Jed’s body was covered in scars. I’d gotten so used to seeing them that I barely noticed anymore, but his words reminded me he’d had a lifetime of experience coming out on top of fights he had no business winning.
If anyone understood that a few scratches were a small price to pay for what I was seeking, it was Jed.
“You’ll help me?”
Jed nodded, gazing out at the horizon, looking oddly at peace as it started to rain. “I’ll help you,” he said. “But we’ll do it my way.”
I was going to go out on a limb and guess that his way did not involve putting myself through hell in hopes of convincing my body I was under attack.
“Fine by me.”
Jed gave me a look that said he thought I was constitutionally incapable of doing things any way but my own. Once upon a time, that might have been true, but now I’d do whatever it took to keep my pack safe. To be the kind of alpha they deserved and make sure that what had happened last winter never, ever happened again.
With nothing more than a nod in my direction, Jed began walking back toward shelter, but I just sat there, letting the rain beat against my body and thinking about a broken boy with hungry eyes.
A boy I’d invited into my pack.
A boy who’d tried to kill me.
A boy I’d killed.
Bone-tired and sopping wet, I went home.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CLOSER I GOT TO THE WAYFARER, THE MORE aware I was of the rest of the pack, and the more aware they were of me. Being alpha meant that the others didn’t have an all-access pass to my mind, the way I did to theirs, but even without the benefits of the pack-bond, my friends knew me well enough to know that a quiet Bryn meant Trouble with a capital T.
I wasn’t altogether surprised to find someone waiting for me at the clearing.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
If ever a werewolf had mastered the art of yelling from the diaphragm, it was Dev. Like a knight guarding a princess’s tower, he put his hands on his hips and threw his head back haughtily.
I could so feel a Monty Python impression coming on.
“’Tis I,” I yelled back, playing along. “Queen Bryn.”
With any luck, I could distract my best friend—and second-in-command—enough that he wouldn’t pay much attention to the fact that I looked like I’d been mud wresting—and lost.
“Queen?” Devon repeated, looking down his nose at me. Since he was six foot five, he had a long way to look. “Thou dost not look like a queen.”
I rolled my eyes, but amended my previous statement. “’Tis I. Peasant Bryn.”
Dev’s lips twitched, but he didn’t crack a smile, which was not a good sign. That Peasant Bryn line was comedy gold.
“You okay?” he asked, dropping the accent and searching my face for the answer.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “I just went for a run.”
To a werewolf’s nose, those words would have smelled true. I was fine—as fine as I could be, given everything that had happened in the past two years.
“You want to tell me why you’re not wearing any shoes?” Devon asked, quirking one eyebrow to ridiculous heights.
“Not really,” I replied. “Peasant Bryn is a girl of few words.”
Maybe I should have given him a real answer, but this was Devon. He couldn’t stand to see me in pain. I doubted he’d understand why I’d sought it out.
A twig snapped somewhere behind us—fair warning we were about to have company. If I’d been in a more charitable mood, I might have acknowledged the fact that “company” had probably stepped on the twig on purpose. I knew better than anyone if Caroline didn’t want to be heard, she wasn’t heard. She came out of nowhere and disappeared the same way. She was the ultimate hunter, a psychic with supernaturally good aim.
We weren’t really what one would call best buds.
“Heya, Caro,” Devon called, perfectly amiable. I didn’t understand how he could call her by a nickname. She’d been a part of the coven that had waged war against our pack. She’d made our people bleed—Devon included.
“Did Jed find you?” Caroline met my eyes and ignored Devon. Dev wasn’t the type to be ignored, but for some reason, he let Caroline get away with it.
If you asked me, Caroline got away with a lot.
“Jed found me,” I told her. I didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t seem to expect me to.
“In that case,” she said, turning back the way she came, “I guess there’s not really anything else for me to say.”
As she turned, I caught a glimmer of something in her eyes, and I couldn’t help but think of the way Ali looked, gritting her teeth and breathing through the worst life had to offer, the memories that cut her to the bone.
“Wait.”
Caroline paused. She waited. I didn’t know what else to say to her, didn’t want to be talking to her at all, but the resemblance to my foster mother, however fleeting, had reminded me that no matter what this girl had done, she was family. Ali’s family.
Her biological family.
“You should come by to see Ali more,” I said finally.
That was as close to an olive branch as I could come. Caroline lived with Jed: on our land, but not in the house I shared with Ali; privy to what the rest of us really were, but not a part of the pack. If I’d had my way, the girl who’d shot Devon and—whether she’d meant to or not, whether she’d had a choice in the matter or not—helped kill one of our own would have been living in another hemisphere. But Ali cared about her. She wanted a relationship with her, and I couldn’t be the one to screw that up.
Family mattered to Ali the way Pack did to me.
Family. Pack. That combination of words made me think of another person who should have been standing here, but wasn’t. A person whose absence I couldn’t blame on Caroline in any way, shape, or form.
Maddy.
Maddy, who’d been one of us. Maddy, who’d loved an angry, broken boy.
Maddy, who’d left, because I’d killed the boy she loved.
For a moment, Caroline actually met my eyes, and I wondered if she played Eric’s death over and over again in her head, the way I obsessed over Lucas’s. I wondered if she felt even an ounce of my guilt, if she sat up nights, staring at the ceiling.
Caroline broke eye contact first. She turned on her heels and left without snapping a single twig.
What happened last winter wasn’t her fault, Bryn, Devon told me silently, for maybe the thousandth time. Caroline never stood a chance against her mother’s mind-control mojo. You know that.
Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but my pack should have had twenty-two people, and it didn’t. Eric should have been starting his sophomore year in college, and he wasn’t.
Your mother never had a choice when Callum ordered her to beat the crap out of me, I retorted. But I don’t see you rushing out to mend bridges with her.
That was a low blow, and I knew it. Growing up, Devon and I had both been a part of the same pack—Callum’s. Devon’s mother was the second-in-command, and the moment Sora had laid hands on me, she’d changed everything—for me, for Ali, for her son.
Suffice it to say, Devon was much less willing to forgive and forget when the person who ended up hurt was me.
For a second after I snapped at him, I thought Devon might turn around and leave me standing there by myself, but he didn’t. He put an arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.
“Come on, brown-eyed girl,” he said. “Let’s get you some food.”
I’d never done a thing in my life to deserve Devon. I probably never would.
We passed the restaurant on the way back to my cabin, and Lake—who’d heard us coming—shot out the front door like a jackrabbit. Or a werewolf under the influence of too many Pixy Stix—take your pick.
“Got room for one more?” she asked. Dev inclined his head in a gentlemanly fashion, and Lake was on my other side in
an instant, her arm flung around my shoulder, just like Devon’s.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
Physical contact sent my pack-sense into overdrive, and my body was flooded with the feeling that this was how it was meant to be. We were together. We were safe. I could feel their wolves, feel the emotion rising up inside of them, the same way it did in me.