“Dusk in ten minutes, Bryn.”
The words were issued from directly behind my left shoulder, and the only thing that kept me from making a sound somewhere in the “eep!” family was years of experience with frustratingly stealthy werewolves. Despite my own training and the bond I shared with the rest of the pack, if Weres wanted to sneak up on me, they could. Even in human form, werewolves were stronger, faster, and more capable of masking their presence than us non-supernatural types. The most I could do was attempt to hide my surprise when they caught me off guard. Today, I was certainly getting plenty of practice at that. First Callum, and now this.
I whirled on the intruder. “I don’t care when dusk is,” I said. As my best friend, Devon was morally obligated to listen to me whine, and if he was going to keep me from working on “The Tree (or possibly Fire Hydrant) of Knowledge,” I was going to take full advantage of that obligation. “Nobody else has a five p.m. curfew.”
Devon didn’t bother to expend energy by disputing my words or acknowledging my whine in any way. He just leaned back against the door of my garage-turned-studio and waited for my ranting to subside.
“Besides,” I continued, hoping to engender some level of sympathy, “Callum’s put me on surveillance. I’m sure my babysitter will be showing up any minute to escort me home, whether I like it or not.”
Fact of life: pretty much everyone I knew was stronger, faster, and less disturbed by the idea of throwing a girl over his shoulder and hauling her to a given destination than anyone had a right to be.
A slightly more satisfying fact of life: I didn’t have to make it easy for them. I’d doubtlessly lose any fight I started, but it was the principle of the matter. That, and annoying werewolves was a good way to dispel pent-up frustration—if and only if they were bound to keep you safe and couldn’t raise claw or canine against you.
Teeth ripping into flesh. Skin tearing like Velcro.
Glancing out the window in a show of calm, I wondered why my “escort” wasn’t here already. Like Devon had said, it was almost dark, and Callum’s wolves were nothing if not punctual. It was at that exact moment that I noticed the faint grin on Devon’s face.
“You’re my escort?”
Devon shrugged. “The Big Guy tells you to do something, you do it, even if it means babysitting a bratty little human girl who calls playing with glue art.”
I reached over and smacked him.
Devon just smiled back at me. He was my best friend. My partner in crime. He was most certainly not my keeper. I was going to kill Callum for this. He knew that in my current frame of mind, I would have fought anyone else, but I couldn’t fight with Devon, and Devon couldn’t disobey Callum.
Insert four-letter word here.
“Have I mentioned that I really hate werewolves?”
“A time or two, I believe,” Devon said. For no reason other than the fact that he could, he adopted a ridiculously affected British accent. “Come along now, luv. Be a dear and walk with your old pal Devon, yeah?”
My best friend, the drama geek. If I didn’t go with him now, there was a high probability that he’d keep switching accents until I caved. A werewolf channeling the Swedish Chef was not a pretty thing—and I had absolutely no desire to see it again.
“Fine.” I sighed melodramatically. Two could play Dev’s game, and if he was going to put his drama chops to use, I had every right to channel my inner diva. “If we must, we must, yeah?”
My own British accent was, in a word, horrid.
To his credit, Devon didn’t wince. Instead, he adopted an austere look. “Indeed.” He managed to maintain his serious expression for about two seconds before the two of us started cracking up. He linked his arm through mine and gently steered me out the door. We locked up and then headed down the trail toward town.
“Do you have any idea what’s got Callum’s panties in a twist?” I asked as we walked.
“It’s a miracle he let you live past childhood, darling. I can’t imagine anyone else talking about our esteemed leader’s underpants.”
Although his words were entirely true, I couldn’t help but notice that they weren’t an answer. “Don’t evade the question, Dev. Callum said he’d put an entire team on me. I’m guessing that means more than just you and that you got the short straw tonight because—”
“Because Callum knew you’d be defenseless against my ample charms?” Devon suggested winningly. Of our generation in the pack, Dev was the largest, the strongest, and the most likely to turn alpha himself one day, but being Devon, he preferred to think his true power lay in other domains.
I rolled my eyes. “Because Callum knows we’re friends,” I corrected. Werewolves had heightened senses, and a person would have had to be deaf, dumb, blind, and just plain stupid to miss out on the connection that Devon and I shared. There were only a few other juvenile wolves in our pack, and with Devon’s sense of flare (he was, I was certain, the world’s only metrosexual werewolf), he’d never really fit in among the other pups. Then Callum had brought me home, Marked me, and given me to Ali. Most of the pack had ignored the tiny, shell-shocked human, but Devon claimed he’d loved me from the moment he’d seen me, shivering in Callum’s arms, blood-spattered and wild-eyed. The two of us quickly became inseparable. It was to Devon that I’d said my first words once I started talking again, and with Devon that I’d mastered the fine art of mischief. He was Devon.
And now, Callum had placed me in his charge.
“I hate this,” I said.
“I’m sure you do, Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare, but I’d not have you endangering yourself on my watch.”
It took me a second to realize that Devon was channeling Callum. The impression was a hilariously good one, and it reminded me that even when he obeyed orders, Devon was not just another member of the pack.
“Your stubbornness is also your folly,” Devon continued. He even had Callum’s facial expressions—or lack thereof—down pat.
“Fine. You win. I’m laughing. Happy now?”
Devon grinned, Callum’s quirks instantaneously melting off his heart-shaped face. “I’m ecstatic.”
“The point is—” I tried to bite back my giggles, but that stubbornness/folly line was so spot-on that I was having trouble recovering. “The point, Devon I-wish-you-had-a-middle-name Macalister, is that if Callum’s got an entire team watching me—including your fine wolfy self—then there’s something going on. I want to know what it is.”
“Leave it alone, Bryn.” Devon’s voice was soft and uncharacteristically serious. He knew something, he knew that I knew that he knew something, and he still wasn’t telling. Ten-to-one odds, that meant that (a) Callum had forbidden him from telling me, and (b) Devon agreed that it was in my best interest not to know.
“Devon!”
“Bronwyn.”
I really needed to come up with a better retort than “you suck.”
The two of us walked in silence for a bit, until the trail veered off to the right. Ark Valley was about 90 percent woods, and the forest was protected by the town by-laws—not surprising given that the town was one of a dozen or so in a five-state area founded by Callum’s pack, way back when. Every couple of decades, the pack moved, rotating through our territory just when the older wolves’ agelessness began pushing the line from “incredible genetics” to “unnatural.” We’d been in Ark Valley for as long as I could remember, and the townspeople hadn’t gotten suspicious yet—at least about the aging thing.
“Your castle awaits,” Devon said, gesturing to Ali’s house.
“Not going to walk me to the door?” I asked, pretending to be shocked at his lack of gallantry.
“Of course I am. Many would think that a bonny lass such as yerself wouldst be able to stay out of trouble for a distance of fifteen feet, but I know better.”
“Did you just use the words yerself and wouldst in the same sentence? You can’t be a pirate and a courtier at the same time, Dev. It just isn’t done.”
/>
In a gesture below the dignity of the average werewolf, he stuck his tongue out at me. Still, he walked me all the way to the front door, depositing me on the porch and waiting for me to open the door and walk across the threshold. I dug out my keys, unlocked the steel door, and stepped inside, just as dusk fell.
“Good boy, Devon,” I taunted. “You got me home before dark. If you can sit, shake, and roll over, too, I’m sure Callum will give you a doggie treat.”
“Forget Callum and his so-called panties,” Devon said, finally taking his tongue back into his mouth so that he could speak. “It’s a miracle that I let you live past childhood.”
I snorted. On any other girl, it would have been a perfectly normal, if indelicate, sound to make. On me, it sounded more animalistic. More wolfish, even though I wasn’t a Were. Hazard of being raised by a pack. For the most part, with a little effort and a lot of resolve, I could keep them out of my head, but they still snuck their way into my mannerisms. I’d never be one of them the way Devon was one of them. I’d never Shift to another form, and I’d never have a wolf sharing my body and stalking through the corners of my mind. But I’d never be like other girls, either.
I shook my head to clear it of thoughts—another gesture that wasn’t as human as I was—and I realized when I zoned back in that Devon had already taken his leave. He’d made it to the trail and a good ways down it in a matter of seconds, not bothering to mask his inhuman speed. Nobody but Weres came as far into the forest as Ali’s house. Nobody but Ali and me.
“Close the door and hang up your jacket,” Ali called the orders to me from the kitchen. She had an uncanny sense for knowing what was happening in her house even if she couldn’t see it. Before she’d bellowed, I’d been microseconds away from dumping my coat on the floor.
I followed her orders to a T and then walked into the kitchen, following the sound of Ali’s voice and the scent of cooking food. I had a good nose—a matter of necessity in the pack, human or not—but I couldn’t quite parse what I was smelling into its component parts. “Marinara sauce,” I mused out loud. “Peanut butter. Onions. And …”
“Oreos,” Ali declared, popping one into her mouth. “You want?” she asked after she’d gulped hers down.
I took the proffered Oreo and surveyed the rest of the kitchen. “Cravings?” I asked.
Ali shrugged hopelessly.
“Where’s the steak?”
It didn’t matter what Ali was craving, there was always meat involved. The baby had turned her into a carnivore, and Ali, who couldn’t stomach even the sight of a rare steak eight months ago, ate them daily now. Such was the price of a Were pregnancy. That, and the fact that instead of kicking, like normal babies, Ali’s son Shifted forms. A couple of months ago, I’d joked about selling tickets to watch her stomach during the full moon. Now, with the baby’s birth closer all the time, it really wasn’t funny anymore.
“I’m going to be fine,” Ali said, reaching up to rub my shoulder with one hand.
“You always do that. It’s like you can read my mind.” I meant it as a complaint, but it came out nostalgic, like part of me was preparing to look back fondly on that habit when she was gone.
“I’m going to be fine,” Ali said again. “You know me, Bryn. Have I ever backed down from a fight?”
Never. Before Callum had thrust me into her care, she hadn’t even been a part of the pack. She’d only just found out that werewolves were real and that more often than not, they took human women as their mates. For an orphaned kid she’d never even met, Ali had abandoned her own life and risen to the challenge. She’d taken Callum’s Mark and mastered it, insulating herself—and me—from most of what it entailed. There wasn’t a Were within a hundred-mile radius that she hadn’t stood up to on my behalf, Callum included. I thought that was why he’d given me to her, instead of to one of the other Weres. He’d made her Pack so that she could take care of me, knowing that she’d be unaffected by dominance hierarchies, knowing that she wouldn’t put up with someone giving me crap just because they were dominant enough to think that they could.
“You’re going to be fine,” I said, repeating Ali’s words. I believed it. I really did. I just forgot that I did sometimes. I’d seen too many women die in childbirth. Female werewolves were extremely rare, and human bodies weren’t meant to carry werewolf pups.
“Where’s Casey?” I asked, changing the topic of conversation and hoping that my thoughts would follow suit. “It’s not like him to miss a meal.” Ali’s husband was an eater. And for the past eight months, he’d been quite the hoverer as well. Food plus Ali meant that he should be here, and even though I hadn’t quite gotten used to the fact that it wasn’t just me and Ali anymore—or the idea that when I slept, there was an adult Were sleeping down the hall—Casey’s absence struck me as fundamentally strange.
“Casey’s eating out tonight,” Ali said. “Here, taste this.”
I was so caught up in trying to figure out why Casey was “eating out” and what Ali wasn’t telling me that I almost took the bite she offered me. At the last second, I came to my senses and realized that whatever concoction Ali’s cravings had led her to create, I really, truly didn’t want any part of it.
“Your loss,” she said, spooning the goop, which definitely contained both the peanut butter and the marinara sauce I’d smelled, into her mouth. She followed it with an Oreo.
“I’m going to throw up,” I said, gagging—and not just for show.
“It’s all part of my master plan,” Ali replied. “Cravings are just the pregnant woman’s excuse for making everyone around her as nauseated as she is.”
“You’re evil, Ali.”
She smiled and serenely took another bite. “I know.”
I took refuge in the refrigerator and nosed around until I found something edible. Popping the container into the microwave, I turned my attention back to Ali, who was very good at distracting me—just not quite good enough.
“Your husband’s not home for dinner, even though he hasn’t gone more than ten feet away from you since you hit seven months. Callum decided to start enforcing my curfew and assigned an entire team to keep an eye on me. You’re making pregnancy jokes to distract me from asking questions.” I ticked the observations off on my fingers as I spoke out loud. “Something’s going on.”
“If I asked you to please, as a personal favor to me, stay out of it, would you?” Ali asked.
I busied myself by checking on my microwavable mac and cheese and didn’t reply.
“Didn’t think so,” Ali sighed. “What if I told you that I was tired and cranky and very pregnant, and that I needed you to do this for me, because I can’t take the extra stress right now?”
Now that was a low blow, and Ali knew it. I didn’t want to be worried about her, and she didn’t want me worrying about her. “You’re going to be fine,” I said, trying to respond the way I would have if I really wasn’t concerned at all. “And telling me to stay away just makes me want to know more. It’s obviously pack business, and there must be some danger involved, otherwise Callum wouldn’t be pulling his ‘trouble’s afoot’ routine. But it can’t be too dangerous, because Casey’s involved, and Callum would never risk him this close to your due date.”
Ali didn’t say a word. I tried to read her face, but she had an ability matched only by Callum’s to hide her emotions completely.
“Do you really need me to leave this alone?” I asked softly. I couldn’t risk hurting her, even if we both wanted to pretend that there was nothing—and could be nothing—wrong.
“Yeah, Bryn, I think I do.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll leave it alone—for now. But I’m not going to like it, and once that kid is born, and you’re fine, I’m getting a tattoo, piercing my belly button, and eloping to Mexico with someone you’ve never met.”
She laughed and then stuck another Oreo in my mouth. As I was chewing, she tweaked my hair. “Bryn, Callum’s got you under surveillance. You wouldn??
?t make it a foot into a tattoo shop before someone yanked you back out.”
“You never know,” I replied. “Tonight, my guard was Devon, and I happen to know for a fact that he thinks tasteful body art is quite the thing.”
Ali responded to my retort with one of her own, and we went back and forth for so long that it didn’t occur to me until much later that she had assumed that my security team would still be in place by the time the baby was born. And that really made me wonder, because our pack had a tendency to take care of trouble very quickly. Threats were eliminated the instant they were identified. Callum ran a tight ship, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of pack business would necessitate my being inside by dusk every night for a month or more.
Despite my promise to Ali, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and by the end of the week, I’d come to the realization that the weirdest part of all of this wasn’t that something had everyone on edge. It was the fact that nobody would tell me what it was. The pack didn’t just want me safe. They wanted to keep me in the dark.
And ever since the night the Big Bad Wolf had come knocking at my parents’ door, I hadn’t been overly fond of the dark. Not metaphorically. Not actually. I liked seeing what was laid out in front me. And if Callum and Ali and Devon thought they could keep me blindfolded indefinitely, they were wrong.