Maddy, not Madison.
Ours, not Wilson’s.
Healing, not broken.
She hadn’t been able to go back to her family. Not after being dead for ten years, not when she couldn’t go more than a mile away from the rest of our pack without her wolf driving her back—to pack, to safety, to home.
“Bryn.”
I turned toward Callum’s voice, and something inside of me began to dissolve. Seeing him would always make me feel like a kid, and it would always remind me of the things that had brought me here. The things he’d done and the things he hadn’t. Some days, I thought everything went back to Callum—
He’d saved me from the Rabid when I was four.
He’d Marked me.
He’d raised me.
He’d given me Ali, who loved me enough to take me away.
He’d trained me.
He’d pushed me.
He’d lied to me.
And ultimately, he’d let me discover the truth, because based on everything I’d learned about Callum’s knack, he had to have known that I would.
“Let’s walk,” I said.
For a long time, Callum and I walked and said nothing. And then, finally, he spoke. “How are your grades?”
Somehow, I hadn’t pictured that as being his opening.
I rolled my eyes. “It’s summer. No school, ergo no grades. Ali’s been homeschooling the youngest of the new Weres, though. They aren’t quite elementary school—ready yet, so she’s got her hands full.” I paused. “Lake, Maddy, and I will be driving in to the closest high school starting in September. Chase and Devon, too.” I was babbling, but I couldn’t seem to help it.
“How is Ali?” Callum asked me.
I nodded. “She’s good. She misses Casey, but I don’t think she’ll ever go back to him.”
Casey had dropped by, with my permission, a few weeks after we’d gotten back from Alpine Creek. He’d come to see the twins and to talk to Ali. It killed me that I’d been the one to tear the two of them apart, but the simple truth was that Ali might eventually forgive him for the part he’d played in hurting me, but she’d never let him in again. Not when she knew that if push came to shove, pack loyalty would always run deeper than anything he felt toward her.
“He visits the twins sometimes,” I said. “We’re thinking of taking them to Ark Valley for Christmas. If the alpha of that region gives us permission.”
Katie and Alex were nine months now, but they looked more like two-year-olds. They were gaining on Lily every day, much to her indignant dismay. Ali said the twins’ growth would slow down by their first birthday, but that they’d always be a little ahead of the curve.
“Is this what you came here to talk about?” I asked. “Ali and the twins? My grades?”
“Education is important,” Callum argued reflexively.
This wasn’t what I’d expected for my first interaction with one of the other alphas as their equal. Callum had walked out that door the day my pack had killed Wilson, the same as the others alphas had, and he’d signed off on giving me part of his territory from afar. Somehow, I’d imagined our first face-to-face meeting being more ominous.
I’d imagined it hurting more.
“We miss you,” Callum said. “And Devon.”
Sora and Lance couldn’t have been happy about the fact that Devon had left Ark Valley, but at the same time, I doubted they were surprised. Their oldest son had left his pack and fought his way to the top of another when he wasn’t that much older than Devon was now.
With or without me, Dev would have left Ark Valley eventually. He was too strong and too independent to stay.
“I miss you, too,” I told Callum. A month earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to say the words. I wouldn’t have even been able to think them, and I certainly wouldn’t have meant them. I wondered if he knew that I wasn’t talking about the pack. For most of my life, he’d been one of the most important people in it. He’d lied to me and he’d beaten me and he’d helped me and then left me alone to deal with the fallout, but he was still Callum. I still had his Mark carved into my body.
I always would.
Moving with fluid grace, Callum turned and pulled me into a hug. He didn’t rub his cheek against mine, didn’t Mark me as his or try to get me to submit. He just held me, and then he moved back and looked me in the eye.
I felt his wolf reaching out to me, calling to me through the power that bound me to others of his kind. At first, my instinct was to slam up my psychic shield, but a small sound escaped Callum’s mouth, and I realized that he wasn’t asking to be let into my head, or to control my bonds.
He was offering to let me into his.
Cautiously, I looked into his eyes, and I reached out to him, my heart speeding up as I did. Part of me recoiled, waiting to be slapped back, and throughout my territory, Cedar Ridge wolves stopped what they were doing and answered my distress.
I’m fine, I told them. I’m going to be okay.
And I would be. This was Callum. And even though a large part of me didn’t trust him, there were also parts of me that always would.
So I let down my own walls, and I stared into his eyes, and Callum reached out and caught my mind, the way he’d caught my body when I’d launched myself at him as a child, putting me on his shoulders and spinning me around.
In those seconds that I was inside Callum’s head, I saw the world through his eyes, and I realized that Mitch had vastly understated the power of Callum’s prescience. It wasn’t just a habit for knowing what was going to happen, an instinct. It was a web, an intricate web of possibilities, of dominoes that could fall, paths that might be taken, and the futures that might result from each.
Everything was connected. Every action had a consequence, and though it was very hard to get the drop on Callum, he wasn’t all-knowing. His power was limited by physical proximity—of all the children Wilson had attacked, I’d been the only one close enough for him to see. And even when an event was close enough, when he could make out the threads crisscrossing the time line’s web, he wasn’t perfect. He couldn’t control the future. He could only steer it—stay away from actions that led to dead ends; do things that he didn’t want to do to save the people he cared about in the long run.
Slowly, I unraveled his interactions with me. He’d come to save me when I was four, because he’d known I’d need saving, but he hadn’t gotten the vision in time to save my parents as well. And when he’d failed on that front, he’d seen horrible things in my future if he left me there, so he took me with him. And he’d known that the pack wouldn’t accept me unless they had to, so he’d Marked me and forced their hands, and he’d seen that he couldn’t give me to any of the other wolves or keep me himself without putting me at the center of a firestorm, so he’d chosen Ali and shown her what awaited me if she said no.