Chapter Eight
~Kalo~
I couldn’t smell whatever scent had caught the werewolves’ attention, but it clearly unsettled them. After a final round of silent glances, Felix and Leo turned back towards the pack house.
“We’ll check in with Darius,” Felix announced. “See if anyone else has reported anything.”
Leo glanced over at me. “You two should come inside too. It might not be safe out here.”
That didn’t appeal to me at all. The sun on my face felt too precious to surrender yet. “There doesn’t seem to be an immediate threat,” I pointed out. “And Calista can reach out through her mind-link if we need help, right?”
I couldn’t quite imagine how it worked or what it sounded like, but I knew the werewolves were able to communicate telepathically.
Leo’s brows drew together in concern, and I braced myself for an order, or at least an argument. But he appeared to fight against the protective instinct he’d described to me earlier, shaking his head quickly as if dismissing something his wolf had said.
“Alright. Stay close to Calista, and if anything changes, anything at all, mind-link us the second you sense it.”
“I will,” Calista answered, though Leo’s eyes had never left me.
He hesitated a fraction of a second more before turning away and falling into step beside Felix.
The two of them strode back the way we came, leaving me and Calista alone on the trail.
I let her set the pace, and for a few moments, we simply walked in companionable silence.
Above us, birds tweeted in the evergreen trees, and gradually, my tension began to ease.
She broke the silence first, her eyes still ahead of us and her hands in her pockets. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.” That was what we came out there for, wasn’t it?
Her question, however, had nothing to do with genies. “Leo said you didn’t choose to be mated.”
Not technically a question, but I winced at the reminder anyway. He’d sounded so uncomfortable when he said it. Or unhappy, perhaps. Because of me, it seemed.
“Nobody chooses it, though,” she continued. “I mean, they don’t choose who they’ll be mated to. It’s decided by the moon goddess, if you believe in that, or perhaps just fate and a bit of biology.”
“I understand that,” I assured her. “The genie magic gave me a basic knowledge of werewolf life.”
“I’d love to know more about how that works, but I also need to say that even if you have a basic understanding of it, it’s not the same as truly believing in the mate bond. I mean, I thought I knew everything about werewolves before I met Vaughan, and I’d barely scratched the surface.”
I’d been readying myself to defend my position, but her final statement only left me confused. “What do you mean? Aren’t you a werewolf?”
“I am now. I wasn’t then.”
“How is that possible?” Werewolves were born, not made. That much, I knew for certain.
“It’s a long story, but the short version is that my family died when I was a child. I was raised by humans and grew up believing that werewolves were behind the attack. I thought they were monsters. If someone had told me I’d end up mated to one, I would’ve thought they were insane.”
“And yet you are mated to one.”
She nodded, her gaze lifting towards the branches overhead as a bird landed, shaking the branches of the tree with its beating wings.
“Meeting Vaughan shattered everything I thought I knew about the entire species. He wasn’t violent or cruel.
He wasn’t hungry for power. He wants to protect his pack, yes, but he’s moral and decent and tries his best to do the right thing.
The more time I spent with him, the more my assumptions fell apart. ”
The wind moved through the trees with a gentle sigh, stirring her blonde hair.
“By the time I understood what being mated to him meant, I could see the bond for what it is: the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Taking a moment to try to put myself in her shoes, being raised to fear werewolves and suddenly finding herself tethered to one forever, it made the love she clearly had for her mate even more miraculous.
“So, you think the mate bond is always right?” I summarized.
“I wouldn’t go that far, but from what I’ve seen since joining this pack, I do think it’s rarely wrong. Even when it arrives at the worst time imaginable.”
She glanced at me sidelong, gauging my reaction as we turned onto a quieter stretch of the path.
The distance between the trees widened a little, letting the sunlight break through more easily.
The birdsong that had accompanied us to that point seemed to fade as a flash of movement in the distance caught my attention.
A figure emerged from behind a tree, dressed in a long, dark cloak of some kind. No face was visible, leaving me unsure whether they were facing us or not.
“Who is that?” I asked, squinting to try to make out the figure more clearly.
Calista turned in the direction I was facing. “Who’s who?”
“Right there,” I said, taking another step forward. “Near that cluster of firs.”
The figure still hadn’t moved, and Calista followed my gaze again, her eyes narrowing.
Ultimately, though, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t see anyone.”
“Someone is there,” I insisted. “Dressed in black, right beside the tree.”
She raised a hand to her forehead to shield the dim sunlight, but it made no difference. “Sometimes the forest makes shadows where none exist.”
I knew what she meant. The longer I stared, the more the trunks of the trees themselves seemed to waver and dance. But still, the figure stood, solid and unmoving.
Could I really be imagining it?
In the distance, something whispered across the air.
“Kalo.”
My body went rigid.
I knew that voice. It was the one from my dream, the same tone that held the same threat. You’ll never be free.
“I think we should go back inside after all.”
Calista nodded without hesitation. “It’s gone very quiet all of a sudden. Something feels off.”
She was right. Not only had the birds stopped singing, but all the other sounds of the forest seemed to have dimmed too.
Spinning around, we returned the way we’d come, our pace significantly quicker than it had been on the way out. As we moved, I resisted the urge to glance back. If something waited in the forest behind us, the same something that kept appearing in my dreams, I wasn’t ready to face it yet.