I got bit.
I got bit.
I got bit.
That was why I was doing this. I needed to know what had happened to Chase, and I needed to know what was being done about it.
I opened my mouth to ask Callum point-blank if there was a Rabid in his territory—where Chase had been attacked and who they thought had attacked him, but just as I was about to let loose with the inquisition, a third set of tracks joined ours.
Lance.
Through the bond, he felt solid and heavy, and there was the faintest whiff of vanilla and cedar in his scent.
“Hey, Lance,” I said.
Lance, of course, said nothing.
“Sorry about ditching you a couple of months ago,” I said, intent on getting a response out of him.
Nothing. Nada. He just kept pace with me and Callum, without ever saying a word. The air between us felt almost as empty, but there was just a hint of something. It was either disapproval or amusement. Or possibly both.
Look at Lance, with actual emotions, I thought. And then it occurred to me that there was some chance he could hear me.
Can Lance hear my thoughts? I asked Callum silently.
He can feel them, same as I can, but fainter. Unless you want him to hear you. Most pups have trouble speaking mind-to-mind in human form, but you seem to be rather proficient. I attribute it to your stubborn nature.
“And stubbornness is my folly,” I said out loud, snickering at my own joke, which Callum and Lance clearly did not get.
After a small eternity, in which I made a few more comments that made equally little sense to my companions and in which Callum chided me on my form not once, not twice, but three times—you’re slipping, Bronwyn Alessia. Stay on the balls of your feet—Lance, Callum, and I came to a halt at the Crescent.
I bent over, hands on my knees, breathing hard. Maybe I was out of shape. Or maybe twelve miles was an inhuman (not to mention inhumane) distance to force someone to run. Either way, I wasn’t in the best shape for a fight. Not that Callum or Lance paid much attention to my obvious pain.
“Now,” Callum said, and Lance came at me, a wall of muscle and bulk. He wasn’t as graceful as Callum, but he was lighter on his feet than a man his size had any right to be, and unlike me, he hadn’t just abused both of his lungs in the cruelest of fashions.
Rather than move in the direction of his blow, diffusing its effectiveness, I followed my instincts and dropped to the ground entirely, his ham-shaped first missing me by a hairbreadth.
In a fight, gravity can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the odds stacked against me, I had to play nice with the elements. Unfortunately, dropping to the ground put me in a sensitive position, and as Lance bent toward me—probably dead set on picking me up and throwing me like a discus—my weight wasn’t balanced enough across my body to give me any kind of flexibility in how to respond. From my crouched position, I could only go forward. And going forward meant going into Lance, which was something like driving a pickup into a steel wall.
So instead, I went through Lance. More specifically, I dove in between his legs. It would have been a beautiful move, too, but at the last second, I felt his feet snap together, snaring mine and leaving me entirely vulnerable.
“Bryn, to your feet. Lance, again.”
At Callum’s commands, Lance released me, and without a moment’s pause, he came for me again, exactly the same as he had the first time. The predictability of his move gave me a fraction longer to think about my response, but thinking at all was a mistake, and he caught me in the shoulder.
Use the bond, Callum told me. Feel his movements before they get there. Don’t think. Just do.
“Again,” he said out loud.
This time, I managed to dodge Lance’s fist, and when he brought his other leg back around mine, I jumped and then caught the fist he sent flying toward my face, intent on turning the momentum against him. Which would have worked beautifully if I’d been a Were. But I wasn’t, and instead, the effort of stopping his fist put some major pain on my palm.
Don’t let the bond convince you that you’re one of us, Bryn. You’re human, no matter how like a Were you feel.
“Again.”
Time after time, Lance threw blows at me, and I dodged them, playing to my strengths. I was fast, I was light, and I wasn’t afraid of playing dirty. I was small and flexible and—as Lance muttered at one point—completely insane. The bond let me predict his movements, but it did little for letting him track mine, because even I didn’t know what I was going to do next.
“Again.”
I was really beginning to hate that word. At this rate, I wouldn’t even get to shower before my first class. Impatient, I decided not to wait for Lance to come to me this time. I broke the first rule of Fighting with Werewolves 101. I attacked. And then, my common sense came back to me, and in the microsecond it took Lance to recover from an unexpected blow to a very sensitive region, I turned tail and ran, and I was up a tree before he managed to get ahold of me again.
“Good,” Callum said. I wonder if he noticed that I’d picked a taller tree this time. No way was Lance getting me off this branch with a well-aimed tackle. I waited for Callum to instruct us to begin again, but the word never came, and Lance looked up at me and smiled—or came as close to smiling as he ever did.
Then he nodded to Callum—a solemn half bow—and ran back off into the forest.
Callum looked up at me. “You’d best be getting to school. We’ll run again tonight,” he said. “And tomorrow, you’ll fight Sora.”
“When can I see Chase?” I asked.
“When you’re ready.”
“When will I be ready?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Do the words straight answer mean nothing to you?”
“Enough,” Callum said, in his “This is the Final Word” voice of authority. I half-expected the bond between us to shake with the alpha-ness of it all, but it didn’t. It was almost as if this tone—which I associated with Callum putting his foot down in the most intractable way possible—had nothing to do with Callum being the leader of our pack, and everything to do with him being Callum and me being me.
“There was nothing in my permissions about not asking questions,” I told him, feeling rather secure in my perch.
“And there was nothing in your request about ending your grounding,” Callum countered.
I narrowed my eyes. “That’s Ali’s decision, not yours.”
Callum didn’t reply, and it occurred to me that the expression on Ali’s face when she’d reamed me out about my illegal adventure into Callum’s basement had looked disturbingly similar to the look on the alpha’s face now.