I went to my knees in the gravel and sobbed. Jamie. He lived. Everyone doubted me, everyone said he was gone. I was right. I knew it. Finally, he’d been there right in front of me. Solid. Real. Sane.
Maybe sane.
But... but he’d been there all along. He knew I stayed at the cabin, he followed me through the park and the mountains. He could have reached out any time to tell me he was okay. To relieve me of the unbearable uncertainty of his fate, to let me move on. But he hadn’t.
I turned to the vampire and found he’d disappeared as well.
Hopper returned, blood on his whiskers, and chased me back to the porch. I sat there long enough all of me went numb as the cold seeped away what little energy remained. I stared blankly at the yard. Jamie was alive. He was alive and he knew I looked for him. He’d followed me, protected me. Just like the brother I’d always known.
And yet... Things were different. He was different. His eyes were hazel before he disappeared, and yet somehow they turned gold. He growled and snarled, and managed to intimidate the wolves that attacked me. He connected with them, even though Dragomir attempted to do the same thing. He told those wolves to leave me alone and they did, however reluctantly, and when the vampire attempted to make the wolves attack us, Jamie took control away again.
I rubbed my eyes and pressed my face against my knees. Were they even werewolves? Or was Jamie a werewolf and he could control normal wolves? Could those giant wolves be dire wolves or another remnant lupine species? Something entirely new?
I held my breath. What the hell was going on? Archer and his people were werewolf hunters, the vampire who saved my life wanted to kill them, and my brother controlled a pack of wolves who might have been werewolves who wanted to kill all of us.
The silver chain and medallion brushed my skin and reminded me of the old Jamie. Our old life together. That he chose to leave us. He left me. Every day he chose to stay away. He made the decision every week, every day, every hour for ten years to let me believe the worst. Let me believe he might have died.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. The whole world crashed down around me. Nothing made sense anymore. Everything I planned and hoped for collapsed in the space of a few minutes. There was no future with Jamie. He didn’t want the life I wanted, he didn’t plan to come back to the cabin to hang out and eventually get a job or get back to research.
He might as well have died. It would have been less painful.