He wasn’t necessarily surprised. Once Owen and his HOPD crew had seen the claws and fangs, there was no going back.
Hale nodded absently, only half paying attention as he listened to Davina mention that she was trying to get in contact with the guy from STAT who’d supposedly killed one of the ghouls with a metal pipe.
“Unfortunately, he’s been very difficult to reach,” she added. “But I’m hoping that he’ll be able to give me more details on how he handled that ghoul. Until we have something solid to go on, it’s critical that you all avoid a direct confrontation with the ghouls.”
Connor frowned. “I agree we need to avoid a direct confrontation, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still do a careful recon to see if we can pick up a scent trail.”
Trevor would have liked to help out with the plan for the scouting mission, but he had something more important that he needed to do right now.
“I’m going to go talk to Jenna,” he announced. “She’ll want to know about Ada and Nicole. It’s also time for me to come clean about a few things with her. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”
Connor gave him a nod but didn’t say anything as he went back to the map he’d been studying earlier. That was about as close as he was ever going to get to giving his blessing, Trevor supposed.
He could live with that.
CHAPTER 17
This time, Jenna heard the door of her apartment open even though she was deeply entranced in the sculpture she was busy working on. Since there were only two people who had keys to her place—Madeleine and Trevor—she had a pretty good idea who it was. Part of her wanted to storm into the living room and confront him immediately, to keep him out of her workshop…her sanctuary. But in the end, her fingers just kept working the clay, seeking to recreate the vivid image that was trapped inside her head.
Jenna felt his presence at the door of her home studio space long before catching a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t pause her work, instead putting all her focus on getting the jawline right. Achieving the width necessary for the fangs while retaining the inherent beauty and perfection of the form was tricky.
Trevor didn’t seem interested in pushing her. He simply stood there in the doorway with his shoulder leaning on the jamb, watching her work. It probably should have irritated her, but for some reason, it didn’t. There was a bizarre comfort in knowing he was close by.
She found herself wondering about that feeling of comfort. She had every reason to be upset with Trevor. Furious even. But for some reason, that wasn’t the emotion she was experiencing at the moment.
“Remember when I told you that I got out of the army because I was injured during a deployment?” Trevor said, the sudden words not startling Jenna as much as she might have expected. “You asked if it was bad, and I sort of made it out to be no big deal.”
Jenna nodded but didn’t answer, her heart racing a little faster at the direction of this one-sided conversation. The jawline on the sculpture was good now, but she couldn’t get the shape of the mouth quite right. In the mental snapshot locked forever in her head, Trevor’s lips had been pulled back, revealing his long, glistening fangs. But somehow his humanity had still been evident and clear. That dichotomy was difficult to capture in clay.
“Well, it turns out that it was definitely a big deal,” Trevor added, coming closer, watching her work. “It was the night my entire life changed and I became a werewolf.”
The word grabbed her attention and she stopped working to look his way. That was probably a mistake because the pain and torment in his soulful brown eyes nearly took her breath away. She was supposed to be mad at him, but it was difficultto remember that when he was gazing at her like someone lost and alone.
“Werewolf?” Jenna questioned softly, breaking eye contact to focus on the sculpture again in an attempt to regain control of her flailing emotions. “That’s what you are? The fangs and everything else?”
Jenna saw him nod a little from the corner of her eye, his own attention now focused on her hands and the clay being shaped under them.
“Yes, I’m a werewolf. Though not in the sense you’re probably imagining. I wasn’t bitten or scratched by another werewolf or anything like that. That’s not how it works.”
She looked over at him again, not trying to hide her confusion. “Then how does it work? How did you become what you are?”
“A traumatic event,” he said simply.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured even as her heart began to beat faster and her chest tightened, making it hard to breathe. There was something visceral and instinctive about the words that she didn’t like.
“Some people are born with a unique piece of genetic material in their DNA that turns them into werewolves,” Trevor explained.
“Okay,” Jenna said, not really understanding what that meant. “Where does the traumatic part come in? Or do I even want to know?”
“The gene requires a specific combination of chemicals—namely adrenaline and cortisol—to turn on, and that only happens in the levels necessary during an extremely stressful fight-or-flight situation that comes with a life-or-death kind of thing.”
“And that’s what happened when you were injured on that deployment?” she asked, heart thudding even faster now as she turned to face him.
He nodded. “I was in Afghanistan as part of a NATO-led support mission. It was supposed to be a noncombat deployment—we were only there to do vehicle maintenance for the locals—but it didn’t work out that way. Our small forward-operating base outside Kandahar was hit in the middle of the night. The perimeter was overwhelmed in minutes, and I spent the rest of the night fighting building to building and tent to tent.” He paused, swallowing hard. “The battle was out of control and my fellow soldiers—friends—went down one after another. I was shot multiple times, but somehow, I kept going, trying to help as many people as I could. Getting the injured somewhere safe became more and more difficult as the night wore on, since the fighting was everywhere. I vaguely remember thinking that if we could hold on until morning and see the sun come up, we’d be okay.” He shook his head. “I never did see it come up, though, because I lost consciousness way before that.”
Jenna didn’t realize she was crying until she felt silent tears rolling down her face. She would have wiped them away, but there was too much clay staining her fingers to try it. So she simply let them fall, not wanting to interrupt Trevor’s story.
“When I finally woke up hours later in the field hospital, I found myself on a stretcher with an empty IV bag in my arm, surrounded by a whole lot of dead people.” Trevor’s gaze was distant, as if lost in the memories. “It seems that during the initial triage, I’d been deemed a category four non-salvageable, and the doctors were forced to set me aside so they could focus on those soldiers who had a better chance of survival. To say I surprised them when I stumbled out of that mortuary tent would be an understatement.”
