Alex was here, and Katie was here, and that was all either one of them needed to know that things were right in the world.
Crossing the room, I picked Alex up and settled him on my hip. He snuggled into me, but never stopped watching his twin doing her very best to coax Callum into a full-on wrestling match.
“Rrrrrrrrr.” Katie issued a particularly fierce baby growl. A few seconds later, my foster mother appeared in the doorway, and I crossed the room to stand beside her. Out of habit, I handed Alex off. Ali took him from me and slipped her free arm around my waist. It was an affectionate gesture, but it also sent a message. Callum might have been the one who’d asked Ali to raise me, but Ali was reminding him that I was her daughter and that she would never fully trust him again—not with me, not with Katie, not with Alex.
Not after what Callum had ordered Sora to do to me.
On Ali’s other side, her four-year-old shadow—who’d followed her into the room—got tired of waiting for the rest of us to acknowledge her presence.
“Katie,” Lily said loudly, “you come over here.” She narrowed her little green eyes. “You play with us.”
When Katie did not heed Lily’s “suggestion,” Lily walked right up to Callum and kicked him in the shin.
“Lily!” Ali sounded horrified—and horribly, horribly amused. For my part, I was stunned. Lily was all of four years old, and Callum was the most powerful werewolf on the continent. Play fighting with him was one thing, but an actual assault?
I waited to see how Callum would respond, but he just turned slightly, deferring the situation to me.
“Lily,” I said calmly. “Come here, please.” She seemed to be considering whether or not she could get another kick in first.
Now, I added silently.
She came. But she wasn’t happy about it, and as she raised her arms imperiously upward, I caught a hint of a smile tugging at the corners of Callum’s mouth.
I picked Lily up, wishing she were a tiny bit less sturdy.
“Sorry about that,” I told Callum. “She’s four.”
In most packs, children were a rarity—prized, protected, precious. There wasn’t a werewolf alive who would have retaliated against a pup—let alone a female one—no matter what she did, but it still probably wasn’t a good idea for Lily to get the impression that she could shin-kick werewolves ten times her size with impunity.
That could have gone badly, I told her.
Lily hunched her shoulders, ever so slightly. “What if I just kicked him a little bit?” she asked, not bothering to send the question through the pack-bond.
Beside me, Ali choked on laughter.
“You are not helping,” I told her.
She grinned. For all I knew, maybe she’d put Lily up to it.
No kicking someone who could eat you in two bites, I told Lily. Not even a little.
She furrowed her brow, and a flurry of thoughts crossed from her mind to mine, all of which could be summarized as follows:
I was her alpha—not Callum.
This was our home—not his.
And Katie should have been paying attention to her.
Luckily, for everyone involved, Katie got tired of play fighting and picked that exact moment to change back to human form. Naked as a jaybird, she gave Callum a toothy grin and streaked out of the room. With the little streaker’s twin still balanced on her hip, Ali took off after her. Ordering Lily to behave, I set her down, and she followed on their heels, leaving me alone with Callum.
There was so much unspoken in the air between us that I didn’t know where to start, or if I wanted to start at all. This was the first time it had been just Callum and me since he’d promised to end my human life.
“Ali said you went to see one of the psychics who lives here. A Resilient?” Callum was the one to break the silence. He did a good job of sounding politely curious, but I spoke Callumese well enough to know that polite was always a cover for something else.
“I did,” I replied, not offering any more than that. If Callum wanted to know what Jed and I had been doing, he could ask. Just like I could theoretically ask him why he’d waited so long to Change me—why he was still waiting—when every day I was human was a day my pack was more at risk than it would be if I were a Were. He’d told me, the day he’d made the promise, that I had some human time left and he didn’t want me wishing it away, but if there was one person in the world who should have understood that, human or not, my life wasn’t ever going to be normal, it was Callum. If anyone could understand that what I wanted, what I was scared of, who I loved didn’t matter—it was Callum.
“Why?” I asked him finally, not putting any more of the question into words than that.
“Because,” he replied, rising to his feet and heading for the door. “You need to be human for this.”
This?
In the kitchen, the phone rang. Callum tilted his head to the side. “Shay,” he said. “For you.”
I had no choice but to answer the phone. To ignore the oily condescension in Shay’s voice, the undertones, the fact that he’d tried to kill me—indirectly, of course—more than once. I stayed in control. I calmly told Shay that he could count on my presence at the Senate meeting. I said the words man-killer, rogue, and Rabid like they were nothing.
But Shay wasn’t the type to let things lie. “I’m looking forward to your, shall we say, insight,” he said. He wanted me to know that no matter how calm I sounded, he was aware that this issue was personal to me.
“I don’t know, Shay,” I replied, refusing to take his bait. “I’d bet you know more about the kind of wolf that kills humans than just about anyone.”
I could practically feel my words hit their target. Shay wasn’t a Rabid. He wasn’t out of control, he wasn’t an exposure risk, but he was a killer—and I deeply suspected that he’d killed more humans than anyone on the Senate knew. Humans who weren’t a threat to Shay’s pack or the species, more broadly.
Humans like Caroline’s father.
I doubted the Senate knew what Caroline and I had discovered—that Shay, unprovoked and in his right mind, had attacked and killed a psychic and exposed himself to the man’s coven, with the intent of inciting their hatred against other werewolves. That knowledge was a card in my hand, and I needed Shay to know that I wouldn’t hesitate to play it.
“I look forward to your arrival,” Shay said, his voice as calm as mine. Still, in the silence that followed, I could practically feel him on the other side of the line, his eyes pulsing with bloodlust, hating Callum, hating me.
I said good-bye and hung up the phone.
Fear, Jed’s voice suggested from somewhere in my memories, and for just a fraction of a second, I let myself smell it, taste it, feel it.
I let it usher in the red.
And then I let it go.
I turned back to the door, where Callum was standing. I wanted to ask him again why I had to stay human, when going to a Senate meeting in my current state was the equivalent of taunting a bull and drawing a big red target on my back.
But I didn’t. Callum wouldn’t have answered the question anyway, and I wasn’t in the mood to let him tell me no.
“You did well,” Callum said.
I accepted the compliment, but didn’t dwell on it.
“We should get ready to go,” I said, turning to leave. “We’ll want to arrive in Shay’s territory well before nightfall.”
I’d made it halfway out of the room before Callum spoke again. “I know you have questions. I know that you want to know why I haven’t Changed you yet.”
Those words stopped me in my tracks.
“There are limits to what we are, Bryn. Humans grow. They age, they change, and they learn.”
I didn’t make a sound, didn’t give any indication that I’d heard his words, though if he were listening for my breath, he might have realized it was caught in my throat.
“There are reasons, Bryn-girl,” Callum said finally. “And the only one yo
u’ll be getting out of me is that, sometimes, it’s hard to teach an old wolf new tricks.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
HOURS—AND AN EXTENDED ROAD TRIP—LATER, I still hadn’t made any sense of Callum’s words.
WELCOME TO NORTH DAKOTA! The sign in front of me declared cheerfully. DISCOVER THE SPIRIT!
I glanced over at Devon. He held his hands artistically to the side and wiggled his fingers.
Jazz hands? I asked silently.
No, he corrected, jerking his head toward the sign. Spirit fingers.
I choked back a laugh. We were getting ready to cross into another pack’s territory, and my second-in-command was making spirit fingers. I couldn’t blame Dev for injecting some much-needed comic relief into the situation, especially since I knew he’d spent the past few hours thinking about the member of Callum’s pack due to meet us here.
Sora. Callum’s second-in-command. Devon’s mother.
If Callum realized what the idea of seeing Sora again was doing to Devon, he gave no indication of it. Instead, he’d spent the drive here silent and still, his hands on the wheel and his gaze locked on to the road. I’d passed that same stretch of time playing Callum’s cryptic statements over and over again.
It’s hard to teach an old wolf new tricks. You need to be human for this.
This as in the things Jed was teaching me about being Resilient? Or this as in whatever was about to happen with Shay?
There are reasons, Callum had said. Reasons, plural, but he’d only given me one—not the whole story, never the whole story with him.
“After you, Bryn.” Callum’s voice brought me back to the task at hand. I glanced back up at the welcome sign and then stepped forward, out of Montana and across state lines. I expected to feel something as I crossed the border that separated Snake Bend territory from Cedar Ridge: an electric shock, a chill on the surface of my skin, nausea, power, something. But there was nothing, no indication that if it hadn’t been for the Senate meeting, if Shay hadn’t invited us into his territory, stepping over this invisible line would have been an act of war.
Shay wouldn’t have forgiven my trespassing the way I had forgiven Callum’s. He would have used it as an excuse to attack me. He would have killed me, and he would have enjoyed it.
“My turn.” Dev crossed to join me. He bumped his shoulder against mine, a gesture of comfort and solidarity as old as our friendship. His presence beside me calmed the thoughts in my head, slowed the beating of my heart, but as I glanced back over the border—at our land, our territory, our home, I felt a sliver of unease take root in my gut.
Leaving my pack behind felt wrong. Taking Devon with me felt worse. If I couldn’t be there to protect them, he should have been. Without the two of us, they were vulnerable, open to attack.
“They’re safe, Bryn,” Callum said, from the other side of the border. Even without any actual psychic connection between the two of us, he could still read me like a book.
“Are you sure?” I couldn’t help the question, because I had to be sure.
A change fell over Callum’s face. His pupils didn’t pulse, but looking at them was suddenly like staring into a bottomless cavern, knowing in the pit of your stomach that something was staring back.
“The day someone takes advantage of a Senate meeting,” Callum said, his voice a perfect match for the power in his eyes, “is the day there’s no Senate.”
This was Callum the alpha speaking. This, my pack-sense told me, was real power—unimaginable, ancient power. Twin instincts battled in my gut—one that wanted nothing more than to offer up my throat and one that wanted me to fight for what was mine, what Callum could have taken from me, from all of us, if he’d been a different man.
Then, as suddenly as the power had started spilling off Callum, it was gone, and he was just Callum again. The hint he’d shown us of his true power receded, and he strolled across the border looking unassuming and unaware.
Try unbelievable, I thought, but there was comfort to being reminded of who and what Callum really was.
Shay could be snide. He could gouge open old wounds and try to intimidate me, he could maneuver and manipulate and try to give me enough rope to hang myself—but I didn’t have to oblige, and at the end of the day, unless Shay wanted to face Callum one-on-one, he’d play by the rules.
If there was one thing in this world that Callum would go to war over, it was me.
“Looks like Shay has moved his pack closer to the border,” Callum commented, as he stepped forward. I followed, and a slight breeze caught my hair. As the three of us went farther and farther into Shay’s territory, my alpha senses were flooded with power.
“We’re not the first ones here,” I said.
Callum confirmed my observation. “Knowing Shay, we’re probably the last.”
Not so long ago, Callum had hinted that the other alphas were forming alliances. I doubted Shay inviting the rest of the Senate into his territory before us boded well. Werewolves weren’t designed for democracy. The instinct to dominate was always there, and the moment the Senate imploded, there would be blood.
“Callum.” Sora announced her presence—a courtesy meant more for my benefit than the others’. My senses were good, but hers were better, and outside of my own territory, my pack-sense didn’t react the same way to foreign wolves.
Here, we were the foreign ones.
That thought distracted me enough that I didn’t have to give Sora my full attention. I didn’t have to remember playing at her house, eating dinner at her table, sleeping doubled up with Devon in a tiny twin bed. I didn’t have to hear the sound of her fist plowing into my face or feel my ribs pop, all over again.
But beside me, Devon couldn’t think of anything else. He hadn’t seen or spoken to his mother since that day, and coming face-to-face with her now cut him deep. Without a word, I took a step sideways, until my shoulder was touching his, a reminder that right here, right now, I was fine. I was solid, I was whole, and Sora wasn’t a threat to either of us.
In fact, next to Callum, she was probably the closest thing to an ally we had.
“Devon.” Sora met her son’s eyes, and I could practically see her wanting to reach out and touch his face. Luckily for her, she managed to restrain herself. “It’s good to see you, Dev.”
“Likewise,” Devon replied blithely, but I could tell by the way Sora’s nostrils flared that she smelled the lie.
Sora looked at me. “Bryn.”
I didn’t reply, unsure what I could say that wouldn’t just fan the flames. On some level, I knew it wasn’t logical to hold Sora responsible for something Callum had ordered her to do. It made no sense that I could ride in a car with him, but couldn’t stop the rush of emotion I felt just looking at her. Werewolves didn’t have a choice about obeying their alphas—not unless they were strong enough mentally to go alpha themselves. That was how I’d killed Lucas. I’d ordered him to die.
But Sora hadn’t even tried to fight Callum’s order. She hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t shown even a fraction of regret. Fair or not, it was her face I’d seen in my nightmares right after it had happened. No amount of conceptual understanding about the role that moment had played in setting up everything that had followed could change that. My body knew her. It knew what she had done to me, and “logic” didn’t stand a chance at overriding a thing like that.
For a few brief seconds after she said my name, I took Jed’s advice and let myself remember: the smell, the taste, the overwhelming darkness. Then I pushed it back behind lock and key, my jaw set, my mind empty.
“Hello, Sora.” It was easy to say—surprisingly so. I wasn’t that girl anymore, and I wasn’t afraid.
“You’ve seen Shay?” Callum asked. The idea that his second-in-command would have been to see Shay without him was nearly unthinkable, until I recalled the obvious: in addition to being Callum’s second, Sora was also Shay’s mother.
She’d given birth to him. She’d raised him, same as Dev.
&
nbsp; “I have,” Sora replied. “And, no, I don’t have any idea what he’s up to, but there’s something. There always is.”
There wasn’t any particular condemnation in Sora’s voice, and it occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t the only reason Devon was no longer on speaking terms with his mother. Parental expectations could be killer, and Devon’s brother had transferred into the Snake Bend Pack and challenged its former alpha when he wasn’t all that much older than Dev was now.
The last time I’d spoken to Sora, she’d talked about Devon’s potential and what he was meant to be—none of which had anything to do with who Devon was. As a purebred werewolf—a rarity in our world, since female Weres were few and far between—Devon was bigger, stronger, and more dominant than most, and Callum had groomed him almost as much as he’d shaped me.
But Devon would never be Shay, and while I thanked God for that fact, I wasn’t entirely certain that Sora wouldn’t have preferred it if he were.
“We should go,” Callum said, stepping between Sora and Devon—between Sora and me. “Shay will have felt our arrival, and I wouldn’t put it past him to send out a welcome party.”
I wouldn’t put anything past Shay.
I’ll take dysfunctional families for five thousand, Alex. Devon’s voice was bright and sardonic in my mind.
I swallowed a laugh. Seriously, Dev, are you okay?
Peachy, Dev replied. You?
Almost of their own volition, my shoulders pushed themselves backward. My chin went out, and as a sense of detached calm flooded my body, I told Devon exactly what he wanted to hear.
I was ready for this. If Shay wanted to dance, I’d dance.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHAY OBVIOUSLY HADN’T BEEN LIVING AT THIS END of his territory for long. The smell of his pack should have been thick in the air. The trees, the grass, the very earth should have absorbed it like soot or smog, but instead, I could make out only the scents of the wolves present. Devon, whose nose was infinitely better than mine, didn’t seem to be able to smell much more than that, at least according to what I could pick up through the bond.
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