It took me a while to understand what he meant. Hunter spoke of the morning the pack had appeared at Josh’s door and brought me to the abandoned barn. The thought firmly knotted my stomach. I must have gone mad. After all, I was casually lying in a tent with one of my former kidnappers. That sober view of things almost made me overlook what Hunter was really getting at.

  “E-excuse me?” Had Hunter just told me that the whole pack knew when I had spent my first night with Josh? It had to be a joke. I was almost desperately waiting for the punch line, but it didn’t come. Instead, Hunter sounded even more earnest.

  “Normal people take off in such situations, you know?” he said. “But you were with him, even though he had gone pretty crazy before.”

  Pretty crazy apparently implied Josh’s ugly fight with the pack after the car accident. My ears became fire-red. I could’ve sworn I was glowing in the dark.

  “Yeah . . . because . . .” I couldn’t find the words to get me out of this embarrassing turn of conversation. Actually, none of this was any of his business. Why would he involve me in such a subject—and all this while he was lying next to me in shorts and an undershirt? I’d like to have sunk into the ground.

  “Are you guys always alone?” I had no choice but to ask a question in return, and I hoped it would be equally awkward and make him stop talking or change the topic. I would probably never be able to look into Hunter’s eyes again without remembering this conversation. At the same moment, I remembered that I had just stepped out of the shower on that fateful day. It just kept getting worse and worse the longer I thought about it.

  Hunter grinned as he answered me. No shame at all.

  “Not really,” he said and quickly became serious again. “We take women home, yes. But never for more than one night.”

  He shrugged his shoulders once more.

  “The risk is just too great.”

  As much as I wanted to suppress the image in my head, I suddenly remembered what burden the werewolves carried. Josh had told me there could be no friends. Often not even family, because the werewolves would have to keep them at a distance. A firm relationship or even marriage was practically impossible. How could a werewolf explain to their spouse why they disappeared for three days during a full moon? What partner would just accept it without drilling or investigating? Plus, you could attract lots of attention, even by just making the mistake of accidentally touching a girlfriend’s silver bracelet. Werewolves were loners—I heard Josh say that clearly in my memory—and when they found a pack, that was the greatest happiness for them. For most of them, it was too tedious to stay friends with normal people, so they kept their distance. That’s why many chose to live on their own.

  Hunter was right. I couldn’t let Josh and my relationship be the rule. Even I had tried to escape at first, though I hadn’t succeeded. In the worst case, I could have ended up revealing not only Josh’s secret but the existence of the pack as well.

  Hunter’s words left me speechless. I was still embarrassed by the subject, but I felt sorry for the big werewolf too. No one should have to be left alone, especially when they couldn’t help their fate.

  “I . . . I’m sorry.” My bias from before had evaporated. “It must be so hard, dealing with this curse.”

  I knew how Josh felt about it. He had spent decades hating himself and had only begun to reconcile with his fate when our relationship began.

  “It’s not a curse,” Hunter replied. His answer was so unexpected that my eyes widened. “It’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

  He laughed a muffled, bearish laugh.

  “I can still have girls. Just not for long.”

  He managed to bring back my awkwardness with a single sentence, but then his voice became soft as he continued speaking.

  “And maybe someday I’ll find someone, like how Josh found you. Until then, I’m just having fun.” He smiled again. “That’s nice too.”

  “Hunter, please!” I raised my hand so he would finally stop talking. My gesture made him laugh even more—loud enough that Keith’s suddenly smacked his hand against the tent. I remembered that the Dodge was practically right next to us.

  “Shut up, goddamn it!” He kicked the wall, narrowly missing my foot. “We’re not in the damn Boy Scouts! I want to sleep!”

  That only made it worse, and now I started giggling. We laughed at Keith until he hit one of the traveling bags against the truck. The bang echoed through the forest like a shot, closely followed by more angry clamor for several seconds.

  “You’re really uptight,” Hunter said, still chuckling after Keith had calmed down. “I can’t believe you’ve stayed in a relationship with a werewolf this long.”

  His cheerful tone made it sound like a compliment. Before I could reply, though, he stretched out and turned his back on me. It was time to sleep. We didn’t want to get Keith all wound up.

  “Wake me up if anything happens,” Hunter added.

  In the sudden silence, my thoughts remained alone. However, this time they weren’t dark ones. Tomorrow was the day we would rescue Josh. Also, I would have never thought it possible to find anything close to friends in the werewolf pack of Shatterlake. The men, or at least Hunter and Liam, made me feel like everything was fine, and thanks to their efforts, I could sleep properly again for the first time in a long while.

  Chapter 18

  “Hunter,” I muttered the next day. “Stop it.”

  We had reached Edmonton about an hour ago and decided to fill up our supplies before going further. We didn’t know what condition the pack, and Josh, would be in this afternoon after the rescue, so we wanted to be prepared to return to Shatterlake immediately. For this reason, Keith and Liam had gone to gas up the truck while Hunter and I bought plenty of food. Or rather, Hunter took care of his food and I tried not to lose control of the budget. We needed bottles of water, which Hunter had to carry, and meals for today and tomorrow. Meanwhile, Hunter piled one candy bar after the other into my basket.

  “I told you to pack what you need,” I growled.

  Hunter was wide eyed.

  “But I need all that,” he answered. “I may have to fight later. I have to keep my strength up.”

  I took a look at his shopping cart. There were cakes, pretzel sticks, potato chips in five variations, marshmallows . . . I could’ve kept going.

  “It’s just candy. You can’t get power from that.” I noticed a box of cereal, camouflaged in the colorful tangle of food. “And why cereal? We don’t even have milk.”

  He looked at me in horror. “Have you never had cereal without milk?”

  I sighed. This would be the most expensive supermarket purchase of my life, I was quite sure of that. The cart was so full that I had to stack the cans on top of Hunter’s sweets. I tried to forget how much money this werewolf had. Hunter probably had more in his account than Keith, Liam, and I combined, but he made no move to pull out his credit card. Instead, he handed me a box of brownies to put into the cart.

  “That’s enough,” I demanded. I’d expected Hunter to be cheap. He lived in a magnificent castle of a home, but he drove a tiny Polo and wore normal clothes. Today it was the dark shirt from yesterday and jeans that accentuated his leg muscles. Standing close together, we probably seemed like a very strange pair. Hunter was not only twice as wide as me, but I also barely came up to his shoulders. Looking up at him almost hurt my neck.

  “How about some fruit?” I turned to the side to fish an apple from the shelf. It was round and juicy green.

  Hunter wrinkled his nose. “Yeah. Liam can have it.”

  I wasn’t quite sure if he was serious, so I packed several as a precaution. The few dollars no longer mattered anyway, not with how much Hunter was getting. “And Keith?”

  If Hunter was already putting together a feast, the other members of the pack should also get something. I thought about putting some chocolate bars in my bag, but Hunter beat me to it.

  “He likes fish. Something with fish would be right for him.”

  After I turned pale from seeing the total at the cash register, we went back to the parking lot. This supermarket was quite crowded today, even though it was a Sunday. There were people and shopping carts everywhere. Even so, we noticed the rust-colored Dodge immediately. It towered above the smaller cars in the row and shone in the sunlight like aged coral.

  “There they are.” Hunter had taken the overfull bags from me so that I wouldn’t have to carry them. While I followed him across the asphalt, I inspected the purchases again. This amount of food should be enough even for four ravenous werewolves—at least until tomorrow. If necessary, we would be able to eat at a rest stop on the way home.

  “Why fish?” I remembered when I saw the can. “Is it Keith’s favorite food?”

  That surprised me. I would have thought he was more of a burger and ribeye guy.

  Hunter grinned so wide it scared me. “No, Keith hates fish.”

  My mouth was open. “Hunter, you’re a real dick sometimes.”

  He laughed loud enough to attract the attention of the surrounding customers. They glanced at us in surprise but then went on quickly. Of course, Hunter must be a pretty intimidating character to them. He had seemed the same to me until recently.

  Instead of replying, he nodded toward the Dodge. Keith had leaned out of the side window to watch us with an extremely annoyed expression. His hand gestured for us to hurry.

  “Look at him,” Hunter said. “Sometimes you can’t help but tease him.”

  On the way to our destination, Liam asked me to swap places with him. He was tired of looking at Hunter eating all day and wanted to read without the wind bothering him, so with a heavy heart I let him get into the passenger seat. For me, this meant riding in the back of the blasted truck.

  Keith never even seemed to consider easing his foot off the gas. I sat huddled behind the driver’s cab and clawed at the edge of the cargo bed as if sheer willpower could turn it into a seatbelt. I thanked heaven that this road was better maintained than the one on the way here had been, because this one had no potholes. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have lasted a minute without being flung out. Even so, I pressed myself as tightly as possible against the back of the driver’s cab while the speed tore at my clothes. The wind seemed to be sucking out my breath. I didn’t dare to move an inch. I became dizzy as soon as my gaze fell on the surroundings rushing by.

  “Ruby!”

  Hunter must’ve shouted my name three times before I heard him. He was standing right next to me, hands on the roof, letting the wind rush against his body. His shirt fluttered like a sail, exposing part of the tank top beneath. I was terrified of seeing him slip and fall out of the Dodge, but he wasn’t afraid. He even loosened one of his hands to reach for me, but I swatted it away.

  “Come on!” He had to shout against the wind. “This is fun! I got you.”

  “I’d rather not,” I shouted back. Unlike him, I only saw all the things that could go wrong. I couldn’t even be in the car without being scared; how could I stand in the back of one?

  Hunter just laughed at my answer and hammered on Keith’s roof. “This thing can go faster!”

  It seemed to work. Keith suddenly accelerated—and I turned to hold on to the cargo bed edge as tightly as possible.

  Even before we reached the factory site, somehow I knew that it would be empty.

  The large complex was located far from Edmonton but was too easy to reach. We left the highway and followed a tattered country road to get to it. There were no barriers, no signs, nothing. There was no one to stop people from coming close to the building. A first look at the factory itself seemed to make my fears a certainty. I saw smashed windows, open gates, and rotten masonry damaged by winters. The roof had collapsed in multiple places, and that sight brought a terrible fear back to me.

  Josh wasn’t here.

  “No.” I hung halfway off the cargo bed to see better. Hunter stood behind me and gnawed at his lip but didn’t say anything.

  No, I thought. It couldn’t be. It mustn’t. We had to find Josh here. It had taken so much for us to come here—the pack and I—and there were no other clues about Josh’s whereabouts. He had to be here. I didn’t know what to do if my doubts were confirmed.

  Liam and Keith got out of the truck to go check. Hunter accompanied them.

  “You stay here and lie low,” Keith said to me. “If anybody comes, yell.”

  I nodded and watched the three men leave, only to slap my hands on my face shortly afterwards. I was shaking like a leaf. What should we do if we were wrong? What if Liam’s information turned out to be coincidences from which we’d drawn the wrong conclusions? How were we supposed to find Josh if we had to start over? The tension tore my nerves and turned me into a bundle of angst. I prayed that the pack would have Josh with them when they came back.

  In the end, it was nothing more than a prayer, a hope that wouldn’t come true. It only took ten minutes for the pack to return, but that was enough time for me to lose my mind a hundred times. I could see the disappointment in Hunter’s face. He turned his gaze away as soon as a single word left my lips: a silent no. It was over.

  We hadn’t found Josh.

  “Let me go in,” I whispered. “I have to look.”

  Keith rolled his eyes.

  “We were just inside,” he said irritably. “There’s nothing in there. Just a dozen years of waste.”

  He kicked the tire and made me flinch.

  “We came here for nothing.”

  I just sat there and looked at him as if I couldn’t understand his language. My mind closed off from the meaning of his words. I was frozen and still waiting for the pack to resolve this joke. I hoped that they would finally bring Josh and they were just having some perfidious fun delaying it. However, despite Keith’s tone, there was something in his eyes that I had never seen before. Compassion.

  “No.” I shook my head. “You just didn’t look properly!”

  Keith looked like he really wanted to argue. Hunter spoke first, offering me his hand to help me down.

  “Come,” he said gently. “We’ll go in and have a look.”

  At that moment, I wanted to sink into his chest and cry.

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  Inside the factory, my laboriously built tower of confidence collapsed. I had spent a whole week trying to convince myself why Liam’s hunch would prove correct. No argument had been too farfetched for me to know that Josh was here. I had seriously believed I could feel him and that I had chased him all the way to Alberta. Here and now, I saw how wrong I was.

  There was nothing here. The factory consisted of a single large room, which reminded me of a production hall or warehouse, and was completely empty. Diffuse light penetrated through the broken windowpanes, making the dust dance in whirls around us. The stone floor at our feet was cracked and full of sand. We were standing in the middle of nowhere. No one here had ever researched werewolves. I even doubted that any human had set foot in this place in the last years. There must be another reason the investor had not done anything with the building. Maybe he had simply misjudged and didn’t have enough money.

  That’s it.

  My own two words seemed to darken every corner of my soul. I had arrived at the destination of my journey and yet had achieved nothing. I had put everything on the table for this factory building—my savings, my job, and my relationship with my parents. Now, I’d leave empty-handed.

  My hard-won time was used up, and Josh was farther away than ever before.

  “Red . . .” Hunter probably didn’t know what to say. He stood beside me like a huge shadow and didn’t move from the spot. It was as if he were afraid that any wrong word would kick a nervous breakdown into gear.

  I couldn’t respond to him. I couldn’t go on any longer. I just stared into the abandoned hall and tried to understand that I would have to live with this emptiness inside me from now on.

  I would never find Josh.

  “Ruby.” Hunter touched my shoulder, so I jerked and looked at him. His dark eyes were filled with worry.

  “We’ll find him,” he said encouragingly. He shook me gently, which helped me regain some semblance of consciousness. “There aren’t many places you can hide a werewolf.”

  He smiled.

  “Especially not one as angry as yours.”

  It was obvious how hard he was trying to help me. For this reason, I raised my hand and let it grip his fingers. It was for no particular reason. I just needed someone to hold on to. Hunter, understanding my gesture, remained silently by my side for another minute. Then he nudged me to leave the factory with him.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered.

  I was so upset, I didn’t even cry. Everything in me was rigid.

  When we got back to the Dodge, nobody said a word. Hunter wordlessly lifted me back into the cargo bed and jumped up after me. His good mood seemed to have died away. Even Keith hardly dared to look me in the face and only stoically fixed his gaze past the steering wheel. Liam was the only one who seemed to remain normal. He typed into his smartphone before turning around to meet my eyes.

  “I’ve just spoken to my friends.” Now I could see that his brow was furrowed a bit. “When we get home, I’ll go through everything again.”

  He was trying to give me some hope.

  “We’ll find him,” he assured, and neither Hunter nor Keith said anything to agree or disagree. They were waiting to be allowed to drive off, so I sank down and crouched behind the driver’s cabin.

  “Okay,” was my only response.

  I spent the trip in silence. Suddenly it didn’t bother me anymore that Keith was too fast and that I didn’t have a seatbelt. My mind was focused on Josh the whole time. It felt a bit like after the Jetta accident. It had taken me days to realize the extent of that evening. At that time, so many things had happened one after the other that my mind had hardly kept up. It had preferred to throw the details to me in bits and pieces. Every day I had woken up with a different memory—always with an image that I had repressed until that moment, and it was happening again today. I sat there watching the landscape, which passed us by in blurred colors. I thought over and over again about losing lost track of Josh. He wasn’t at the factory, and he had probably never even been in Alberta.

 

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