Part of me understood why she was doing this. If Ali hadn’t been so icily furious on my behalf, I might have hated the pack—and Callum—but if was a luxury for another time. Right now, I could handle being mad at Ali, but I wasn’t sure I could handle anything else, and I wasn’t going to risk the dense vortex of emotions in my gut working their way to the surface. I was not about to break down. Not in this car, not once we got to Montana, not ever.
“You would be doing the same thing,” Ali told me. “If something happened to me, if you were in charge of Katie, and if the pack had attacked her—whatever the reason—you would do the exact same thing.”
“Shut. Up.” I broke my silence.
“I’m doing this, I’m not sorry I’m doing this, and I’m not going to undo it,” Ali said. “Live with it, kiddo.”
“You didn’t even ask me what I wanted,” I shot back. “What happened—it happened to me.” It was bad enough that Callum had taken it upon himself to decide what I could and could not handle knowing with respect to The-Night-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. I wasn’t about to let Ali take this away from me, too. “I’m the one they hurt. I’m the one who bled, I’m the one whose body is so bruised that I might as well start answering to the name ‘Patches,’ and I’m the one who had to watch Callum—”
I broke off. Didn’t want to go there.
“Watch him what?” Ali said evenly.
“Nothing,” I said through clenched teeth. “He did what he could.”
I knew it was wrong to be mad at Ali for trying to protect me, but not Callum for hurting me in the first place. I just didn’t care.
“Do you honestly think that Callum didn’t know what would happen, Bryn? From the moment he left you alone with Chase?” She stared out at the road before us, and I leaned forward and flipped on the radio, hoping to drown out her words.
Her face tightened and then her hand lashed out. My arm, like a creature possessed, jerked upward, throwing up a block to protect my face before my conscious mind had time to realize that all Ali was doing was turning the radio back off.
Unsettled, I lowered my arm and hugged it tight to my chest, feeling small and stupid and laid painfully bare.
If Ali noticed my reaction, she at least had the decency not to call me on it. Instead, she pressed on with the current topic: Callum, justice, and me.
“How many times in your life have you gotten the drop on Callum, Bryn? How many times has anyone? He knew damn well you’d break the conditions before he set them down.”
Callum had always known what I was going to do before I did it. I’d spent my entire life trying to get the drop on him.
He knew me.
No. I didn’t want to hear this. She couldn’t make me. Radio. On.
In the backseat, Katie whimpered from her car seat. Both twins had cried solid for the first hour, and about fifteen minutes back, they’d finally cried themselves out and fallen asleep. My brother and sister weren’t any happier to be leaving than I was.
Shhhhhhh, I told Katie silently. It’s okay. I’m here.
The farther we drove away from Callum’s stronghold, the weaker the twins’ bond to the pack grew, and the more they latched on to Ali and me. Especially me. I was pretty sure that Katie had yet to figure out that I wasn’t a wolf. The night I ran with the pack confused her. Even now, with my own packbond muted, I was the closest thing she had to Pack.
To home.
“I can’t feel them anymore,” I muttered, my words lost to the song blaring from the speakers.
It began to rain, and Ali turned the windshield wipers on and the radio off.
“You can’t feel who?”
“The pack. Even after … what I did … they were still there. Faintly.” Chase was just more there. But as the mile markers ticked by, everything was getting fainter, and now I couldn’t feel any of the Weres at all, except for Chase—and I could barely feel him. He existed only as an image, a sound, a feel in the recesses of my brain, but even that was getting harder and harder to hear.
“Chase didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, allowing my ire to take the place of the holes in my soul. “You made them lock him up, and he didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Believe it or not, I’m not a monster, Bryn. I asked Callum to lock him up, because Callum issued an edict that no one was to stop us from leaving. Based on the way that boy stood guard over you while you were unconscious, flashing from one form to another, daring us to move him from your side, I inferred that he might not be able to keep himself in check when we left, and that you might not want him to face the kind of justice that had been visited upon you.”
For a single second, that took the wind out of my sails. “Did you have them lock Casey up, too?” I sneered, once I’d recovered.
“As a matter of fact,” Ali replied, her grip on the wheel tightening, “I did.”
Radio. On. Only this time, it was Ali’s decision, not mine, and she turned down the volume and changed the station. In the backseat, Katie closed her eyes again, and for the next hundred miles, the four of us drove in near-silence, the gentle warble of country music the only sound in the car.
Ali drove straight through the night. At some point, I fell asleep, and in my dreams, Chase came to me in wolf form. His fur was black, his body lean and muscled, and his eyes were lighter even than their human counterparts: two orbs of ice blue in a sea of darkness. I didn’t say a word, and he didn’t make a sound. The two of us just sprawled out on the ground about a foot apart. I could feel his warm breath on my face, and after an eternity of the two of us staring at each other, I buried my hands in his fur, which should have been coarse, but felt silky soft in my hands. His chest rose and fell as he breathed, and I could feel my heart beating in unison with his.
“This doesn’t mean we’re mates,” I told him.
He opened his mouth very wide in a mischievous, wolfy yawn.
“Women’s liberation and all that,” I continued, catching his yawn and trying to push it down. “No Mark. No lifetime commitment. No ‘property of’ signs. We just have a bond, that’s all.”
His tail beat quietly against the dirt beneath us, and a smile worked its way onto my own lips.
“Loser,” I said, playing my fingertips over his rib cage, oddly compelled to scratch his belly.
In response to my insult, Chase bared his teeth in mock threat, but scooted closer toward me, and after a long moment, I laid my head on his neck, and the two of us—girl and wolf—fell asleep, into a dream within a dream.