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It took everything he had to keep still and listen.
“Yes?” he said when his mother didn’t move.
“She took him to the main gate in a horse trailer,” Paul said when his mother still didn’t open her mouth.
Kathleen sighed. “She’s going to force him to open them.”
She’d done it. She said she was going to make him feel like she had, and she’d done it. In a million years, he’d never thought she would do it by literally kidnapping him, but she’d done it.
Why hadn’t she come to him? She was in the woods alone with a dominant dire wolf with the soul of a spoiled boy.
He burst out of the stables.
“She wouldn’t want you to interfere!” his mother called after him.
He stopped. His family had taken and taken from her. Was this another choice he was wrestling from her hands? He shook his head. She was facing adire wolfalone. She could have all the furniture and a thousand apologies later. He would not leave her to that.
His wolf sent him a vision of running through the forest with a hopeful note in its howl. It could get them there the fastest.
He also would not put a horse in harm’s way.
Fine, you win.
His wolf’s triumph made him nervous.
Don’t eat anyone.
“Aiden…” Paul said before trailing off.
“It will be fine.”
He stripped out of his clothes as his cousin said, “It’s never been fine before. I don’t know why all of a sudden you think it’s gonna be fine.”
Aiden ignored him and let the beast take him. The color red leached out of the world as his other senses sharpened. Everything reoriented around what he was smelling. It was impossible to describe to anyone who wasn’t a shifter. Humans were oriented to the world by what they saw. They used their eyes to balance, find themselves in space, and map the world. The wolf did it through scent. Instead of a picture of a valley, he had a chain of scents in his head. With effort, he could fit it onto a visual map his human half could understand, but it wasn’t the same.
Some scents loomed large to the wolf, making that area seem much bigger than it was. Some things had hardly a scent at all, and that area shrunk in his mind’s eye.
So when it started along the path to Goldie, the world fell away, and the faint scent of her skin and the rose soap she used loomed large.
He didn’t know his wolf could run so fast.
You can’t eat Buck,he told the beast desperately.
It didn’t even spare him a thought.
You need my help!
Why had he thought shifting was a good idea? Why did he think he could influence the wolf when Goldie’s life was on the line?
He held on, buried in the depths of his brain, praying in turn that they would be in time and that she would have it handled and didn't need him. Buck would be humbled but unharmed; the wards would be open, and Aiden would be totally unnecessary.
The wolf slid to a stop and crouched.
Hope soared for two seconds before he heard a voice. “We expected to have more. The idiots hesitated.”
That wasn’t Buck.
Nathan.
