Just because I was a part of the living world didn’t mean I’d forgotten how to accept a ghost, how to allow myself to be that doorway.
The wolf leaned forward. I pulled him into me, shivering now at the strangeness of sharing my living flesh with an unliving spirit. “I got you,” I said. “I’ll carry you home.”
“Brogan!” Lu called from behind me.
Then she was there, helping me to my feet, and I was telling her I was fine, I was fine, we were fine.
We walked the dark pathway, her arm around me, pulling me up and up. We breached the surface, gulped down the shocking freshness of an open sky, and fell, gratefully, into the embrace of friends. Surrounded. Safe.
Chapter Seventeen
Ifelt the cold of the truck’s tailgate behind my thighs, remembered lying on the blanket someone had spread, Lorde curled beside me, her big fuzzy head on my stomach.
I saw the sky, dark and pricked through with clean white holes.
I heard voices, someone trying to talk Ricky into the passenger seat, someone growling softly, someone whining.
Lu was there, would always be there, settling herself so that my head was on her lap, her hands in my hair.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she kept saying, a tremble in her voice I hadn’t heard for a long time. Fear. It was fear.
And then I heard Abbi.
“I think I should close the door,” she said conversationally. “We don’t want them coming out of there. So maybe I’ll just…um…lock it.”
“Don’t you dare go toward that cavern,” Lu called, and several of the werewolves growled louder.
I could hear a commotion.
“Lu,” I said. “Love, let me… Lu, let me up.”
She pressed my shoulder and scowled, looking down at me with stars in her hair.
I smiled. “Gods, you’re beautiful.”
She shook her head. “I’m annoyed with you. You need to rest.”
“I’m—”
“If you say ‘fine’ one more time, I will poke one of your wounds.”
“—fine. Ow!”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do I need to poke another one to make my point?”
“Just, no, yes, all right. I am not fine. There? Good? Can I sit up now, which I feel perfectly capable of, and if I am incorrect on that matter, you can tell me you told me so?”
Her honey eyes glowed in the darkness, and it was all I could do not to card my fingers into her hair and kiss her.
“I want to see Abbi. Please.”
She shifted back so I could get my hands under me and lever up. My head swam, but the dizziness passed quickly.
Abbi was surrounded by werewolves. No, not just Abbi. Her Shadow was there too.
I blinked. “I’m seeing a huge black panther, right?”
Lu placed her hand on my back to steady me. “You are. That’s Hado.”
