Page 8 of Bound

“How did you—”

“I’m not an idiot. Someone like me, who can track vampires? Of course the Tracers would want to use me. I’d be invaluable to them.”

“Do you want to work for them?” My heart began to pound. I tried to picture it, Topher, who could sit in the back of a shabby corner café for hours with a book, utterly unaware time had passed at all, a Tracer, and found I couldn’t.

“I have to find my brother. Whatever it takes.”

A sense of dread rose, too fast for me to tamp it down. Topher cut a suspicious glance my way.

“It’s just,” I said, careful to keep my voice neutral. “You know I get it. I’ve told you before how my dad’s been missing for two years. But you have to consider whether a move like that would get you more resources or sign your freedom away for good. My uncle runs the Council and I’m afraid every day what he would do if he found out about me, that I would be whisked off to Dallas to live in a gilded cage.”

I’d seen what life as the Council’s most powerful neuro-manipulator was doing to River. And despite what he said to the contrary, I’d known my youngest brother from the time he used to eat paste and steal my stuffed unicorn to sleep with on nights fierce Texas thunderstorms tore through the hills surrounding our parents’ ranch. Working for my Uncle Guillermo destroyed people from the inside out. And one of us had to find a way to reach him before it was too late.

The thought of that happening to Topher—

He flicked on the turn signal to exit, the striped orange and white peaked roof of a Whataburgerlooming in the distance, strips of light from the highway lamps illuminating his square jawline. I drew a breath.

“I swear to you, we will not stop looking until we find Kieran.”

He turned, whiskey-amber eyes widening fractionally. Frowning, he quickly turned back to the road. “Say it again.”

“You heard me.” We didn’t do soft. We destroyed chairs. Pulverized entire rooms. Made up without speaking over greasy sacks of takeout and rock-paper-scissors over who got to pick what was on streaming. And right now, Topher Greer could have shattered me with a feather.

He licked his lips, not quite pulling up to the drive-thru speaker box, and screw it all, my heart slammed in my chest so hard I was sure it could be heard a mile away.

“You believe me.”

“I’ve always believed you.”

The words escaped before I could help them, a terrible dagger of truth capable of shredding the deceit in which I’d so carefully cloaked myself.

I held my breath because this, this was too dangerous to be allowed, what I had been protecting us both against for close to a year. I’d felt it. Of course I’d felt it, knew in those dark moments the bond resurfaced that some warped part of our connection made Topher believe there was something there, that he wanted this, wanted us. It wasn’t real, would never be real. Everything I touched turned to ash, my power a sickly-sweet poison that made everyone around me think they adored me before its effects sharpened into a heroin like addiction and they realized they would crawl to the ends of the earth to bleed me dry. No one could love me, not really. Not when I could never trust myself or them.

He wasn’t the only one who felt it. Somehow over the course of weeks and months, I’d allowed things to get irrevocably twisted in my head, feelings I’d known from the start were absolutely out of bounds clawing their way through my subconscious courtesy of my messed-up bastard of a wolf. No matter how hard I fought to ignore them now, they pulsed, ever present, always there. Topher Greer was off limits. One hundred percent, completely, off limits. I’d told myself I would do everything possible to avoid him outside of neglecting my siring duties entirely…

…until I hadn’t. Somehow Netflix nights and dinners to check in and those stupid, stupid books had twisted us into a tangled knot of thorns I wasn’t sure could be cut free. Not without destroying us both. And still the obsession my wolf had with him lingered.

My usual method of dealing with things, casual no strings attached hookups that took care of my wolf’s needs without ever forming a lasting, dangerous connection, were decidedly off the table now that our wolves were bonded. I was this close to the edge every second of every day. And the worst part was, I couldn’t tell anyone about it.

Topher Greer and I couldn’t be together. Not when he was bound to me by magic rather than choice. And the sooner my wolf got the memo on that, the better.

2

Topher

I CROUCHED IN WOLF FORM IN THE GRASS on the outskirts of a housing development half an hour east of Austin. A careful sniff revealed a single sprig of pungent sage buried in the surrounding buffalo grass. At nearly nightfall, the hazy Texas twilight was reduced to a palette of blues, yellows, browns and endless gray. A line of electrical towers hummed in the distance, well beyond the range of human hearing.

After two years as a werewolf, it was still hard to reconcile my human side with my animal form. I was Topher in one, something else in the other. Borns like Caldwell made little distinction between human and wolf other than switching skins. For them, the connection was natural as breathing, a bond they’d felt since the womb and didn’t feel the need to fight off like a foreign invader at every full moon. For Bittens, those of us forced into this life against our will, that deep sense of wrongness lingered, a feeling of being other many never learned to fully accept.

But I had to be in wolf form for this. I needed the moon magic that glowed in my wolf’s bones like liquid fire and only echoed in my human ones like the flash you see on the back of your eyes after staring at a bright object on a sunny day. I could feel them out there, the vampires who’d been stalking me every night since I’d escaped, staying just out of range where I couldn’t ID them.

Even if no one else believed me.

If reading an undead signature right after they’d dematerialized out of a crime scene felt like a white-hot sparkler bought from a fireworks stand on the Fourth of July, this magic was an echo, the soft glow of placing your palm face up into a square of sunlight. There was nothing tangible. Nothing I could taste or see or hear, only the slightest warmth in the back of my mind. The unnatural presence that ever since the day I’d been held captive, I’d associated with vampire. They’d been here. I was sure of it. And I was going to prove it.

On silent paws, I cut through the back of the wooded lot. Red wasps buzzed in the dry grass beneath the snarled cedar trees. A crooked plastic sign flapped on a chain link fence, warning against trespassing. Faded plastic kiddie toys littered the yards. A pair of mixed breed dogs growled at me from behind a fence. Shifting to human, I walked up to the third house past the blue mailbox on the corner, the one with spiny agave plants lining the strip by the sidewalk.

I rang the bell three times before the door cracked an inch. Chad Malone had on a white tank with sweat stains at the armpits and track pants that smelled like they hadn’t been washed in a week. His pupils were blown, his gaze unfocused. High as a kite. In another lifetime, he’d been Kieran’s best friend. More recently, he was his dealer.