Heartsong (Green Creek 3)

He glared at me. “And you think you need to just be near me right this second?”

I wasn’t intimidated. “I think so. If you want me to go, I will.”

His shoulders slumped. “Goddammit. Goddammit.”

“Come on.” I grabbed him by the arm, careful of the stump at his wrist. I led him away from the pyre in the opposite direction of the house. I thought he would protest and pull away, but he didn’t. His head was down, and he didn’t speak, but he followed me willingly.

I found the perfect tree a little ways into the woods. It was old, the trunk wide. There were green leaves on it, and the grass underneath was springy and soft. I pushed him down to the ground before settling next to him, our backs against the tree.

“What are we doing?” he asked.

“Just being.”

“This is stupid. We’ve got things to do. We need to—”

“It can wait.”

“It can’t,” he retorted, but he didn’t try to stand. “Chris and Tanner said they could only reach five out of the ten packs they called. Five, kid. Which means that there are five packs who’ve been torn apart by—”

“You can’t know that.”

“Patrice and Aileen have already confirmed one. They said it was a bloodbath. And the children in that pack were gone.”

I hadn’t heard. I’d been caught up in everything else. “Shit.”

“Succinct as always.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t even try to say that we could just give him what he wants.” I looked down at my hands. “What he’s asked for.”

“Yeah, that’ll go over well,” he said dryly. “Let me know when you’re going to do that so I can make sure to be there.”

“Worth a shot.”

He shook his head. “We can’t….” He shifted, stretching his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. “I didn’t know.”

His brother. I nodded.

“How did I not know? They hid it from me. All of them. Another secret.” He knocked the back of his head against the tree. “Elizabeth said she didn’t know.”

“Do you believe her?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Yeah. She and I, we have an understanding. But that doesn’t mean Thomas didn’t know. Abel did, at the very least. But I… I should have known. When I saw him. When he saw me. He’s been here this entire time, and he just—I tried a couple of times, to help him. To see if I could break him out of his shift. It never worked.” He flexed his hands in the grass. “He was more wolf than anything else. But I could tell he didn’t like it when I was in his head.”

“He may not even remember who he was, Gordo. How long has he been shifted? Years? That has to take a toll on him. Maybe it has to do with being an Omega. Or maybe he’s just lost.”

Gordo glanced at me. “You sound like you know what that’s like.”

“I do,” I admitted. “Even though I didn’t know exactly, when I was in Caswell, I always felt off. Like the lines of who I was were blurred or the colors inverted. Like a photo negative, I guess. I didn’t know what it was. I do now.”

“It’s weird, right?”

“Yes,” I said promptly. Then, “What?”

He shrugged. “That even through all my father’s magic, part of you knew. That you didn’t belong there. That you already had a home and you just needed to find your way back to it.”

I hated what I was about to say, but he needed to hear it. “And maybe that’s the same for your brother. For… Gavin.”

Gordo tensed. His fingers dug into the earth.