Chapter 38 #2
When they made it down the mountain, she talked about the river, the difference between what it’d been before the dams were put in, and the calm river they were looking at. This was the most dangerous part of the entire river back then, called The Suck.
And all the while, Tuesday sat in the passenger seat and watched the trees and then city move past the window — and tried to locate herself inside the silence where the pack used to be.
She wasn’t the same person she’d been an hour before. Wasn’t the same werewolf. She was weaker, and she was alone. Her aura was hers, without the pack pulsing through it. She hadn’t even known how easily the energy had come to her. Had been part of her very being. A gift.
Her grandmother’s kitchen smelled like French onion soup before they were through the door, which meant she’d started it before they left.
She’d known her granddaughter would need comfort food even before Tuesday had known.
She sat at the island and watched her grandmother move through the kitchen with the efficiency of a woman who expressed love by feeding her family.
The steaks were perfect. The soup was exactly right. The mac-and-cheese was from scratch, with three cheeses. The kind that took an hour and was worth every minute.
She ate all of it, but still felt like someone wearing her own skin wrong.
She wasn’t Tuesday anymore.
Tuesday was a pack wolf who knew where she belonged, who had the rhythm and energy of her people running through her blood.
This person sitting at her grandmother’s kitchen table…
this person didn’t have a name yet. The woman who’d chosen, deliberately and with full knowledge, to cut herself loose from the only community she’d ever truly known.
She was no longer Tuesday. She was a stranger.
“Have I made a terrible mistake?” she asked.
Her grandmother was putting away clean dishes, and she answered without turning around. “Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
“Does he love you?”
“He told me he did, and I knew he did before he ever said the words.”
Her grandmother turned to look at her. “Then the only mistake would be not finding out if love is enough.” She turned back to drying and putting away. “The rest is just the cost of finding out.”
Tuesday sat with that, wanting to get up and help, but her grandmother had already fussed at her — twice — when she’d stood to help.
“I think I’m okay to drive now,” she told her grandmother after two games of Scrabble.
“Yes, I believe you can. Follow your heart, my sweet granddaughter.”
It was nearly ten on a Friday night. He’d be in the clubhouse, almost certainly, she thought.
She couldn’t come up with anything to text. The only way this could happen was for him to scent her.
To know she was no longer pack.
A lone wolf.
She let Google tell her how to get there, and then had to circle the lot before giving up and driving to the overflow parking which, based on the signage, belonged to the MC’s bike and car shop.
It took all her strength to walk through both parking lots and into the restaurant, but her wolf still came to the surface when she scented him. He was off to the right, behind the bar, frozen in place, staring at her.
There was nothing left to do but walk to him and let him scent her. Let him breathe in what she’d done.
- - - ? - - -
Knife was behind the bar when she walked in, and he froze. Her head turned to him within seconds, and she seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see her.
But she walked to the bar and squeezed between two people on barstools to stand in front of him, across the bar.
“Smell me.”
He could only stare at her for a long moment. It was such an odd order, he tried to make sense of it.
When he couldn’t, he leaned towards her and breathed in.
And it was Tuesday… but not.
It took him a moment to understand the difference.
The scent of the pack was gone, and she smelled weak. Not as much magic powering her. This was recent, and she hadn’t figured out how to survive as a lone wolf yet. She was vulnerable, walking around like this, and it pissed him off.
“What the fuck have you done?” He heard his wolf in his voice, but there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
Thank you for reading KNIFE.