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“Of course.” She spoke smoothly, as if there was nothing out of character about my requests.
But I saw the look that she and Shaw exchanged as I left the room.
CHAPTER6
Liam
Later that day,I racked my brain thinking about what it would be like to be Nathan Longroad. Putting myself in a frame of mind to try to understand him, to imagine his thoughts, seems like it might give me the best chance to move into his head.
I imagined through his eyes.
But it seemed like a betrayal of my past self to try to imagine the room where I had been kept. I had been a secret from the rest of the Longroad pack, for reasons I didn’t really understand. It wasn’t as if they would have come to my defense.
Chained up in their basement, I had come to know Nathan Longroad well. I had been twelve years old when I was sent to the pack as part of a fostering exchange, an idea from medieval times that was supposed to bring peace between our people.
It hadn’t worked particularly well. The Longroad pack alpha was an asshole who was raising his sons to be assholes. Our own father and alpha hadn’t been great either. He’d been abusive to our mom and to us, and when illness took our mother, she’d died with a smile on her face like she was finally being released.
Or so Karissa had told me. I hadn’t been by her side. I’d been with the Longroads.
Nathan had been two years younger than I was, and I’d always been a tall, strong kid for my age. My father used to complain that I’d have looked the part if only I didn’t act so differently. I’d been lost in my own world. I’d had visions from the time I was young.
So one day, the older Longroad son had come back to his pack. Instead of coming after me, my father had just left me there, forgetting to pick me up again as if I were just so much trash. Just like my family, it seemed as if the rest of the Longroad family forgot me except for one of the Longroad sons, Nathan, who had come down to hurt me all the time. He reveled in the way I had once been taller and more powerful than he was but now was helpless.
His father was convinced, at first, that he could use my strange gifts. I’d heard him talking with his trusted advisors, the people who knew I was still there, about how they could use my visions. But time went on, and no matter how much he asked me to reveal things, to walk through other people’s visions, I’d refused to help him. I had tried to develop my powers in secret, and that was how I knew some of what I had to do to get into Nathan’s visions. That was how I’d escaped into Amelia’s dreams. But I didn’t want to be his tool, so I’d pretended to be even stupider and more disconnected from the real world than I was.
And after a while he had left me alone. He said maybe I would be useful someday down the road, as I grew into my powers. They’ve been convinced that I was part Fae. I didn’t know anything about the Fae, and I didn’t know if they were real.
But although he left me alone, Nathan didn’t.
And all along, some part of me had hoped every day that my father would come and rescue me. But it had been Brennan who welcomed me home.
Certainty crystallized in my chest. It didn’t matter how much it hurt. I had to go into Nathan’s mind.
Stone too had been convinced for a while that my visions could be useful. But I didn’t want to be Stone’s tool for his wars.
I had never tried to shape my abilities to be a tool for me, because they didn’t want them to become a tool for anyone else.
Suddenly that seemed colossally stupid and short sighted.
I closed my eyes and imagined that room around me again. I imagined Nathan’s booted feet stopping in front of me, and I tried to imagine myself as the boy in the boots. I tried not just to look up at him as his eyes glowered down at me but to imagine myself in his head, seeing me as pitiful and worthless. A familiar sense of loathing rose in my chest, hating myself for being different, for being so disconnected from anyone else. Looking down at myself, it was easy to imagine why someone would want to hurt me. Something pressed on my chest so hard that I couldn’t breathe.
Sometimes I was afraid I had given Amelia my panic attacks, that she had felt them because of the connection between us and now she had them too. Maybe my body had taught hers how to stop breathing. I tried to draw breaths over and over again but I couldn’t get myself to calm down. My heart hammered in my chest. It felt like my heart was being squeezed so tightly that it would explode.
I took off running, catching a brief glimpse of Karissa and Shaw’s worried looks as I ran through the house. I barely cleared the front door which exploded in front of me before I leapt off the porch steps, transforming into the wolf.
I ran.
I would have run for much longer, if Amelia hadn’t needed me. Instead, I was determined to try again, once the wild panic had receded. Feeling a deep sense of dread, I headed back toward the house.
Shaw met me in his wolf form. He nosed against me, checking to see if I was alright. He whined his worry for me, Shaw being more vulnerable in his wolf form than he ever would be as a human.
I nipped him lightly, playfully, trying to tell him that I would be all right.
The two of us ran together back to the house. When we had shifted back, I said to him, “I have to go into Nathan’s head.”
“I know,” he said, and the conversation we had earlier which I had completely forgotten came back to me.
Embarrassment washed through me, but he said, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
