From her crib, Katie yipped again, clearly impatient. Little sis wanted what she wanted when she wanted it.
“Good girl,” I crooned, scooping her up and setting her on the ground.
“Aren’t you supposed to be encouraging her to stay in human form?” Devon asked me. For once, his accent and the set of his impeccably groomed eyebrows were completely his own.
“Moi?” I said innocently. “And how am I supposed to do that, hmmmm?” I threw Devon’s own pet noise right back at him. “I seem to recall something about my being completely human and unable to control the forms of subordinate wolves.”
Trying to force my will on Katie would have gone against everything I fought for on a day-to-day basis—not to mention the fact that opening up my pack-bond enough to force something on either of the babies would have left me vulnerable to having someone else’s will forced on me. That was a can of worms that I wouldn’t open unless and until I had to.
Kaitlin, blissed out in puppy form, sniffed at my shoes and then sneezed.
“And also,” I added, “I like her better this way.”
Katie nosed at the carpet and then gave it a good chew. When it proved recalcitrant enough that she couldn’t pull it up, she growled.
“Who’s a fierce little girl?” I asked her. “Who’s going to kick butt and take names and help her big sister get into all kinds of trouble someday?”
Devon snorted. “Sometimes, I think the term bad influence was invented specifically with you in mind.”
Considering that he knew nothing of my deep-seated need to fight my way to Chase again, that was probably an understatement. Rather than say something that might give away my thoughts, I opted instead for a surefire distraction.
“Not it,” I said.
Dev cocked one eyebrow at me, a trick that it had taken him years to absolutely perfect.
I gestured toward Alex, wrinkling my nose ever-so-slightly. “Not it.” My nose wasn’t anywhere near as sensitive as anyone else’s in this room, but even I could sense something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Unlike me, Devon had an animal’s tolerance of what I referred to as “diaper commodities.” In addition to having superstrength, accelerated healing, awesome senses, and an extended life span, werewolves, I had recently discovered, were also pretty much immune to the horrors of poop.
Devon picked Alex up and sauntered over to the changing table. Alex made some vaguely unhappy sounds, but Devon banished them by singing what seemed to be a punk-rock version of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Halfway through, he segued disturbingly smoothly into a number from Rent.
The music soothed me as much as it did the baby, and I turned my attention back to Kaitlin, who now appeared to be very conscientiously stalking my shoelaces. I smiled half a smile at her puppy antics, wondering what it would be like to be able to join her, to shed my human skin and the confines that went with it and just live in the moment as a wolf. What would I look like with four legs and fur—would I be light-colored like Katie, or a darker timber, like Dev?
I wondered if I’d be velvety black with ice-blue eyes, like Chase.
And then, I was there again, in that moment, watching his muscles tense and pull and send electric pulses through my body as he Changed. With equally little warning, I was elsewhere and another set of blue eyes glistened yellow as a large, gray wolf with a white star on his forehead leapt for the throat of a human man whose features had long been replaced by Callum’s in my memory.
Come out, come out, wherever you are, little one. No sense hiding from the Big Bad Wolf. I’ll always find you in the end. …
A hand on my shoulder made me jump.
You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself, Callum told me with his eyes, but out loud, he didn’t say anything to me at all—he just squeezed my shoulder once and turned his attention to Kaitlin.
“Ach, Katie-girl, what are we going to do with you?” His brown eyes soft and his mouth set with mock sternness, Callum scooped puppy-Kaitlin up in his arms. She lapped at his face and he bit back an indulgent smile. “If your mama sees you like this, she’ll not be pleased,” Callum said, before puffing out a breath that had my little sister sniffing like crazy.
Even without being a Were, I knew what Callum would smell like to her: safe and strong and home. He was the alpha, and in our world, that made him as close and important to Kaitlin as her own parents. As important as I hoped that I would be to her someday.
Eventually, Katie tired of the confines of Callum’s loving hold, and she began to whine and wiggle, angling for the floor.
“I know exactly how you feel,” I said under my breath.
Callum didn’t bat an eye at my complaint. “You,” he said to Katie, “need to change back to human form, and you”—he fixed his gaze on me—“my dearest, darling, and not-quite-grown little girl, need to trust that I have and have always had your best interest at heart.”
My future mini-me and I were equally incapable of resisting Callum’s orders. If Callum said to Change, Katie had to Change, whether she wanted to or not. For me, Callum had a different kind of pull. Years of shielding myself psychically from my bond with the pack may have dulled Callum’s supernatural influence over me, but he still had a human one, and I couldn’t deny the truth in his words. Callum didn’t want to see me hurt, and he had no qualms about acting to ensure my safety. He cared for me.
Callum reached out and ran a hand over my hair, the same way Devon had stroked Katie’s. Meanwhile, the little princess settled into her baby body enough to thrash her little baby arms, and she let out a shriek worthy of an opera-singing banshee. I had to give it to her, the kid knew how to scream with the best of them. I could almost hear the howl behind her unhappy cries.
Kaitlin—or Kate now, clearly—did not like being caged, not by orders she had to follow or by limbs that wouldn’t do what they were told and skin that stubbornly refused to feel even the least bit like fur.
“Her Royal Highness is displeased,” I told Callum, translating Baby Kate’s wails into words.
He shifted her in his arms and crooned and patted her bottom, speaking to her in a mix of languages I didn’t know and couldn’t understand beyond the fact that once upon a time, he’d probably said the same thing to me. Kate resisted being consoled, but soon the wails died to whimpers and the whimpers to the occasional sniff. Expertly, Callum got her into a fresh set of clothing, since Shifting had destroyed her Baby Gap bodysuit and booties. Already, the twins were wearing clothes made for much older infants, and Katie, with her penchant for spending time in an animal form that aged much more quickly than she did, was growing even faster than Alex.
I’d never realized how fast Weres grew when they were this small. We’d only had one or two live births since I’d been with the pack, and I’d never been up close and personal with those. I knew that Devon had always looked at least a couple of years older than I did, even though we were the same age, but the older we’d gotten, the more natural that difference had seemed. A six-week-old infant who looked like a six-month-old was much more bizarre than an almost-sixteen-year-old who could have passed for twenty. At this rate, Ali’s babies wouldn’t stay babies for long.
For some reason, that thought made me look at Callum again, and I wondered if he realized that inside, I was changing even quicker than the twins were on the surface. I think he knew, the way he always did. The heavy sadness of his eyes as he looked back at me glowed with something akin to premonition. In Callum’s gaze, I saw the reflection of my own sudden self-awareness that I was barreling toward adulthood, and that the next words out of my mouth would be my first running leap in that direction.
A leap that even five minutes before, I would have fought tooth and nail against taking.
“I need to register a request for permissions,” I said, using the officially sanctioned language for approaching the alpha as one of his pack. This time, I needed to do things right. Callum, his expression completely masked, set Katie back down in h
er crib and nodded to Devon, who left the room.
My stomach flip-flopped with the fear that he would say no, but I made myself stand tall as he followed protocol to a T. “Your request has been registered. Define the terms of the permissions you seek.”
I was suddenly very aware of the fact that I was in the room with Callum the alpha, not Callum who scolded me about algebra. My heart started beating faster and my mind went again and again to the beast inside him and from there to the things that a wolf as strong as Callum could do, if you tempted his ire and he were so inclined.
“I need to see Chase,” I said, my voice quiet but firm. “I request permissions to have a supervised visit with him.” About then, I started losing my rather tenuous grip on the control I was aiming for. “I’ll do whatever you want, I’ll follow every rule you set down, but I need to see him.”
Callum looked at me and into me, his eyes steely and sharp. His poker face wavered for a split second when I voluntarily promised to follow the rules—a completely unprecedented event that would, in all likelihood, never happen again.
After roughly two and a half eternities, Callum finally nodded. “I’ll grant your request, with conditions to be set down by the next full moon.”
I hated the idea of waiting even a second longer than I had to, but I wasn’t about to argue or look a gift wolf in the mouth.
“Thank you,” I said, bowing my head, the way I’d seen other Weres do in the past. Callum stepped forward and pulled me into a hug, running his hand over my hair again, the same way he had when I was four and looking for solace after skinning my knees. At that moment, part of me didn’t want to see Chase, because I didn’t want to remember anything outside of the here and now, where I was safe and loved and part of something bigger than myself.
But another part of me knew that wasn’t an option, not for me, because there were bad people in the world who did bad things, even to kids, and I wasn’t the type who could stand by and pretend that there weren’t.
If there was a Rabid in our territory, I needed to know.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE NEXT FULL MOON WAS A SUNDAY IN MID-APRIL. Even though it felt like I’d been waiting forever, when the big day finally arrived, a thin cord of dread looped itself around my neck like a hangman’s noose. Growing up, I used to fake the stomach flu on the day before a full moon. I’d retch and moan and concoct secret mixtures of just the right texture to throw into the toilet in order to make it sound as if I was blowing chunky chunks. Ali was never fooled, but sometimes she’d let me stay home from school anyway. I always thought that it bothered her, too—watching them lose bits and pieces of their human façades as the day wore on. I’d seen Weres Shift hundreds of times, but it was different when the moon was full. Even in their human forms, they exuded unnatural energy, adrenaline and hormones battling inside their body to determine whether they’d turn into a lover or a fighter. They oscillated from one end of the spectrum to the other, snapping and snuggling and just generally driving any humans in the near vicinity crazy with the unpredictable bipolarity of it all.
For them, moonlust was a natural high.
For me, it was a hum. A high-pitched, disturbing hum of power, and the creepy, crawly feeling of someone watching me from the shadows. In fact, Callum had probably decided to make me wait until the full moon to hear the conditions of my visit with Chase because he’d hoped that I’d withdraw the request rather than venture directly into the belly of the beast on my least favorite day of the month.
But even with the noose tightening moment by moment and my stomach flipping itself inside out, I wasn’t backing down. There would be no fake chunk-blowing today.
“Can I make you something for breakfast?” Ali pulled a kitchen chair away from the table, her subtle way of telling me that I would be eating breakfast whether I wanted to or not. I considered arguing, because my stomach was knotted up enough that the idea of jamming food down into it seemed ill-advised, but the expression on her face told me that she’d probably been up late with the twins, and that she’d waste no time putting the fear of God (and sleep-deprived mothers) into me if I balked.
“Cereal?” I asked.
Two minutes later, like magic, a bowl of cereal appeared in front of me on the table, and Ali took a seat, her eagle eyes watching as I swirled my spoon around in the bowl before taking a bite.
“Callum said you asked for permissions,” Ali said, her casual tone belied by the fact that she’d known for weeks and hadn’t mentioned it until now. “To see the new boy. Chase.”
I shrugged and took another bite of cereal, my stomach clenching in protest.
“You’ve never played by their rules before,” Ali continued on, leaning over and snagging a marshmallow out of my bowl and popping it into her mouth. “You don’t ask permissions, you don’t acknowledge dominance, and by the time you were in kindergarten, you’d clamped down on your end of the bond so hard that I thought you’d break it.”
She made another grab for my cereal, and I pushed the bowl toward her. “Knock yourself out,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
Ali pushed the bowl back my way and tilted her head toward mine. “Eat.”
I ate. She watched, and finally, I realized that she was waiting for me to say something.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want to understand why it is that the girl who has never met a rule she hasn’t broken would voluntarily agree to give the local patriarch the power to set her limits in absolute stone.”
“Patriarch? Puh-lease. It’s Callum.”
“Your words, not mine. And you’re dodging the question.”
The thing about asking permissions was that it required Callum to interact with me officially. I’d taken away his option of phrasing orders as requests, and I’d appealed to him as part of the pack, not as me. It had been a huge gamble, because if he’d turned down my permissions, and I’d gone to see Chase anyway, I’d have broken Pack Law and opened myself up to Pack Justice.
But Callum hadn’t turned me down. He’d accepted my request, and whatever conditions he laid down today, I’d abide by them.
“I needed to see Chase, and this was the only way.” I turned my head away from Ali but snuck a peek back at her out of the corner of my eye. “I couldn’t have gotten anywhere near Callum’s house on my own, not after last time. At least this way, I’ll get to see him.”
The visit would be supervised, and it would happen on Callum’s terms, whatever those were, but by the time it was over, I’d have answers. Or possibly more questions.
I’d have something, and that was infinitely more than what I had now.
“Why this boy, Bryn? Why do you need to see someone who would just as soon eat your calf as look you in the eye? What could he possibly have to offer?”
Whoa. Ali was sounding suspiciously anti-Chase. Ali wasn’t anti-anybody. I said as much out loud, and she shrugged.
“Casey doesn’t trust him.”
“Casey doesn’t trust anyone,” I replied. “He’s paranoid like that. I mean, come on, he’s a werewolf who installed a nanny cam in his kids’ room.” I pointed my spoon at Ali for emphasis. “A nanny cam.”
Like anyone would hurt Kaitlin or Alex. The worst Casey had to worry about was me telling them things they wouldn’t understand until they’d been verbal for at least a couple of years, and I knew (a) where the nanny cam was, and (b) how to disable it. Fatherhood had turned Ali’s husband into a suburban soccer mom.
“Forget about Casey and promise me you’ll be careful, Bryn. Callum isn’t Callum when he’s the alpha, and there isn’t a single one of them that isn’t dangerous.”
This was our family she was talking about. Callum. Devon. Casey, Sora, and Lance. My age-mates. The twins.
“I’ll be careful.”
From the look Ali gave me, it was almost like she didn’t believe me. How insulting.
“I can be careful,” I said, somewhat disgruntled.
“Br
yn, when you were six years old, you tried to bungee jump off a jungle gym by connecting the straps of your overalls to the bars with your shoelaces. Caution has never been your strong suit.”
“And yet, I always seem to come out of it without a scratch.” I smiled winningly. Ali gave me a look.
“You’re a survivor,” she allowed grudgingly. “And you’ve been lucky. That doesn’t mean you have to press your luck.”
I answered Ali’s pointed stare with one of my own. “You worry too much.”
“I’m your mother. It’s my job.”
From upstairs, a noise somewhere between an ambulance siren and a banshee’s howl announced that at least one of the twins was awake for the day. For a few seconds, Ali remained seated, looking at me, and then she sighed. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid,” she said as she stood up and took my empty cereal bowl over to the sink.
“I promise I won’t do anything stupid,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.” Kind of. “I have to do this, Ali. And I’m trying really hard to do it right.”
Ali nodded and, as she walked back by me to head upstairs, pressed a single kiss to my part. “You do what you have to do, Bryn. Just come home in one piece.”
Those words were less than comforting, and for the briefest of instants, I considered giving up. Withdrawing my request. Falling prey to Ali’s and Callum’s best-laid plans to convince me that this wasn’t the path down which I wanted to tread.
And then I cursed under my breath, stood up, and thanked my lucky stars that Ali didn’t have super-hearing. The twins, on the other hand, had probably heard my epithet but wouldn’t know what it meant or the fact that I wasn’t allowed to say it. And hopefully, they wouldn’t say it themselves, because it would make a poor entry in their baby books under “baby’s first word.”
“I’m going out, Ali. I’ll be home …,” I started to say that I’d be home soon, but in reality, I had no idea when I’d be home, because I had no idea what Callum would ask of me in return for the permission to see Chase. It could take all day, all night, all week …