1
That fall, everyone was asking Lydia Vasquez the same question:
“What are you going to do?”
It was all she heard, morning till night, even when no one was actually saying it out loud. It was in the way everyone in the pack shuffled their feet and spoke in low voices. It was the subtext of every question about her grandmother’s health. It was probably a subliminal message buried in the alarm tone that woke her up every morning ... usually from dreams where people asked her what she was going to do.
Or dreams where she askedherselfwhat she was going to do.
She never had a real answer. Not for long, anyway.
Even a bad answer would have been better than none at all, but she was running out of those too. Every time she thought she’d come up with a potential solution, even a farfetched one, it fell through like sand between her fingers.
What are you going to do?
No one ever put the whole problem into words. It was too awkward. You couldn’t look someone in the eye and say, “When your grandmother dies, which will probably be any day now, how are you going to hold on to the pack? If Reeve Steele challenges you as the new alpha, will you fight? If you fight, can you possibly win? And if you lose, what happens to us?”
But whether they spelled out all the obstacles in her path or not, she had to say the same thing:
I don’t know. I’m trying to think of something.
And, well ....
“Think faster,” her grandmother said bluntly. “I’m dying faster, so you have to think faster.”
“I’mtrying,” Lydia said, but she could tell her grandmother was hearing it as a whine, not a dogged statement of purpose.
Her grandmother, as usual, was unimpressed. “Try harder.”
Lydia had to bite back the urge to ask if her grandmother had any more useful suggestions. Ruth Willmore had always been steely and stern, and she wasn’t going to soften up just because she was on her death-bed. She wouldn’t want to be handled with kid-gloves. But at the same time, Lydia would feel a lot better about herself if she didn’t snap at her right now.
Since she was short on reasons to feel good about herself lately, she was going to take every win she could get.
She took a deep breath. “I’m going to take a walk. Maybe that’ll help me think.”
To her surprise, that won her a look of grudging approval.
“Try the woods,” her grandmother suggested. “Go on all fours. It’ll clear your head.”
Lydia’s inner wolf perked up at that idea.
Too much time sitting in rooms lately,it said.We’ll feel better if we can run.
It was too reflexively respectful of its aged alpha’s looming presence to say that it wanted to smell things besides the clammy, medical odors of the sickroom, but Lydia could feel it itching to sniff at something fresh.
“Thanks. That’s a good idea.”
Ruth readjusted her pillows. “Of course it’s a good idea,” she muttered.
Lydia headed out into the cool morning air. Even with her relatively dull human nose, she could smell the comforting aroma of greenery. Somewhere in the distance, someone was running a lawnmower, adding to the earthy scent in the air.
Her small, isolated mountain village had a few humans who were in the dark about the shifters in their midst, but this neighborhood was all-wolf. It was safe to transform out in the open, even in broad daylight. Lydia relaxed and let herself sink down into her shift form.
The pavement felt wrong beneath her paws, so she wasted no time in leaping into the grass and loping off into the woods.
The pale afternoon sunlight and dark trees made the whole forest look like it had been sketched with charcoal. The last few months had been so unrelentingly, grindingly exhausting that it’d been a long time since Lydia had really gotten tobreatheand appreciate simple pleasures like mountain air and scattered rainbows of wildflowers. As she padded over the forest floor, she stirred up delicious scents. It was like walking through a cloud of the sweetest perfume in the world, at least as far as her wolf was concerned.
Crickets chirped; birds sang to each other; water bubbled over the rocks in the creek.
