Community…pack.
A foreign but welcome feeling fills my chest as I settle back into my seat. I realize that I’ve been a feather in the breeze, drifting, blown around, spinning. But now? Now, I think I might have found a soft spot to land.
When I raise my eyes, I find Melana Arcan staring steadily at me. Tears well in her eyes like she can see my realization written all over my face. She offers me one of her beautiful smiles, and my throat tightens with emotion. A small tear spills down her cheek, and she lifts her hand to wipe it.
Something in the way she moves, or maybe it’s the way she’s looking at me, jars me. And all at once I’m no longer sitting at a table on Alpha Morgan’s back deck. I’m standing in a dirty, dimly lit warehouse, and someone’s crying.
I look around, completely confused, and discover a group of kids who are roughhousing quietly next to me. I can’t see any of their faces, they’ve got a tight ring going, and I’m trapped outside of it, facing their backs as they all bend over a pair of turtles. What clothes they have on are tattered and filthy, not that the skinny bodies inside the worn fabric are much cleaner.
“I don’t think they want us to eat them,” a little emaciated girl declares sullenly while poking a stick at one of the shells, the body of the turtle locked safely inside.
An older boy with dirty dark hair snorts and reaches out to flick the girl on the head. She growls at him and rubs the spot he abused, leaning away to keep him from doing it again.
“Prey never want to be eaten, stupid,” the boy jeers, and several other kids his age scoff their agreement.
“There’s not enough here to feed more than one of us anyway,” a tall thin girl sighs.
“Do you think Alpha will be back soon? Think his mate will feed us?” another girl asks.
The mean dark-haired kid barks a cruel laugh. “I don’t think she’ll be alive long enough to do anything. Alpha was pissed. He’s going to do to her what he did to his den, make ’em pay for questioning him.”
A few of the littler kids whimper and tuck themselves close to one boy. He’s tall and has dark hair like the pitiless kid, but when he wraps his arms protectively around the scared ones, it’s clear the similarities between the two stop there.
I move closer to the kind boy, drawn to him in a way I can’t explain but feel on a visceral level. I want to reach out and tap him on the shoulder, force him to turn to me so I can see his face—a face, I can feel in my gut, I’ll know instantly.
“B, can you take us out hunting?” another boy asks the cruel kid, who rolls his eyes.
Before he can answer though, wails sound off from somewhere outside the metal walls of the building. I look around, the screams and cries growing louder with each passing second. A door crashes open, the boom of metal striking metal making me jump. It’s so loud that it almost drowns out the surprised cries some of the children make.
A massive man storms in, his thickly muscled arms holding a woman who’s doing everything she can to get away. His greasy hair clings to his head, and his thick brows are drawn in anger. Compared to him, the woman is tiny, clothed in little more than dirty rags. A clump of her hair is missing from her head, and a trickle of blood is visible on her neck.
“You will fucking submit,” the man bellows in her face, and she screams something unintelligible back.
“Where is she, you bastard?” the woman snarls, and the man tosses her away from him. She flies through the air, crashing against the metal wall of the warehouse, and the collision reverberates through the entire building.
“Mommy!” a tiny voice cries out, and then little feet are pattering across the concrete floor to get to the groaning woman as she tries to push herself up from the ground.
The vision blurs for a second, then suddenly I’m the one moving closer to the hurt woman, and when I look down, the tiny feet and the child’s body belong to me.
The big man roars in outrage, but I don’t pay the fury radiating off him any attention, my sole focus on getting to the woman on the ground. Her head snaps up and a familiar blue-green gaze fixes on me, a gaze I would know anywhere despite how long it’s been since I last saw it.
My mother.
Her battered face hardens with determination, and her eyes start to glow. Black veins crawl up her neck, and a tear spills down her cheek. She opens her mouth, and with every ounce of strength she has left, she screams, “RUN!”
I slide to a stop as a brown wolf rips free from her body just in time to intercept the colossal gray wolf that starts viciously attacking her.
I scream as I watch them tear each other apart, the sound of my fear and pain ricocheting all around me until I snap out of the memory as brutally as I was sucked into it.
I gasp, alarm and terror spilling out of me as I slam my hands to my chest and breathe through the fear. I blink, and I’m back sitting at a table with the alpha and luna, the guys, and their family—only now they’re all staring at me with concern.
Ellery, Gannon, Ruger, and Perth are instantly crouched around me, guarding and protecting me. If only they could shield me from this.
I don’t even know what to think.
“What happened?” Ellery presses, threading his fingers through my hair and pulling my focus to him. “Breathe, baby, just breathe,” he encourages as I pant through my shock and outrage.
Our gazes connect and I swallow past the lump of astonishment in my throat. “My mom was a wolf,” I rasp, and emotion starts to sting my eyes. “So was my dad,” I whimper, and I feel Ruger, Perth, and Gannon put their hands on and around me as though they’re trying to lend me their strength. “I saw him attack her. She must have gotten away somehow and took me and ran. I think she was hiding me…from him.”
26
NOAH
It’s colder in Howling Rapids than it has been since the day I stumbled into this unexpectedly deceptive eerie town. The slice of sky I can see between the blazing red maples is the muted gray that signals an impending snow storm. As if that hailstorm a few days ago wasn’t enough bad weather. Everything around me feels as though it’s holding its breath in anticipation of the first flakes. The air is crisp with a slight bite to it that feels good against my anxious, heated skin.
I’m about to shift into a wolf for the first time.
I bring my arms up and hug them to myself for a moment, though the puffy jacket I’m wearing kinda impedes my ability to self-soothe. Not that there’s really any possibility of tamping down on the anxiety churning my breakfast into a bad idea right now. I feel like I’m dangling over a boiling ocean, about to be dropped into the bubbling sea without so much as a life preserver.
Today I’m going to meet my wolf.