“How many times in your life have you gotten the drop on Callum, Bryn? How many times has anyone? He knew damn well you’d break the conditions before he set them down.”
Callum had always known what I was going to do before I did it. I’d spent my entire life trying to get the drop on him.
He knew me.
No. I didn’t want to hear this. She couldn’t make me. Radio. On.
In the backseat, Katie whimpered from her car seat. Both twins had cried solid for the first hour, and about fifteen minutes back, they’d finally cried themselves out and fallen asleep. My brother and sister weren’t any happier to be leaving than I was.
Shhhhhhh, I told Katie silently. It’s okay. I’m here.
The farther we drove away from Callum’s stronghold, the weaker the twins’ bond to the pack grew, and the more they latched on to Ali and me. Especially me. I was pretty sure that Katie had yet to figure out that I wasn’t a wolf. The night I ran with the pack confused her. Even now, with my own packbond muted, I was the closest thing she had to Pack.
To home.
“I can’t feel them anymore,” I muttered, my words lost to the song blaring from the speakers.
It began to rain, and Ali turned the windshield wipers on and the radio off.
“You can’t feel who?”
“The pack. Even after … what I did … they were still there. Faintly.” Chase was just more there. But as the mile markers ticked by, everything was getting fainter, and now I couldn’t feel any of the Weres at all, except for Chase—and I could barely feel him. He existed only as an image, a sound, a feel in the recesses of my brain, but even that was getting harder and harder to hear.
“Chase didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, allowing my ire to take the place of the holes in my soul. “You made them lock him up, and he didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Believe it or not, I’m not a monster, Bryn. I asked Callum to lock him up, because Callum issued an edict that no one was to stop us from leaving. Based on the way that boy stood guard over you while you were unconscious, flashing from one form to another, daring us to move him from your side, I inferred that he might not be able to keep himself in check when we left, and that you might not want him to face the kind of justice that had been visited upon you.”
For a single second, that took the wind out of my sails. “Did you have them lock Casey up, too?” I sneered, once I’d recovered.
“As a matter of fact,” Ali replied, her grip on the wheel tightening, “I did.”
Radio. On. Only this time, it was Ali’s decision, not mine, and she turned down the volume and changed the station. In the backseat, Katie closed her eyes again, and for the next hundred miles, the four of us drove in near-silence, the gentle warble of country music the only sound in the car.
Ali drove straight through the night. At some point, I fell asleep, and in my dreams, Chase came to me in wolf form. His fur was black, his body lean and muscled, and his eyes were lighter even than their human counterparts: two orbs of ice blue in a sea of darkness. I didn’t say a word, and he didn’t make a sound. The two of us just sprawled out on the ground about a foot apart. I could feel his warm breath on my face, and after an eternity of the two of us staring at each other, I buried my hands in his fur, which should have been coarse, but felt silky soft in my hands. His chest rose and fell as he breathed, and I could feel my heart beating in unison with his.
“This doesn’t mean we’re mates,” I told him.
He opened his mouth very wide in a mischievous, wolfy yawn.
“Women’s liberation and all that,” I continued, catching his yawn and trying to push it down. “No Mark. No lifetime commitment. No ‘property of’ signs. We just have a bond, that’s all.”
His tail beat quietly against the dirt beneath us, and a smile worked its way onto my own lips.
“Loser,” I said, playing my fingertips over his rib cage, oddly compelled to scratch his belly.
In response to my insult, Chase bared his teeth in mock threat, but scooted closer toward me, and after a long moment, I laid my head on his neck, and the two of us—girl and wolf—fell asleep, into a dream within a dream.
I see you.
Words dripped, sing-sung, from a crooked mouth. No face. No body. Just a mouth—bones cracking, jaw breaking.
I see you.
Sharp smile, fanged and smeared with red.
I recognized the voice. I recognized the blood, but this wasn’t my nightmare. It was Chase’s.
Like a strobe light, images flashed in rapid fire in front of me. A man: brown eyes, open face, never aged past thirty. Red teeth. Gray wolf, white star. Jaws snapping.
So much blood.
I looked for Chase, called to him, but I couldn’t find him. I was too far away.
Wolf. Fight.
Not my dream. Not my instinct. Not my haze, but the whole world went blood-red nonetheless, almost purple. Rotted. Congealed.
Chase. I had to find Chase.
I could feel his eyes opening. Lightning in his stomach, jaw aching as he Shifted back to human form.
Look at me, Callum whispered to him, a ghost on his shoulder.
You’re mine, said the mouth with the wolf attached. I made you. You belong to me.
And that was what did it, because Chase didn’t belong to blood and panic. Didn’t belong to a Rabid rotting from the inside out. He didn’t even belong to Callum, steady and sure.
He belonged to me.
Light surged all around us in a starburst, halfway between the moment of detonation for an atomic bomb and the skyline on the Fourth of July.
Warm.
Safe.
Mine.
And just like that, Chase and I were back on a bed of wet leaves and grass, the smell of dirt and autumn reminding me that this was a dream. Only a dream.
In human form, Chase curled beside me, his forehead damp with sweat, and I ran my fingers through his matted hair, as naturally as I had his wolf fur. I folded my body against his, keeping watch until his breathing slowed, and mine slowed, and together, we faded into sweet, blissful nothing.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”
My first instinct when I heard Ali’s words was to growl, but as the real world settled back into place and the protective instinct my dream had awakened slipped from me, I remembered two things. First, I wasn’t actually a werewolf and therefore didn’t have the possessive-protective gene dictating my every move, and second, I wasn’t talking to Ali at the moment. Feeling awkward in my own body, I rubbed the sleep out of the corners of my eyes and instead of growling, settled for a pointed glare.
Ali ignored me. She just unbuckled her seat belt and climbed out of the car, shutting the door on me and my mood. While I was still trying to get over the insult, she opened the back door on the driver’s side and unhooked Katie from her car seat.
“I take it we’re stopping?” I asked.
“We’re here,” Ali corrected me. “You slept like the dead and missed breakfast. I’m sure someone can rustle you up some food if you’re hungry.”
Settling Katie on one hip, Ali gestured toward the other car seat. “You mind?” she asked.
I wanted to say yes, but the look on Alex’s face—scrunched up and lopsided—kept me from being difficult on principle. I unbuckled my seat belt, opened the door, and slid out of the car. I was halfway through liberating Alex when my mind caught up with my body enough to wonder where here was.
The air was crisp and cool for early summer and smelled like snow in my nose, even though there wasn’t a hint of white on the stretch of grass under my feet. Hoisting Alex into my arms, I turned and looked away from the car, and the way the earth stretched out before me—green and flat and untouched—threw me back.
Turning slowly, I took in the 360 view. There was a large, wooden building up ahead of us—a restaurant, or maybe an inn—and from the distance, I could see a crooked sign hanging over a small porch but couldn’t make out the words. Other, smaller buildings dotted the horizon, looking like they’d been carved from the land itself. There were scattered trees, and in the distance, I could see a denser forest and a hint of blue. Water. Possibly a lake.
And that was the exact second I realized where we were—and who lived in Montana.