Raising my head, I howled, my heart thumping faster when they joined in without question, making a wild and richly raucous chorus.
The rumble of a car pulled me back from our music-making, and with a snarl I pressed my nose to the ground and snapped up Gabe’s trail. Together we plunged into the sparkling and spinning flurries.
Alexi
I had done well, considering. I glared at my hand as it shivered like a panicking animal caught in a trap. Stop shaking. It shook harder. Shoving it into my coat pocket, I looked toward the house, the porch and turret shrouded in a swirl of growing snow and gathering gloom.
A shadow moved, darkness smeared over darkness, and Max appeared, cradling Mother as carefully as if she slept in his arms. The car’s trunk glowed in the dark, and I watched him lay her in the back, careful to not knock her head against the trunk’s edge. He hesitated, staring, as I slowly closed the trunk, shutting Mother away in darkness.
“I should come,” he said, his voice as rough as the stubble that marked his jawline.
“Nyet.” Max and I might war over little things, but regardless of the fact he tried to kill me once—and nearly succeeded—I did not hate him. So I would spare him this if I could. “Nyet.”
“You cannot do it. Not by yourself.”
I glared at him, wondering if the cure had dulled his superior night vision. Could he read my eyes even now? I considered the task and my abilities.
“Alexi. I am right. You hate it, but you need me to come along.”
He was correct. On all counts. Mother was a … How could I say it without lessening the fact it was Mother in the trunk of the car? A burden? Nyet. A difficulty? Never. A … I struggled to put a name to it until it occurred to me that Mother wasn’t involved in this at all. Not anymore. Mother was gone. This was her body—something her soul (presuming such things existed)—had shrugged off.
“Sasha.” He invoked my nickname as only Max could: like a boy who still looked up to his big brother. The same way he used to say it when we were all just little scraps of flesh with no idea of what we were or what we were destined to become.
“Da, Maximilian,” I conceded. “Will Pietr…?”
“Nyet,” Max assured. “Jessie has him—occupied—in his room.”
“Lucky Pietr,” I muttered, sliding into the car and trying to not think about what we were going to do. And where.
“Da,” Max said with a sly grin that somehow still came easily to him. “Lucky Pietr.”
CHAPTER THREE
Jessie
Lucky me, I was alone with Pietr. In his room—one of the locations my father still held as taboo when it came to where Pietr and I spent our time. And yet, lucky Dad, nothing was happening regardless of location or proximity.
I wanted to scream.
Although I’d been sent to distract Pietr, just being close to him was distracting me.
He’d crawled out of his bed (and a bit of his depression) and made himself busy. Already. Maybe this was denial: Counselors say grief comes in stages, and denial is one of the earliest. I didn’t care, because Pietr—climbing out of sorrow so fast—was amazingly encouraging.
But even as encouraging as it was, there was still something odd about Pietr after the cure—something softer, something quieter, something …
Less.
What if the alpha wolf had been such a big part of Pietr’s makeup that removing the wolf reduced him to something much farther down the food chain?
Something simply human.
“I do not know if I can respect a school that believes we have such a great need for upper-level math,” Pietr muttered, bent over the papers on his desk. “What time is it?”
That question—asked with increasing frequency—shook me. Pietr had been born with an internal clock that began ticking obnoxiously in his ears with his first full change. To know that his last change deafened him to it—or wiped it out entirely—was frightening. But on the edge of his bed, my fingers twisting in the bedspread, homework and the time was far from my mind. Pietr—alone—was the only thing on it. “Seven … ish?” I guessed.
“Seven-ish?” he snorted, and pulled a watch out of his desk drawer. A watch I’d never seen before.
“Is that new?”
He nodded, examining the small clockface. “Seven-ten,” he said with a tone just short of authority.
“You’re not sure?”
He rubbed a thumb across the glass. “Nyet,” he admitted. “It says seven-ten … seven-eleven now. But I don’t feel it. I see it, but it doesn’t seem real. Like time no longer connects to me. It sounds crazy, da?”
“Not when you consider recent events.” Like the fact werewolves existed. And I’m dating one. Well, I had dated a werewolf. Now I was dating just some normal guy.
Nice and normal. No prickle of heat between us when he pressed his body to mine, no roasting breath heating my lips when he paused just before a kiss … Snap out of it, Jess. “How much math do you have?”
“Enough that an apt description of the quantity should include the phrase bordering on the ridiculous.” He shook his head. “There is no need to drown us in numbers.”
I nodded, watching him. “I guess it depends on what you plan on getting into…,” I whispered, watching the back of his strong neck where his hair ended in slight curls.
“What?” he asked. He pinned me with blue eyes that pierced straight to my heart even as they sent it racing. Think, Jess. But the hair that usually tumbled into his right eye was swept back, giving him a very studious look. A look that made me want to do things that’d mess it all up …
His fingers drifted along the chain at his neck and he suddenly sat up straighter. “I don’t need this anymore, I guess,” he mumbled, slowly unfastening the necklace that had been specially designed to keep his animal magnetism in check. He set it on the desk beside his textbook. “Any different?” he asked, his eyes soft, his voice sweet.
He knew I hadn’t been affected before, but now my reaction seemed even more important. I cleared my throat. “No. You’re still Pietr to me. My beautiful Pietr.” I leaned forward, but he’d already turned back to his jumble of books and papers.
Dear. God. How had he turned me into this? Unable to focus on anything but him …
His mother had just died, and I was imagining touching him. What sort of monster had I become?