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Aidan shook off the memories and took a deep breath of the winter Appalachian air, normally so soothing to both of them. But even with this nose, he smelled blood in the air.
“What have they done?” he asked the empty stretch of road where the car service had dropped him.
The beast reared within him, flashing images of shifting and hunting. It was a wolf; it had no words. It communicated with emotion, sensation, senses, and gut instincts. The last thing on earth Aiden would do was let it free in this forest.
Normally, he could keep the urge to shift tamped down, and the wards around his house did it when he couldn’t, but the alpha was dead. It was a freak accident, a challenge, or something worse; no one knew. All Aiden knew was that his pack was down another wolf, and the glue that held them together was gone. So when his publicist called insisting on a whirlwind launch for his latest book that had gone unexpectedly viral because some fifteen-year-old kid talked about it for fifteen seconds on an app somewhere, he agreed. He could get away, blow off some steam, and let his pack sort out its leadership headaches.
It had not been a good idea.
The pack was in worse disarray, and the closest he’d come to blowing off steam was one of his interviewers, a little blonde. Her one act of courage turned out to be asking him out for a drink. She’d proceeded to smile and nod her way through the most boring evening of the trip. The only thing honest about her was her eyelashes. He’d started asking her increasingly ridiculous questions to see if he could break her. He knew he’d failed when he told her he only ate bar peanuts, and she told him how lovely it must be to have such a simple diet.
Her fluttering eyelashes had made it clear he could take her to bed, but sleeping with a rag doll while trying to keep his wolf from its prey wasn’t an attractive evening.
He snapped back to the present when he almost stumbled off a jagged wrench in the land soaked in the blood of his pack, and everything in him went cold. No human could have done this, and no wolf either. This was magic.
“Those idiots did not fight witches.”
They could not be that stupid.
The beast offered his opinion with a flash of one of his cousins jumping off a cliff. Then it offered to hunt them down.
If there were witches involved, he definitely wasn’t shifting.
He pushed down the thought that he might not be able to control it and wondered if he should go home at all. He could head off into the hills, give up the fight, and let the beast take him.
The breeze brought him a fresh whiff of his pack mates. He could not go gallivanting into the sunset. However tiny, he still had a pack.
He hiked into the woods to a cabin where his cousin Jackson lived. The older man had never found his wolf and eked out a living keeping a stable for the pack close to town. Most dwellings on pack land were inaccessible by car, including Aiden’s. They’d made that call before his mother’s time when the pack had grown so small that hiding became the only possible defense, especially as the Appalachian Trail grew more popular, and humans roamed these woods.
He circled his cousin’s house, not willing to socialize tonight, and headed for the horses. His wolf suggested again that it could get them there in a quarter of the time, and Aiden ignored it.
He would go home, sleep for twelve hours, eat his daily portion of airplane peanuts, and then maybe he’d feel in control enough to let the beast run.
His beast protested the peanuts dramatically.
That was a joke.
The wolf sent him images of chunks of raw meat.
Relax, you’re getting steak.He gave up trying to explain sarcasm to a beast whose idea of a joke was letting its prey go so he could chase it down a second time.
He slipped inside the stables and was greeted by nickers and huge heads swinging over stall doors. He stopped near one stall and held out a hand. Strong lips nuzzled his fingers.
“I don’t have a snack. I’m sorry, girl,”
The horse chomped down on one finger, and he pulled away. “Stop that.”
She was young, spirited, and thought she could get away with anything. What did it say about him that the strongest woman in his life was a horse? He took his saddle off the wall and walked to the next stall where a larger gelding stood pretending like Aiden didn’t exist.
“I’m sorry,” he told the horse and rested the saddle on the stall door.
Not even a dip of the head.
“I’ll never go away again,” he said as he slipped inside and ran his hand over the horse’s back.
Bonanza swung his head to look at him.
“I promise.”
