CHAPTER TWO || HUNTER
Iwoke up hard, furious, and aching, which was becoming a real fucking pattern lately.
The dream refused to be banished immediately.
It was that same damn clearing, with Daniel standing at the edge of the trees, ridiculously enticing with the silver light of the perpetually full moon painting his face into an alluring mix of light and shadow.
It made his elven features, slightly too pretty for a man, both haunting and mysterious, rather than the face I’d fallen in love with when I was a teenager and first discovering I liked boys.
He’d worn the same awful expression as always.
Brittle, like he was afraid to breathe in too deep.
It made me want to simultaneously run over and shake him and also hold him until it went away.
I’d been a total asshole to him in the dream—Lee would probably call it a defense mechanism, or whatever. You again, I’d spat, as if he was an inconvenience rather than the person my entire body was screaming to get closer to. And then I’d walked away from him. I’d been a dick to Lee, too.
But doing anything else would’ve been a mistake, especially the Daniel part.
Because looking at Daniel Henbane for too long made me remember way too many things I was trying very hard to forget.
Like the sensation of his legs wrapped around my waist, his hot breath on my neck, the way his breathing sounded when I was buried deep inside his—
Dammit! Nothing good was going to come from continuing that train of thought.
I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling of the cabin I shared with Lee, and waited for my body to get the memo that the dream was over and it was okay to not be rock hard and desperate for friction. The arousal would fade away if I ignored it. It always did.
But the ache underneath—the bone-deep longing that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the warlock himself—that part took longer. Hell, it had been two years and I was still waiting.
On the opposite side of the room, Lee’s breathing changed. He was awake, too.
We didn’t say anything for a while. That was the worst part about the mate dreams—the silence afterward. We both knew. We’d both been there. And neither of us wanted to be the first one to acknowledge it.
I cracked first.
“Same dream?” I asked the ceiling.
“Yes.”
He sounded calm. But Lee was almost always measured, because he processed things at a pace that would make a glacier look impulsive. Where I ran hot—quick to anger, quick to laugh, quick to do something stupid—Lee ran deep. When no one else but me was around, at least.
It was one of the strangest things about being split from the same person.
We’d started in the same place, but two years of being separate people had turned us into near opposites.
Or maybe he’d always been the careful and analytical half of the person we once were and I…
well, I was the part that really wasn’t.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of my bed.
The cabin was spacious, by the standard of the commune—it was able to fit two beds, a full kitchen and bathroom, a dumpy couch facing the television we’d scrounged from a thrift store in Ellensburg—the nearest actual city to the commune—on our first excursion down the mountain, and a square wooden kitchen table with mismatched chairs.
Morning light filtered through the hideous red and blue tartan curtains that had been there when we moved in.
From outside, I could hear birdsong and the distant sound of someone—Lacey, probably—chopping wood.
“You told me not to be a dick to him,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “There’s no point in being cruel. He can’t undo the past. And he didn’t choose to be in our dreams.”
“You don’t know that,” I shot back. “He’s a warlock. He might be casting spells to—”
“C’mon, Hunter. You know he’s not doing anything like that. You know exactly what this means.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. The dream was already getting hazy around the edges, the way they always did once I was fully awake, but the core of it—Daniel’s face, the longing in his dark eyes, the careful distance he’d kept from us—that part stayed way too vivid.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“You brought it up.”
“Yeah, well, that was a mistake.”
Lee was quiet for a moment. Then he sat up too, his movements unhurried. He looked at me from across the cabin. His green eyes, identical to mine—because everything about us was identical, right down to the freckle on our left wrists—were steady and patient.
“What did you whisper to him?” I asked. “At the initiation.”
That had been three days ago, but I hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask him until just now. Whatever it was had caused Daniel’s whole expression to crumple like an empty beer can.
Lee frowned. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because whatever you said, it’s been eating him alive. I can feel it.”
And I could. It was a low thrum of guilt, longing, and desperate hope—maddening. I didn’t usually admit things like that to Lee, because it came too close to admitting why I might be feeling the warlock’s emotions, even from a half-dozen cabins over.
In fact, ever since waking up as a wolf, I’d been able to sense Daniel’s emotions at the edges of my awareness.
It had gotten even stronger since his initiation into the pack.
Hell, I could probably close my eyes, spin around, and point in the direction of him at any given moment.
His presence was taking up that much rent-free space in my mind.
Lee didn’t speak for long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.
Then he said, “I told him I want to forgive him, but I’m not sure it’ll change anything.”
I sat with that, dumbfounded.
For several long moments, I had no idea what I actually felt.
It was so at odds with what I wanted. Because I wanted to be angry with him.
I craved the familiar heat of fury, the righteous certainty that Daniel had destroyed our lives and didn’t deserve our forgiveness, that any suggestion to the contrary was a betrayal.
But my anger wouldn’t come, even if I might’ve wanted it to. Instead, what settled into me was a heavy sadness, the kind that presses down into the soul and strips away every single defense against it.
“Did you mean it?” I asked when I trusted myself to speak normally again. “The forgiveness part?”
“I meant all of it.” Lee’s eyebrows shot up and he tilted his head to the side, holding my gaze from across the room. “I want to forgive him. Don’t you?”
The honest answer was yes. Of course I did.
I wanted it so badly that some nights, in the quiet dark of the cabin, the wanting felt like it would eat me alive. I wanted to forgive Daniel. I wanted to stop being angry. I wanted to close the distance in the dream, or better yet, in the real world.
I wanted to touch him, to feel his body against mine the way I hadn’t since—
Since before. Since Lee and I were one person and Daniel was everything to us.
But wanting and doing were very different things.
“I try not to think about that,” I said.
Lee studied me for a long time, still infuriatingly patient. “You’re going to have to, eventually.”
“Yeah. Well. Not today.” I stood up. The cabin suddenly felt too small, the walls too close together.
I needed to move. I needed to be anywhere that wasn’t six feet from my literal other half, having a conversation that was threatening to peel my skin open. “I’m going for a run.”
He nodded but he didn’t offer to come with me.
A rarity, since we did practically everything together.
But he probably understood that I needed the space from him.
If I was a little more generous and patient—like him—I might let myself wonder how he was feeling, too.
But I strongly suspected I didn’t want the answer to that question.
I dressed quickly and I was out the door before Lee could say anything else.
* * *
The forest blurred around me, swallowing me whole as I raced through it.
It was morning and without moonlight, I couldn’t shift, but I was still stronger and faster than the average person, even when in human form.
And the area around the commune had trails, of sorts, beaten by the pack over the years.
I ran hard and fast, weaving through the pines, leaping fallen logs, pushing my body until my muscles burned and my lungs ached and there was no room in my head for anything except the next stride. This was the only time the noise in my head quieted fully.
But the problem with running was that eventually, you had to slow down. And when I did, the thoughts were right there, teeth bared, waiting for me to lower my guard.
All of it came rushing back: Daniel. The dreams—and yeah, they were mate dreams, I wasn’t a total idiot. The connection humming between Daniel, Lee, and me like a living thing. Wondering if I, the impulsive half—the weaker half—actually belonged here at all.
That was easy to answer, at least. Because I didn’t. Plain and simple.
I hadn’t been born into the pack, the way Reed, Lacey, Sarah, and Emma were. I hadn’t chosen the bite, the way Harris had. I hadn’t had five years to adjust to being a werewolf, the way Oliver had. And I wasn’t as smart as Lee. Even Daniel, who could do literal magic, belonged more than I did.
The only thing I had going for me was that I was a damn good fighter—I was better than Lee in that singular way. One of the best fighters in the pack, actually. Even though I’d only gotten a crash course in the months after becoming a wolf.
Somehow, violence came naturally to me. And I’d adjusted to my new abilities better and faster than Lee had.