I didn’t get the chance to argue because his head snapped down toward the tree line so fast the hairs on my arms lifted. I felt his wolf rise within him. Diesel stared down at the Hollow, his eyes narrowed and his shoulders tight.
“What is it?” I whispered. “Diesel?”
Diesel inhaled. Slow. Deliberate. Sniffing the air. If anything, the tension in his shoulders got tighter. He seemed…uneasy.
“Diesel?” I heard the edge of panic in my voice. “Talk to me.” We weren’t ready for an attack. I got ready to shift.
Diesel exhaled loudly. “Not ours,” he muttered.
Not Hollow. Not Stonefang.
“Pack Council?” I asked.
He shook his head.
Something else? What? My stomach knotted. “Where?”
“Everywhere,” he said, voice low. “Which is wrong. Things don’t smell everywhere unless they’re power. Or”—his jaw clenched—“or old.”
Old. My wolf pressed hard against my skin. The druid’s voice slipped through my mind uninvited,the Hollow remembers.
“What does that mean, Diesel?” I asked him quietly.
He was still staring down at the Hollow. “Ancient answers to what is ancient.”
I swallowed. “Ancient? The land?” I recalled my conversation with Wolfe this morning when Killian hadunashamedly woken me, with a pissed off look as he handed me a cell phone. Wolfe had called Killian to tell him he needed to stay at Stonefang one, maybe two days more. He’d called Killian because I’d forgotten the black phone they’d given me needed to be charged.
It was charging now, and I would have to get used to the fact that my husband would be away from me at times as he spent time with his other pack. Not other,our. It would take time to get used to thinking of it as one pack. But I would.
If we survived what was coming.
“Is it the same thing that Wolfe sensed, do you think?”
Diesel’s eyes whipped to mine. “He felt something?”
Shit. Did he not know? “Um, maybe. Diesel?—”
“No. No, no, no.” He stalked toward me, wagging his finger back and forth as if I’d foolishly summoned a demon with a scented candle. “You can’t drop that like it’s casual conversation. ‘Is it the same thing that Wolfe sensed, do you think?’ is not a sentence we gloss over. What did he feel? When? Why am I only just hearing about this now?—”
I grabbed his arm. “Diesel.”
He froze.
I lowered my voice even though we were both at the top-ish end of a mountain. “Because I didn’t want to scare the pack until I knew what it was. And because the druid said?—”
“Oh, this is getting worse by the second,” he muttered.
I ignored him. “Because the druid said the Hollow isn’t quiet anymore. It’s reacting. And that means something is coming. You feel it too. So is it that? Or is it something else?”
Diesel stared at me. Not angry. Not sarcastic. Heglanced at my waist, quick enough that anyone else would have missed it, but I wasn’t anyone else. He looked worried. Deeply, painfully worried.
“What do you feel?” he asked, voice softer now. “What is the land saying to you?”
“It doesn’t say anything,” I breathed. “It’s just…there.”
His expression tightened. “It is, but does it feel…content? Or?—”
“It feels anticipatory.”
