“Oh, that’s kind of far.” More like an hour, there and back.
“Kels, I will be perfectly fine for the time it takes you to jog to and from the railroad tracks.”
Kelsey crossed to the recliner, bent and kissed her cheek. “You’re the best.” She waved her phone. “Text if you need—”
“Get out of my house.”
Kelsey laughed and obeyed.
She stretched for an extra few minutes, mindful of her recent physical slacking, then set out down the street. She felt more herself in these clothes than any others, bright and comfortable and ready to move. Maggie’s neighborhood was quiet and without sidewalks, and she had to move aside for a car only once. The sun warmed her shoulders and the top of her head, and the swinging of her ponytail was pleasant, adding to the feeling of motion. Her strides were measured and steady, and her legs and feet followed the commands of her mind with little effort. As the energy of exertion flowed into her muscles, she thought how Maggie’s body had become unable to do this same work, and she hoped this ability would come back soon.
At the end of the street, she turned right and jogged another block. At the end of that, she pictured her dear old railroad tracks, the memories created there, and she turned toward them.
She was breathing deep and strong when the cracked blacktop road intersected the unused tracks. She left the road and slowed her pace to walk between the rails, careful not to trip on any ties. Instead of slapping in rhythm, now her shoes crunched stone.
So many memories of gathering here with the wolf pups, trying to walk a rail and keep her balance for as long as they could—which never worked out, since a wolf could keep his balance forever. A few other girls showed up sporadically, early in their teen years, but none of them stayed. They hung out with the pups for the duration of a crush on one of them, or they poked with intrusive questions, or they made obvious politically correct overtures in the name ofbefriending the lupines, as though these already awesome guys needed their approval. Every time a girl disappeared, Kelsey’s body gave an inward sigh. Not because she needed the wolves to herself. If a true friend had shown up, a human girl like her, she’d have extended a welcome. But because the presence of these fickle gigglers, these side-eyeing judges, insulted the dignity of her pack.
Kelsey sat on a rail, knees poking up, arms making a shelf across them, and looked down the track. Sunlight filtered through the canopy of overgrown trees above her. A cardinal cheeped not far away, flew in a red blur across the track to the trees on the other side. A hawk cried, high in the sky.
The hawk whose wingbeats had distracted him… Was Trevor caught off guard by the sound because he was no longer used to it? Had his senses begun to return because Kelsey had returned?
She lowered her forehead to her arms. Sixteen years ago, not far from where she sat, the pack had spread a gingham blanket and feasted with her on a party-sized bag of potato chips, on sandwiches her blue-eyed boy made in secret and brought to share. He was always sharing.
Unless the thing to be shared was the truth about himself, about his hurts.
Maybe that wasn’t fair.
Well, it was fair to be mad. If he weren’t sick, she already would have told him…
As a breeze blew her hair forward across her arms, Kelsey jolted upright. Was she leaving him? Could she face it now, here with her memories?
The question seemed to cleave her in two. Yet her feelings alone couldn’t answer it. For once she had to use her head as well as her heart. No matter how it hurt her. No matter how it hurt…
Trevor.
She could ban him from conversation but not from her thoughts. She sprang to her feet. She had to get back to Maggie’s. She wasn’t accomplishing anything, sitting out here with her memories and her questions.
She stretched, then headed back toward the blacktop road. The questions hovered over her like a raincloud the whole way.
At Maggie’s driveway she stopped still. A khaki pickup truck sat beside her car. That wasn’t Trevor’s, wasn’t Ezra’s. It was…Malachi’s. Why would the alpha come to see them, unannounced on a Monday? Official pack business? Did such a thing exist?
Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.
Kelsey stumbled up the ramp and into the house, her breathing loud and tight. “Malachi!”
He strode down the hall from the living room. “Kelsey.”
“You’re here to notify me. He died. Trevor died, and you’re here to notify me.”
“No.”
The force of the single rumbling word, the weight of his massive hands on her shoulders, slowed both her inward spiral and her shallow breaths. She pulled for more air, and her chest opened a little.
Malachi held her gaze and said, certain and calm, “I brought him to speak with you.”
“He’s here?”
Malachi motioned down the hall. “Go and see.”
