I needed to be Pack.
On some level, I knew that this was the hardest thing, the worst thing about letting them in—I had no guarantee that I’d ever be able to get rid of them, because I had no guarantee that I would ever want to. The life I’d been living was no less than sensory deprivation.
Callum’s hand was on my neck again, and I leaned into it.
Safety. Warmth. Alpha, my pack-sense told me.
Callum. Here. Mine. And then, one by one, the others came forward, placing a hand on me, touching me softly. It should have been creepy. I should have been giving lectures about my bubble and the fact that I despised having anyone stand inside it, but I wasn’t.
Instead, all I could think was that for the first time in forever, Callum wasn’t the only person who felt safe. He wasn’t the only one I could trust to protect me, to save me, to let me be me, even when it caused him no small amount of strife.
This was my family. Even the ones I didn’t like, even the ones who’d wanted me dead for as long as they’d known me—they were mine the same way Katie and Alex were. We were part of each other, and even if there was no love between us, there was something.
Pack.
I felt the change before I saw it—electrifying on my skin’s surface, but world-changing inside of it. I could feel myself changing—not into a wolf but into the person I was in the pack. A daughter. A sister. A force of nature.
Their strength flowed through me. I couldn’t force my human limbs to harness the power of their wolves, but I felt it, and for the first time in forever, it didn’t scare me.
Callum arched his back, and with that single motion, his human form melted away, the transition from man to wolf as seamless as water going from a cup to a puddle on the floor. His fur was gray and tawny-tipped, and he stretched once, pushing his front paws into the ground and raising his tail, before straightening to his full height.
As a man, Callum was built more like a cowboy than a linebacker, threatening only if you knew how much power lay under his skin, but in animal form, his weight rearranged itself into something that took your breath away. No one, under any circumstances, would have mistaken Callum for a natural wolf. He was enormous, and with a wolfy smile on his face, he looked directly at me.
“Arrroooooooooo!”
That sound—which I classified as halfway in between a howl and a Justin Timberlake solo—had me whirling around. Devon! He was larger than a normal Were, nearly Callum’s size and not even full-grown. There was a Herculean grace to his movements, a lightness to his four-legged step.
My Devon.
He jumped up and knocked me gently over, and a second later, the two of us were rolling around on the ground, the way we had when we were still really little. He took care with his claws and teeth, and I dug my fingers into his belly, tickling and scratching, and when he buried his nose in my hair and woofed slightly, breathing in and out next to my ear, I smiled.
And then Kaitlin was there, barreling toward me at full speed. She dodged through the older wolves, and they carefully stepped aside, each and every gaze on her, their heads tilting to the sides with wolfish reverence.
Kaitlin dove headfirst into our wrestling match, and I wrapped my arms around her, lifting her puppy body up into the air and then bringing her down and rubbing my nose into her fur. She lapped at my face, and her tail beat viciously back and forth, so fast that her entire body was vibrating.
Girl! She seemed to say. Sister! Pack! Bryn!
The combination of these things seemed to be more than she could bear, and I let her prance up and down my body, until she lost her balance and rolled head-over-tail to the ground. The other wolves went deadly still beside me, but Katie bounced straight back up and with a dignified yip, brought Alexander down upon me as well. Struggling to keep up with his sister, he bounded over and immediately latched his teeth onto my pants leg and started tugging.
Katie was a wrestler, but Alex—I knew instinctively—wanted to run.
I wanted to run.
But I couldn’t. Not yet. Alpha. Alpha. Alpha, my pack-sense was telling me, and in unison, Katie, Alex, Dev, and I turned to Callum, who threw back his head and howled, a long, joyous noise that the others echoed.
That I echoed in my high, clear human voice.
And then we ran. Furry bodies all around me, bumping into me, weaving in and out of my legs, and I just jumped over them. I cried out to them. I sang and screamed and tried to outrun them, and even though I stood about as good a chance as one of the babies, they let me. Gray and gold and brown and white and black and every shade in between: the pack was a blur of colors, and even though I couldn’t help but pick up on their awareness of my pale, patchy, furless skin, it didn’t matter. Not to me and not to them.