“You’re all butt hurt,” Keegan told him.
“I have to do this, man.”
“I don’t understand why.”
Liam shrugged. “I don’t understand either. I’ve dreamed about it night after night after night. It’s like there’s something up there, man. There’s something calling me. And I have to go figure out what it is. Hopefully, it’s just nothing. Hopefully, I’m just crazy. But if I’m not, if I’m not absolutely losing my mind, then there’s something up there, and I need to deal with it.”
Keegan grunted. “Sure. I can’t really argue with your logic.”
“Oh, stop it. I know it’s not logical, hence the whole I-might-be-crazy part. That has nothing to do with anything.”
“You sure you’re not part wolf?”
“Pretty much, yeah. I don’t see myself getting pregnant anytime soon.”
“Well, you know, there are the other kind. The ones who get the other wolves pregnant.” Even over the rumble of the engine, he could hear Keegan’s amusement. “Alphas, we call them.”
“Yeah, unlikely.” He actually wasn’t looking for anything like that. He just wanted to get on with his life, stop dreaming about something or someone needing him, and get back to important stuff like finding shit. That was his job. He could find anything. Someone needed some strange part of some machine that he’d never heard of? No problem. He could find that strange part. A person needed passion fruit in the middle of winter. He was on it. Lemons. Every kind of lemon. Anything known to man in the middle of winter when a pregnant dragon was craving. He was that Calhoun.
They drove up the mountain, the trail fairly well-marked, especially on the way up to Loyal’s. They didn’t stop there, although Keegan did smile widely as they passed. Rory had told him and his brothers the wolves could do this weird thing where they talked in their brain like the dragons did, so Liam just assumed that was what Keegan was doing.
It didn’t matter; he didn’t care. He just wanted to get up the mountain. The climb was fairly easy for a bit and then all of asudden, the grade turned to a stone-cold bitch, the four-wheeler grumbling. Still, it did all right until the snow started.
“You still got another couple miles to go from here,” Keegan told him. “I’ll shift and run with you, but we have to leave the four-wheeler here.”
“Fair enough. You saved me a night biking up here, so let’s do this.” He settled his backpack and went to cut a stick to walk with, because his mountain bike wouldn’t go any farther either, studiously ignoring the fact that behind him, Keegan was turning into a wolf. It was unnatural, it was weird, it creeped him out.
But that was not on Keegan. That was on him. They headed up, Keegan zipping by him. The big red wolf was fucking gorgeous. It was really unfair how cool the wolves were, and that Rory was the brother to become one.
He was just going to be a Calhoun no matter what. Just a dude on two legs singing the Eagles songs at the top of his lungs and keeping his core engaged as he walked in his hiking boots. Up the hill. Up the mountain. Oh damn, those dragons had liked their altitude.
Goddamn, that pull though, the tug inside of him, kept getting louder. Stronger. And Keegan suddenly stopped, sniffing the air, and then barked sharply.
“I don’t care what it is; I have to go see.” It would be nice if he could understand wolf, but shit, he couldn’t even speak chihuahua. The clearing where the dragons’ home had been was overgrown, kind of wildly so, for as short a time as it had been deserted.
He’d been told there was nothing there now but the outbuildings and a clearing. The house itself had supposedly been transported to the dragon realm, but Liam could see the entry to the sunken home. So he walked right up to the door of what had been the main tunnel into the dragons’ home.
He took a deep breath. With his luck, there was some kind of weird dragon-y booby trap here, and he was going to open the door and get turned into dust. Liam could handle that, because at least it would shut up the hum of this call in his head.
Feeling unaccountably anticipatory, he grabbed the door handle and heaved it open, coming face-to-face with a painfully skinny young man holding a baby in his arms.
“He did come… Alpha, I knew you would,” the guy said. And then he collapsed, just keeling over forward in a dead faint.
Liam darted forward and grabbed the baby before they hit the ground. The infant was skin and bones, but alive. Liam stood there for half a second, staring, wondering what the hell this all meant.
Then he snorted. “Hello, there. Well, shit. What do I do now?”
Chapter
Two
“We have to get him some help.”
“We do. Let’s take him to the house.”
“He’ll be safer at the pack.”
“You think he’s one of yours? Seriously? What about the little one?”
