Stealing Butterflies

Chapter Eight

Sometimes I forget where I am.

Not all the time, but every once in a while I'll just be prancing through the trees, and then be all like, "Where am I..."

Which then results in:

"Why am I here..."

Which then ends up in me stumbling around for a little bit, and getting back to Emily's after a half hour or so with "crazy eyes," as Jared would say. He called me out on that once.

"Dude you look like you just saw a ghost," Seth had said, pausing Super Mario mid jump.

"He's got crazy eyes! Like that guy in that movie," Jared shouted, after a good laugh fest, with his voice sounding all creepy and psycho when he said "crazy."

"What are you even talking about?" I asked.

"You know, the one with the chick and the house and it was at that place and then he was all like "ahhhh" with the baseball bat and then the weed whacker started spinning midair."

Seth and I had pretty much the same expression of: What?

Silence for a little bit.

"Never mind. I think I watched that one at that place with that... other person. Yeah. It was him. Paul."

Our expressions didn't change much.

So, I'm very experienced at what is necessary to do if I ever get lost. It's simple, really. You just calm down, make sure your surroundings aren't dangerous, and, if so, get the hell out of dodge. Then, you stick your wooly snout in the air and work your way from there. "Follow your nose" takes on a whole new meaning.

Emily's is my go-to place because it smells so heavily of "werewolf."

Our smell is really hard to explain, because it's nothing really concrete or real. It just is. I guess if I had to put words to it, the best way to describe it would be to say warmth and woods.

Because even in such an extremely wooded area, Emily and Sam's house smells like the heaviest possible concentration of the trees, berries, leaves, earth, life and heat, all mashed together into one big mess.

All of my brothers, and I guess myself included, have a different variation. We each have our own degree of "woods" as our scent. But I couldn't tell you what each is made of, because I've been seeking them out for so long. Like Quil's smell just registers in my brain as Quil.

But, even with all that experience, when I try to find something while I'm in my human form, in a car, in the rain, I fail miserably. Well, unless I have someone, like Jacob, on the other line talking me through it. Even then, it takes awhile. I think my truck must be hardwired somehow to point the wrong direction no matter what.

So halfway home from Forks, and my little adventure with the bloodsuckers, I realized that I had a very large problem.

I had no idea where Katie lived.

And I was supposed to pick her up at six.

My first reaction was bunch of curse words that I shouted at no one, which was then followed by incoherent freaking out.

And so I called Sam.

"What?"

"Sam-Sam-Sam-Sam!"

"Embry, breathe."

I seriously have absolutely no idea how he always knows when its me.

He must have an extra Alpha-sense or something.