Trial by fire(8)

Carved from dark cherry wood, it bore the mark of Callum’s craftsmanship: smooth, even strokes of a carving knife he’d carried in his pocket for as long as I could remember. As an artist, I favored materials lifted from the recycling bin or stolen off bulletin boards around town. Callum carved wood, and apparently, he’d carved this piece for me.

I turned the box upside down, and the horse, no bigger across than the width of my hand, fell out into my palm. There was no note, no explanation—just a little wooden horse that, for whatever reason, Callum had sent to me.

A year earlier, I might have rolled my eyes at the gesture and been secretly pleased that he’d thought to give me anything at all.

Now I was suspicious. Highly suspicious.

What are you playing at, Callum?

There was a part of me that expected a response to my silent question, even though my pack-sense no longer extended to Callum or any of the other members of the Stone River Pack. They were Stone River, I was Cedar Ridge, and we might as well all have been human when it came to feeling each other’s thoughts.

Seriously, Callum. A miniature horse?

I knew this wasn’t just a gift, the same way I knew that Casey was here as much for Ali as for the twins. Werewolves were creatures of habit, and if there was one thing I’d learned about Callum in a lifetime of growing up in his pack, it was that he never did anything without purpose.

Easy there, Bryn-girl. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.

It was easy to imagine Callum saying those words, just like it was easy to imagine him whittling, the knife moving in a blur of motion, wood dust gathering on the backs of his fingers as they moved.

“So,” I said out loud, turning the horse over in my hands, “the only question is why.”

The horse was not very forthcoming with answers, so I tucked it into the front pocket of my jeans, annoyingly sure that someday this little gift of Callum’s would make perfect, crystalline sense and that I’d probably kick myself for not seeing the why sooner. Until then, I’d just have to be patient.

I hated being patient.

In search of a distraction, I went to look for Chase and found him sitting at the edge of the woods, almost out of sight from the restaurant and small cabins that dotted the rest of the Mitchells’ land.

“You out here alone?” I asked Chase. “Don’t tell me Lake and Devon have scared you off already.”

I was only half joking. Lake had a fondness for weaponry and a habit of treating firearms like they were pets. If you weren’t used to it, it could be downright disturbing.

“I haven’t seen Lake,” Chase replied. “And Devon’s fine.”

Of all the words I’d heard used to describe Devon Macalister, fine wasn’t a particularly common one. People either loved Dev or hated him; there wasn’t much in between.

“Was it the kids, then? Ali swears Lily’s worse at three than she was at two.”

Chase smiled and shook his head. “I just needed a minute,” he said. “Quiet.”

It took me a moment to realize that Chase wasn’t talking about the kind of quiet you heard with your ears. The rest of the pack couldn’t sense one another as strongly as I could sense them, being alpha—but I remembered what it was like to have the whisper of a pack constantly pulling at the edges of your mind. For Chase, who spent so much of his time at the edges of our territory, the noise level here was probably deafening.

“Quiet, huh?” I said, trying to remember what that was like.

Chase reached up to take my hand and nodded, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the surface of my palm. Without meaning to, I saw a flash of his thoughts, saw that he could have shielded his mind against the others but had chosen not to, because that would have meant closing me out, too.

I settled down on the ground next to him, matching his silence with my own. With Devon and Lake and even Maddy, I was always talking, joking, arguing, laughing, but with Chase, I didn’t have to say anything, didn’t even have to think it.

Given everything I had to think about—Callum’s cryptic gift, Casey’s arrival, the feeling that my dream the night before hadn’t been just a dream—there was something calming about sitting there, just the two of us.

Right up until it wasn’t.

For someone with the size and build of an NFL linebacker, Devon was impressively light-footed, and he appeared above us without any forewarning, oblivious to—or possibly ignoring—the implication that if he’d arrived a few minutes later, he might have interrupted something else.

“Who’s ready for some food?” he asked, all smiles. “Dare I hope Ali is making her scrumptious cranberry sauce of awesomeness?”