CHAPTER SIX || LEE #2
Was I a full, complete person? Was I a person who, if things were different, could choose Daniel and be chosen in return? Who truly belonged anywhere?
Perhaps Hunter caught the shape of my emotions—they were harder to hide here, after all—or he saw the expression on my face. Because his brows drew together in confusion.
I was about to tell him I was fine—and I was. After all, this was nothing new. But then, over Hunter’s shoulder, I saw something strange on the opposite side of the lake.
There were two shapes, standing motionless at the far shore. They glowed with a sickly, pale luminescence, their forms indistinct, wavering at the edges like a heat shimmer rising off pavement.
They were watching us.
My stomach lurched. The last of the warmth drained from me, leaving me feeling as if I were encased in ice. My inner wolf recoiled. And I knew, deep in my bones, that the creatures didn’t belong here.
They were wrong. Their presence was a violation of nature.
Before I could speak or point out what I had just seen, someone crashed out of the tree line behind us.
I whirled, stepping in front of Daniel instinctively.
It was Robert Callahan, one of our regulars at the Crescent Moon bar the pack owned and operated in town.
Except he looked more panicked than I’d ever seen him: wild-eyed, gray-faced, and drenched in sweat.
He was wearing his red and black flannel shirt, faded blue jeans, and tan work boots, the same clothes I’d seen him in dozens of times before.
But they were disheveled, as if he’d been running.
The flannel had been buttoned incorrectly. The shoelaces were untied.
He stumbled toward us, his hands outstretched, his mouth working and his eyes filled with terror.
“Why can’t I remember?” he gasped. His eyes darted around, not focusing on us, without even a flicker of recognition. As if he couldn’t really see us. Or maybe it was just that he was beyond caring. “I can’t remember anything! Why can’t I—”
Then he collapsed to the ground. And the dream shattered.
* * *
I bolted upright on the floor, my heart hammering, gasping.
Hunter was already awake and sitting up on the couch, breathing hard too. His green eyes were wide as they met mine. Above us, the sudden creak of the loft floorboards and the change to the warlock’s breathing told me Daniel had jolted awake too.
For a long moment, none of us spoke.
“What the hell was that?” Hunter said at last.
“I don’t know.” My voice sounded strange to my own ears. Too uneasy and ragged. “That’s never happened before, right? No one else has ever been in the dreams. Just the three of us.”
Hunter frowned at that, shooting an uneasy look up at the loft. I wasn’t sure if he was upset that I was openly referencing the dreams in Daniel’s presence—if so, that was too damn bad—or if he thought that maybe the warlock had something to do with it.
Daniel scrambled down the ladder to join us.
“You guys—” He broke off, swallowing, his gaze darting from me to Hunter and then back again. “You guys had the same dream, right?”
Hunter sighed heavily. “Yeah. We did.”
Almost in unison, Daniel and I both shot him startled looks.
I’d expected him to—what? Gaslight Daniel? Pretend it hadn’t happened? Openly lie to him?
Freezing him out was one thing. Refusing to talk about the dreams at all or acknowledge them in his presence wasn’t great. But it wasn’t the same thing at all as intentionally messing with his sense of reality. That was something else altogether. And apparently, Hunter wasn’t willing to do it.
I realized, with a stab of guilt, that I had underestimated him. He was angry and sometimes an asshole, but he wasn’t that cruel.
“That was Robert,” Daniel said, recovering first. From the wide-eyed way he was staring at the both of us, he seemed shaken by Hunter’s admission. Or maybe it was simply from the dream itself. Either way, he didn’t press it. “He’s in the bar practically every day.”
I nodded, relieved. This was good. Focusing on the specifics of the dream was way better than ruminating on the fact that maybe Hunter was capable of a lot more depth than I’d ever given him credit for.
Why Robert, of all people? Usually, he didn’t say much, but he came in every afternoon like clockwork.
He ordered a beer, sat out on the back porch, overlooking the deep forested valley below.
He occasionally came inside to order a second beer and then watched other folks from town play pool, but sometimes he just left.
As far as I was aware, very few people in the town knew that much about him, despite the fact that he’d lived in Crescent Springs for years.
“Right,” Hunter said roughly. “It was definitely Robert. But why the hell was he in our dream?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. As far as I knew, they were a space built from the bond between the three of us, inaccessible to anyone else. Another person—and much less a mundane human—appearing in that space shouldn’t have been possible.
“Maybe we should tell Reed?” Daniel said doubtfully. “And Harris. Both of them.”
“No!” Hunter said vehemently, a wall slamming down over his expression.
Daniel’s eyes widened slightly, as if startled by Hunter’s sudden burst of emotion, but he fell silent and didn’t argue.
I understood Hunter’s reaction immediately, though. If we told Harris and Reed about the shared dream, we’d be essentially talking about the fact that Daniel was our fated mate. It wasn’t something either of us were ready for anyone else to know.
Though it was early, none of us went back to sleep.
Instead, Daniel made us a light breakfast. Coffee and toast. “Sorry,” he said, setting the plate down on the counter next to a small plate with half a stick of butter on it.
“It’s all I have in the cabin right now.
Maybe we ought to grab food in town, when everything opens? ”
“This is fine,” Hunter said immediately. “Thanks.”
Both of us stared at him again. The surly edge to him wasn’t gone, exactly, but it had definitely softened. Maybe he was remembering the fierce joy of the three of us holding a star together, turning our dream into a thing of awe instead of a nightly prison sentence.
I already missed the version of him I’d glimpsed, the way his expression had been blown open and filled with wonder.
The domesticity of it was disorienting. The three of us eating together in the gray morning light felt both profoundly strange and oddly natural.
Against my will, I was reminded of the way we’d planned to propose to him, back when Hunter and I were still one person.
We’d been carrying a ring in our watch pocket for months, waiting for the right time.
It was just a simple gold band, nothing fancy, but we’d saved up for it for months before our father had died.
Hell, we’d even been carrying it the night we were split into two people.
And like everything else about us—right down to the clothing we’d been wearing that night—the ring had also duplicated.
Except, just like Hunter and I, the rings were also slightly different—mine ended up as white gold, all the vibrancy leeched out of it, the copy coming out slightly wrong.
Hunter’s, however, was still the true gold we’d originally purchased.
I’d put my version of the ring in a sandwich bag and then stuck it under the large rock behind our cabin, unable to bring myself to throw it away, but also not wanting to look at it every day, either.
I wasn’t sure what Hunter had done with his. We’d never talked about it.
But if things were different, Daniel and I might’ve had breakfast like this practically every morning.
Maybe he’d cook and I’d squeeze us glasses of fresh orange juice, because he didn’t like juice from concentrate.
And during breakfast, we’d talk about work or make plans for how we’d spend the day together.
How many moments like this could we have had if things hadn’t gone the way they did?
Hunter ate mechanically, his brows knitted together, which meant he was deep in thought, worrying something over in his mind. He was rattled, I could tell.
I kept sneaking glances at Daniel, too. But his face betrayed nothing of what he was thinking.
I wondered how the dream was sitting with him, too.
I probably could’ve sensed his emotions and maybe even his thoughts through the bond, if I’d wanted to.
But prying into his inner world on purpose, without his consent, felt wrong.
My phone buzzed, shattering the silence. Reed.
“Do you have an update?” he asked when I picked up.
“Sort of,” I said, and told him everything we’d discovered last night.
“Good work. In that case, I need you at the bar,” he said, when I’d finished. “Harris can keep an eye on Oliver and the others. But I could use an extra pair of hands opening up.”
“You’re not worried about—”
“From what you’ve just said, it sounds like each pack member is going to manifest magic in specific ways,” Reed cut in. “We already know yours. And seeing into the future isn’t exactly likely to get anyone killed.”
“We’re not sure it works like that. We don’t know anything for sure. The sympathetic manifestations are just our working theory for what’s happening.”
“Still, it would be awfully nice to have a heads-up if I’m about to accidentally set someone on fire or something. I’m not sure how this is affecting me yet, but we can’t afford to keep the bar closed. Have Hunter and Daniel stay on the research.”
The phone still clutched to my ear, I glanced over at Daniel, who was watching me with those unreadable dark eyes. Then at Hunter, who I was certain could hear every word through the phone’s tiny speaker.
“Go,” he said. His voice was gruff. His gaze flicked to Daniel then back to me. “I’ll make sure nothing happens to him.”
Daniel opened his mouth—probably to protest that he didn’t need a babysitter—but something in Hunter’s expression stopped him cold. He closed his mouth and looked down, his cheeks going pink. “Yeah, alright.”