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I had always wondered how Nathan had found us. He must have had someone shadowing us the whole time, or maybe he’d planted trackers in my stuff. It might have been my own mother who sewed trackers into my clothing for that matter. Nothing would have surprised me.
“I’m so sorry,” Rose sobbed.
I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I needed to think, but for now, I gathered my weeping sister into my arms. “You were only eleven,” I said, to myself as much as to her.
She’d just been a child. She had no idea the hell that she would bring forth. She hadn’t meant to do such deep colossal damage.
And yet… I still struggled to contain the anger flickering in my heart like the start of a fire. I tried to push it down, wrapping my arms around her and remembering what she had looked like at eleven when she adored me. She’d counted on me to braid her hair and get her ready for school, to teach her to weave friendship bracelets for her friends and to tell her to turn off her light when it was getting too late.
The last five years of distance between us, the way she had turned cold, as if I had somehow wronged her when I ran away, suddenly made sense. She’d had to deal with her guilt somehow. And she had found relief in disdain for me.
I had missed my little sister all those five years. I wasn’t sure our relationship would ever be the same as it could have been if she hadn’t told our mom, if she hadn’t started all my misery in motion, and if she hadn’t hidden her betrayal all these years. If she hadn’t wrapped that betrayal in distance and dismissive words.
But for now, I just rubbed her back and whispered to her that it was okay, that she was just a child.
And that was true too.
* * *
The next morning dawned bright,and I had a hard time waking up after my restless night, even listening to Dylan’s cartoons and feeling the bed rock under his weight as he shifted back and forth at the foot of the bed.
Aiden came in with coffee, and I told him, “This is why you’re my favorite brother.”
“Not a lot of competition,” he pointed out, sitting on the front of the opposite bed and taking a sip of his own coffee. “So, where are we going to go now?”
The world felt very big and very open and a little bit terrifying. “We’ll have to stay on neutral territory.”
“That means almost any major city is open for us,” he said.
There were a handful of cities that were owned by packs, and the humans that lived there were oblivious to them. Even though the packs controlled everything they did. But we would stay far away from those dark cities.
“Let’s keep going west until we find someplace where the sun never stops shining.” I’d spent my life surrounded by pine trees and I had loved them, but the sudden longing for palm trees, for something so different that I could believe life itself could be different, struck me deeplyg .
Aiden flashed a grin at me. “California bound.”
I grinned back at him, then looked to find Rose, her face still looked blotchy from the tears she’d cried, probably late into the night. I held out my hand to her. She hesitated, but when she came and sat beside me on the bed, I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. “I think Rose will love California.”
I’d never been, but I was making a wild bet.
Rose smiled back at me, a slow smile like the sun coming out after the rain, and I pulled her in close and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. There was nothing we could do about the past. We had to just keep moving toward the future.
The quiet expectancy in the room was broken by a footfall outside and the scent of a wolf. We all sensed it at the same time, except for Dylan, who remained fixed on his cartoons. The rest of us leapt to our feet.
A heavy knock landed against the door.
Aiden squared his shoulders. “You go out the window. I’ll hold them off.”
A wolf was outside our door.
But which one?
I bundled Dylan up, whispering into his ear to be quiet so he wouldn’t fuss about his TV shows. His lips pressed together tightly. He was obedient in a way that wasn’t quite natural for a child, as if he knew how much danger we were constantly in, and it made my heart ache even as I was grateful for the silence.
I gestured for Rose to come with me as we went to the bathroom at the back of the motel room, where a window looked out onto the dingy runoff parking lot beyond, where a few eighteen-wheelers were parked.
I raised the window—it had creaked open slowly the night before when I opened it, then closed it and double checked it was locked—and leaned my head out, inhaling the scents. I didn’t smell wolf.
“Go on out,” I told Rose.
