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“I can’t,” Buck said sadly.
Aiden’s wolf cheered from within him, and Aiden stopped short.
Why are you so happy?
He got a vision of two wolves wrapped around each other in his bed.
Aiden gasped. That was why the beast wasn’t trying to eat the kid; it was onBuck’sside. Buck would not open the wards, so Aiden’s wolf could keep its witch.
“Never mind,” Aiden said abruptly and pivoted away. He looked between Nathan and Buck. “You’re a disgrace to this pack.”
Nathan puffed up. “I’m going to lead this pack.”
The wolf went from smug to murderous in half a second. It tore itself in half with the dueling truths that it could never lead this pack and it would kill before ever submitting to Nathan. Aiden felt his canines cut his tongue.
“X-nay…” Ellis whispered.
Aiden rotated his neck, feeling the vertebrae shift and crack. “You have one day. If your son doesn’t fix this, there won’t be a pack for anyone to lead.” He slammed out of the cabin.
Ellis opened the door seconds later, spoiling his dramatic exit.
“You good?”
Aiden took a breath. “Yeah.”
He started walking, but his cousin didn’t follow. He pivoted to see him lounging on the stoop, breath misting in the air. “I think I’ll hang here for a minute.”
“So I don’t circle back around and eat somebody?”
Ellis shrugged. “You missed the target you want. I don’t want to become a convenient substitute.”
Ellis was afraid of him? Old pain choked him for a second, but he just nodded.
“Good night,” he said in as normal a voice as he could manage before he stalked away.
He’d gone a hundred feet down the hill when a voice said from far too close, “Deep breath.”
The wolf reared at his moment of inattention, but he reined it in easily when he saw his mother walk out of the trees.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, even as he wrapped her in his arms and let her familiar presence soothe the beast.
They shared the same brown hair and eyes, but she was a fraction of his size. She pulled back and cupped his cheek and then yanked on the end of his beard. “I saw you tramping through the woods toward Nathan’s. Ellis isn’t enough to stop you, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t bleed out on his living room floor.”
“How’d you know I was going to talk to Nathan?” Aiden asked, trying not to sound like the petulant teenager he’d just tried to intimidate.
“Who else?”
“Didn’t know you cared to save his sorry hide.”
“His granny made that nice rug in his living room.”
Aiden hadn’t noticed the rug.
“Thank you,” he said after cycling through three other less charitable responses. He gestured to start walking, eager to get out of earshot of the cabin.
She kept pace easily, though he was a foot and a half taller than her. There were crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes, but otherwise, she looked the same as she had the whole of his childhood.
They got down to the paddocks, empty for the night. Every paddock was ringed with two fences. Chain link kept the wolves out and wood kept the horses in. Aiden took a running leap over both as his mother opened a gate in the chain link and then slid through the lowest of three openings in the wood to join him.
