It’d been eleven months since I’d recorded a video in a house at the end of a lane.
And I had nothing to show for it.
I dropped the phone back in my bag before I crushed it in my hand.
After a moment’s hesitation, I reached over to the glove compartment and popped it open. I told myself I was being stupid, that I’d just looked at the contents the day before. They wouldn’t tell me anything new, and it was pointless to dwell on them.
But they were all I had.
I pulled out four pieces of paper, each featuring blocky words I’d long since memorized.
The top page—the last one I’d gotten a couple of weeks before in a nothing town in Kentucky—read:
STOP FOLLOWING ME. GO HOME ASSHOLE.
“Fuck you,” I muttered. “You goddamn dick.”
The other three notes were similar, each of them blunt and scathing, threatening me with bodily harm, telling me he wanted nothing to do with me. I closed my eyes, remembering the way he’d looked when he snarled at me, telling me I was nothing but a child, that he didn’t want anything to do with me, that he wasn’t pack.
His heart had held steady and true, but I still thought him a liar.
Because I’d felt it when he’d stood before his father, a witch turned impossibly into an Alpha beast, one eye socket empty, the other red and b
lazing. I’d felt it when the bond that had stretched between us—a bond I’d been blind to—snapped in two.
He had been one of us.
He had been pack.
And he’d given himself up to Robert Livingstone.
To save us all.
I couldn’t let that go.
I couldn’t let him go.
I owed it to him.
To find him.
To do whatever the hell it took to bring him back.
I should have seen it for what it was. In the couple of years he was by my side, all the times I’d scowled at him and snapped at him to leave me the fuck alone, I should have seen it. From the moment I’d faced him outside the Lighthouse when the hunters had come to Green Creek, I should have known.
The third note read:
LEAVE ME ALONE. GO HOME OR I’LL HURT YOU.
The second note read:
I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOU.
The first note read:
ARE YOU TRYING TO GET YOURSELF KILLED?
Though I fought against it, I smiled. I’d only heard him speak a few words, and they’d been grunted more than anything, but somehow, it fit with who I thought he was. I wasn’t allowing myself to think of what he could be to me. When I tried, my chest felt tight. We weren’t Ox and Joe. Or Kelly and Robbie. Or even Gordo and Mark, though the fuck you vibe was apparently a family trait.