Wolfsong (Green Creek 1)

He reached out and ran his fingers along the bark of a tree.

His father had done the same many times when we’d walked through the forest.

I told him as much.

He smiled at me. “It helps.”

I didn’t know what that meant, not really, but I let it go.

“You can feel them, can’t you?” he asked as he stepped over a rotting log that burst with flowers and long blades of grass.

“Most of the time,” I said.

“Carter? Kelly? Gordo?”

I shrugged. “It’s getting there. I think. I don’t know. Gordo, maybe. Only because I’ve known him. I’m tied to him.”

“You’re tied to everyone else too.”

Until you broke that away, I wanted to say. Until you snapped those threads like they were nothing.

But I didn’t. Because I was moving beyond it. For the most part.

“It was my fault,” he said, and I hated werewolves right then, hated being tied to them as I was, because there were so many times that my thoughts didn’t seem to be my own anymore.

“It’s not like that,” I muttered.

He rolled his eyes and there were whispers of who are you and where did you come from, spoken in the voice of a little tornado. It was that disconnect again. The little boy I’d known, the teenager he’d been, the man he was now. He was gruff and quieter than he’d been before, but little flashes broke through the cracks every now and then. Joe was Joe was Joe.

I could live with that. For him. Because of him.

“It’s a little like that,” he said. “But I’m fixing it.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “It’s hard to put into words.”

“Try.”

He narrowed his eyes at me but took my hand in his, our fingers meshing together. “I guess it’s like—okay, it’s probably stupid to say instinct and that you wouldn’t understand because you’re not a wolf, but it’s not like that. I think you’re more wolf than man these days.”

He sounded proud about that. I didn’t understand why.

“This is my home,” he said. “It’s where my father grew up, like his father, his father’s father. We were meant to be here. There’s a certain… magic in it, I guess. Not like Gordo’s magic, but something that runs through the ground beneath our feet. It recognizes me. The pack. The Alphas. When things get frayed—broken—it feels it.”

“And you broke it,” I said without meaning to. “When you cut us off, you broke it.”

He winced, but nodded. “Yeah, I guess I did.” Then, “You felt it, didn’t you?”

I remembered that feeling in my head and chest when I’d woken up that morning. The two words on my phone.

I’m s

orry.

Yeah. I’d felt it.

“There was something,” I said as levelly as possible.