“Cat, he was buried under the snow. There was no chance.”
She took that fact in. There had been another wolf in that avalanche. “There might’ve been a chance.”
“I’d already injured him.”
She slid away from him, shocked.
“After he attacked me! I was defending myself.”
“I’ve seen your wolf; you don’t have to defend yourself at all.”
“He was a werewolf, too, attacking me on neutral ground in the middle of a blizzard. He attacked me, Cat, and I was walking away. That’s how we got caught in an avalanche. I was walking away!”
She didn’t know what to think. She lived in a world of magic and werewolves, but until now, she used it to solve petty theft and peer into the future about what books might be popular to buy. Yes, there were spikes in the lawn, but those had always been her biggest problem, not the wolves they were supposedly defending against. She thought it was overkill, paranoid, and a huge waste of energy. But there were werewolves out there trying to kill each other.
“He wasn’t well, Cat. There are four packs in Manhattan. I’ve never been in a fight like that before.”
“What are we doing?” she whispered.
She’d barely made a sound, but he answered anyway. “I don’t know. I know there is no world in which we work. But can we solve the next problem?”
Oh yeah, her terrible, homicidal family. How did her life becomethis?
If they were to solve that problem together, she had to trust him. Could she do that? Did she have a choice?
She didn’t know about forever. Approaching his pack and calmly discussing dead wolves just highlighted for her how impossible this was, but she owed him that at least.
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
She went to turn around to head back down the mountain, but he shook his head. “That’s not the next problem.”
“What now?”
“Dinner.”
She supposed part of the reason she felt completely on edge was a lack of calories. After a long moment, she nodded once, and they walked past the rockfall. She didn’t know if she trustedhim, but that wasn’t new. He said he’d been walking away from the fight. He had to have been walking away.
He made it around the cliff, and she saw a gigantic house up on a ridge. In the dying light of the sun, it seemed to glow.
“Holy shit,” she said. “There have to be at least thirty rooms in there.”
“I didn’t actually count, but probably.”
“There aren’t thirty wolves in there, are there?”
“No. There are… I don’t know. I lost count of who got on the plane.”
“Mateo!”
How could he understand the entire history of witches and shifters? How could he walk around with a brain like that and not be able to count the people living in his house?
“They’re going to love you,” he said.
“All unspecified numbers of them?”
“They’re going to be polite to you,” he said and sounded very growly.
She did not want to fear him. She didn’t want to fear any werewolf anymore.
