“In your dreams, Broadway boy.” Shaking out her long blonde hair—a motion laden with excess adrenaline—Lake stood and stretched her mile-long legs. If the girls in school were all secretly pining for Devon, the boys were absolutely smitten with Lake. Clearly, they’d never met the business end of her shotgun or had their butts whipped at pool.
Soon. Soon. Soon.
Across the table, Maddy sighed, and Devon bumped her shoulder with his, a comforting gesture meant to communicate that he understood. Soon, our entire pack would be gathered in the woods. Soon, the Weres would Shift and I would let their power flow through me, until I forgot I was human and the difference between four legs and two virtually disappeared.
Soon—but not soon enough.
“So,” I said, my voice low and soothing, intent on keeping my pack-mates focused, however briefly, on the here and now. “Hamlet. What do I need to know?”
“New girl.”
I balked at Lake’s answer. “I was thinking more along the lines of Guildencrantz and Frankenstein.”
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” Devon corrected absentmindedly as he followed Lake’s gaze to the double archway at the front of the cafeteria. I turned to look, too, and the rest of the student body took their cue from us, until everyone was eyeballing the girl who stood there.
She was small—the word tiny wouldn’t have been a misnomer—and her eyes seemed to take up a disproportionate amount of her face. Her skin was very pale, and she was dressed almost entirely in black, save for a pair of white leather gloves that covered her arms from the elbows down.
She looked like a porcelain doll, and she felt like a threat. Given that I could tell, even from a distance, that she wasn’t a Were, I had no idea why something inside me insisted I track her every move.
“The natives are getting kind of restless,” Devon commented offhand. Weston wasn’t a big school, and mid-semester transfers were practically unheard of, so White Leather Gloves was garnering more than her fair share of murmurs and stares.
Including mine.
“Mayhaps I should go play the white knight, divert the spotlight a little?”
Devon’s suggestion was enough to make me switch my gaze from the new girl to him.
“No.”
I wasn’t sure who was more shocked by the sharpness with which that word exited my mouth—Devon or me. Our pack didn’t do orders. Given the way I felt about people getting dictatorial with me, I wasn’t prone to pulling rank on anyone else. Besides, Devon and I had spent so much time together growing up that even if he hadn’t been my second-in-command, I still wouldn’t have been able to force my will on him. The closest I could come to ordering him to do anything was threatening to decapitate him if he didn’t stop singing The Best of ABBA at the top of his lungs, and even that was mostly futile.
With a lightly inquisitive noise, Devon caught my gaze and held it. “Something you’d like to share with the class there, Bryn?” he asked, arching one eyebrow to ridiculous heights while keeping the other perfectly in place.
I debated answering, but it was probably nothing—just that time of the month, with emotions running high and my heart beating with the power of the impending full moon. Still, I hadn’t spent my entire life growing up around people capable of snapping my neck like a Popsicle stick without learning to pay attention when my instincts put me on high alert.
If my gut said someone was a threat, I had to at least consider the possibility that it was true—even if the someone in question was five foot nothing and human down to the tips of her leather-clad fingers.
Instead of mentioning any of this to Devon and opening that can of worms, I threw another French fry in his general direction, and the tension between us melted away as he reached for his plate and armed himself. “You know, of course,” he said, pitching his voice low, “that this means war.”
I couldn’t help glancing back toward the archway and the new girl who’d been standing there a moment before, but she was already gone.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
Protect. Protect. Protect.
I let the feeling wash over me, absorbed it, and then relegated it to the back of my head, with the promise of soon, soon, soon and the desire to run. At the moment, I had more immediate concerns—like my retention of Hamlet definitely leaving something to be desired and the incoming French fry flying directly at my face.
That night, I was the first one to arrive at the clearing. We hadn’t had a fresh snowfall since the second week in November, but this time of year, the layer of white on the ground never fully melted away, and I breathed in the smell of cedar and snow. I was wearing wool mittens and my second-heaviest winter coat, and for a moment, I closed my eyes and imagined, as I always did just before the Shift, what it would be like to shed my clothes, my skin, and my ability to think as a human.