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He draped his arm around my shoulder and led me inside. “Yeah, well, that can change at any time.”
“I always feel like you’re preparing us for something in particular.”
He stiffened slightly, but I noticed. “Preparation is about as important as control. Get cleaned up. Perdita’s cooking.” He glanced at me. “Pretend to like everything.”
I laughed. “I do like everything.” It was hard to feel miserable around Nathan who had made me a part of his family on the day we met.
“Teenage boys,” he said with a shake of his head. “No standards at all.”
“I don’t want to get old if it means thinking I’m too good for everything.”
He grinned. “Ouch.”
“Is Byron back yet?”
“He’s on his way. Dominic said that Eric’s call came from Copenhagen, but Byron couldn’t find any sign of him.”
Eric had vanished weeks ago, with only a recent phone call to let us know he was okay. Some of the others said he had been complaining that the pack was growing too large for a while, that he probably needed a break from the constant struggles for dominance within the pack. But if the alpha himself was still searching for him, then he obviously disagreed. Maybe he remembered as clearly as I did how happy Eric had been when Byron told him he could stay. What had changed so quickly?
“Anyway,” Nathan said. “Byron will be leading the run tonight. You coming with?”
“Nah. Don’t need to yet.”
He shot me a concerned glance. “It might help you fit in.”
“I have homework,” I lied.
A muscle in his jaw ticked, but he didn’t try to force me. That was the great thing about Nathan. He didn’t use his dominance against me, even though he easily could. His uncle was the alpha, after all. He had told me once that if it was easy, it wasn’t necessary, but I wasn’t sure I understood what that meant exactly.
Inside, I ran up to my room, got cleaned up, then joined Nathan and Perdita for dinner. We weren’t related, but they put on a show of being my guardians, even giving me the Evans name because when I arrived, I didn’t have one. I had no idea who my parents were, or even where I had been born. We’d invented a birthday for me.
The day I had joined the Evans pack had been the day my life truly began. I didn’t like to think of the old days—or the old ways—very often. Submissive wolves hadn’t survived for long under a violent, kind of crazy alpha, but he had died before I was old enough to know him. I’d been raised around wolves who did know him, who followed his ways, and I was lucky I had escaped them.
And even luckier that I’d been taken in by Nathan and his human mate.
“Are you okay?” Perdita asked when she served me dinner. “You’re looking peaky. Think you need to join the others tonight? I don’t mind being alone if you’re worried about leaving me.”
I shook my head. “I know. Just something weird happened today. There’s this girl…”
They exchanged an amused look, telegraphing exactly what they were thinking.
“It’s not like that,” I protested. “It’s not like you two.” Those two being legitimate soul mates who had met while under a curse that they had eventually broken. Their love had shown me that people could be trusted back when I had been used to something different. “She’s new, and there’s something weird about her. My wolf doesn’t like it. She looks… unusual, but there’s an atmosphere around her that creeps me out.”
“Maybe it’s not the wolf reacting to her,” Nathan said wryly. “Maybe the teenage boy in you is just too scared to talk to her.”
Perdita speared a piece of broccoli with her fork. “As long as you don’t give out mixed signals and confuse the girl.”
“I’ll never hear the end of it,” he muttered under his breath, but his eyes twinkled with good humour.
“Nope.” His mate winked at me. “So who is this girl?”
“I don’t even know her name,” I said. “I just get this weird vibe from her.”
“She can’t be weirder than you,” Perdita said. “What’s weirder than a werewolf?”
* * *
That night,I couldn’t sleep. Sweat rolled down my back when I sat up in bed in the darkness. Maybe I was wrong; I should have gone on a run with the others instead. When I couldn’t sleep, I usually chased rabbits nearby. Perdita didn’t ask too many questions. She wasn’t a wolf, but she understood that we had a different lifestyle to normal teenagers. I still felt guilty when I climbed out of the window and shinnied down the drainpipe. A part of me didn’t want to leave her unprotected, but she had a giant wolfhound who rarely left her side. It wasn’t like we lived in a dangerous time anymore.
