“Oh my god,” Dylan said with genuine horror.
“So you’re right; I am selfish. Where the hell am I going to go?” That at least was the bone-deep truth. “I knew a long time ago that staying meant buying into their werewolf project.”
“You don’t think it’s a good idea to get rid of them?”
“No?” Cat said. She couldn’t lie. “The twins are constantly worried about the shifter wars, but I think this is going to count as a provocation.”
“They’re dangerous!”
“I know,” Cat said. That was also the truth. “Which is why I’m going to help.”
“Get yours before they get you,” Dylan said.
Cat turned back at the base of the stairs. “I genuinely hope one day in the future you feel the warmth of human kindness.”
“It’s for suckers,” Dylan said and disappeared back into the sitting room.
Cat took a huge breath and vaulted up the stairs to her room.
She didn’t waste time. She grabbed her ultralight backpack she had taken to the mountains and started packing up. She’d spent more than a month in the woods with nothing but this backpack, so it was easy to put together her essentials, but thenshe paused. It wasn’t just about essentials. Her whole life was in this room, all her photos, her memories, and her crystals.
She got out a much smaller backpack for day trips and whispered, “If I never saw any of you again, what would I miss?”
Filling that backpack took a lot longer as the clock ticked toward midnight.
20
Cat paced her tiny room, trying not to look at the walls and everything else she would leave behind. She’d filled most of the daypack with photographs, a single crystal ball, and a few keepsakes meaningless to everyone but her: a friendship bracelet each sister had made years ago, a closed pinecone from her first solo trip overnight to the woods, a pressed leaf from her first winter here, so brittle it was almost dust. It was tucked between the pages ofAnne of Green Gables,the first book the twins gave to their foster daughters, as if the story of an orphan from a hundred years ago on an island in Canada might help. She had pored over the pages, though she could barely read a word of English.
She hoisted both backpacks out her window onto the porch roof and lowered them to the ground with a rope made of her bedsheets, feeling crazy, when a voice cried, “What the?—”
Shocked and scared, she flung herself out the window after the backpacks. She hadn’t left the house via the roof since high school, but old memories had her clinging to the wainscoting as she peered over the edge to see a figure in black with a mop of red hair staring at her sheets.
“Annie?”
“Cat?”
“What are you doing?” they asked at the same time.
Then they laughed, because it was obvious. Annie had a big backpack on her shoulders and was dressed all in black, except for her neon hiking boots.
“You, um, inspired me,” Annie said.
Cat’s stomach sank. “I inspired you to do what?”
“They’re never going to change. And I already left him once because of them.”
“Left who?” she asked, but she knew. The wolf in the woods with the homemade clothes and the wild look in his eyes. “Tell me you’re not going to go live with his pack in the woods. They’re insane, Annie.”
“No. We’re getting far away. He’s meeting me at the edge of town. We’re going to camp out for a few days and see if we can get a bus down.”
“Stay safe,” Cat said when she wanted to say so much more.
“Why don’t you do the same? What are you doing here?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cat said after a long moment.
“So you’re not running away with him?”
