Pack of Her Own, page 23
I went back downstairs. Wren had laid Misty out on the couch, a pillow under her head, and was watching her from the armchair until she noticed me.
“Hikaru is on her way,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “She’ll make sure Misty is okay. And doesn’t remember anything.”
I snorted. “Yeah, that would be nice.”
“Nat, I’m sorry.”
I didn’t want to hear it, so I made a beeline to the door. I had one foot out the door before she spoke again.
“Please, Natalie. Wait?”
I stopped but didn’t turn around. “What more do you want, Wren? What more can you possibly do to me?”
“It’s not about you being trans. That was never a problem for me. You are not a problem for me. You have to believe me. I just can’t…with a human…” I heard her let out a long breath and could imagine her shaking her head. “Please know, I never meant to hurt you, Nat.”
I glanced back over my shoulder.
“Well, you failed.”
And suddenly I had no more words. I walked out the door, walked out on the best—and shortest—relationship I’d ever had. Just when I thought I was out of tears to cry, my body surprised me, and I sobbed the entire ride back to the city.
Chapter Thirty-two
Wren
I was barely aware of anything as my wolf gnawed on the leg bone of a white-tailed jackrabbit. We lay in our rough den, eating happily as the wind twined its way through the trees. The fur on our back ruffled slightly and we tucked ourselves a little tighter into a ball with the bone loose in our teeth. The scents of pine and leaves and damp undergrowth filled our nose as we slowly started to drift off to sleep.
Then there was a new scent on the wind. It was vaguely familiar, and I didn’t pay any heed, but my wolf was smarter and more alert. She bared our teeth, hackles rising, and a low growl rumbled out of our den.
From downwind came the very deliberate crunching of twigs and leaves, making its way ever closer. The smell got stronger and it took longer than I would have liked, but eventually we recognized it to be Heather. We stood and discarded our meal, then left the den to meet with my pack member.
Heather’s wolf was smaller than me, with russet red fur from nose to tail, speckled with white and gray. Everything about her screamed speed over power. Three feet from me, she stopped, lowered her head to the side, and assumed a submissive position.
Alpha. I heard Heather’s voice echo in my head. It wasn’t the weirdest thing ever, but after years of being on my own it was still weird to communicate while shifted.
Heather. I acknowledged her, then let the wolf in me take over. She moved forward, putting her jaws on Heather’s exposed shoulder and biting down softly. I had to struggle to keep my awareness focused on what was going on and not slip back behind the wolf, letting her take over completely. What do you want?
You’ve been gone a while, Wren.
I backed away from her, closer to my den. What’s your point?
People miss you.
And that’s a reason to shift by yourself and come into the woods?
It was hard. Really hard. My wolf and I aren’t…there’s just so much more to learn and work on. I need you back, Wren. I needed to find you. I know you’re hurting.
I turned and snarled at her, baring teeth far larger than hers. You know nothing!
“Hey!” A voice cracked through the silence of the woods. I spun to see Hikaru, standing downwind from me. How the hell had she gotten here so damned quietly? “Back off, Wren. She was just helping me find you.”
My wolf whined as I pulled her awareness back to take the driver’s seat once more. Looking between the two of them, I couldn’t control the anger rising from my gut. I bared my teeth again and prepared to pounce on the smaller wolf.
You led her here?
Heather’s wolf shook as I gazed at her. She asked me to help find you. She’s worried about you. Wren, we’re all worried about you. You’ve been gone for over a month!
A strong grip on the back of my neck was the only thing that stopped me from tearing Heather apart. I spun to growl at Hikaru, but she only gripped me tighter.
“Go on, Heather,” she said loudly. “Get back to your home. I need to talk to your Alpha alone.”
Heather looked from me to Hikaru and back again. I could sense her hesitation in leaving me with a potential threat, and I felt bad for trying to attack her.
Go, Heather. Give your wolf control and run for a while. Just remember not to go into the town.
She hesitated still. Alpha.
I’ll be fine. Hikaru won’t hurt me. Go and learn your wolf better. I’m sorry I haven’t been there to help.
Her movements were slow and cautious, but eventually she turned and loped off back into the trees. A moment passed before Hikaru let me go.
I hate you sometimes.
She only stared at me. “You realize it’d be easier to have an actual conversation if you weren’t an animal right now.”
I knew she couldn’t hear me in wolf form, but damned if she couldn’t see what I was saying on my face.
It took longer than it should’ve to find myself in the right headspace to start the shift. It was almost like the silver sickness had returned, preventing me from shifting again. How long had it been? My wolf wasn’t much for checking the time or recording days. My wolf was reluctant to step back, but even worse was my reluctance to step forward. Being human again meant thinking about things again. Thinking about things meant feeling emotions.
Emotions were the whole reason I’d been in the woods so long in the first place.
Slowly, I shifted back to my human skin. Shivering in the breeze without the protection of my fur, I glared at Hikaru as she watched without a hint of discomfort.
“What? It’s not like I haven’t seen it before. I am your doctor.”
I grunted at her and made a little seat on a large rock sticking out of the ground a few steps away. When I was as comfortable as I was going to get, I looked back at my old friend.
“Why are you here?”
“We were worried about you. You’ve been gone too long.”
“I don’t care.”
“Yeah, but other people care about you. And they’ve been taking care of your business.”
I shook my head. “I never asked them to do that.”
“You don’t get to choose that for others. That’s not how life works.”
“If they’re unhappy that I’m gone, then that’s on them!” I picked my knees up, wrapping my arms around them. “I just want to be left alone.”
Hikaru shook her head sadly. “I know. I get it, I really do, but you have responsibilities back in town, and you need to pull yourself together.”
I launched myself to my feet. “Don’t tell me what to do! I don’t want to go back there! There’s nothing left for me!”
“Excuse me?” I backpedaled quickly at the sudden fury in Hikaru’s voice. Her eyes started to glow as angry trails of red spread outward across her face. Her hands went dark, fingers sharpening into long claws far more wicked than my own. “Nothing? Nothing, Wren?” She snarled. “I seem to recall a poor, wretched wolf coming to my doorstep with nothing.” She stalked forward on nimble feet, and I stood petrified in front of her. Only once had I ever seen her go full vampire before, and it was as terrifying then as now. “But now that wolf has a life! She has a diner and staff and a home and, most of all, friends who give a shit about her!” She stopped mere inches from me, claws moving like she was barely holding herself back from shredding my skin. “Even if she was an idiot and broke her own damned heart!”
Her fangs had dropped and were sitting in front of her lip as she bared her teeth at me in a look more terrifying than my wolf’s most ferocious snarl. I fought the urge to close my eyes, waiting for her to fall upon me and take what she wanted. Then she turned away from me and took a long breath. Suddenly I could move again, and I backed away into my little den, feeling the bone I’d been chewing on under my foot.
“I had to do it.” My voice was so quiet she wouldn’t have heard it if she were human.
Slowly, her hands returned to normal, and by the time she turned around her face had cleared up, leaving her with her normal eyes behind the purple-tinted glasses. “If that’s really what you want to believe, then maybe you deserve to be left out here.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t want to hurt her. I just couldn’t live with myself if something happened to her because she was with me.”
“Wren, you did hurt her! You hurt her by driving her away!”
“Yeah, but at least she’ll survive!”
Hikaru took a step backward, confusion making her eyebrows rise. “She could have had more than that with you.”
I tried to convey a look of are you stupid? from my eyes, so I didn’t have to say the words out loud. “It’s because of the mate bite! Even on the small chance she could survive it, what kind of life could she possibly have with me? I can’t risk her getting caught up in all the werewolf bullshit again. Craig still hasn’t shown his asshole face, and I know he’s not going to let his brother’s death go. Everywhere I go I have wolves coming after me. What kind of life would that be for a human?”
Instead of understanding or even pity, Hikaru only looked even more confused. “I don’t understand. You drove her away because you didn’t want to give her the mate bite?”
“Obviously!” I threw my hands in the air. “She was begging me to bite her, and damn it, I wanted it more than anything. But I couldn’t! I couldn’t risk her like that! If she died because I tried to make her my mate, I don’t think I would’ve survived it.”
“Wren.” Hikaru’s voice drifted off as her face went from confused to shocked to something like pity. I wanted to claw and tear to make it disappear. “Who told you the mate bite risks the mate’s life?”
I blinked at her. “The Alpha of the next county. Kendra Harper. And it’s not all mates, only the humans. Humans can’t handle the power, the magic that flows into them with the mate bite.” As the words tumbled out, my stomach started to twist with each syllable. What if I was wrong? What if I drove Natalie away for nothing?
Hikaru slowly shook her head. “No, Wren. Humans can take the mate bite as well as any wolf shifter.”
“No!” I growled, filled with the sudden energy of denial that pushed me to start pacing in front of her. “No. No. No. No. No!” I gripped my upper arms tight, digging nails into my skin until it hurt. I wanted to scream with the frustration, the rage that was building within. “No!” I screamed. “No! Please! Please tell me I didn’t…I didn’t…” I gasped in deep breaths of air. “Please say I didn’t push her away for nothing.”
“Kendra Harper lied to you. Or she was told wrong or had a bad experience. I can’t say for certain why or what happened with Ms. Harper, but I can tell you that the mate bite is perfectly safe for humans and shifters both.” She gave me a small, sad smile. “I’m sorry, Wren.”
I turned on her. “How the hell do you know? Why do you know so much about me and my kind when you’re a fucking bloodsucker?”
If she took any offense to my words, she didn’t show it. “I’ve been around for a long time, Wren. I’ve learned things.”
I shook my head. “There has to be more to it than that.”
She let out a long sigh. “Fine. But this stays between us, do you understand?”
“Why?”
“Because my past is not a story for you to tell others. I’ll thank you to keep it to yourself.”
I truly thought about it and decided that I needed to know. I needed to know if I could really believe her that her information was better than Kendra’s. I needed that assurance, and my silence was a small price to pay.
“Tell me, please.”
She took a few steps forward and reached up, pulling the collar of her shirt out and down her left shoulder. I realized this was the first time I’d ever seen Hikaru’s pale skin outside the usual parts. And there, snaking down and around and back up on her collarbone, were long-healed marks in the shape of—
“A mate bite?” I whispered.
She nodded. “My mate.” Her voice rumbled low in her throat like she was holding back a flood of emotion. “She gave me the bite a long, long time ago.”
I stared. “But you’re…”
“I wasn’t always a vampire, Wren,” she said. “No one is. Vampires can’t bear children.”
“You were a wolf?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Human. Pledged to marry the head of our village long before Japan was what it is today. Then I met her.” She smiled softly. “My Yasha. She stole my heart, and then she stole me from the village. We traveled Japan for years after she bit me. We were together for a long time, Wren, and we never stopped loving each other.”
“A long time?”
“The mate bite is special, you know that. It allows one mate to live as long as the other mate does. Even humans can live for several hundred years as long as their mate survives.”
I tried to make sense of all this new information, but felt my head wanting to explode. The only coherent thought slipped off my tongue. “What happened?”
Her face darkened. “We took a ship to the mainland and continued traveling and exploring. Until we reached what’s now the Russian part of Europe.” A red-tinged tear trickled down her face. “We stumbled on a clan of vampires. They took me, and Yasha tried to save me. But it was too late.” She looked away. “They’d turned me. Otherwise, I would’ve died with my love. And done so happily.”
I covered my mouth with my hands. “Oh, dear Mother. I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”
She sniffled and shook her head. “It’s the past. I live on.”
“How?” I asked. “How do you keep going? I’m almost ready to tear my own heart out, and Natalie is alive only a few hours away. How did you do it?”
“Because she’s in here.” She tapped her head, then her heart. “And in here. I am the only living memory of Yasha. I have to remember her, otherwise no one will know she even existed.”
“You preserve her memory?”
She smiled and nodded. “Just so.”
“Fuck.” I drew the word out with a long breath before rubbing my hands over my face. “What do I do? How do I fix this?”
“You still want to be with her?”
I glanced down at my body and could still sense Natalie within that well of magic that all shifters had. “I do,” I whispered. “I still feel her. I still want her.”
She gave me a kind smile. “Then come on. Let’s get you back into the world so you can get your girl back.”
She threw her arm over my shoulders, and together we walked out of the darkness of the woods. With my best friend beside me, I took my first steps back into the light of the world.
Chapter Thirty-three
Natalie
“Shit!” I shouted as the long scratches up my arm stung like a mother. The water was cool against my skin as I ran it under the tap, washing away blood and dirt and whatever else that cat might’ve had on its claws.
“Natalie? You okay?” Rory’s voice preceded her entrance into the exam room. I nodded and hissed when my finger caught one of the gashes. She appeared beside me and gasped. “Holy shit! What happened?”
I grimaced as I soaped up my arm. “Ms. Galar’s cat,” I said. “Apparently, he doesn’t like me much.”
“Mr. Nibbles did that to you?” She stared at my arm. “What the hell did you do to him?”
“Nothing!” I said. Guilt rolled through me as she backed off a couple of steps. “I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. It was just a regular check-up. I’ve done it plenty of times.”
“That cat is always such a sweetheart.”
I snorted. “Not today, apparently.”
She looked me up and down then pulled me away from the sink. “Sit down,” she commanded. I wasn’t in the mood to argue, so I sat on the rolling stool. She grabbed a few rolls of gauze and antiseptic before going to work on my arm. “I know you’ve never gotten along well with cats, but damn, girl. This is ridiculous.”
I could only shrug. She was right that I was never a fan of cats—they were never fans of me, really. But I’d never gotten clawed like this before. And I couldn’t tell Rory that maybe they smelled werewolf all over me, because even after a little more than a month back in the city and with many, many showers, I could still smell Wren all over my skin.
“I’m sorry about what happened out at the cabin,” she said suddenly, her eyes and hands focused on bandaging me up. She shook her head. “I didn’t know Misty was going to go all crazy like that and hunt you down.”
I bit my lip. This woman was so good to me, but I couldn’t really tell her anything. I couldn’t tell her that her old friend was a werewolf, and I’d fallen hard for her and then she pushed me away because I was different. “It was my fault. I slipped and told her where I was. I didn’t know she was going to come after me.”
She let out a long breath as she finished with my arm. “But that’s all over with, right? She’s done now?”
“Goddess, I hope so. I never want to see her again.”
“So, the cabin did sort of work out for you? Maybe not so much in the end, but the rest of it?”
“It made me think about a lot of things.”
She smiled. I couldn’t tell her anything about Wren. Even leaving the whole werewolf thing out, I couldn’t hurt either one of them. Wren was allowed to have opinions—even if they were the wrong ones. Didn’t mean I needed to be around her at all.
“Did you get to swim in the lake?” I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Isn’t it gorgeous there? And the town hasn’t been turned into a tourist trap, so you’re not fighting for space with everyone else.”
