Down. Up, down! You!
The content of Kaitlin’s thoughts told me that she was in wolf form, playing. Or, more specifically, play fighting. I didn’t realize until I opened the front door and walked into the living that the person she was playing with was Callum. He was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Even that low to the ground, there was still a weight to his presence, a power I never would have noticed before I was an alpha myself.
A power that my baby sister—not quite a baby any longer—gave very little heed as she bobbed up and down on her front paws, lowering her head with a loopy, lupine grin. A second after I came into the room, she pounced on Callum’s feet.
He bobbed his own head and reached out to gently tussle her from one side to another.
You! You play! Katie was ecstatic. Out loud, she made a sound that could only be described as a baby growl, and I felt a sudden stab of loneliness—because I was Katie’s alpha, and she was playing with Callum, because he was Callum, and there was nothing playful between the two of us now.
Bryn? Katie whirled around, feeling my presence as safety and warmth. She came bounding over to my feet and immediately bit my sock, pulling me toward Callum.
No, Katie, I said softly. You go. You play.
She cocked her head to the side. Bryn play?
Later, I told her. Bryn play later.
Satisfied, Katie turned her attention back to Callum. In blatantly unstealthy fashion, she leapt toward him.
Out of habit, I scanned the room for Alex. Where one of Ali’s twins went, the other followed. I found him standing in the shadows, intently watching Katie, like a bodyguard keeping an eye on a particularly troublesome client. On the other side of the pack-bond, his mind was steeped in the sensation of togetherness and love and warmth, the way I felt when the pack went for a midnight run.
Alex was here, and Katie was here, and that was all either one of them needed to know that things were right in the world.
Crossing the room, I picked Alex up and settled him on my hip. He snuggled into me, but never stopped watching his twin doing her very best to coax Callum into a full-on wrestling match.
“Rrrrrrrrr.” Katie issued a particularly fierce baby growl. A few seconds later, my foster mother appeared in the doorway, and I crossed the room to stand beside her. Out of habit, I handed Alex off. Ali took him from me and slipped her free arm around my waist. It was an affectionate gesture, but it also sent a message. Callum might have been the one who’d asked Ali to raise me, but Ali was reminding him that I was her daughter and that she would never fully trust him again—not with me, not with Katie, not with Alex.
Not after what Callum had ordered Sora to do to me.
On Ali’s other side, her four-year-old shadow—who’d followed her into the room—got tired of waiting for the rest of us to acknowledge her presence.
“Katie,” Lily said loudly, “you come over here.” She narrowed her little green eyes. “You play with us.”
When Katie did not heed Lily’s “suggestion,” Lily walked right up to Callum and kicked him in the shin.
“Lily!” Ali sounded horrified—and horribly, horribly amused. For my part, I was stunned. Lily was all of four years old, and Callum was the most powerful werewolf on the continent. Play fighting with him was one thing, but an actual assault?
I waited to see how Callum would respond, but he just turned slightly, deferring the situation to me.
“Lily,” I said calmly. “Come here, please.” She seemed to be considering whether or not she could get another kick in first.
Now, I added silently.
She came. But she wasn’t happy about it, and as she raised her arms imperiously upward, I caught a hint of a smile tugging at the corners of Callum’s mouth.
I picked Lily up, wishing she were a tiny bit less sturdy.
“Sorry about that,” I told Callum. “She’s four.”
In most packs, children were a rarity—prized, protected, precious. There wasn’t a werewolf alive who would have retaliated against a pup—let alone a female one—no matter what she did, but it still probably wasn’t a good idea for Lily to get the impression that she could shin-kick werewolves ten times her size with impunity.
That could have gone badly, I told her.
Lily hunched her shoulders, ever so slightly. “What if I just kicked him a little bit?” she asked, not bothering to send the question through the pack-bond.
Beside me, Ali choked on laughter.
“You are not helping,” I told her.
She grinned. For all I knew, maybe she’d put Lily up to it.
No kicking someone who could eat you in two bites, I told Lily. Not even a little.
She furrowed her brow, and a flurry of thoughts crossed from her mind to mine, all of which could be summarized as follows:
I was her alpha—not Callum.
This was our home—not his.
And Katie should have been paying attention to her.
Luckily, for everyone involved, Katie got tired of play fighting and picked that exact moment to change back to human form. Naked as a jaybird, she gave Callum a toothy grin and streaked out of the room. With the little streaker’s twin still balanced on her hip, Ali took off after her. Ordering Lily to behave, I set her down, and she followed on their heels, leaving me alone with Callum.
There was so much unspoken in the air between us that I didn’t know where to start, or if I wanted to start at all. This was the first time it had been just Callum and me since he’d promised to end my human life.
“Ali said you went to see one of the psychics who lives here. A Resilient?” Callum was the one to break the silence. He did a good job of sounding politely curious, but I spoke Callumese well enough to know that polite was always a cover for something else.
“I did,” I replied, not offering any more than that. If Callum wanted to know what Jed and I had been doing, he could ask. Just like I could theoretically ask him why he’d waited so long to Change me—why he was still waiting—when every day I was human was a day my pack was more at risk than it would be if I were a Were. He’d told me, the day he’d made the promise, that I had some human time left and he didn’t want me wishing it away, but if there was one person in the world who should have understood that, human or not, my life wasn’t ever going to be normal, it was Callum. If anyone could understand that what I wanted, what I was scared of, who I loved didn’t matter—it was Callum.
“Why?” I asked him finally, not putting any more of the question into words than that.