Joe didn’t say anything.
“He text you back?”
“How did you—”
“You stare at that phone enough.”
“Oh. Um. Yeah. He did.”
“Everything all right?”
He laughed. It was a hollow sound. “No, Gordo. Everything is not all right. But nothing has come back to Green Creek.”
If I were a better man, I would have said something comforting. Instead I said, “That’s what the wards are for.”
“Gordo?”
“What.”
“Why did you—why are you here?”
“You told me.”
“I asked you.”
For fuck’s sake. “Go to sleep, Joe. We have an early start.”
He sniffled quietly.
I closed my eyes.
I DIDN’T know them. Not as well as I should have. For the longest time I didn’t care. I wanted nothing to do with packs and wolves and Alphas or magic. When Ox had let spill that the Bennetts were back in Green Creek, my first thought was Mark and Mark and Mark, but I pushed it away because that was the past and I wouldn’t have any of it.
The second thought was that I needed to keep Oxnard Matheson far away from the wolves.
It didn’t work.
Before I could stop it, he was already too far gone.
I kept them at arm’s length. Even when Thomas came to me because of Joe. Even when he stood in front of me and begged, even when his eyes flashed red and he threatened, I didn’t allow myself to know them, not as they were now. Thomas still had the same aura of power around him he always had, but it was more intense. More focused. It hadn’t been this strong, even when he’d first become the Alpha. I wondered if he’d had another witch at some point. I was shocked at the burn of jealousy at the thought, and hated myself for feeling that way.
I agreed to help him, to help Joe, only because I wouldn’t let Ox get hurt. If Joe hadn’t been able to control his shift after everything he’d been through, if he’d been slowly turning feral, it’d mean Ox was in danger.
That was the only reason.
It had nothing to do with a sense of responsibility. I owed them nothing.
It had nothing to do with Mark. He had made his choice. I’d made mine.
He’d chosen his pack over me. I’d chosen to wash my hands of them all.
But none of that mattered. Not anymore.
I was forced to know them, whether I wanted to or not. I’d lost my mind when I’d agreed to follow Joe and his brothers.
Kelly was the quiet one, always watching. He wasn’t as big as Carter and probably never would be. Not like Joe, who I thought was going to grow and grow and grow. It was rare, but when Kelly smiled, it was small and quiet with a bare hint of teeth. He was smarter than the rest of us combined, always calculating, taking things in and processing them before the rest of us could. His wolf was gray, with splotches of black and white on his face and shoulders.
Carter was all brute force, less talk, more action. He snapped and snarked, bitching about anything and everything. When he wasn’t driving, he’d kick up his boots on the dash, sinking down low in his seat, the collar of his jacket flipped up around his neck and brushing against his ears. He weaponized his words, using them to inflict as much pain as possible. But he also used them as a distraction, deflecting as best he could. He wanted to be seen as cool and aloof, but he was too young and inexperienced to make it work. His wolf resembled his brother’s, dark gray, but with black and white on his hind legs.
Joe was… a seventeen-year-old Alpha. It didn’t make for the best combination. That much power after that much trauma and being so young wasn’t something I wished on anyone. I understood him more than the others, only because I knew what he was going through. Maybe not the same—magic and lycanthropy weren’t even in the same ballpark—but there was a kinship that I tried desperately to ignore. His wolf was white as snow.
They moved together, Carter and Kelly circling around Joe whether or not they realized it. They deferred to him, mostly, even as they gave him shit. He was their Alpha, and they needed him.
They were all so different, these lost boys.
But they did have one thing in common.
All three were assholes who didn’t know when to shut the fuck up. And I was stuck with them.
“—and I don’t know why you think we should keep doing this,” Carter said one night a few weeks after we’d left. We were in Cut Bank, Montana, a little town in the middle of nowhere, not far from the Canadian border. There was a small pack near Glacier National Park that we were heading toward. A wolf we’d stumbled upon in Lewiston told us they’d recently dealt with Omegas. The wolf had trembled under Joe’s Alpha eyes, fear and reverence battling all over his face. We’d stopped for the night, and Carter had immediately started in.
“Give it a rest,” Kelly said tiredly, frowning as he tried to find a TV channel that wasn’t hard-core porn from the eighties.
Carter snarled at him wordlessly.
Joe stared at the wall.
I flexed my hands and waited.
Carter said, “What happens when we get to this pack? Have any of you thought this through? They’ll tell us Omegas were there, but what the fuck else?” He glared at Joe. “You think they’ll know where that bastard Richard is? They won’t. No one does. He’s a ghost and he’s haunting us. We’re—”
“He’s the Alpha,” Kelly said, eyes flashing. “If he thinks this is what we’re supposed to do, then we’re going to do it.”
Carter laughed bitterly as he started pacing the length of the shitty hotel room. “Good little soldier. Always falling in line. You did it with Dad, and now you’re doing it with Joe. What the fuck do either of you know? Dad is dead and Joe’s a kid. Just because he was a goddamn little prince doesn’t give him the right to take us away from—”
“That’s not fair,” Kelly said. “Just because you’re jealous that you weren’t going to be the Alpha doesn’t mean you get to take it out on the rest of us.”
“Jealous? You think I’m jealous? Fuck you, Kelly. What the hell do you know? I was the firstborn. Joe was Daddy’s little boy. And who the fuck were you? What do you have to offer?”
Carter knew where to cut. He knew what would make Kelly bleed. What would get a reaction. Before I could move, Kelly launched himself at his brother, claws extended, eyes orange and bright.
Carter met his brother with fangs and fire, teeth sharpened and hair sprouting along his face as he melted into his half shift. Kelly was fast and scrappy, landing crouched on his feet after his brother backhanded him across the face. I stood, feeling the flutter of a raven’s wings, needing to do something before the goddamn cops were called and—
“Enough.”
A burst of red hit me in the chest. It said stop and now and alpha i am the alpha, and I stumbled at the force of it. Carter and Kelly went stock-still, eyes wide, little whimpers crawling from their throats, wounded and raw.
Joe stood near the bed. His eyes were as furious red as Thomas’s had ever been. He hadn’t shifted, but it looked like it was a close thing. His mouth was twisted, hands in fists at his sides. I saw a trickle of blood dripping onto the dirty carpet. He must have popped claws and was digging them into his palm.