Lone Werewolf Duology (bxb)

9. Sleepless in Montana

May 2017, Montana, USA

Volya lost his fear of planes with his flight-virginity, so instead of fretting about falling out of the sky, he slept like a baby on the trans-Atlantic flight. And during the 4-hour layover in New York. And on the domestic flight that took them from the East Coast to some place in Montana he'd never heard of. Montana he did hear about, but so far it amounted to a violet outline of the mountains and a sprinkle of one-story houses caught in the headlights of a minibus.

Their new driver was more intriguing than Montana. The guy wore fatigues over a muscular body. His dark hair bristled in a military buzz cut. At the same time, two-days' worth of stubble hugged his jaw and cheeks. Large nose sat askew, probably a memory of the same blow that left behind a scar, puckering his lip enough for his right canine to peek.

The guy's brown eyes were ordinary, but when they zeroed in on Marina, the unguarded glance between them was something else. However, he extinguished it like a cigarette butt under heel. When the two shook hands, it was all business.

"Damir, how're things?" Marina asked the driver in Russian.

"Not too shabby," he replied in the same tongue without an accent. Without a foreign accent at any rate—there was more than a splash of the Volga-River's vastness in the way Damir spoke. The dialect was particularly noticeable next to Marina's unmistakable I-was-born-to-Petersburg-intelligentsia speak. These regional differences didn't deter Marina. She scooted over to sit next to the driver.

Volya strained his ears to overhear their conversation, because being polite had never netted him anything useful.

"The simulations ran okay," Damir said to Marina, twisting in his seat to make sure everyone onboard had settled in. "But there're some common roots that I can't reverse-engineer."

Volya leaned back with a sigh. Whatever those two were discussing, they could have been doing it in English for all the good it did him.

Naturally, their driver wasn't just a driver, like Marina wasn't just an interpreter, but he would have guessed that on his own. That's how Liam rolled, surrounding himself with strange people. Like, say, Volya... another specimen in his collection. A genetic phenomenon from Slobodinsk or some such nonsense.

Despite their arrival to Montana, Liam hadn't revealed anything yet, because that's how he rolled too. The popstar loved being all mysterious. Mysterious and beautiful, even when he dozed off, with his head lolling. As if Liam sensed Volya's questioning gaze, a smile flickered onto his lips. It was like watching a fluorescent tube in the hall that was at the death's door. One buzz—and it was off. Next flutter—and it was back on.

***

After half-an-hour of traversing Montana, the bus caught a pothole. It jolted Liam awake. He peered out of the window and his smile gave way to a frown.

Volya pressed his forehead against the glass and squinted into the darkness, to see what chased Liam's bliss away.

The bus was rolling to a stop in a paved parking lot in front of a mansion. It brought to mind two giant birdhouses connected by a gallery. Each of them peaked into a steep triangular roof and was decorated by three cross beams and a balcony. The logs and the river-stone borders exuded a sturdy charm. Apparently, this monster of a house was not large enough, because standalone buildings and trailers sprouted all around it.

In short, places like that normally didn't put frowns on people's faces, but Liam was Liam.

Proud of his growing vocabulary, Volya asked Liam in English, "What the heck is wrong?"