“Thanks.”
Zeke and Khalil set the pups back on the ground. Khalil narrowly misses losing a thumb, but Zeke isn’t as quick. Remy clamps his jaw down on his forearm, and Zeke has a hell of time shaking him off.
The moment Zeke is free, Khalil runs the pups off, and I rush over to Zeke. Blood is already running from the punctures in his olive skin. Thorin curses and removes his shirt, tearing the bottom hem away to make a bandage for Zeke’s arm. “We need to get back to the cabinnow.”
“What about Meera?”
“Aurelia!” Thorin roars so loudly I jump. The rage in his eyes makes me want to run in the opposite direction. “Enough. This is serious. We don’t know what those pups have, and the wound could get infected.”
Shame courses through me, and if I could slap myself without looking like a nutjob, I would. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Of course. Let’s go home.”
I start forward to lead the way, but Zeke stops me with a hand on my stomach and pulls me back until I’m by his side again. “I’m fine. The bite can wait.”
“We need to clean the wound before infection sets in,” Thorin argues.
“She can clean me up later. Right now, she wants to find her wolf, so that’s what we’re going to do.”
She can clean me up later.Those words repeat in my head as Thorin and Zeke engage in a pissing contest. Khalil turns out to be the tiebreaker. He pulls me out of the band of Zeke’s arm, leaving Thorin and Zeke no choice but to follow.
“We can’t just leave them,” I tell Khalil when I remember the pups.
“They followed you once,” he says.
Sure enough, when I look over my shoulder, the pups are weaving in and out of trees as they trail us from a distance.
“This way,” Thorin says after we walk for less than a minute.
He and Khalil must have been following Meera’s trails—or the wolves that killed Roman—when we stumbled upon the pup.
“There are multiple tracks here,” Thorin says when we reach some downfall and a creek running downhill. “Meera’s,” he says, pointing out her distinct tracks. She’s wounded, so they’re off unlike the multiple sets we find. “There was a fight here.” Thorin swears. “Meera was outnumbered.”
My heart doesn’t speed up or slow down.
It breaks.
I completely forget the pups are stalking us until they sniff the ground and whine before suddenly taking off in the direction of the creek.
“What the—”
“Fuck. We need to follow them.” Zeke takes off after the pups, giving us no time to ask why. The rest of us follow, forming an arrow of desperation with the pups making up the head followed by Zeke, me, Khalil, and Thorin bringing up the rear.
Finally, we come across four trails that form an intersection, and lying in the center of that crossroads is—
“Meera!”
I run past Zeke, dodging his hands when he stops instead of pressing forward. I ignore their shouts for me to stop. The pups have already reached their mother. They’re climbing all over her and tugging at her ears and tail, begging her to rise and ease their fears.
But she doesn’t.
The she-wolf continues lying on the ground, and her breaths are so shallow that I’m not sure she’s breathing at all.
As soon as I reach Meera, Zeke snatches me back. “Careful, Aurelia. This just happened. There’s a chance that the wolves that did this to her are still in the area.”
“We have to help her.”
“She’s dying.”
“We have to help her!” I scream. When none of them move to aid the she-wolf, I turn my teary gaze to Thorin. “You promised me.”
