Seven
The problem with making out with your antagonistic classmate, who is also your best friend’s crush and also definitely, without a doubt, a werewolf—is that it’s debilitating.
I spent the Saturday after my birthday with a pillow pulled over my head, groaning intermittently, not unlike I’d seen Cella do when she had a bad migraine or period cramps. Mason was a mental migraine. An emotional period cramp. Maybe not that last one.
Needless to say, I got in the car with my dad and with Cedric, who spent the drive brooding out the window.
I needed to speak with my brother, but I didn’t know where to start. Somewhere down the line, we had forgotten how to talk to each other.
The drive took us into sprawling countryside. It struck me how far a person—or a wolf or something in between—would have to run to end up in our forest from here. Whatever had been on his mind must have been heavy. Something about that image seemed awfully lonely.
My dad parked the car on the road beside a log fence that seemed to stretch on forever. Sheep dozed in the pasture.
I would have asked my dad if this was the right place, because no way was Mason a farm boy.
But there was no mistaking the crackling feeling in the air—a sensation I had come to know too well over the last week—of wolves nearby.
It was faint, only a tickle, but there must have been a lot of them for me to feel it with no one in sight.
Itching with it now, it was impossible not to remember the moment last night when that feeling had come tumbling down.
It had been so physical. In the instant between when Mason had grabbed me and when he’d kissed me, our repulsion had risen to an almost unbearable peak, only to vanish like it had never existed, a killer wave crashing through a dam.
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes like I could physically shove back the flashing images—scarce moonlight striped over a brown chest, the determination on his face when he kissed me, his swollen mouth after, his dazed shameless eyes asking me to come back . . .
Regret nearly brought me to the floor. Cella.
Cedric gripped my shoulder, maybe to steady me, but more likely to shake me awake. “Get a grip,” he said. “You can’t show weakness tonight.”
He pushed, and my feet started moving obediently. Dad was already several paces ahead, walking along the fence. I tried to concentrate on each step I was taking into enemy territory. I tried to bury Mason.
I whispered, “Have you been setting traps around our house?”
Cedric fell a step behind but quickly recovered. “I’m trying to protect our family.”
“You could kill someone.”
“They shouldn’t be in our woods to begin with.”
“Not just one of them—animals, joggers.”
“We live in the Whispering Woods, Kier; no one jogs there. And the traps are weight sensitive. They won’t shoot unless it’s something big.”
“You could kill a deer.”
“They’re overpopulated anyway. It took us five minutes to get out of the driveway.”
“You could hurt one of us.”
“Vampires aren’t exactly known for their nightly runs, either. Definitely not around the edges of our territory.” He appraised me with a sideways glance. I hated when he did that. “How did you find out?”
“I was, uh, on a run. Last night.”
Cedric looked at me flatly.
“Seriously, I was.”
“After the birthday chalice?”
“Thought it might . . . help me digest.”
My brother only hummed and started walking faster. I jogged to catch up.
“Cedric. Why do you have those?”
“What’s that?” asked my dad. Cedric’s eyes flashed in warning. I shut my mouth, and we filed in on either side of our dad—or, more importantly tonight, our chief.
He led us into the trees that bracketed the pastures.
The woods were largely populated by oaks that, unlike the spruce and fir in the Whispering Woods, let through broad bands of moonlight.
There was a break in the canopy where a goliath of an oak had fallen.
Its trunk was so covered in moss it might be mistaken for an odd hill, if not for its treetop branches and the roots at its base like a gnarly maw.
Standing in front of that trunk, in full moonlight, were five figures.
If a fight broke out, we would be outnumbered.
I didn’t notice I had slowed until I felt a hand on my upper back.
It was Cedric, reaching out behind Dad. He patted my shoulder blade, and I steeled myself as the werewolves came into view.
It was a good thing, too, because a second later I could make out Mason’s face, and I probably would have said “motherfucker” out loud if I wasn’t clenching my jaw so stupid hard.
Motherfucker, I thought. Motherfucker.
After bearing the brunt of my bad karma in the last week, I’d thought I might actually luck out tonight, if only because the odds were in my favor: out of the entire pack, surely the chance that Mason was werewolf royalty were at least sub-fifty.
I was a fool. The chances were 100 percent.
Mason didn’t seem shocked to see me, though he did grimace. He was the fourth in line behind three women and one man. He was wearing a blue cashmere turtleneck, which I would’ve found hilarious if it wasn’t my fault.
“Welcome!” The woman who spoke, presumably their leader, had a wide jaw and deep dark skin.
With lithe limbs, big hair, and a catlike gaze, she seemed more lion than wolf.
“Thank you for meeting with us and for agreeing to do it here. Your sacrifice in convening on charged ground does not escape us.”
She crouched briefly on one knee, ducking her head into her opposite forearm, and her family followed suit.
“Are we supposed to—?”
Dad shushed me, then bowed at the waist. Cedric’s hand on my back pushed me down to match, though his nails biting into my shirt gave away how much he hated it.
“Of course,” said our chief. “Take it as a gesture of welcome into our territory.”
Cedric cleared his throat. Across the small clearing, one of the younger women went, “Oh.”
Dad had said it so smoothly, our territory. I glanced at him with suppressed admiration. He might as well have said, You aren’t the least bit threatening to us. Which . . . respect.
“Thank you,” said the alpha, voice clipped. “Now that we are neighbors, we must negotiate our shared space.”
“How many are in your pack?” asked Dad. “And what has brought you here?”
“We number sixteen. We left Sacramento to avoid conflict with a neighboring pack that threatened, in their recklessness, to expose us to humans.”
“We value quiet. Our clan feeds without panic; our presence is unnoticed.”
“We don’t draw eyes, either. We keep to our woods and our herd. Hunt clean.”
They passed questions back and forth, introducing their heirs, delineating our respective territories, establishing that neither group hunted humans, emphasizing that no blood should be spilled between us without consequences.
There was a lot of talk of urges and how stellar we all were at repressing them. It was pretty boring.
Until my dad took from his pocket a gleaming white fang that dangled from a gold chain like a pocket watch.
Extracted from the root, the fang seemed gruesomely long.
In turn, the alpha untucked a leather necklace from her shirt, pulling it off over her head.
It was strung with a fiercely curved black claw.
The leaders approached each other and held their right palms up.
Watching each other’s faces, with the moon as their witness, they swore that after tonight, they would never again allow their blood to mingle.
Then they sliced each other across the palm and shook hands.
My dad didn’t so much as blink at the foul, greasy smell of her blood.
The other wolves stepped forward. The closest to Cedric, the shorter sister, extended a hand right in front of him, and he looked off into the trees like he didn’t see it for as long as he could get away with.
My dad cleaned his palm with a handkerchief and offered his hand to the other man next.
The alpha’s husband looked like a lumberjack, thick ginger beard and flannel and all.
Unlike me and Cedric, replicas of our dad, the wolves’ daughters looked like they had jumped into the gene pool at different ends, with Mason landing in the middle.
One of Mason’s sisters had her father’s stocky build, close-cropped coily red hair, and olive skin covered in dark freckles.
The other was dark and willowy, with braids half the length of her body.
She and Cedric shook hands for an unusually long time, arms flexed like they were trying to break each other’s wrists.
I tried to get my hand in and out of Mason’s as fast as possible, but he pressed his thumb down to keep me in place and leaned into my space.
“We need to talk,” he whispered, though with four pairs of werewolf ears around, it hardly felt private.
I shook off his grip and murmured to my dad that I wasn’t feeling well. He nodded and told me I could wait in the car and then that he was proud of me. I felt bad for lying. But I really did not want to talk to Mason.
***
Three minutes later, Mason asked me, “Can we talk now?”
I jumped so hard a branch scratched the top of my head. I hadn’t sensed him coming. Patting down my hair, I huffed, “Stalker.”
“Do you want help finding your car or not?”
There were trees in every direction. No sign of the pasture. I was probably walking in circles.
“Fine.”
Mason didn’t move. “You tried to kill me.”
“What—?” I said, probably loud enough to be heard by his family. I lowered my voice. “—are you talking about?”
“Aren’t we past playing dumb?” His face was shaded by the trees. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t go back there and tell everyone that I almost died on your soil twice last night.”
“Why haven’t you, then?” I retaliated. Mason glowered but didn’t take the bait. “Twice?”
He yanked down the high neck of his shirt. To the right of his throat, those twin pinpricks were still there even though I had barely bitten him—hadn’t even tasted him.