They sang.
They laughed.
They howled.
They looked at me.
I thought of a boy with eyes of ice telling me that he loved me, that he didn’t want to leave again but he had to, he had to, his Alpha was demanding it, and he would come back for me, Gordo, you have to believe I’ll come back for you. You are my mate, I love you, I love you, I love you.
I couldn’t do this.
And then Joe put his hand on mine.
He squeezed, just once.
“Come on, Gordo,” he said. “You know the words. You got this.”
I sighed.
I sang.
We were all hungry like the woooooolf.
We drove on and on and on.
And in the furthest recesses of my mind, I heard it again. For the first time.
It whispered pack and pack and pack.
I KNEW it was coming. Every text, every phone call got harder to ignore. It was a pull toward home, a weight on our shoulders. A reminder of all that we’d left behind. I saw how much it hurt Carter and Kelly when they heard their mother had finally shifted back. How much it pulled at Joe when Ox asked questions he couldn’t answer.
Mark never said anything.
But then I never said anything to him either.
It was better this way.
Which was why I didn’t argue too much when Joe first said, “We have to ditch the phones.”
His brothers put up a fight. It was admirable, going against their Alpha. They begged me to tell him no, to tell J
oe he was wrong. That there was a better way to go about it. But I couldn’t, because I was dreaming of wolves now, of pack. They didn’t know what I did. Hadn’t seen the way the hunters had come to Green Creek without warning, come to the house at the end of the lane to deal in death. We had been unaware. Unprepared. I had seen Richard Collins fall to his knees, the blood of his loved ones staining the ground around him. His head had tilted back and he had screamed his horror. And when the new Alpha had put his hand on his shoulder, Richard had lashed out. “You did nothing,” he snarled. “You did nothing to stop this. This is your fault. This is on you.”
So when Joe turned to me, looking for validation, I told him he was being stupid. That Ox wouldn’t understand, and did he really want to do that to him?
But that was all.
“It’s the only way,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
Joe sighed. “Yes.”
“Your Alpha has spoken,” I told Carter and Kelly.
I took their phones.
They slept badly that night.