I opened my mouth to tease her, but she gave me a look, and I decided it had been a long hard night for all of us.
I must have drifted off before we got back to the Crossroads. I dreamed I was a ghost, a wolf, running free in a summer forest, looking for a path, a way through the trees. I dreamed I was looking for my family, looking for a way home.
I woke to Lu’s fingers skating down my cheek. “We’re here.”
Lorde rested her fuzzy head down on my stomach again and sneezed on me.
Lu rubbed the dog’s head. “Come on, Lorde, let’s get all of us inside and wash the dust off. Brogan?”
“I’m awake,” I said, though I was still reaching for the dream. There was something important there, something I needed to remember.
The bathing took some time. Hunters each took their turn in the showers, and so did Lu and I. I offered to help bathe Lorde, but Lu shooed me off to the great room where we were all supposed to gather.
The werewolves bathed outside using the hot water hose set up, most of them naked in human form and completely comfortable with that.
I rested on the love seat as the great room slowly filled with people. Abbi and Hado wandered in, then the hunters, and Lu, who sat with me in the love seat. The werewolves arrived in noisy crowds.
Ricky finally rambled into the room carrying a whiskey bottle with a strip of masking tape that read “Apple Cider” slapped over the label, and a few brushes in her other hand.
The air charged with a tingling sensation as soon as she set the items on a side table.
“Shortest way to break what’s left of the bonds, though there’ll be a bit of a sting.” Ricky opened the bottle, releasing the scent of apple cider and rosemary into the room.
She fingered a small needle out of her cuff and poked the tip of her finger.
She dipped the brush into the tipped bottle, swiped the wet bristles over the bead of blood, and rolled her hand open to reveal a tattoo of a padlock on the inside of her wrist. “You all might want to take a nice deep breath and think happy thoughts.”
Before I could catch a breath, she slashed the brush over the lock tattoo.
There was aclick, a burst of lavender light, and a pinch of pain.
Heartbeats I’d become accustomed to were gone. The voices, the emotions, the strangely comforting chaos of two wolf packs, a handful of hunters, and a single Crossroad, gone.
I exhaled like the air had been slapped out of me. Lu did the same.
A few of the wolves growled, others whined, and then they all drew toward each other, drew toward Summer and Cove, touching, arms around shoulders, hands catching hands, wolf bodies leaning against legs.
Pack. Family.
Lu rested her head on my shoulder, soft breath warm on the exposed skin of my neck.
We stayed like that for some time. Until the beat of her heart and mine were once again in rhythm, until the connection between us, which had never broken, which even death couldn’t strip away, filled the space abandoned by dozens of broken bonds.
Until we were once again, just us.
“It’s going to be okay,” Abbi said, though I didn’t know which of us she was talking to. “I’ll go make some more moon balls.”
Abbi and her panther went into the kitchen, and half a dozen wolves detached from the hug-fest to flank them like a royal guard.
“Did everyone get out?” Lu asked.
Ricky’s coloring looked off, dark circles smeared beneath her eyes. She nodded. “Which is a damn miracle. I thought I’d lost some of you fools. Haven’t seen Val, though.”
I shivered as echoes of the dream drifted through me. “He saved me,” I said. “He sacrificed himself.”
“Did he stay behind?” Ricky asked, confused. “I don’t feel his loss.” She pressed her fingers, one of which now had a bandage on it, against the TV tattoo on the side of her neck. “My connection to him isn’t broken.”
“He was badly hurt.” I braced for the next bit. “I…uh…might have let him possess me. Might have insisted on it.”
