Page 20 of Nightshade

“Of course. Well, I can certainly fill you in.”

I was rushing him out the door, and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do that evening, and he was . . . he spoke well and kindly, and that was the problem. Everything I learned about him and his pack made me feel like more of a worm for endangering them all.

I’d use them for my own survival, and to manage that, I needed a degree of distance. But when he moved to the door, I lurched a step forward.

“Leo?”

He turned back to me. “Yeah?”

“The witches. Have you . . . heard anything from them? Are they searching for me?”

Leo’s jaw flexed and his cheeks hollowed. “We haven’t heard anything, but I’ll run the perimeter of our land just in case, okay? You don’t need to worry.”

I forced a smile and nodded. “Of course. Thank you.”

He left, and I shoved the bed back against the windowed wall so I could read by moonlight.

CHAPTER 11

Leo

I ran the full perimeter of the inner pack lands, and it took almost two hours, even at my top speed, dodging around trees and leaping down embankments. If I ran around all the land we owned, it might take all day, but those miles nearest the hunting lodge and the pack homes mattered most.

Besides, we’d never had the witches invade on foot before. That would have been odd. They always drove in, in their shiny new SUVs that smelled like leather and a kind of synthetic air freshener that made my nose twitch.

I smelled no sign of any outsiders—none but Altair, anyway.

I tried not to think about how the scent of him had changed in the last day. It had been paper-thin when I’d found him, just the vaguest whiff of something tantalizing, like a hint of perfume remaining on a decades-old love letter.

Now, it was more like last year’s love letter. Still not incredibly strong, but more present, something that was there whenever I was near him. Musky and sweet and almost mouth-watering in a way that was unfamiliar.

It wasn’t a food smell, like the cake-scented body spray the Crescent wolves had sent to Evie in a care package with a bunch of things that had made her squeal with delight. It wasn’t like any kind of perfume I’d smelled on any of the people in the city, fascinating as they had been. It was unique, and constantly made me want to turn around and walk back toward it.

To find its source and bury my face in it.

Or better, to find Altair and feed him again.

I tried not to take it in a bad way, his hesitance to feed more . . . deeply. I could tell he wasn’t being entirely honest with me about it. The starved look in his eyes alone told me that he wanted more. Wanted to latch onto my neck and just keep pulling.

After all, if the amount of blood I’d given him was all a vampire needed to be completely sated, then they would never have killed even a human. It simply hadn’t been that much. Now, maybe Altair was dealing with the aftereffects of starvation, and trying to treat it the way those of us who needed regular food did—slowly working their way back up to real meals. But I didn’t think so.

I was certain he was holding himself back.

The only real question was whether he was doing it to keep from scaring me off, or because he knew what was going on in my head, and it made him uncomfortable. I still had no idea if vampires could smell things the way wolves could. If he knew that whenever his lips grazed my wrist, it was all I could do to keep breathing. That I had to run through a litany of the unsexiest things I could imagine to keep from getting an obvious erection while his fangs broke my skin.

It was sick. I was broken, for sure. What kind of weirdo enjoyed being hurt?

So if Altair knew, he probably pitied me, at best. Maybe he was even disgusted, but kept taking at least a little, because he didn’t want to starve to death and had years of abuse to recover from.

Hard to blame him. Who wanted a fucked-up werewolf?

Even if someone wanted a werewolf with mental issues, it’d be one of my brothers, who were an alpha and . . . well, terrifying. I was just boring nice Leo.

I checked in on the hunting lodge before heading back toward the pack for the night, but my skin was crawling. I was wrong. Not about something, but made wrong. My brain didn’t work right, and everyone around me had to deal with all the ways in which I was screwed up. Killing Barry and stealing Mama’s blankets and talking incessantly and keeping secrets and getting turned on when vampires bit my wrist.

It was no wonder I was constantly on the outside of everything. Who would want to be around a complete fucking weirdo?

I was overcome by the need to bathe, so on the way back home, I made a detour to the river, dumped my clothes on a bush, and plunged myself into the cooling fall water. At least it wasn’t winter yet. It got downright hard to take a bath in the wintertime, except inside, where Mama always kept a giant pot of water on the hearth to warm baths inside.