I pushed myself harder. My muscles complained, some even snapped only to rapidly heal. I would pay for that over the next few days, but none of that mattered as long as Giselle was safe. I didn’t even care if anybody saw my giant wolf running through alleys, across yards, and even main roads. I was sure there would be news stories and perhaps even a lot of memes about a possible escape from the zoo or a wild animal on the loose, but that was for human Ben to worry about in the morning. At the moment, all that mattered was getting to Giselle.
Until I got to the highway.
I wondered if I should run right up the overpass. But as much as my wolf screamed that we had to take the most direct path possible, what seemed like a short path sometimes ended up takingmoretime.
I could run along the shoulder, but there were still quite a few risks to that: being hit by a semi-truck, causing accidents with other vehicles, or being overwhelmed by the fumes from so many vehicles. Already, the stench of gasoline, diesel, andrubber across the ground was enough to make it quite difficult to keep a hold of the scent I was tracking. If it weren’t for the fact that it was a scent I’d grown up with, a scent that had been burned so deep into my senses that it followed me occasionally into nightmares, I would have lost it entirely.
With a great deal of effort, I overrode my instincts and darted to the side, cutting into the narrow strip of trees that lined the busy highway.
It wasn’t a straight shot, but at least I had more cover as I progressed from the edge of the city through the suburbs to the more wooded lands beyond. We were still a ways out from my pack’s ancestral lands, but I was familiar with the area. Although we’d been careful not to travel too much on other shifters’ territory, there was a space between ours and the city that belonged to no one—too close to the humans, too densely populated for any of us to feel comfortable claiming it as ours.
Would the scent lead me back there? At any other time, that thought might have given me pause, but I couldn’t afford to slow my pace. As I raced ahead, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly where I was rushing to. After all, if the scent was from my past, why wouldn’t it lead me back to the place I had once been so proud of and fiercely protective of? I had sold all of it but our burial grounds, because I couldn’t live there with the echoes of everything I had once held dear.
Focus. Run. The only thing you have to do is run. No thinking.
Right. I was on a mission. Everything else could wait, even the trauma and panic that battled to take center stage of my thoughts.
I didn’t know when the transition happened, but the pheromone trail I was following was no longer the ghost of an echo. It was stronger, tinged with the acrid brimstone of purehatred. If it was indeed who I thought it was, well, that made sense, didn’t it?
All of this had to be a sign that going on a date had been wrong. That I shouldn’t be moving on. I was an alpha, and surely my punishment for failing my pack was to live my life in service to my children, but remain alone otherwise. I didn’tdeservecommunity. Or maybe, somehow, I was still locked in a night terror and I’d never really escaped. Honestly, I would be fine with that, because it would mean Giselle was okay and not involved in the awful mess that was my life.
Let’s hope it’s that one.
Nose burning, muscles screaming, and my body using all the speed it could possibly muster, I finally picked up on another scent.
Giselle.
But that wasn’t all. There was a strange sound. At first, I didn’t know what it was. It was so rapid and uneven that it sounded like someone shaking a bunch of heavy rocks around in an empty box. But then I recognized it as Giselle’s heartbeat.
That couldnotbe good.
Although I hadn’t exactly been buddy-buddy with humans for most of my life, I had interacted with them enough to have a general idea of what their heartbeat was supposed to sound like. I was familiar with how they were at rest, how they were when they worked a labor-intensive job—so many of the gigs I worked to keep myself occupied were just that—how they accelerated when they lied, when they were attracted to someone, when they were high, even when they were drunk. But I had never, and I truly meantnever,heard a heartbeat that rapid and violent before.
And Giselle was so slight, too. It was hard not to imagine her heart trying to break through her ribcage. God, I had reallyfucked up, hadn’t I? Surely, no one could survive something like that for long, and Giselle wasn’t in the best of health.
She just had to hold on a little longer. Just another minute, then I would spend the rest of my life making it up to her.
Not that she’d ever want to see me again.
It didn’t even cross my mind that I was about to expose the existence of our species to her. I could now hear two heartbeats, and the smell of the beta that had betrayed me filled the air.
After what felt like an eternity, I burst through the trees and was greeted by none other than the wolf form of one Charles French, the man who had led the attack that wiped out my pack.
I snarled, but that word wasn’t enough to describe the sound I made. It was wild. It was full of so much pain and rage that it physically hurt. It was vengeance that I thought I had already wrought.
“You!” was all I managed to get out in shifter-speak, the way many of our kind communicated in animal form. It wasn’t always language, often consisting of more abstract ideas and flashes of images, but I knew without a doubt that any wolf within a two-mile radius heard the exclamation.
“Benjamin Poynter!” the other wolf howled back, and it was like someone had dunked a bucket of ice water over my head.
Because that wasn’t the voice of my beta.
Charles and I had grown up together, hit puberty together. He’d helped me through my alpha training, and I’d connected him with the girl I had thought would be his mate—she’d ended up running off with a different guy to another state. We’d been through thick and thin since he showed up on our lands when he was six years old, his hand clutched in his mother’s, who had been bruised from head to toe. What she had to endure to look like that after even a day of travel had told our alpha all he needed to know, and they were adopted into our pack with open arms.
Charles had killed her, too, along with my wife. Her body had been outside my house under a shattered door. She’d tried to show her love to our pack to the very end, even against her own son.
I could never forgive him for that.
And yet, the wolf standing in front of me was not Charles.
