

Two women, as Grandma Sage had always been tight-lipped about her past, and now that he thought about it, she probably wasn’t related either.

What a trio they must’ve made, a green-eyed redhead, a black senior citizen, and a Native American kid without a clue.

He left the room, went to the door, opened it.

A woman stood there with a massive bundle of hair piled up on her lowered head in shades that shifted from caramel to blood-amber. Snow was falling behind her as she lifted her head, but her eyes were slower and took their time sliding up his body. By the time they locked onto his, her eyebrows were high.

“I…you…I…” She closed her lips, cleared her throat, but never let go of his eyes.

Hers were the darkest blue he’d ever seen. For a second he forgot to breathe. Then she said his name and broke the spell. “I’m uh… looking for Wolf Travail.”

“Not looking for him, looking at him.”

“You’re…Cilla Travail’s son?”

“So I’ve been told.” He was proud of himself for not missing a beat.

“Yeah. Okay. So, I’m Camellia Rio and I—”

“Camellia Rio? Really?”

She crooked one eyebrow and her chin rose.

He saw he’d offended her and spoke fast. “Sounds too pretty to be a real name, is all."

“Like Wolf Travail, you mean?”

He had to lower his eyes fast. She was too quick for him, and he was sure it had flashed in his eyes—the knowledge that his name was made up. Probably. Not knowing was killing him.

“So full disclosure,” she said. “I work for a lawyer.”

“If it’s about the hospital bills, I—”

“No, not about the bills. I agreed to help your mother. She had a small life insurance policy and she left instructions for—listen, can I come in? It’s cold out here.”

He turned to look at the house behind him. His mom’s bedroom door was open, the mess he’d made going through her things, fully visible. When he looked back at Camellia Rio, her blue eyes told him she’d already seen it. Snowflakes were gathering atop her mountain of hair. He sighed in surrender.

“Yeah, sure, come on in.”

***

Willow Brand, Sky Dancer Ranch, Quinn Texas

At the family meeting she’d called, Willow yanked the sheet off the cradle in the middle of her mom’s living room. The one with the name WOLF carved into it. She’d found it in the attic while her folks had been traveling, and she’d kept it to herself for as long as she could stand. Her anger had only grown. So she whipped off the sheet and let it sail to the floor in the corner with all due dramatic flair.

There was a collective gasp and Willow said, “What is this, Mom?”

Beside her, Jeremiah tightened his arm around her shoulders and whispered, “I thought you were gonna ease into it, babe.”

She ignored him and continued. “We were looking in the attic for my old cradle for Lily and Ethan’s baby, and we found this. What does this mean? Who’s Wolf?”

Taylor, her mother, did not speak. She had gone still, staring at the cradle, her long black hair, streaked in silver, formed a smooth curtain over her face. But then she looked up and her brown eyes shifted to Willow, who was her younger mirror in every way.

“I—” Her beautiful face crumpled and she ran from the room with Willow’s father Wes, right on her heels.

“What the hell is going on?” Willow called after her parents as they ran outdoors, leaving the rest of the whole dang clan behind them.

A heavy hand fell on her shoulder—Uncle Garrett’s hand. “I s’pose this talk is overdue.” Then he looked around the room at the gathered Brands. All of the elders, their wives, too, except Wes and Taylor. Aunt Chelsea was walking around with a pot, refilling coffee mugs. Willow’s cousin and best friend Ethan moved closer to her side while his beautiful Lily’s blue eyes beamed with concern, her hand resting atop her swollen belly. Maria-Michelle and her new husband Harrison drew nearer. Cousins Trevor and Orrin leaned on either end of the mantle like opposite bookends, one as dark as the other was light, and Orrin’s kid sister Drew, blond and blue eyed like her brother, sat on the hearthstone. Except for his black-framed eye-glasses and bigger build, Baxter could’ve been their older brother with his shaggy golden mane.

As Willow looked from the stunned faces of the younger Brands to the expressions of their parents. Resolved and expectant. It was clear most of the elders already knew whatever it was Uncle Garrett was about to say. Uncle Ben and Aunt Penny were not holding her gaze, but averting theirs whenever she looked their way.

Garrett moved to the center of the room and took a breath. Aunt Chelsea met his eyes and nodded, and he seemed to take courage from it. “Willow, sweetie, you were not your parents’ firstborn child,” he began.

Every one of Willow’s cousins sent a wide-eyed look her way. And then Uncle Garrett told the story.

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