“A moment, please, Devon?” Callum asked, his tone perfectly pleasant. Devon nodded, his eyes cast downward as he stepped aside. The alpha’s effect on his wolves was immediate and overpowering.
Bless my human immunity.
“Bryn.”
That wasn’t what I expected him to say. I expected him to yell-without-yelling. To narrow his eyes at me. To grab my chin in his hand and force me to meet his most uncompromising gaze.
He didn’t. Instead, all he said was my name. My stomach twisted sharply. Something was wrong.
“Ali?”
“She’s fine now. There were some complications. She’s on bed rest.”
The pack had its own doctor, a werewolf who’d been trained in the 1800s but did his best to keep up with modern medicine of both the human and veterinary varieties. In the past two centuries, he’d overseen more than his fair share of births, and it stood to reason that he knew what he was talking about. Besides, it wasn’t like Ali could go to a normal hospital, not when her baby was anything but.
Blood. Blood-blood-blood-blood—
I tried not to think about the bad thing. I tried not to think about women, just like Ali, who hadn’t survived. I tried not to picture myself hiding under the sink, terrified and alone, knowing there wasn’t a single thing I could do to stop death when it came knocking on my door.
Callum brushed my hair out of my face, forcing my mind to the present. “She’ll be fine, Bryn.” He paused, and my Mark hummed in a way that made me wonder if his stomach was twisting, too. “I promise you, Ali will be fine.”
Werewolves didn’t make promises lightly. Callum, as alpha, was bound by his word. I really wanted to believe him, but there was no way he could know for sure. Even Callum wasn’t psychic.
His lips curved upward, ever so slightly—half warning, half smile. “I also promise, little Bronwyn, that for the next three weeks until the baby is born, you won’t so much as sneeze out of turn. You’ll go to school. You’ll go home. You can make as many paper fire hydrants as you want, but you’ll stop pushing it.”
I had a feeling that what he really meant was that I’d stop pushing him. Stop asking questions. Stop thinking about the scent of danger in the air, the indescribable buzzing that told me that something in our pack was off.
“Ali will be fine, and you’ll be on your best behavior.” The tone in Callum’s voice sounded more like prophecy than an order, and I pushed down the urge to challenge him. Part of me wanted to, but the other part couldn’t stop thinking about Ali.
You’ll be on your best behavior, and Ali will be fine.
I inverted the order of Callum’s words and silently made Fate a deal. I would do whatever Callum said, would do whatever anyone said, and in return, karma, the universe, whatever would see to it that Ali made it through alive.
Fair was fair. A bargain was a bargain—and at this point, all there was left to do was wait.
CHAPTER FOUR
“SHE’S OKAY. SHE’S OKAY. SHE’S GOT TO BE OKAY.” I turned on my heels and started walking back down the hallway, continuing my litany. “She’s got to be okay, right, Lance?”
Devon’s father—all 6′6″ of him—was my current bodyguard and the least talkative werewolf I knew, so it wasn’t exactly a shocker when he didn’t respond. Only this time, I wasn’t sure whether it was because he wasn’t exactly social in his human form, or because he didn’t know what to say. Bryn babysitting duty encompassed many things, but it usually didn’t involve me teetering on the edge of hysteria and reaching out to the closest Slab of Werewolf to pull me back.
“Ali’s going to be fine.” I addressed my words to Lance’s mammoth chest, unwilling to look him in the eye. “She’s strong. She’s never backed down from a fight.” Speaking hurt my throat, which tightened as I tried to breathe. “Not everyone dies,” I said more softly. “She’s going to be okay, right, Lance?”
“Right,” Lance said, suddenly discovering his voice. I glanced up at him, and his strong, Nordic features shuddered as he attempted something that resembled a smile the way that a great white shark resembles a goldfish.
That, more than anything, freaked me out. Ali was less than twelve feet away, behind closed doors with the pack’s doctor, an hour into a labor that was more likely to kill her than not. My entire body was shaking, and no matter what I said, the ghosts dancing in the corners of my mind whispered that everyone did die. Maybe not in labor, but when it came to me and mothers, dying was the status quo.
And now, Lance was actually speaking to me and smiling, something he hadn’t done in the entire course of my childhood, let alone the month he’d been part of my security team.
This could not possibly be a good sign. If he’d thought I was worrying over nothing, he wouldn’t have said a word.
“I’m going to throw up,” I said, turning again, this time to run for the bathroom. I slammed the door behind me and lunged for the toilet, but nothing happened. I was so scared, I couldn’t even throw up. I had to get out of here. I couldn’t just wait in our house, listening to Ali scream but barred from being in there with her. I couldn’t pace up and down the halls, stopping only when someone came to tell me that it was over, one way or another.
If Lance was talking to me, that meant that he was far enough off his game that he might not catch me in the act of leaving. Ali let out another bone-crunching cry of pain, and I closed my eyes, willing myself not to hear her screams. Forcing myself to pay attention only to the goal of escaping, I crept toward the window, letting the inhuman noises ripping their way out of Ali’s battered throat cover the sound of my steps. I lowered my body out the window and climbed down the side of the house. If I hadn’t been in such good shape, thanks to the daily workout regime I’d been put through every morning since I was six, I probably couldn’t have managed to make it to the ground without breaking both my legs, but between my training and my desperation to get away, it was a snap.
I hit the ground running and didn’t stop. As a matter of reflex, I covered my tracks, running in patterns designed to make tracking me difficult. There were several streams in the woods, as well as the disturbingly named Dead Man’s Creek, and I made a point of crossing all of them. Whenever I saw a second pair of tracks, I ran along them, and I loosed my emergency bag of cayenne pepper (which I kept on my person at all times) in an area where I knew any self-respecting tracker would take a great big whiff.
If that didn’t throw Lance off, nothing would. Everyone else would be too concerned with Ali to worry about me.
I’d been instinctively covering my tracks for several minutes before I realized where I was going and why. For the past few weeks, I’d been the poster girl for good behavior. I’d kept up my end of the bargain with fate, and now it was the universe’s turn to pay up. The way I saw it, I’d promised Ali I’d leave the pack’s secret alone until the baby was born and she was in the clear. Now, Ali was in labor, and I needed a distraction.
Close enough.
As part of my poster-child act, I hadn’t let myself actively think about the origin of the pack’s unrest, and I hadn’t formulated a master plan, but on a subconscious level, I think I’d always known where to go to find the answers. There weren’t foreign wolves on our land. A human hadn’t discovered our secret. There was a threat. An outside threat that couldn’t be dispelled with tooth and claw. Whatever the answer to this puzzle was, my best chance of finding it was about a mile away, deep in the heart of the woods, sitting directly on top of the highest point of elevation in the valley.
Callum’s house.
And for once, he wouldn’t be there, and he wouldn’t know that I had been until after I left. Then he’d kill me, but given the circumstances, I wasn’t entirely sure that I would care.
I knew the way there by heart, even though I rarely found myself on Callum’s doorstep. He preferred to come to me in my studio or at Ali’s house. Callum’s home was reserved for pack business. We all met there, twice a year: the wolves and their wives and Ali and me. It was a different sort of meeting than the pack’s ceremonial runnings, where the Weres shed their human skin and let their wolves come out to play. Those meetings I avoided like the plague, but the ones that took place at Callum’s house required my attendance. There was always an artifice of bureaucracy to them, like anyone in a room full of Weres could forget, even for a second, that our lives weren’t democratic in the least. My inclusion—and Ali’s, before she’d married Casey—marked me as unique in the werewolf world. Humans, unless claimed and Marked as a wolf’s mate, were never invited to Callum’s house. They were never initiated into the pack. They certainly weren’t adopted using a ceremony meant for pups whose mothers had died in childbirth.