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“What if they find us?”
“They won’t. Are you sure your parents won’t find us?”
“They might, but who cares if they leave town? It might be for the best if they come looking for me.” I shivered. “I just want to go home, Dorian. Away from Dublin. We might have a place to stay there. You know, where an entire community isn’t trying to kill us.”
“Not the entire community.” He took my hand and held it in his pocket. “Just the really angry ones.”
“Maybe I’ll laugh about it when this is all over, but in the meantime, thank you. For everything.” I squeezed his hand. “I know it was hard for you to stand up to Victor.”
“Actually, it wasn’t.” He sounded surprised. “I didn’t even think about it.”
“So that’s your problem. Thinking too much.”
He managed a weak smile. He kept looking around us, his stance defensive. Relief crossed his face. “Here’s the train. No turning back now.”
I couldn’t even hear the train, but shortly afterward, it pulled into the station. When the train stopped, we got on and found an empty carriage. I sat next to Dorian, our knees touching under the table. I was still unsure on the whole werewolf thing, but I liked having Dorian around, and I felt far braver on a train heading out of Dublin.
If going back to my old village was what it took to keep us both safe, then we had to try. Maybe it would have been better to go to the police—unless my sleepwalking happened to come up and make me look mentally unstable somehow. I wasn’t sure of much anymore.
“If they hurt us, they’d draw attention to themselves,” I said as the train pulled from the station. I had been holding my breath, waiting for somebody to come rushing into the station to stop us. Running away wasn’t usually my thing, but Victor was a nasty piece of work, and he had a lot of friends. “They wouldn’t get away withthat.” Without thinking, I touched the minor puncture wounds on my neck.
Dorian reached out to stop me then dropped his hand. “Try not to hate them, Margo. You don’t understand how they feel right now. They’re in a bad way. Protection and loyalty are important to us, and we couldn’t protect our own. Most of the pack don’t even know the whole story because the alpha’s trying to flush out the killer, but they won’t stop to check the facts right now. It hurts too much.”
The pain in his voice hit me in the chest. “It hurts you, too.”
“It feels like a noose around my neck. Eric and Alex were bad enough, but Mara?” His voice broke on her name. “She was my best friend in the pack.”
“I’m so sorry.” I laid my hand on his thigh. “I know you were close. I didn’t know her very well, but I liked her. I still can’t believe this happened to her. It doesn’t feel real.”
“Feels too real to me.” He drew me against him and sighed against my hair. “I have a terrible feeling. I think someone is trying to take over the pack, or maybe even destroy it. Byron and Nathan have been taken by the police because Mara’s top was found with blood on it. But it had to be found somewhere connected to the Evans family for them to be on the radar of the police, right?”
“You think the killer placed the hoodie somewhere it would be found?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Amelia said the spirit we released at Halloween must be stuck to the killer, but nobody’s acting possessed. The spirit reached into lots of us, but you’re the one it wanted. So what if the killer was just waiting for their chance to disrupt the pack, and this spirit crap became their perfect opportunity?” He shook his head. “Except Eric’s been gone longer than that—unless he’s the one doing this, but he was so happy with the pack. He couldn’t have faked that. I just… don’t understand any of this.”
“You blame yourself,” I said, realising why he sounded so upset. “You think you could have stopped this.”
“Couldn’t I? I could have told somebody about the spirit board, stopped everyone from using it. But I took part because I’m a pathetic submissive wolf, and now people are dead.”
“You’re not pathetic, and it isn’t your fault. If we’re going to start the blaming game, I’m the one who found the spirit board, and I said nothing when Emma took it. But we didn’t kill anyone, Dorian.”
“It doesn’t matter. The pack hates me.” He looked miserable. “I don’t have anything else. I’ve no family, nowhere to go.”
“They wouldn’t just kick you out,” I said. “They wouldn’t give you their name and then dump you.”
“Why not?” he said. “I make a terrible werewolf. I’m not dominant. I don’t care about being in charge. I’m not particularly strong or fast. I’m the runt, the coward. Even if I didn’t screw this up, there’s still not enough room for all of us. Byron has no choice but to move some of us out of there. There’ll always be younger wolves in need of his help. There’s no place for me. What do I bring to the pack that makes me worth keeping around?”
“You were brave enough to stand up to them,” I said. “That’s the hardest thing you can do.”
He smiled. “You don’t have a problem standing up to people.”
“That’s because I don’t know them very well. If my parents had found me before we left and told me to stay behind, I wouldn’t be sitting on this train right now.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“Tonight, I’ll turn on my phone and send them a message letting them know I’m okay. Then I’ll turn my phone back off.”
“They’ll worry.”
