“I feel like I just shotgunned a fifth of whiskey,” Ridge says, smacking his lips together. He catches my eye, his own gaze bleary. “What the hell is going on? Where’s Sable?”
“Man, I cannot wake up,” Dare adds, leaning over and shaking his head as if trying to shock his brain awake.
My stomach falls out beneath me as I suddenly realize why they look as strung out as I feel.
“She used her magic,” I say, my voice low and strained. “On purpose, this time. A spell to make us sleep. Then she left.”
I remember teaching her that spell during one of our training sessions, showing her the sigils and helping her practice them. The witches who captured me as a pup used the same spell on me sometimes, and the memory sends a shudder down my spine.
Dare rubs the sleep from his eyes again, though it’s clearly not helping, and leans heavily against the wall. “Why? Because she was worried about hurting us in her sleep?”
“No.” My heart skips a beat in terror as the realization dawns on me. “Because she’s going to look for the lone witch on her own.”
It’s a testament to the power of Sable’s spell that we all stare at each other blankly for several long seconds before everyone reacts.
“Mother fuck—what do we do?” Trystan leaps to his feet and somehow manages to not fall over. “We go after her, right?”
“No question,” Ridge agrees, nodding sluggishly. “Dare, you know a bit about the landscape?”
He nods. “Yeah, I think so. Fuck, I hope so. I can get us to Wolfsbane Mountain, for sure. Navigating past there will have to be organic. Relying on scent tracking and signs. If we hit magical barriers, we’ll be shit out of luck.”
I speak up, my heart hammering somewhere in the vicinity of my throat. “The question is, does Sable have any idea where she’s going?”
“I doubt it,” Trystan says, an abnormal note of fear creeping into his voice. “I mean, she knows the general direction, because we talked about it earlier. But she has no training in tracking, and no fucking way of protecting herself.”
“That’s not fair,” I argue, even though there’s little heat behind the words. “She’s a wolf. She’s got teeth.”
“But no experience fighting,” Dare grunts. “If she crosses the wrong side of a grizzly, she’s toast.”
Ridge shoots me a concerned glance. “We need to go. Now.”
For what feels like the fourth time in as many weeks, we make quick work of packing essentials. I make the discovery that Sable packed a bag before she left, because her backpack is missing from Ridge’s closet, as well as a handful of Amora’s borrowed clothes. So we focus on getting enough clothes for the four of us for several days, plus enough non-perishables for all of us.
We’re in the kitchen, picking and choosing what can travel well and feed us later in the event that we can’t find game, when Ridge shoulders his bag and says, “I’m going to speak to Amora, let her know what’s happening.”
“Hey, have her send a messenger to my dad too, if you can.” I swing my own bag up over my shoulder, leaving it loose since I’ll have to shift when we leave.
“And to my pack,” Trystan adds. “Clearly, I’m not coming home soon. They deserve an update.”
Ridge nods. “Will do. Meet me where the road ends north of the village.” Then he vanishes out the back door.
Thanks to Dare, we know Wolfsbane Mountain is twenty miles north. From there, we have no way of knowing how much longer the journey will be. Even in wolf form, it’s a haul. As long as there’s wildlife out there, we’ll have access to food, but I don’t honestly know what to expect when we reach the outskirts of the witch’s territory. Anywhere witch magic hangs heavy in the air, animals tend to avoid the area, like it’s off limits. Once we cross whatever barriers she has up, we’ll be on our own.
One thing is for sure—Sable should not be making this journey alone, and I blame the four of us for putting her in this situation.
“We should have listened to what she was saying back at Elder Jihoon’s house,” I mutter to Dare under my breath as Trystan leads us out the door a few minutes later. “It’s easy for us to say ‘we’ll figure it out.’ We aren’t the ones going through what she is.”
“I guess.” He shakes his head as we start heading up the road, his jaw hard. “Shouldn’t she trust us? We’re her mates. We wouldn’t steer her wrong.”
“But what do we really know about any of this?” I scrub a frustrated hand through my hair. “We’re the assholes, Dare. Not Sable. We could easily steer her wrong without even knowing we’re doing it. She’s the only one who knows what it’s like inside her head, what the witch magic is doing to her. We should’ve put more stock in her opinion. She knows finding another witch is a risk, so if she still felt like she needed to do it, there’s a reason for that. It’s because this is bad. Worse than we knew.”
“Fucking hell.” Dare’s lips press together, worry darkening his eyes. “I just wanted to protect her.”
“Yeah. Me too. The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Trystan says wryly from up ahead. I didn’t even know he was listening to us. I’m still not used to this new version of the West Pack alpha, who listens and stays out of his own head long enough to be involved. Sable’s been a good influence on him.
Ridge is several houses down, standing on Amora’s front porch. In the pre-dawn light, all I can see of her is the pale flash of her hands in the doorway as she talks to him. Trystan, Dare, and I don’t stop, continuing on to where the road ends abruptly at the edge of the village. As we wait for him, my mind drifts back to the day I talked Sable into staying as she stood on a spot at the edge of the village and looked out into the wilderness, psyching herself up to leave.
Somehow, I doubt she even hesitated tonight. I can picture her in wolf form, the moonlight shining off her dappled blonde-and-white fur, a reflection in the night as she bounded into the woods.