Chapter 13
Thirteen
T he inn was quiet when they slipped out the next morning.
“They’ll sleep until dinner,” Oliver told Luna as he drove them toward the mountains. “If we’re lucky, we’ll get back before they even notice we’re gone.”
Luna’s toes flexed in her fashionable hiking boots. “You know, you’ll probably have to carry me if this hike takes more than three hours.”
“What, you?” He snorted. “I suspected as much, princess. Those boots are worn in, right?”
Luna flexed her toes harder. They weren’t, but she was wearing double socks like Sabine had advised her the other day. That made her safe from blisters, right? She suddenly wished she’d gone on all those hiking trips her LA friends had invited her on. The longest hike she’d done was two hours, and she’d spent the last forty minutes whining for Hector to carry her.
They pulled into the parking lot at the base of the mountain. Luna stared up at it as Oliver checked their supplies in the giant backpack he’d insisted on taking with them. The mountain was shockingly beautiful, even if it was going to be hell on Luna’s poor feet.
She snapped a photo on her phone.
“For the website,” she explained when Oliver glanced over. “Gotta have good pictures of all the attractions.”
Oliver went back to zipping up the backpack. “Right. Because you’re going to revamp us whether we want to or not.”
“You’ll thank me one day,” she said cheerily. “Unless you still want your family business to go down in flames.”
His head snapped up. It took Luna a second to realize why the phrasing might’ve freaked him out.
“I mean,” she said hastily, trying not to imagine the inn burning thanks to some crazy woman with a prejudice against werewolves. “Wouldn’t want all that laundry and roof-fixing to go to waste, right?”
She headed toward the start of the mountain path, which was helpfully marked with a sign. After a second, he followed. Luna felt the bond hum in satisfaction as he arrived behind her, watching her look up at the mountain towering over them.
“There’s still a little bit of snow up there,” she pointed out. “We’re sure it won’t start snowing again before we get down?”
“If the weather forecast has anything to say about it, no,” he said.
“And you’re sure you can guide us up there okay? ”
Oliver rolled his eyes. “It’s hardly guiding. The path is straightforward, and there are flowers all over once you get high enough.” He hitched the backpack higher up his shoulders. “Come on. If we’re lucky, we can make it back by dinner.”
He set off up the trail. Luna sighed and followed, feet already sweating in her double socks and boots.
Three and a half hours later, Luna had seen three disgusting bugs and zero flowers.
“Just keep an eye out for a white flower with a red center,” Oliver said for the dozenth time, looking like he was considering tossing her off the mountain. Luna almost wished he would. Her feet hurt , she was sweaty and gross, and her nose was freezing. The bond helped a little, warming her up from the inside out whenever she got close enough. But it wasn’t a match for the chilly air surrounding them.
“I didn’t even ask for this,” she complained as she trudged after him. “Why am I the one going up the stupid mountain for the stupid breakup flower?”
“Because I’m going,” he reminded her. “Which means you have to come too, or I would’ve passed out before I even got to the parking lot. Hurry up.”
“ You hurry up,” she muttered. She clutched her jacket closer to her chest since he had no room in his backpack and refused to carry it. When she’d asked what the hell was even in that giant backpack he was lugging around for a one-day hike, he’d given her a look like she was the biggest idiot in the world and started listing off first aid equipment, blankets, a flare, and non-perishable foods.
Luna came to a stop, wheezing. “Okay! I’m done! We need to rest.”
“ You need to rest,” he corrected, hopping easily up a rocky bit of path. “The faster we get this over with, the faster we can break this bond and go back to our lives. Come on.”
Luna flopped down on the ground.
Oliver paused. Luna wondered if he’d stopped because he heard her sit down or because the bond had started to stretch, urging him to go back. Luna could feel it in her chest, warm tendrils reaching out toward him.
“Flowers all over the mountain,” Luna said. “Really?”
“Once you get high enough,” Oliver answered. He turned and sighed when he saw her sitting in the dirt. “Can you just get over yourself for five seconds? Your feet hurt, boo-hoo. When this is over and you go back to your life, your feet will never hurt again. You could pay someone to carry you up a hill.”
Luna thought back to Hector, who hadn’t carried her the rest of the way no matter how hard she begged. He’d tried joking his way out of it, but the more she begged, the quieter he got. Finally, he’d turned around and said, babe, you’re not making this very fun right now.
It had made Luna go quiet for a full five minutes. They were, admittedly, the fun couple. It was what drew them to each other. It wasn’t just her; if Hector ever got too serious, which wasn’t often, Luna would tell him to go back to normal. Being serious is for boring people, he liked to say.
But this was Oliver . Their tentative truce was almost over. Luna had yelled in his face so many times, what was one more?
“I will get a train of people to carry me,” she hissed, surging to her sore feet. “I can’t wait to get back to normal! Being bonded to you has been the worst month of my life.”
Oliver’s jaw twitched. For a moment, she thought she might have hurt his feelings.
Then he snarled. “Here I thought you were actually enjoying it. Worming your way into my family, remaking the inn in your own image?—”
“Excuse you , I’m making it better!”
“Nobody asked you,” Oliver argued. “Just pay for a new sign and leave!”
“I would love to,” Luna yelled. “Unfortunately, SOMEONE decided to drink the bond nectar and?—”
She stopped. There, on a cliff face over a steep drop, was a small flower poking out of the rocks. A cluster of white with a red center.
Luna cried out triumphantly. “Breakup flower! Yes !”
Oliver whipped around to look. His scowl melted into shock when he saw Luna was not in fact joking. Then it set into steely determination.
“Whoa,” Luna said as he stalked toward the cliff edge. “Um… Bit of a drop.”
“It’s fine,” he replied. He didn’t even look down at the steep drop between them and the cliff face. A log protruded over the gap, thick and rotting.
Luna winced as Oliver stepped on the log, testing its give. “Are you seriously going to walk out on that?”
“No,” Oliver said. “Of course not.”
He got down on the ground and started to shimmy across the log.
“Oh,” Luna said. “Much better.”
She padded cautiously over to the edge of the cliff. Oliver was halfway across the log, clinging like a spider monkey. The drop loomed below, maybe ten feet of empty space before it came to an abrupt stop at the patch of path where they had briefly stopped to have an impassioned argument about the dubious usefulness of double-socking.
“Are you sure this is the best way to get it?” Luna asked as Oliver climbed across the log.
Oliver shushed her. “I almost have it.”
He stretched out, straining toward the flower. His fingers skimmed the white petals.
Luna grimaced. “I don’t know. That log looks a little?—”
A sharp crack rang out as the log snapped in two. Oliver scrambled back, but it was too late. The log fell, taking Oliver with it.
Luna shrieked. She rushed to the edge of the cliff. The bond inside her chest spasmed with pain as she peered over.
Oliver lay on the path below them, the log splintered around him. He was groaning, clutching his ankle .
“Oh my god,” Luna yelled. “Are you okay?”
“I’m great,” Oliver croaked, face twisted in agony.
Another pulse of pain rushed through the bond. Something was very wrong.
It took her several minutes to rush back down the path. Her cell phone signal never went higher than one bar, flickering in and out of service and not sending one of her emergency texts.
When she finally reached the spot where Oliver had fallen, she found him sitting up against a tree clutching his phone morosely. The backpack was resting beside him.
She dropped to her knees next to him. “Are you okay? Did I go too far?”
“Nope,” he said through gritted teeth, arms curled protectively around his legs. “Are you getting any signal?”
She shook her head, looking him over. She couldn’t see any broken bones.
“Where are you hurt? I felt something when you hit the ground.”
“Wolves heal fast,” Oliver said.
Another jolt of pain through the bond. Luna thought about jabbing him in random places until he howled. Then she remembered they were stuck on a mountain together and decided against it.
“Show me,” she demanded.
Oliver sighed. Then he lifted his arms to reveal his ankle, which was swollen to the size of a grapefruit.
Luna shrieked again.
“Calm down,” he told her. “Last time I broke an ankle, I could walk on it after a day.”
“A day?” Luna laughed, incredulous. “You said we’d be back by dinner!”
Oliver tipped his head back against the tree, wincing when it jostled his leg. “We have supplies.”
“So? I’m not sleeping out here!”
“There’s a cave down that way.” Oliver pointed down the path. Luna vaguely remembered him pointing it out and saying that Vida veered off the path to smoke in it during her first and only hike last year.
Luna snorted in disbelief. “You want me to stay in a cave ?”
She gestured at herself: peppy ponytail, stylish jeans, cute yet durable boots that were killing her.
“We have blankets,” he reminded her. “And I’m a furnace, remember? I can spare some body heat.”
Luna scoffed. She thought about making a joke about how this was all a ploy to get her to snuggle, but they’d slept together enough times by now that he could’ve done that anytime he wanted. She didn’t want to endure his flat look that let her know how much he didn’t want to sleep next to her, even if their bond howled for it.
“Your family will send someone to find us,” she tried weakly.
“My family knows I pack like this.” He slapped the backpack sitting beside him. “And it’s not long until dark. If they do send somebody up before I can make it back on foot, they’ll be able to smell us from the path. ”
Luna glared at him.
Oliver sighed. Suddenly, he looked exhausted, all the fight going out of him.
“You can keep walking if you want. Another hour, maybe two, and you’ll find a flower somewhere less dangerous. Then you can come back for me. But I’ll still need somewhere to stay tonight. And unless you’ve seen a hotel behind a tree somewhere…”
He trailed off, staring up at her expectantly. He expected her to leave him, she realized. Leave him injured and helpless in the middle of some hiking track for a few hours while her distance put him in even more pain than he already was.
“It would hurt,” she said. “A few hours of me walking away, you’d pass out again.”
“And I’d be fine once you got back,” he argued. “This trip can’t be for nothing.”
She went cold, imagining it: walking back and finding him limp and unconscious, his ankle still swollen. Alone, just like he insisted he wanted.
“I can’t get Spotify up here,” she said.
He frowned. “What?”
“I’m not going on a hike, alone , with no music to keep me company,” she said, grabbing the backpack and hauling it on. “We can get the flower once you’re healed. Come on.”
She held out a hand.
He stared at it. “There is no way you can lift me.”
“Then help me out!” She slapped his shoulder.
He huffed a pained laugh. Then he reached back, pushing himself up on the tree behind him. At Luna’s urging, he slung a toned arm around her shoulders. Luna ignored the bond singing in satisfaction inside her chest and took a step.
He stepped with her, face tight with pain.
“You have to lean on me,” she told him.
He rolled his eyes and muttered something about flattening her. But he leaned harder, Luna grunting under his weight as they shuffled forward another step.
“There,” she said, panting. “Better.”
It took forty minutes of slow, painstaking shuffling to reach the cave. It was further off the path than Luna expected—she couldn’t even see the path from its entrance—but Oliver assured her that his family would be able to smell them easily if they walked up the path.
He unzipped the backpack, ready to lay out the blankets before Luna swatted him aside and took the blankets out of his hands.
“Let the girl with two functioning legs do it,” she said, standing up and snapping the blankets out, letting them drift onto the thankfully dry ground.
Oliver shuffled onto them. He reached for the backpack again, this time pulling out a bag of snacks.
“Lot of time to kill waiting for that to go down,” Luna said, nodding at his swollen ankle. “And I can’t answer all the work emails that are definitely piling up. I have this pottery company in London that seems eager for a newsletter swap. I think they’d be really good for… Anyway. Want to play I Spy? I spy something… green.”
“Tree,” Oliver said, not looking up.
Luna gasped. “Oh my gosh, you did it.”
Oliver handed her a juice box and several strips of jerky.
Luna blinked at them, weirdly charmed. “Thanks.”
“Thanks for the blankets,” he replied, leaning up against the cave wall. He bit into his own strip of jerky, chewing loudly. “Well, thanks to me for bringing them. Thanks for taking two seconds to lay them out.”
Luna rolled her eyes. She bit into her jerky, picturing him here with his family. Dealing out juice boxes, orange slices, jerky, trail mix, and everything else she’d glimpsed in that snack bag he was pushing back into the backpack for later. Showing them how to identify bugs, which he’d started talking to Luna about before she threatened to push him off the mountain. Maybe teaching them how to light a fire. He took care of his pack. She had to give him that. He was gruff and growly, and he didn’t let anyone in, even the people he was closest to. But he took care of them.
Luna sipped her juice box, trying to quell the fluttering in her stomach. It had nothing to do with the bond—she just couldn’t remember the last person who made her feel cared for.
“So,” she said, settling against the cave wall beside him, their elbows touching. “About that whole… not shifting thing. Is it because of what that woman tr ied to do?”
He stiffened. “Who told you that?”
“Sabine,” she admitted, putting every inch of casualness she could into the word. Everything was easier to talk about if it wasn’t important. “It’s not a big deal . I mean, obviously, it’s a big deal someone tried to kill your family, and now you can’t shift. But like, it’s not a big deal if you tell me about it.”
She took another bite of jerky, chewing through the tough texture. “What am I gonna do about it, right? So, if you want to tell me…”
“Nothing to tell.” He shoved the rest of his food into his shorts pocket, scowling. He looked shaken.
Luna bit her pinkie nail. It was bright blue, thanks to Darren’s efforts two nights ago. It was patchy, but she hadn’t redone it yet. She actually kind of liked looking down and remembering his gap-toothed grin as she let him slide the brush over her nails.
It was going to be a long day. Luna thought about giving up, starting another game of I Spy, or better yet, seeing if they could get physical while not jostling his broken ankle. But something about Oliver made her want to continue. She could see this great guy under all his gruff and bluster. She wanted to coax him out. If he snapped at her, who cared? She’d be out of his life soon.
“Okay,” she said. “But it wasn’t your fault. You’re acting like you did something. You didn’t do anything, that crazy lady did.”
He looked over at her. “Where did this come from?”
“I just…” Luna paused, trying to remember how Grandmother Musgrove had phrased it during one of th eir breakfast talks a few days ago while Grandmother sliced a tinned peach into pieces. “I want you to get out of your own way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She groaned. “I mean you have these moments where you’re this cool guy who loves his family and can actually make jokes! Then you smother it in your stupid grumpy shit. You don’t need to blame yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. Let yourself be happy. It’s easy! I’m happy all the time.”
She finished with a dazzling grin, propping up her chin with her hands and fluttering her eyelashes.
He barked a laugh. His eyes were still guarded, but some of the tension leaked out of his shoulders.
“You are not ,” he said.
She stabbed a finger at him. “You’ve only seen me outside my normal life. I’m so happy when I’m not here.”
He snorted. It was less dismissive than she expected. If it was anyone else, she might call it fond.
“You like Claw Haven,” he said, tugging at the frayed cuff of his battered shorts.
She thought about denying it. She’d spent the first few days bemoaning everything about this tiny town, especially on her phone calls to Hector or her little brother. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized she’d been singing the town’s praises for weeks. Not just because it could make a pretty penny for tourists, but because she liked it here. The beautiful scenery, the quaint streets, the eccentric townsfolk who wouldn’t keep their noses out of your business: minotaurs in the grocery aisles, dragons baking bread, succubi flicking through greeting cards. Merpeople pushing themselves around in wheelchairs and fairies flitting around crosswalks. Vampires in coffee shops and adorable hedgehog women running chocolate stores.
“I do,” she admitted with a sigh. “Okay? It’s sweet. Sue me for liking sweet .”
She looked over to find his face was closer than it had been before. He still had that fond look on his face.
Luna shivered. The bond tugged inside her chest, wanting her to lean in and be filled with warmth. Luna was finding it hard to figure out where it ended and she began.
His fond look collapsed into a frown. “Are you cold? We can get some of the blankets.”
He reached down to tug at the blankets under them.
Luna put a hand over his. “It’s fine. It’s just the, um…” She dragged up a flimsy smile, trying to make herself sound just as peppy as before. “I know a way to keep warm,” she said, sliding a finger under his shorts. “I’ll have to ride you, though. Keep that ankle out of the action.”
He made a low rumble in his chest. He started to lean in, but Luna caught his chin.
“Do you have condoms?”
He scoffed. “Of course I have condoms.”
The incredulousness in his voice made her pull back even further. “You brought condoms on our day hike?”
“Always be prepared,” he said, eyes dark and full of intent. He caught her around the waist and pulled until she was straddling him.
Luna’s breath hitched in her chest. She forced the strange vulnerability down and grinned down at him. “How’s that ankle?”
“Fine,” he said, only a little strained. He’d obviously jostled it while he was hauling her over him. He slid a hand up her shirt, then paused. “Are you sure you won’t be too cold?”
She shot him a wry look and yanked her shirt over her head, gratified when his eyes went half-lidded. She pressed her chest against his. His skin was hot, but the bond was hotter, lighting her up inside.
She ran her hands through his hair, reveling in the heat. “What were you saying about keeping me warm?”