Sandstone and fish. Cedar and sour milk. Ocean salt and sulfur.
Their scents flooded Chase’s senses, making it hard for him to concentrate on anything else.
Don’t let your lip curl up. Don’t growl. Don’t show your teeth, I told him.
He didn’t, but inside him—inside Us—his wolf was awake and ready. It wanted to take control. I wouldn’t let it.
Wolves, it argued back. Not Pack. Protect girl.
If my presence here caused Chase to lose it, I would never forgive myself, so I channeled everything I had into keeping him calm. Soothing his wolf. Guarding his mind as his story spilled in monotone from his lips.
The alphas asked questions—more detailed questions than I’d ever thought to ask. What was the length of the duration of the attack? How long had Chase lain on the pavement before Callum’s wolves had found him and brought him back?
Did he have any insight into how he’d managed to survive? How did he guard his mind from the Rabid? Did the Rabid ever take control of his physical body? Had it ever asked him to attack Callum? Could that happen?
No, Chase explained. Callum had brought him into the pack and trained him to use his pack-bond to guard against the Rabid’s psychic advances. Chase refrained from mentioning that I’d manipulated that bond, that I was the one who chased away the Rabid’s presence in his dreams now.
Finally, the questions stopped. One of the alphas, the one who smelled like sea salt, had the last word. “You’ve done well with him, Callum. You’re a strong boy, Chase, and you’ll been an even stronger man. Stone River is lucky to have you.”
That didn’t sound like a compliment. It sounded like a complaint, but I didn’t have time to process that fact, because the next instant, Chase and I were dismissed.
“You can go now,” Callum said. Chase wanted to argue. He wanted to stay. And for a moment, I wanted to let him, but the older, wiser part of me, the part that had learned about surviving in a werewolf pack from the very best, couldn’t let him.
Go.
I read the order on Callum’s face. I might have imagined that he knew, on some level, that I was there in Chase’s head, but I wasn’t imagining the compulsion behind his request that we leave.
I wasn’t imagining the promise of violence if we didn’t.
Go, I told Chase. Leave the house. Go as far away as you can and still hear.
After all, Callum hadn’t specified where we had to go.
As the door closed behind us, Chase’s body relaxed. He walked quickly, keeping one ear to the conversation in Callum’s house.
It was silent.
They wouldn’t talk as long as they could hear us. There wasn’t a single man in that house who had become an alpha by virtue of their stupidity. The alphas didn’t trust Us, and they weren’t taking any chances. I wanted to scream. Chase wanted to scream. His wolf wanted Out.
The incessant plea—Out, Out, Out—gave me an idea.
Are your senses better in wolf form? I asked Chase silently.
His response told me that he wasn’t sure of the answer. In wolf form, Chase always had trouble thinking. Trouble remembering.
Shift anyway? I asked him. I might be able to think for both of us.
Yes, the wolf inside of Chase said. Yes!
Chase shuddered. The muscles in his neck relaxed. His head rolled to the side, and then pain, white-hot and bone-shattering, enveloped his body.
I felt it. I welcomed it. And as Chase’s human form gave way, a rush of power washed over the pain, turning agony to ecstasy and back again.
Run. As a wolf, Chase wanted to run. It would have been so easy to lose myself to the same overwhelming need, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. In wolf form, Our senses were doubled, and as We padded away from Callum’s house on all fours, the alphas finally began talking. We could hear them, but they couldn’t hear Us.
Wolf didn’t want to listen. Wolf wanted to run.
No. Unlike Chase, whose conscious thoughts were scrambled and wordless post-Change, I was still me. I could still remember why We’d Shifted, and I could still make out the meaning in the words the Senate was saying, even if I could only decipher about one in every three.
“… Change … powerful.”
“… miscarriage …”
“… five in the entire country! Five!”
Five what? Five Rabids? I hoped to God that wasn’t true.
“Two in your territory, Callum.” Shay’s voice traveled better than the other alphas’. He talked more loudly, putting more power into his voice, because of all of them, he was the youngest and he had the most to prove. Wolf understood this better than I did, and I pulled my understanding of the situation from instincts that weren’t mine.