Others were not.
But they were all slow and sweet.
It took me a moment to figure out what they were.
Heartbeats.
I could hear hearts beating.
Picked them out one by one.
There were ten of them in the room with me.
There should have been eleven.
There should have been eleven.
There should have been—
“Hush,” a voice whispered near my ear. A cool hand came to my heated brow and brushed my hair off my forehead. “You’ll wake the others.”
“I wasn’t even talking,” I muttered weakly.
“I know,” Elizabeth said. “But you don’t have to. Not anymore.”
I knew what she meant. Why she meant it. It didn’t seem possible.
And I knew the heartbeat that was missing.
“Joe?” I asked.
“Close your eyes,” she said near my ear. “Because things are different now and you must find a way to hold on to your humanity. Close your eyes, Ox. And listen.”
I did.
I heard many things.
I felt even more.
There were the heartbeats of my pack, lying around me on the living room floor at the house at the end of the lane. Pillows and blankets had been placed around us, and everyone had curled up against each other, reaching and touching in some way, the wolves curled around the humans. I was at their center. Elizabeth was somewhere near my head. There was an empty space to my right.
I heard their breaths.
The little sighs they made in their sleep.
I smelled them too. Sweat and dirt and blood, but underneath that it was the forest and the trees, sunlight filtered through a canopy of leaves, and that smell right before a thunderstorm, ozone-sharp and earthy.
But there was another smell. A baser smell, embedded into each of them.
I recognized it as my own.
They all smelled like me.
Like their Alpha.
It wasn’t just mine, though.
Because inlaid with my own scent, there was the heavy scent of another.