The fire crackled around us in the darkness. For the last two nights, I’d kept walking through almost the entire night. Now Jason stopped me, afraid I might pass out. So we were all huddled together around bright orange flames that we’d cooked dinner on earlier.... I had a pretty good feeling they’d only cooked the meat for my benefit, not needing it that way for themselves. Still, I appreciated the effort.
The twins seemed to be able to sleep anywhere and had conked out on the ground, happily snoring. I barely suppressed a grin. When he slept, Jason snored, too. It must be a family trait.
“You should be sleeping.”
“I can’t.” I rubbed the back of my neck at the throbbing pain that had started there. “I’m too wound up. Besides, I’m not convinced we’re safe having a fire. We’re going to bring every monster in the area to us.”
“They’d all be nuts to try anything. You are under the personal care of three Werewolves.”
“Fifteen Vampires could take you down.” And lately they’d been sending huge numbers after me.
“They could try.”
“Jason, don’t forget where I found you: unconscious in a Vampire temple. Clearly, you are fallible.”
“See the weird the thing is that they didn’t attack us. They must have drugged us somehow. I’m still not sure how it happened. We’d all eaten the same meal that night, shared a really large buck we’d taken down. Now, I’m wondering if it was drugged.”
That made sense to me. The Vampires under the direction of Isaac Icahn were immensely clever. If they’d wanted the Wolves, they’d have figured out how to get them.
“Even more reason to be vigilant then.”
I looked down at the venison we’d just consumed. Had it been drugged? Was Icahn going to destroy the entire food supply? Why was he after Jason and his Pack at all? I rubbed my head. It hurt. I really wished there was someone else to contemplate these questions and just tell me what to do sometimes. Shouldn’t adults have been doing that for me?
I felt fine. I was going to have to assume my dinner had been untainted.
“You want me to put out this lovely fire I labored for hours to build for us?”
I couldn’t see his eyes as they stared straight ahead at the leaping flames, but I knew they’d be riddled with amusement. That was the problem with rekindling a relationship with someone you knew really well. It’s so easy to get back into old routines when you should be changing behaviors instead.
“You took ten minutes to build it and I think Autumn did most of the work.”
He snickered. “Are you disparaging my survival skills?”
“I’m not making fun. I’m stating outright that without your sisters and me you wouldn’t live very long in your human form, not if you wanted to eat.”
He leaned back. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I can shift into my furry self whenever I want to.”
I looked up at the sky. The clouds hid the moon, and even the stars weren’t visible. The temperature had dropped considerably. It no longer felt like spring. It was like winter had reappeared over night.
“How close are we to a full moon?”
I’d made myself stop calculating moon phases as part of my ‘getting over Jason’ mentality.
“A couple of days.”
I digested that information. In a few days, Jason, Autumn, and Luna would no longer be able to control their changes at will. In fact, it was likely they wouldn’t even remember what they did during that night. Their Wolves would be entirely in control. Jason’s Wolf hadn’t hurt me during the one full moon shift we’d spent together, but I couldn’t count on Autumn and Luna to not harm me, especially because they had left their Alpha, Andon, behind.
“I need to be away from you guys when that happens.”
Jason’s silence to my statement made me look up from the flames. He stared at me in the darkness, his expression mostly hidden except for the glow in his eyes.
“I didn’t hurt you last time. I saved you.”
I motioned to his sisters with my chin. “I’m thinking of them.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “If I was old enough, just a few years older, I could control them as Alpha.”
“No point on dwelling on things we can’t change. You’re not a few years older. End of story.”
“Rachel.” He stood up and moved closer to me. He pressed his body close to mine, and his warmth was a gift. “I wonder if you can hear the sadness in your voice that I can when you talk these days.”
“Chad just….”
He interrupted me. “This has nothing to do with Chad. I heard it in your voice at the Temple, too.”
“Okay. I think we’ve covered this topic enough.”
I closed my eyes and placed my head on his shoulder, knowing the physical contact would stop this discussion. I was tired of having it.
“Sometimes I think if my mother had lived through the destruction and somehow still been around when we re-awakened, I might be better at navigating the strange array of your moods.”
I opened my eyes. I had no idea what to say to that statement. He was right. His mother hadn’t survived the destruction, not really. She was a Vampire. In fact, seeing her as a Vampire had been what awakened Andon, and therefore the rest of the pack, eleven years earlier. But no one knew that but Andon and me.
It placed me in an incredibly awkward position.
He continued. “What?”
It was hard to keep things to yourself when the Wolf next to you could scent it every time your mood changed.
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Well that’s refreshing. At least you’re not trying to pretend there is nothing wrong.” He tapped my leg. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
“Because it’s going to open a whole slew of problems that I don’t want to enter into now.” Or maybe ever.
I wondered if he could smell my unspoken addition to that statement. I hoped he could.
“Not good enough. I bring up my mother and you get incredibly tense. Why?”
I stared at him and wondered why I didn’t just tell him. His father had told me. Did that mean I had to spend the rest of my life keeping it secret? It’s not like Andon had been loyal to me.
But how did you tell someone his or her mother was a Vampire?
“Here’s the thing, Jason. I don’t know that it’s my story to tell.”
He cocked is head to the side. “You know I’m going to pester you about it until you tell me.”
He would, too. I could absolutely envision the scenario. He’d annoy me to death until I told him what he wanted to know.
“Life would really be easier if I could just cut off your head.”
Jason nodded, a grin crossing his face. “Yep, but you love me.”
“I haven’t said that I do.”
He leaned back. “I can smell it.”
“It occurs to me, Jason, that you could be playing me for a fool with all of this ‘I can smell’ it stuff you talk about. It’s not like I can confirm it for myself. You could be lying.”
“I could.” He stroked his hand on my thigh and I shivered. “But that would go against my personal code of conduct.”
“You’ll have to get me a copy of that book sometime so I can see what it entails.”
“You’re funny.” He yawned. “And I’m not distracted. What’s the matter?”
“Oh, Jason.”
I closed my eyes. Chad was dead. I needed to depend on Jason, who made me feel a ton of conflicting emotions. I couldn’t believe I was going to have to open this door and let what was sure to hurt him out into the open.
“Tell me.”
“Your mother isn’t dead, not really.”
I spoke the words as barely a whisper, knowing he would hear them as if I had shouted.
He stood up, staring down at me. “What?”
“Your father told me he saw her right before he woke up and shook off the bad Werewolf mojo. Seeing her woke him up.”
Jason rubbed his chin. “She’d be really old. Where did he see her? Why wouldn’t he have told us?”
I sighed as I stood up. “Because she’s a Vampire.”
Silence stretched out in front of us. I had to say something.
“You should be able to smell that I’m not lying.”
He nodded. Okay, that was good. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t about to shoot—or bite—the messenger.
When he spoke, it was with tears in his eyes. One second they were there, the next second they had vanished.
“My father has such a bag of lies, I wonder how he can carry them around.”
“I’m sure, in this case, he was trying to protect you from pain.”
I couldn’t believe I’d just said that. Was I defending Andon Kenwood?
He took a step away from me as he stared out into the darkness, seeing things I couldn’t with his sense of smell and his acute hearing. But I didn’t think he was really noticing anything out in the woods. No, Jason’s thoughts were all self-directed at the moment.
“He took you away from me for the same reason. He was protecting me. I’m not a child. I haven’t been for years.”
I could barely make out his words so I stepped closer to stand next to him. “You’re not a child but even you have to admit that he’s always seen your chipper view of the world as being somewhat naive. He thinks he needs to protect you.”
“If you’re not going to sleep, I’m going to shift and run you home.”
I didn’t follow his train of thought. “What?”
“If she’s alive, then my father owes me answers. I have to know where she is and what happened. But I’m not going anywhere until I get you home.”
A sinking feeling surfaced in my gut at the thought of his leaving and I pushed it away. It had to be processed later.
“Don’t worry. I can get myself home. Just point me in the direction I need to walk.”
“No.” His head jerked around as he looked at me and I swallowed my response. Jason was serious. He would not leave.
“Look, you have your own business to handle. I can take care of myself. I have my entire life.”
“Up until now. As you love to point out, I left you sitting in the snow. I’m not going to leave you stranded in the woods. I love you. You’re my mate. That means I see you to safety.”
Genesis wasn’t likely secure. But if I brought that up, I’d probably get dragged kicking and screaming with him to see Andon.
“Okay, let’s go.”
He shook his head. “You need to sleep. Are you willing to give that a try?”
“No way am I going to sleep, Jason.”
“Why not?”
Because if I closed my eyes, I knew who I would see in my dreams. Chad haunted me when he was alive, now he would consume my unconscious mind, accusing me of all kinds of horrible betrayals. The sad truth was that he would be absolutely correct.
“I just can’t.”
“All right, then I’m going to shift and you’re going to get on my back.”
My heart beat fast in my chest. It was the kind of moment that didn’t happen very often, but where I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that something significant was about to happen. I had been putting off seeing him as a Wolf again. It would mean that I was back to being completely okay being around him. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe I had already made that change in my mind and I just hadn’t acknowledged it yet, but in my mind I hadn’t done this yet.
“Are you going to leave your sisters here?”
He nodded. “When they wake up, they’ll follow us. Trust me, they followed me here, they can find us anywhere.”
That was disturbing on so many levels. “Could you guys find me anywhere I went?”
“I can’t speak for Luna and Autumn, but trust me, Rachel, you are my mate. There is nowhere you could go that I couldn’t find you.”
But I knew for a fact that the opposite was not true. “It’s not exactly fair. You can vanish and I’ll never see you again but anytime you want to see me, boom, you follow my scent.”
“What do you propose to do about it?”
“Maybe I should have you wear a bell.”
“We can’t put this off forever. I’m going to shift now.”
Of course, he had known I was stalling. Why shouldn’t he know? He knew everything else by my scent alone. I rolled my eyes.
“Well then go ahead, get it over with.”
With a grin and a nod, he shifted into his Wolf form. His face elongated as his hands covered in fur. His body hunching over, he was almost immediately down on four legs. The whole thing took thirty seconds, but it felt like an hour as I watched him change.
He shook his head as he looked up at me, his wolf eyes finding me in the moonlight. He whined and moved forward until I patted him on the head.
“I’m not sure I can do this. The last time….”
We both knew what had happened the last time I’d ridden on his back. We’d been alone all night in a house until I’d picked up Vampire signals I’d not been able to ignore. We’d had no choice but to run. Still, the time we’d been in the house together had been the one time in the brief time I’d been with Jason that I hadn’t been able to discount as meaningless. I had known, deep in my subconscious, that whatever turned out to be true and false between us, that night had been legitimate.
It had been sweet, powerful, and, for me, all consuming. I had believed in us. If I got on Jason’s back, I might do that again.
He whined again, touching my hand and I knew I had no choice. I needed to let Genesis know what had happened, Chad’s family had the right to hear how brave and flawless their son had been, and Jason needed to have another big confrontation with his father.
None of this could happen in a timely manner unless I got on Jason’s back and let him run us a lot further at a faster pace than I could walk.
It was imperative that I not let my fears of being destroyed again become so consuming that I couldn’t move forward into what had to be done.
I couldn’t spend forever wandering in the woods, no matter how appealing the thought might be. I had a purpose I needed to accomplish, a need that had to drive me on.
No matter how hard I tried, I didn’t remember my mother but I was sure from the stories I head that she wasn’t a coward. My father had been so consumed with his grief that he’d never gotten over it. Life had ceased for him.
It couldn’t do that for me. I hadn’t died. That meant I had to keep going.
“Okay, Jason, I’ll get on your back, but if you drop me on the ground I’m going to cause you pain.”
We both knew it was an empty threat, but Jason dropped his head like he took me seriously. If he’d been in his human form, I would have seen humor in his blue depths.
Holding onto him tightly, I climbed onto his back and wrapped my arms around his strong wolf neck. Placing my head down on his fur that was somehow both rough and soft at the same time, I took a deep breath, inhaling the familiar scent that was Jason as a wolf. I might not be Werewolf but I could still relate to smell. It could still transport me to places in my memories I might otherwise not visit.
As I held on tightly, Jason ran hard through the trees, turning at the last minute and barely missing twigs and trees, which were in his way. It might seem careless but I trusted him. If I held on, I wouldn’t so much as get a bruise on me while I was on his back.
I hadn’t asked him how far we would travel before we stopped and after a while I started to, unbelievably, feel tired pressed up against him as he ran. My eyelids started to close, and Jason growled at me. I forced my eyes back open.
He was right. I couldn’t afford to sleep; I might fall off. The idea made me shudder. I didn’t want to break my arm or, worse, my neck.
A few minutes later, Jason skidded to a stop and I forced my tired legs to climb down from his back. They must have, at some point, gotten stiff and I had a hard time getting my feet to work beneath me.
Jason shifted back into his human form and pulled me against him as he did.
“Come on, Rachel, we’ll both sleep.”
I swallowed. “I’m afraid to go to bed.”
I hadn’t been when I’d been on his back. The whole experience had short-circuited my brain functions, and I’d been able to pretend that I wouldn’t dream. Now that I stood still, I didn’t have the luxury of that kind of imagination.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to see Chad screaming at me.” A tear escaped from my eye and I quickly wiped it away.
“He would never scream at you. He loved you like I love you. I could smell it on him. Truthfully, I could smell it on you, too. His love manifested itself inside of your pores. In a million years, I can’t believe he would scream at you.”
“You didn’t know him. Chad could yell. Would yell, if need be. I think right now, he’d be screaming his head off.”
Jason pulled me into his arms. “He wouldn’t. He’d want you to get home.”
I hoped he was right because even standing in Jason’s arms I could feel myself giving into the blackness of sleep.
“Relax, I’ve got you.”
I hoped he really did.