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I looked up at him. “I need clothes.”
With a wave of his hand, electricity crackled around me. The warmth of the fabric that came out of nowhere surrounded my body, shrouding me in a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt. I watched in awe as the fabric shimmered. Boots pushed me up half of an inch before they laced their way up to the middle of my shin. Even my hair got slicked back, morphing from the frizzy ball of fluff it had become and sparkling with all of its pink grandeur as it shimmered effortlessly, framing my jawline.
“There, better?” Brody asked.
I snickered. “So cool.”
“If you stay long enough, your other powers will emerge.”
I peered over his shoulder, staring at yet another body being laid upon the ground. “Seventeen.”
“Raven.”
“They’re dead because of me! Do you not get that!?”
My voice flooded the world so greatly and so powerfully that birds scattered to the wind. Bugs skittered along the ground, trying to find a hiding place from the new enemy in town. That’s what I had become. An enemy. A powerfully negative force upon an innocent group of people that had once been my family.
“Family,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Brody said with a nod of his head, “we’re your family.”
I shrugged. “Then, wouldn’t you want to protect family from threats?”
He sighed. “That isn’t what I—”
“You know as well as I do that it has to be this way. I’m the reason the pack is vulnerable, and so long as the pack stays vulnerable because of me, there will be more attacks.”
“Then put in the work,” Brody said curtly. “Make yourself less of a threat.”
I shrugged. “Why? Because some man made the stupid decision to put me in charge?”
“You know your father was much more than just some man.”
“Well, he certainly wasn’t my father, for starters.”
“You don’t know the first thing about what happened in your parent’s marriage.”
I bucked up to him. “No, I don’t. What I do know is that my father promised to come for me. To see me, as much as possible. And then, I never heard from him again. That’s what I know. That’s my reality, Brody. You and me? We didn’t know the same man. We didn’t know the same person. He was your hero, but he was my nightmare. Got it?”
He clenched his jaw together. “Got it.”
“Good. Now, get out of my way. I have to go find a way to comfort the grieving mothers before I transfer this pack to you.”
He drew in a deep breath. “Understood, alpha.”
“Wonderful,” I grumbled.
Then, fully clothed and fully set on heading home the next day, I emerged from the woods and walked over to each and every lifeless body lying in the backyard that had once housed games of tag my mother and I used to play together.
While the blood of my father’s dead stained the grass.
20
HUDSON
I tore through the woods at a full sprint, allowing the trees’ branches to slap me across the face. The pain was the only reason why I hadn’t already doubled back and chained Raven up. The pain was the only thing driving me onward. It was the only thing that kept me grounded.
I’d been running for hours. The light of a new day started to rise, but I didn’t even care. I just kept running. I could feel a tightness in my muscles start to form, but I ignored it and pushed my wolf harder. I wanted to feel nothing but the ground beneath my paws.
