CHAPTER TWO || HUNTER #2
So long as I kept my mouth shut and didn’t rock the boat too much, that would be enough to stay.
The pack didn’t know me—not really—and they probably wouldn’t much like me if they did.
Most of them—with the exception of Lacey, who was convinced I had bullshit in both pockets—thought I was a nice guy.
They had no idea I had a deep well of fury and pain inside me that I had no way to express in words.
And then came the worst of it: the thoughts about before.
Hunter Lee Jameson—the person I’d been before I’d become two people—had been in love with Daniel Henbane.
Not the might-have-been-something-someday kind of love. Not a crush. It was the can’t-eat-can’t-sleep-can’t-breathe-without-him, first-and-only-love-of-my-life kind.
We’d been best friends since Daniel’s family moved next door when he was eight and I was nine.
We’d grown up together, inseparable, and we’d done everything together.
Every free moment, he was at my house, or we were playing in the field behind our homes, or else exploring the creek down the street.
For years it was just a powerful friendship, but the intense, all-consuming kind, where you’d rather spend a Friday night with each other than with just about anyone else on earth.
And then, when we were sixteen, the friendship had caught fire.
He’d come out to me a couple weeks prior, a nervous wreck—as if he’d thought for even a second that I might judge him—and I’d been able to throw the ball right back into his court and come out to him, too.
After that, we’d both just… known. Hell, we’d always known. Even before we had words for what we were to each other, what we might become.
Our first kiss had been in my truck, parked at night on the side of Highway 17, a few miles outside our hometown of Moses Lake, the summer before junior year.
There were miles upon miles of open country in both directions, the normally brown landscape of Eastern Washington turned a haunting deep indigo under the canopy of stars.
Daniel had been rambling about something—a book he’d read, maybe, or something he’d seen on TV.
I couldn’t remember the details anymore.
Some of the older memories of before were a little faded, like photographs left out in the sun too long.
But I remembered the way Daniel’s clear, dark eyes had been shining with enthusiasm, the way he’d gestured excitedly with his hands while he talked, grinning at me, and then feeling the sudden, overwhelming certainty that I couldn’t go another second without kissing him.
And so I did. And Daniel had kissed me back. It was like we’d both been waiting our entire lives for that moment. It had been clumsy at first, neither of us having been kissed before, but still perfect.
We’d been boyfriends after that, but we’d never even needed to have the conversation.
We’d both just understood that we belonged to each other.
Even after high school ended, when we were still figuring things out with the rest of our lives, we both knew we were heading somewhere huge and that we didn’t need to rush a goddamn thing.
He’d stayed close, going to community college with plans to transfer to university later.
He’d said it was the smart thing to do, money-wise, but I was sure he hadn’t been able to leave me behind.
I’d been working in construction since finishing high school, taking after my dad.
They’d started me off as a laborer, which basically meant thankless grunt work all day long.
But it was a solid career, a stable one, and I hadn’t minded it.
Not if it meant I might be able to provide for Daniel someday.
There were stolen kisses and moments of passion—making love to him in the bed of my truck, parked in the middle of nowhere, under the stars—and then long nights afterward lying shoulder to shoulder, and talking about the future.
A future that, as far as I knew back then, would be wonderfully ordinary.
I’d taken it for granted that I’d marry him someday. Probably someday soon. I’d had a ring in my pocket for months. I’d just been waiting for the right time.
I came to a full stop at the edge of a stream and sat on a moss-covered rock, breathing hard, letting the mountain air—cold, this early in the morning, despite it being July—bite at the exposed skin of my forearms. Wolves run hotter than humans and I hadn’t bothered with a jacket.
I’d trusted Daniel more than anyone else in the world. Hell, even more than myself, most of the time.
And Daniel had lied every single day, to my face, for the entire time I’d known him.
That was the thing Lee didn’t understand. Or maybe he understood it and just handled it differently.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t forgive Daniel for the split itself. Accidents happened. Magic was unpredictable.
I could even understand, on an intellectual level, why an eighteen-year-old warlock might have been fooling around with a dangerous and forbidden spell in the first place. Kids did reckless shit. I certainly had. That part, I could probably forgive, too.
What I couldn’t forgive was the lie.
Twelve years. Our entire friendship, and then the relationship we’d had afterward. Every conversation, every shared secret, every late night in the truck talking about the future…
All of it was tainted by the knowledge that Daniel had been hiding the most fundamental truth about himself.
He was a warlock. He came from an entire family of witches and warlocks.
He could do magic. And he’d looked me in the eye, day after day, year after year, and pretended to be normal.
In all that time, he’d never told me his secret.
The worst part was that I’d told Daniel everything. Every fear, every hope, every embarrassing secret. I’d handed Daniel my whole self, and Daniel had given me back a carefully edited version of his own.
And then that secret had ended the life I’d always known and handed me a supernatural one I’d never asked for in return.
If I’d known that Daniel was a warlock—and if I’d known that climbing into his room through the window that night, the way I had so many nights before, was going to be dangerous the way it was—I never would have done it.
Or—well, no. That wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have stopped loving him. I wasn’t sure I ever could stop loving Daniel Henbane.
But I might’ve knocked first.
Yet, the whole time, that love had been one-sided. A lie. If Daniel had ever really loved us at all, he would’ve told us the truth.
Which meant that Lee was wrong. The mate dreams were wrong. And my body—aching for Daniel like a phantom limb, remembering the taste of his mouth, the warmth of his skin, all of it inherited from a man who no longer even existed—was wrong, too.
Whatever I felt for the warlock, it wasn’t real. It was residual. Echoes of a love that had belonged to someone else.
That was the story I told myself, anyway. Over and over. Until I almost halfway believed it.
The alternative—that what I felt for Daniel belonged to me, not just Hunter Lee Jameson, and that two years of doing my best to hate him hadn’t killed the love so much as buried it alive—wasn’t something I could afford to consider.
If I let myself feel that, if I let myself want Daniel the way the bond between us was begging me to, I’d be back to trusting him again. And the last time I trusted Daniel Henbane, it cost me everything.
I could resist it. I would resist it. Fate didn’t get to decide who I trusted, even if it had decided that Daniel was mine—or ours, technically, given that Lee was also bonded to him and was having the nightly dreams, too. Trust was the one thing that was truly mine.
A branch snapped behind me.
At the sudden noise, I spun around, my hands raised, my heart slamming against my ribs—and a doe stared back at me from between two pine trunks, her liquid dark eyes wide and startled. She’d frozen mid-step, one delicate hoof lifted.
In the same moment, something flared to life deep inside of me, a wave of what felt like static electricity. But it wasn’t the shift. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt before.
The pulse of energy surged outward from my hands and into the empty air in front of me and then solidified.
There was no other word for it. A barrier shimmered into existence between me and the deer.
It was curved, translucent, faintly golden, and humming with a low vibration I could feel in my teeth.
The doe startled and bolted.
I stared at the barrier, dumbfounded.
It hung in the air for three or four seconds, rippling like sunlight on an oil slick, and then it dissolved, leaving nothing behind except the faint smell of ozone.
I looked down at my hands. They were trembling.
What the fuck was that?
I turned my hands over slowly, half expecting to see something different about them. But they looked the same as always—broad, callused, deceptively human. No golden light. No shimmer. Just my ordinary hands. Except they’d just done something that my hands shouldn’t have been able to do.