“Do you really need me to leave this alone?” I asked softly. I couldn’t risk hurting her, even if we both wanted to pretend that there was nothing—and could be nothing—wrong.
“Yeah, Bryn, I think I do.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll leave it alone—for now. But I’m not going to like it, and once that kid is born, and you’re fine, I’m getting a tattoo, piercing my belly button, and eloping to Mexico with someone you’ve never met.”
She laughed and then stuck another Oreo in my mouth. As I was chewing, she tweaked my hair. “Bryn, Callum’s got you under surveillance. You wouldn’t make it a foot into a tattoo shop before someone yanked you back out.”
“You never know,” I replied. “Tonight, my guard was Devon, and I happen to know for a fact that he thinks tasteful body art is quite the thing.”
Ali responded to my retort with one of her own, and we went back and forth for so long that it didn’t occur to me until much later that she had assumed that my security team would still be in place by the time the baby was born. And that really made me wonder, because our pack had a tendency to take care of trouble very quickly. Threats were eliminated the instant they were identified. Callum ran a tight ship, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of pack business would necessitate my being inside by dusk every night for a month or more.
Despite my promise to Ali, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and by the end of the week, I’d come to the realization that the weirdest part of all of this wasn’t that something had everyone on edge. It was the fact that nobody would tell me what it was. The pack didn’t just want me safe. They wanted to keep me in the dark.
And ever since the night the Big Bad Wolf had come knocking at my parents’ door, I hadn’t been overly fond of the dark. Not metaphorically. Not actually. I liked seeing what was laid out in front me. And if Callum and Ali and Devon thought they could keep me blindfolded indefinitely, they were wrong.
CHAPTER THREE
TWO WEEKS TO THE DAY AFTER CALLUM TOLD ME to stop slacking in algebra, I got a C-minus on a quiz. It seemed like a good counterstrike at the time. After our little encounter in my workshop, the almighty alpha had pretty much disappeared, but true to his word, bodyguards materialized every day like clockwork to escort me home by dusk, willing or not. My promise to Ali meant that I couldn’t do more than keep an ear to the ground to figure out why, and everywhere I turned, there were unspoken whispers, the kind that pulled at my pack-bond and made my hipbone itch, just below the Mark.
“Callum’s going to kill you, you know,” Devon said as I tucked the quiz into my backpack with a quick, vicious grin. Technically, it wasn’t found material, but I thought it would make a rather fetching rosebush all the same.
“I’d like to see him try.” I’d given up on the idea that Devon might crack and give me some hint about what it was that had every wolf in a hundred-mile radius teetering on edge, gnashing their teeth, and closing rank around their females like we’d spontaneously combust the moment they left us to our own devices. “In case you haven’t gotten the memo, I’m not so easy to kill.”
Devon didn’t flinch, but the fact that he didn’t counter my words with a pithy quote from the Bard and/or Dirty Dancing told me that my words had sent his mind down the same paths that I tried my best to avoid. His pupils didn’t dilate. His jaw didn’t clench, but I felt a hum of energy like the striking of a tuning fork in the air between us.
It didn’t take a genius to infer that Devon’s inner wolf disliked the idea of anyone trying to hurt me. Plain old Dev didn’t seem too fond of the possibility, either, and I knew from previous experience that neither boy nor beast particularly cared for being reminded that if things had gone differently the night Callum had brought me home, I might not have lived long enough to be a thorn in anyone’s paw.
Blood. Blood-blood-blood-blood—
I stopped myself from thinking about it and helped Devon to do the same by jabbing his left side with my index finger. If we’d been alone, I might have butted him gently with my head, but this was high school, and the good people of Ark Valley had enough reasons to think that those of us who lived in the woods were just a little bit off.
“Ten-to-one odds Callum has either Sora or Lance on Bryn-duty tonight,” I said, changing the subject with an unspoken apology for bringing up the previous one at all. “You Macalisters seem to be Team Bryn favorites at the moment.”
Devon’s lips settled into an easy, practiced smirk, and the nearly imperceptible tension in his neck and shoulder muscles receded. “If there’s any justice in this world, watching you should convince them how lucky they’ve been to be blessed with a son such as myself.”
“He says with patented Smirk Number Three.”
Devon shook his head and made a sound somwhere in the neighborhood of tsk-tsk. “You’re getting rusty, Bronwyn. That was clearly Smirk Number Two: sardonic with a side of wit.”
I breathed an internal sigh of relief that Devon was fully himself again. All Weres felt the tug between their human sides and their wolves, but Dev fought it more than most. He danced to his own drummer and dared the world to tell him that a purebred Were should have better things to worry about than what he was wearing. All things considered, Devon was almost as much of a rarity as I was. The only difference was, his particular oddity—being the son of a female werewolf rather than that of a male Were’s human mate—gave him the advantage over other werewolves, while mine meant that I’d always be the slow one. The weak one. The one who needed protection from pack secrets that came out after dark.
“Hey, Bronwyn?”
Until those words broke the surface of my mind, I’d been deep enough in my thoughts that I hadn’t been paying attention to the finely honed senses that would have otherwise warned me of an outsider’s approach. Was I slipping, or what? It was one thing to let a werewolf get a drop on you, but a normal teenage boy? That was just embarrassing.
“Yes?” I hadn’t expected to see Jeff (of motorcycle fame) in anything resembling a social setting for at least a semester. He’d been avoiding me since the moment I’d hopped off his bike, and like a chameleon, I’d faded into the background, keeping my distance from his human friends the way I had before my little joyride. As I turned to face him, I caught a whiff of a second scent—Juicy Fruit and plastic—and realized that he wasn’t alone.
There was a girl with him, and she was smiling.
Two of my classmates, approaching me of their own free will? I glanced at Devon and raised an eyebrow, but his gaze was fastened on Human 1 and Human 2. They didn’t even seem to realize they were being watched, and they certainly didn’t feel me stiffen as Devon took a step closer to me.
Gently, I put a hand on Devon’s chest and pushed him back. I’d told Callum I had no interest in provoking interspecies aggression, and I’d meant it. Previous grand-theft-auto attempts aside, my instinct to keep my head down and not draw attention to the pack was almost as well defined as the three parallel scars under the band of my jeans.
“You dropped this.” Jeff held out a pen that I’d been using to take notes (or rather, pointedly not take notes) before the bell rang. But as I reached for it, he twirled it twice and tucked it into the jean pocket of the girl standing next to him. “I think I’ll keep it as payment due for that little klepto moment of yours with my bike.”
The girl standing next to him had a name, and I knew it, but I didn’t bother thinking it. She was a typical Ark Valley girl, a little too quiet, a little too sweet, with metaphorical claws lurking just under the surface.
“Jeff!” the girl said. “You’re horrible. I’m sorry, Bronwyn.”
But she didn’t take the pen out of her pocket. Instead, she wrapped an arm around Jeff. I wasn’t exactly an expert on human-courting behavior, but I sensed the ceremony of the moment. He’d given her my pen. She’d giggled. In another few seconds, they’d both walk away and never give me a second look.
Compared to the werewolf version of courting—he bites her, she bites him, his connection to the pack spills over onto her for all eternity—the whole thing seemed artificial and insignificant.