Personally, I wished Alpha Dearest had required their presence tonight. Next to Devon, I had only one friend in our pack.
Her name was Lake, she was my age, and she and her dad had spent summers in Ark Valley when the two of us were younger. Lake was one of our pack’s only female werewolves and the most outspoken person I’d ever met. I couldn’t help wishing that she and her dad had driven in from the edge of our territory for tonight’s meeting. Purebred werewolf or not, Dev wasn’t quite enough to counterbalance the members of our furry family who didn’t exactly have warm, fuzzy feelings for the human girl standing in our midst.
“There’s no shame in turning tail and getting the Helen Hunt out of here,” Devon told me. “In fact, I would quite recommend it.”
Devon being Devon should have calmed my nerves, but I couldn’t manage so much as a smile. From the other side of the crowd, Callum began making his way toward me, and I could feel the sand slipping through the hourglass, each grain a punch to my stomach and a reminder that my time was running out.
Without a word, Callum placed his hand on the back of my neck, and though it was meant as a calming gesture, physical contact with the alpha had the hairs on my arms doing the wave, one after another.
To a normal girl, the energy in this place would have felt like an excess of adrenaline—something similar to the air in a locker room before a big game, or a math class in the moments leading up to an exam. But I knew better. This wasn’t adrenaline. This was preternatural. It was ungodly.
It was pure, undiluted animalistic energy, and the moment I opened the bond to the pack and joined their group mindset, it wouldn’t be an alien feeling on my skin, static in my arm hairs.
It would be inside of me, and I would be as lost to it as they were.
Callum’s grip on the back of my neck tightened just a bit, and I wondered if my face had given my thoughts away so clearly. In another few minutes, they’d be clear enough to everyone, not in words, but in feel, as the bond let my emotions bleed onto them and into theirs.
Soon, Callum and I were standing at the center of the Crescent, Weres all around us. Sora, Casey, and Lance were the closest to me, with Marcus near the back, probably at Callum’s orders. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“Hello, brothers.”
If Sora objected to the fact that Callum’s greeting wasn’t gender neutral, she didn’t show it. I, for one, was feeling a little disenfranchised—not to mention outnumbered. There were easily a hundred of us in this clearing, and sleek, self-possessed Sora and I were the only females.
I was the only human.
One werewolf was dangerous. An entire pack was an immovable force, an unbeatable army.
I was outnumbered, unarmed, weak, and screwed. In that order.
“Hello.” The pack murmured the word back to Callum in unison, but I could barely parse the syllables into their meaning.
There was a sort of melody to them, an inhuman, musical tone that made it sound more like a hum of energy than any kind of salutation.
“One in our number has requested our counsel,” Callum said. “Bronwyn, daughter of Ali, our ears are yours.”
Though he followed protocol to a T, his words were unlike any that this circle had heard before. First there was the fact that I was a daughter, and the fact that my familial allegiance was given by my mother’s name, and then there was the fact that everyone here knew that Ali hadn’t given birth to me, that I was an orphan.
That I hadn’t always been one of them.
The familiar sound of a spit bubble popping had me looking over my left shoulder, toward Callum’s guard, and sure enough, I noticed that Casey wasn’t the only member of my household here. The twins were present and accounted for: two babies among scores of men, a burly Were who I recognized as one of Casey’s coworkers gently cradling one in each arm.
Well, at least I wasn’t completely on my own. Though after a moment’s reflection, I wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not. My allies in this circle consisted of a fashion-conscious teenage boy who believed in the holy power of the movie musical and two infants wearing shirts with little yellow and blue duckies on them.
An army, we were not.
Bryn. I felt a brush at the edge of my subconscious—not a word, but a gentle reminder—pushing against my hard-won psychic shields.
Right. Their ears were mine. I was supposed to be talking.
“I, Bronwyn, daughter of Ali, request the pack’s permission to speak with Chase, the Survivor.”
Since Chase didn’t have familial ties, the title seemed apt, and I thought I saw a fleck of understanding in Callum’s gaze, something that told me that he might have understood more than I’d given him credit for about my fascination with a boy who could kill me as easily as tell me the truth.