Blood. Blood-blood-blood-blood—
I stopped myself from thinking about it and helped Devon to do the same by jabbing his left side with my index finger. If we’d been alone, I might have butted him gently with my head, but this was high school, and the good people of Ark Valley had enough reasons to think that those of us who lived in the woods were just a little bit off.
“Ten-to-one odds Callum has either Sora or Lance on Bryn-duty tonight,” I said, changing the subject with an unspoken apology for bringing up the previous one at all. “You Macalisters seem to be Team Bryn favorites at the moment.”
Devon’s lips settled into an easy, practiced smirk, and the nearly imperceptible tension in his neck and shoulder muscles receded. “If there’s any justice in this world, watching you should convince them how lucky they’ve been to be blessed with a son such as myself.”
“He says with patented Smirk Number Three.”
Devon shook his head and made a sound somewhere in the neighborhood of tsk-tsk. “You’re getting rusty, Bronwyn.
That was clearly Smirk Number Two: sardonic with a side of wit.”
I breathed an internal sigh of relief that Devon was fully himself again. All Weres felt the tug between their human sides and their wolves, but Dev fought it more than most. He danced to his own drummer and dared the world to tell him that a purebred Were should have better things to worry about than what he was wearing. All things considered, Devon was almost as much of a rarity as I was. The only difference was, his particular oddity—being the son of a female werewolf rather than that of a male Were’s human mate—gave him the advantage over other werewolves, while mine meant that I’d always be the slow one. The weak one. The one who needed protection from pack secrets that came out after dark.
“Hey, Bronwyn?”
Until those words broke the surface of my mind, I’d been deep enough in my thoughts that I hadn’t been paying attention to the finely honed senses that would have otherwise warned me of an outsider’s approach. Was I slipping, or what? It was one thing to let a werewolf get a drop on you, but a normal teenage boy? That was just embarrassing.
“Yes?” I hadn’t expected to see Jeff (of motorcycle fame) in anything resembling a social setting for at least a semester.
He’d been avoiding me since the moment I’d hopped off his bike, and like a chameleon, I’d faded into the background, keeping my distance from his human friends the way I had before my little joyride. As I turned to face him, I caught a whiff of a second scent—Juicy Fruit and plastic—and realized that he wasn’t alone.
There was a girl with him, and she was smiling.
Two of my classmates, approaching me of their own free will? I glanced at Devon and raised an eyebrow, but his gaze was fastened on Human 1 and Human 2. They didn’t even seem to realize they were being watched, and they certainly didn’t feel me stiffen as Devon took a step closer to me.
Gently, I put a hand on Devon’s chest and pushed him back. I’d told Callum I had no interest in provoking interspecies aggression, and I’d meant it. Previous grand-theft-auto attempts aside, my instinct to keep my head down and not draw attention to the pack was almost as well defined as the three parallel scars under the band of my jeans.
“You dropped this.” Jeff held out a pen that I’d been using to take notes (or rather, pointedly not take notes) before the bell rang. But as I reached for it, he twirled it twice and tucked it into the jean pocket of the girl standing next to him. “I think I’ll keep it as payment due for that little klepto moment of yours with my bike.”
The girl standing next to him had a name, and I knew it, but I didn’t bother thinking it. She was a typical Ark Valley girl, a little too quiet, a little too sweet, with metaphorical claws lurking just under the surface.
“Jeff!” the girl said. “You’re horrible. I’m sorry, Bronwyn.”
But she didn’t take the pen out of her pocket. Instead, she wrapped an arm around Jeff. I wasn’t exactly an expert on human-courting behavior, but I sensed the ceremony of the moment. He’d given her my pen. She’d giggled. In another few seconds, they’d both walk away and never give me a second look.
Compared to the werewolf version of courting—he bites her, she bites him, his connection to the pack spills over onto her for all eternity—the whole thing seemed artificial and insignificant.
And yet, for a fraction of a second, I froze.
Sorry, Bronwyn.
I was human. They were human. Whatever games they were playing should have been my games, but my talents currently tended more toward flushing out an alpha who swept into my life just long enough to issue orders and disappear for weeks on end, busy with pack business more important than little old me.