Heartsong (Green Creek 3)

He said, “I’m not going to take it from you. I just want you to see it.”

I almost didn’t. I almost asked him to leave. To let me be. I was tired, and I didn’t know how much more I could take. I didn’t know why I had that damn wolf. It should have been Kelly’s.

I did as he asked.

I took it out.

It was heavy and cool.

He said, “I know things don’t make sense. That we have a history with you that you can’t remember. But I know you fought to keep some part of who you were with everything you had.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you still have that,” he said, pointing toward the wolf. “You kept it secret. You kept it safe.”

“It was important,” I muttered. “I had this cubbyhole in the back of my closet in the compound. I hid it away.”

“Like a hole in a tree.”

I closed my eyes. “Yeah. I guess.”

“And no one was able to take it from you.”

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “And I know you’re still you, Robbie. I know it with everything I have, because that’s not your wolf. It’s Kelly’s.”

I took in a stuttering breath.

He was in front of me then, and he bent over, trailing his nose along my hairline to my ear. “You took it with you wherever you went,” he whispered. “Because you loved it so and couldn’t bear to leave it behind. With you, it was safe. With you, he was safe. After he was taken from your mind, part of you still held on. Even if you can’t remember anything else, remember that. I asked you once why you carried it with you all the time. You said it was because you never thought you could have something so special, and you needed to remind yourself that it was real.”

He kissed my forehead and let me be, closing the door behind him.

I sat there for a long time, the wolf of stone in my hands.

I couldn’t sleep.

I missed the little house outside of Caswell, though the thought made my stomach twist with guilt.

Even worse, part of me wanted to see Ezra. I felt like I was cleaved in two, and there was this guy, this version of myself who could have spent the rest of his life never knowing where he’d come from, the people he’d once loved nothing but smoke reflected in a fractured mirror. That Robbie would have been none the wiser. If the Bennett pack had kept on thinking that I’d betrayed them, I might have never known reality. It was as if Caswell was a dream, and I’d awoken into a nightmare. How far would they have pushed me? What could they have made me do if I’d never known the truth?

It hurt.

And then there was this other Robbie, this Robbie smiling in photographs hung on the wall in a garage in a town in the middle of nowhere. This Robbie was happy, this Robbie was loved, this Robbie was whole, and here I was, stepping into his shoes like I deserved it. Like I belonged.

I felt like a fraud.

I wanted to believe.

I didn’t know how.

I tossed and turned for a few hours. The moon was bright through the window. It whispered to me, and I tried to shut it out. Begged it to leave me be.

It didn’t.

And then I felt guilt about that too, because Kelly probably didn’t feel it like the rest of the wolves, didn’t feel that electric thrum coursing through his body, a kinetic and enthralling energy that was wonderfully insistent. He would remember what it felt like, would remember the comforting weight of the moon as it called out, singing here i am my loves here i am because i am always with you i am your mother i am your father and all will be well will be well.

It was my fault.