I said, “And we have to make him pay.”
And that was it. Later, I would realize that was it.
That was the moment we began to say good-bye.
into the bones/losing you
I STILL didn’t see it coming.
Maybe I should have.
But I didn’t.
THEY LEFT us. After a while.
The strange wolves. The ones I didn’t know.
They left back to wherever they came from.
But not before they held their secret meeting once more.
I couldn’t even find it in me to ask questions.
To give two shits about who they were.
I stared at the closed door.
And walked away.
THEY LEFT and all was quiet.
Carter and Kelly spent hours upon hours in the woods, restlessly moving through the trees. If they didn’t come home at night, I’d find them in the clearing, lying flat on their stomachs near a section of burnt grass, tails thumping to a beat only they could hear.
Elizabeth would disappear for long stretches of time. I never followed her. I never found out where she went.
Mark stayed on the porch, scanning the tree line. I knew what he was looking for, but I didn’t think it would happen. Richard was gone.
And he would stay gone because of Gordo. Gordo, who spent the days that followed shoring up the wards he’d placed around Green Creek. Now that he was pack again, he could access areas of his magic that had been blocked to him before. I could feel the pull of it every time he did something different, that strange sensation that felt like walking down the stairs and missing the bottom step.
Joe stayed in his father’s office.
I tried to keep all of them together.
I lay with Carter and Kelly in the grass. Under the stars.
When Elizabeth was in the house, I made sure she ate.
I stood on the porch next to Mark, running my fingers through his fur, watching.
I followed Gordo around, watching as he muttered under his breath, keeping an eye out to make sure no one in Green Creek saw the way the tattoos moved along his arms. He said it wasn’t necessary. That no one would find out. I went anyway.
Joe barely spoke to me, even when he was human and even when I was at his side.
I didn’t understand what he was going through. I didn’t understand what Thomas had given him. I didn’t understand what it meant to be the Alpha. All I could do was hope that I could be enough as his tether.
Of course, any courting he’d been doing before had stopped.
I didn’t mind. I knew there were other things he had to focus on. More important things.
ONE DAY I went to work, just to do something different.
Gordo wasn’t there. He was with Joe, talking about things I wasn’t supposed to hear.
I might have glared at both of them. They’d stared back with blank faces.
I might have also slammed the door on my way out of the house.
I wasn’t proud of that.
So without any better idea of where to go, I went to the shop.
I stayed off the main street. I didn’t want anyone to stop me. To try and talk to me. To offer condolences. I was sick of condolences.
It probably didn’t help that I was pissed at Joe and Gordo, even though I tried very hard not to be. But they’d never kept anything from me. Not since I found out about witches and wolves. For the most part, anyway.
But when I saw the shop for the first time in days, some of that anger lessened. It dampened the sadness. I thought maybe this was going to be an escape. At least for a little while.
I walked into the shop. The bell on the door to the waiting room rang overhead. It caused my heart to ache a little, but in a good way.
“I’ll be right out!” a voice called from back in the shop.
I knew that voice.
My throat closed. Just a little.
“Welcome to Gordo’s,” Rico said, coming into the waiting room. He was running a rag over his hands, trying to remove the oil under his fingernails. There was the sweet scent of coconut oil on the rag, which Rico swore by. The rest of us used soap and water. Rico said there was no accounting for taste. “How can I help—”
Then he stopped. And stared.
“Hey,” I said. “Hi. Hi, Rico.”
“Hi.” He snorted and shook his head. “Hi, he says. Hi, like he’s some little—get your ass over here, Ox.”
I got my ass over there.
The hug was good. Really good.
“It’s good to see you,” he whispered, arms around me tight.
I just nodded into his neck.
Then he dragged me back into the shop.
There were a couple of cars up on the lifts.
The radio was blaring Tanner’s country music, something about a man and how all his exes lived in Texas, but he hung his hat in Tennessee.
Tanner himself was under the hood of a 2012 Toyota Corolla. It looked like he was replacing the timing belt, singing along with the radio.
Chris was running a diagnostic check on a truck, squinting at the computer screen, even though his glasses were sitting on top of his head. He’d said he hated how he looked in them.
I took in a deep breath with the smell of grease and grime and metal and rubber. It was the same when I’d been a kid, coming in with my daddy, Gordo offering to buy me a pop from the machine.
It was just missing the man himself.
But that was okay. He was busy now.
“Look what the gato dragged in,” Rico said.
They looked up.
I waved awkwardly.
They were on me before I could even take a step back.
They laughed. They held me. They rubbed their fingers over my head. Through my hair. Their arms went around my shoulders. They pressed their foreheads to mine. They told me I was a sight for sore eyes. That they’d missed me. That they were going to work me to the bone when I was ready.
I couldn’t find the words to say what I wanted. Sometimes, when your heart gets so full, it takes away your voice and all you can do is hold on for dear life.
I WALKED home at dusk.
There was no one waiting for me on the dirt road.
I’d expected that.
But it still stung.
The fading sun shone through the trees.
I ran my hand through the tall grass that grew along the road.
I wondered where I was going.
What I was doing.
How long it would take before I could breathe freely again without this weight on my chest.
How long it would take before my pack wasn’t so fractured anymore.
How long before Joe would talk to me again.
To any of us, really.
I wondered many things.
I stopped in front of my house.
My house. Not the one at the end of the lane.
I stared up at it.
I told myself to keep walking.
To go to the Bennetts. To stay there like I’d been doing for the past week.
I needed to check on them. To make sure they were okay. To make sure they had eaten something, at the very least. I couldn’t let the wolves go hungry.
So imagine my surprise when I found myself at my own front door, my hand hovering above the knob. I told myself to walk away.
I put my hand on the doorknob and twisted.
It didn’t move.
I didn’t understand.
And then I realized it was locked, and we never locked the door. Not even after my father left because we had no reason to. We lived in the country. The house at the end of the lane had been vacant, and then it had been inhabited by wolves. There had been no crime, there had been no monsters to come out of the forest at night.