A glance at Casey out the side of my eye told me that I hadn’t.
“Finals went well,” I said, keeping my back to the wall, an instinct that I couldn’t shake, even though we were all family here. “I’m pretty sure I aced algebra.”
I felt Callum smile beside me, but when I looked over at him, his face was neutral, calm. The face of the alpha, taking care of pack business.
My hands flitted to the waist of my jeans, needing a reminder—a physical reminder—that even when he was alpha, he was still Callum. Even when it came to pack business, I was still his.
“Is this about my seeing Chase again?” I asked. I was facing Callum, but Ali was the one who answered my words.
“You don’t have to go. You don’t have to do this.”
First Devon and now Ali. What did they know that I didn’t?
“Nothing,” Ali said, and I wondered if my thoughts were always apparent on my face. “I don’t know anything that you don’t, Bryn, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that this could get ugly.”
“Chase won’t hurt me.”
Ali glanced at Callum, and Devon’s words floated back to me—It’s not Chase I’m worried about.
Callum won’t hurt me, either, I thought, but I didn’t broadcast the words. The fact that I had to say or think them at all was mind-boggling. I’d approached Callum as a member of his pack, and his actions and mine were equally bound by our agreement. I knew better than to break faith with our entire pack, and I had more inhibition than they were giving me credit for.
Tempting fate was one thing; baiting Pack Justice was entirely another.
“Are you ready?” Callum asked me, ignoring Ali. The look in his eyes told me that he knew me better than she did. He didn’t question, even for a second, the possibility that I’d back down.
“He’s just a boy,” I said out loud. Just a boy with a Rabid in his head, who claims he loved me before we ever met. “I’m ready.”
Ali sighed, and the sound was unnatural, like her lungs were being deflated, the air sucked out of them by some external force.
“Take care of her, Casey,” Ali said, and I couldn’t tell if her words were an order or a plea. “Please.”
Casey nodded, but not for the first time, I wondered if he’d fully bargained on me when he’d married Ali.
“I’ll take care with her, Alison. You have my word.” Callum’s words should have been comforting, but as an expert at obfuscation myself, I couldn’t help but notice what he hadn’t said. He hadn’t said that he’d take care of me. He’d said he’d take care with me, and I knew better than to think that those two things were the same.
Casey, Callum, and I walked toward Callum’s house in silence. Sora and Lance joined us halfway there.
“You know he’s not just a boy,” I said, feeling the need to explain myself to someone in Ali’s absence.
“I know,” Callum replied, and I wondered if he meant for me to hear the slight echo of sadness in his tone.
This visit had nothing to do with Chase being a boy and me being a girl. It had nothing to do with the way he dogged my dreams and haunted my field of vision every time I blinked.
This was about the Rabid.
It was about me.
By the time we got to Callum’s house, I’d stopped trying to explain myself.
“Casey, Sora, and Lance are dominant. Your pack-bond remains open. You’re not to touch him.” With those words, Callum disappeared, and I wondered again why it was that he couldn’t or wouldn’t stay to watch my interaction with Chase.
“Hello.”
Speak of the devil. There was depth to that one word. Even just the sound of Chase’s voice made me think of the full moon, silvery and larger than life.
“Hello,” I replied, feeling human and small. Someday, I’d run with him, the way I had with the rest of the pack. Not today.
Within seconds, the two of us were positioned just as we had been the last time, me on the sofa, Chase on a nearby chair. He smiled, and in the curves of his lips, I could almost see his wolf: dark fur, light eyes.
“Same rules as last time,” Sora said, her impeccably controlled voice breaking into my mind.
No touching.
No talking about my family or the way they’d died.
No asking Chase about the method with which another Rabid had torn him limb from limb.
“How are you?” I asked, feeling even more muzzled than I had the last time I’d been in his presence.
“Good,” Chase replied. I’ve got control, he added silently. Nobody in my thoughts but me. Most of the time.
His voice was clearer in my mind than anyone else’s had ever been, and I knew I wasn’t imagining that there was more than a pack-bond between us. I didn’t feel him in my hip, in Callum’s Mark.
I felt him in my stomach and in my lungs. I breathed him in and out and saw him in my mind, in memories he’d had no part of the first time around.
“I had finals today,” I said. The words were insufficient and irrelevant, but as they exited my mouth, my guards relaxed. They didn’t mind me talking to Chase the boy. They just wanted me to stay away from his wolf. Away from the night of its birth, bloody and cruel.
“I don’t miss finals,” Chase said. “Come to think of it, I don’t really miss people, either.”
“You don’t miss being human?” I asked. It was one thing to watch the Weres lose their human selves on the day of the full moon, to watch the wolf slowly taking hold of Callum’s body, or Devon’s, but it was another thing altogether to imagine going from being what I was to the thing that Chase was now.
It could have been me. The thought broadsided me. Chase sat on his chair like a lion lounging on the savannah. Like a wolf, sprawled across wet forest ground. His limbs dangled off the side. His eyes took in everything, flitting between my body and that of my guards.
It could have been me.
“I don’t miss being human.” Chase paused, the human holding back words that his wolf wanted him to say. “I miss you.”
The air between us turned to static, and I felt his pull—magnetic and uncontrollable. On edge between human and not.
Concentrate, I told myself. I hadn’t come here to picture his life before he’d changed. I hadn’t come here to commune with his wolf or wonder if it was a feeling like this that had coerced generations of human females to leave their families for a chance at dying while giving birth to werewolf pups.
I’m not that kind of girl, I told Chase silently.
He shrugged, and I wondered if he even knew what I was talking about, if he had even the vaguest measure of the power calling to my body from his.
“Callum said not to touch you,” Chase remarked. “You don’t smell like meat anymore.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of either of those observations, but I saw other things in the blue of his eyes: control that hadn’t been there the last time we met. And loneliness, the kind that had no business existing in the middle of a werewolf pack.
“What happened to the wolf who attacked you?” Every time I wanted to ask him a question about the attack, I asked him about his life instead, and now that I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t alone, the other questions slipped easily off my tongue.
“He ran off.”
“Is he dead?” I addressed this question to my guards. “Did we hunt him down?”
Sora’s response came almost immediately. “You don’t need to concern yourself with that, Bryn.”
That wasn’t an answer. It was an order. They were ordering me not to concern myself with the Rabid—the reason I’d come here to Chase in the first place.
“I call him Prancer.” Chase saved me from complete and utter frustration. At least he had the ability and force of will to stay on topic.
“You call the werewolf who attacked you, almost killed you, and Changed you Prancer?” I asked.
“I had to stop being scared sometime. Give the boogeyman a name, and he goes away.” Chase shrugged and then continued on in my head. Callum taught me how to keep him out of my mind, but you can’t change the memories. I sleep, and he’s there. When I dream, he’s got me exactly where he wants me, and there’s not a blessed thing I can do about it. But then I wake up, and he’s Prancer. He can’t control my thoughts. He can’t make me scared. Not without my permission.