I straightened on the bed and folded my hands in my lap. Focus. He’d been slow to touch me ever since he’d made his final transformation. Modest—shy. Something between us had changed, something I wanted to fix. “What are you going to do—after high school? Maybe math will count.”
His mouth quirked in a smile. “Math always counts.”
“So what do you want to do?” I asked, feeling the heat rise in my face as my eyes raced along his body, observing his long, lean lines.
“After high school?”
“Yes. That’s what I was thinking. Precisely. What do you want to do after high school?” Not right now. With me. In the quiet privacy of your room.
“I hadn’t really thought about it. Until recently”—by which I knew he meant after the cure—“the idea of a career, complete with eventual retirement, never crossed my mind. Things are different. Da,” he added, a note of sadness creeping into his voice. “Very different. I have a future to plan for.”
I used that as my cue. Pushing to my feet, I crossed the floor and stood before him in two quick steps, my hands on his muscular shoulders. “I hope you mean a future with me…” I breathed deep, qualifying my request. “… at least for a while.” I didn’t want to sound desperate.
He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me onto his lap. “Of course I want my future to include you. You’re the reason I have a future.”
Winding one arm around his neck, I played with his hair, letting the contact calm me and hoping it soothed him, too. But he took my hand in his own and drew it back around to his front, kissing it gently.
Just once.
“Don’t you have homework?” he asked.
With a groan, I stalked back to the bed and my book bag. “I’m sure there’s something I could be doing,” I muttered, rummaging through its contents.
I pulled out my history text and flopped onto the bed with a sigh. Alexi said to keep him occupied—he didn’t specify how. And although I knew how I wanted to occupy Pietr, doing my homework and watching Pietr do homework at least still accomplished somebody’s goal.
Marlaena
My goals changed with the region’s weather. Wincing, I shoved Tembe into the bushes and dove after him as the car rolled by, its headlights dividing the night sky from the inky road with burning white light. Laughter and curses poured from the car’s open windows along with a heavy bass line of some metal tune. The sharp scent of alcohol—and vomit—scalded my nose.
Grain alcohol. Nasty shit. It’d blind them faster than anything else they could do in a dark room alone.… The last thing we needed was some group of dumb-ass country teens reporting seeing a pack of large wolves roaming the mountains.
That’d be enough to get every guy with a gun on our tails. We should have never come this way. What the hell was Gabriel thinking?
I nipped Tembe, making him whine and focus. The noise of the car faded into the distance, and in the dark I saw the hot red glow of wolf eyes as the pack ringed us. Only my saliva softened the sound of my snapping teeth, and I sucked down the acrid scent of Tembe’s growing fear.
Fear made me hungrier. Reminded me we were all either predator or prey. The difference was marked by a narrow margin based on choices: smart or dumb.
Whimpering, Tembe flopped to the ground, sending snow up in a puff of white. Belly up and throat exposed, he submitted.
Totally.
His will? Mine. His life? Mine to take or leave. Life or death. My choice.
Mind-blowing. Knowing where I’d been—how helpless I was …
The sharp sound of a train in the distance flattened my ears and pulled my lips away from my teeth, wrinkling my snout in a growl as my tongue curled.
A breeze tickled my fur, and I spared a glance for the valley below, filled with a bustling town that crawled awkwardly away from its heart, stretching toward the crest of the mountains. The difference between where I’d been two years ago and where I’d led my baker’s dozen werewolves was startling.
From deserts and plateaus in the southwest where grit ground our fur short and left us chasing lizards and holding up liquor stores to some white-bread town where the junction of railroads lay and where ice crusted sharp and fierce between canine toes like glass from a busted windshield prickling in a driver’s hair. Every place brought its own special pain, its own subtle needle prick to tender flesh.
The heat pumping through our veins and singing through our blood combined with our thick coats and temperature-moderating paws shielded us from the worst of the northern wind and weather.
It only stung at unexpected moments …
… and reminded us we were still alive.
I’d take this particular prick of pain over the pricks we’d encountered two states back: men calling themselves hunters. Outwitting them was much more a need than a want.
Sure, we were trouble—but a plague upon humanity? Words like that easily offended an entire pack.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.… Bullets, though—bullets that sizzled in the skin and sat too long in a busted and burning shoulder—they could kill. My shoulder ached with more than memory. Chicago had sucked for me.
My teeth snapped shut like a steel trap on the ruff of fur at Tembe’s neck. He yelped and whined and wiggled in my grasp. I shook him so hard I hurt, reminding him this pain, instead of death, was the extent of my mercy.
Life was a bitch. And for them, I was that bitch. For us, the wolf: the pleasure, the pain, the fear, and the exhilaration of the change—that was the Way.
Alexi
My hands trembled holding the phone, but my breathing steadied and my pulse slowed, the sound of Nadezhda’s voice filling my ear. “Did you find a way?” she asked, her voice yielding and worried.
“Da. She is gone.”
“She was gone long before you made her body disappear, Sasha,” Nadezhda assured.
My voice caught, dragging roughly across my question. “Where are you?” I could hear her, true, but I wanted to see her, hold her. Although remembering how she’d held a gun to my head during our most recent carriage ride together cooled my baser impulses.
“Does it matter?” she wondered aloud. “I am too far for you to see me easily and too busy to make more time than what we have now—on this phone call.”
“So you will not give me your location?”