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 you’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.