I rubbed my hands up and down her arms. “This isn’t the life we promised you. I’m sorry.” I breathed in her scent, drawing it right into my lungs.
“Beckett, this was exactly what you promised. That you’d take care of me, love me, and be there when I needed you most. I don’t blame you for natural disasters.” She kissed me softly, and for just a moment, I leaned on her too.
We fell silent again as another bus rolled into town. Those little orbs would be exhausted by the end of the night.
We watched until the sun was just lightening the sky. The horizon seemed so far away when it wasn’t impeded by trees or mountains. It looked like a wide expanse of nothingness, and I found it both daunting and comforting. There weren’t even any other towns nearby, which was probably why the humans had moved away.
The door downstairs banged shut—you had to bang it since it was warped and wouldn’t shut properly otherwise—and I scented Darius. More specifically, his tears. Kitten was off my lap and through the door into the house before I’d even twitched, but I wasn’t far behind her.
When we made it to the foyer, the rest of our Pack was huddled in a tight circle. Darius’s eyes welled with unshed tears, and Cooper looked pale.
“What happened?”
“It’s all gone,” Cooper whispered.
I reared back. “All of it? Courtland? Rad?”
Darius sniffed. “They just arrived. Rad said they fought until the wall of fire was too great. Still, we lost five Manix. Some wouldn’t leave, others got trapped behind the lines. Courtland looks… devastated.”
He’d feel every single one of those losses, even though it wasn’t his fault. He’d given everyone an opportunity to leave. Stayed and fought the fire beside them. But it wouldn’t help with the guilt, I knew that in my soul.
“Who?”
Darius shook his head. “I don’t know.”
In a population as small as Maxton, it was likely we knew them. Would I be missing the faces of friends or neighbors tomorrow?
“Let’s go upstairs and get some sleep. You need to rest, D,” Corvin said quietly, lifting our Omega into his arms and carrying him back to the ground floor bedroom where we’d put all the mattresses and given him the beginnings of a nest, just in case the worst happened. Which was looking more and more likely that it had actually happened. Now, we’d have to thoroughly add our scents to the room, find him things he could use to furnish it before the cubs came. And then…
And then what? What would we do now? Go back and rebuild?
Exhaustion pulled at me, and I only managed to remove my shirt and jeans. I couldn’t be bothered bending down to remove my socks. Kitten snuggled against my chest, her fingers curled in mine where they rested on Darius’s stomach. Cooper lay further down the nest, his body curled around Darius’s hip, his head just beneath Kitten’s breasts. Corvin was on the other side of Darius, closest to the door. Our last line of defense.
“I love you guys,” Kitten whispered into the darkness. “I’m sorry.”
“We have each other, and these guys,” Coop said, rubbing Darius’s stomach, “who are already getting brownie points for staying where they are for the duration of this damn saga.”
I huffed a laugh, my eyes slowly closing. He had that shit right. No matter how precarious things were right now, I was still the luckiest man alive.
Two days were spent just…adjusting to the new normal. This was aided by the fact that Cooper gave us a list of things that needed to be done to the house, just to make sure it wouldn’t fall down around us. It wasn’t anything major—just adjusting a screw here and there, propping up the front step, taking the door off the hinges and planing down the edges so it would close softer.
While we still hadn’t decided what to do, it was generally assumed we would be here for a little while at least, and if this helped keep our mind off the fact our home had burned to the ground, then I was all for it.
When our place was done, I went around to my mom’s to make sure it was okay. Which was an awkward way to introduce my mother to my new Packmate. Kitten wouldn’t say it out loud, but she was nervous. I could see it in the way her hands moved restlessly, the way she paced around all morning.
“Should I make something? I don’t know how to cook,” she fretted to Darius, who seemed to appreciate someone else being the emotional basket case for a moment.
Darius shook his head. “No, Beckett’s mom will have spent all morning cooking. Where we’ve had all this to keep our mind off it, she’ll have baked. Wear your stretchy pants.”
The witches had dropped off baskets of food, from who knows where. I had to respect Loren; he’d taken us all in without so much as a word, and the rest of the witches had embraced us. I think it was their brand of witchcraft. They were green witches from what I could tell, or as the elders used to call them, fae-touched witches. They had an affinity with nature that went beyond the general witch obsession with Mother Earth.
It meant that a lot of the fresh fruits and vegetables had probably been grown with magic, but I wasn’t worried. I’d take their offerings thankfully. The ones who had dropped off the food had been two young men with big smiles and a demeanor that made me instantly at ease. Which was suspicious in its own way, but I didn’t think they meant it maliciously.
When we’d asked for tools, they'd happily directed us to a workshop on Main Street which had been dusty and empty of people when we arrived. Except for an old Mustang that had made Corvin nearly come in his pants.
My job was secure, since all of the children had made it here. I’d made sure of it. I had purposefully not called a few parents who I knew would stay against advice, risking the lives of their kids. So I hadn’t called them until the bus was well and truly on its way to Moonburst. Unethical? Probably. But my students meant more to me than their pigheaded parents, and I wasn’t risking a single one of them just because they believed being fifteen made them old enough to fight a raging fire alongside their fathers. I wouldn’t lose sleep over it, anyway.
Even Cooper’s job would be easily transferred to Moonburst. But Corvin’s job was gone, since there was no Legion machinery left to be maintained. It was all gone.
