I feel disoriented, drunk, more drunk than ever, even when I was thirteen and me and Riley power-drank so much of my father’s moonshine, we got alcohol poisoning.
Anger assaults me in the middle of Cat’s spinning procedure room. I grip the wall, willing it to stop. She was in distress – the girl. Any alpha connected to the council would know that scent from miles away, the scent of a distressed pack member, or the mate of one.
Tyson smells like he did when I caught his scent over six years ago, but with the addition of the nuance of her. Her scent is heavily bathed by his. My head spins in the opposite direction of the room and I feel angry. Angry at what? At the fact she was here and distressed? At the fact that she smells like Tyson? That he smells like her? The thoughts are abhorrent, but I can’t deny them. I’m confused. I must be. I can’t pinpoint them, but I know they’re wrong.
Did Linc say it’s Monday? What the fuck?
I stumble out of the room and out the back door, Lincoln at my back, and as my gaze hits the sky, what I see sends me to my knees.
“See that, Linc?” I ask.
“What?” Lincoln asks. “I don’t see nothin’ but clouds. What’s wrong with you, brother? Where have you been. We’ve been worried.”
I don’t answer, can’t, because I’m taking in a swirl of moving clouds shaped like wolves. My white wolf circling with a black one, a woman-shaped pink-hued cloud on her knees between us. I can’t make out her features. And I can’t make out what it is about him that I can’t shake – a feeling that he’s meant to be connected to me, but that there’s something between us. She is. She’s between us. And that she smells like him makes me want to rip claws through the sky and shred that black cloud apart.
It doesn’t make sense.
He’s mated to her. Why am I feeling this… this… confusion? I can’t even label it.
A pink lightning bolt slices across the sky, through all three clouds and as they disintegrate, Lincoln shakes me, gripping my shoulders.
“Mase, what’s goin’ on?” he demands with alarm in his features. “Your eyes!”
I shake free of him.
“Did you see it in the clouds?” I demand.
“See what?”
The clouds now just look like clouds. White, shapeless.
Joel and Jase are jogging toward us, then the three of them converse while following me.
I dash wetness off my face. Blood. I ignore it and follow my nose.
What am I looking for? I know that’s her scent and I know where it goes. And as confused as I am, I know in my gut right now that I cannot go there. Can’t.
I’m filled with a vivid sense of wrongness, can’t put my finger on what or why it’s wrong. Is it that she’s his? It can’t be. She’s not meant to be mine. Is she? As I have the thought, I shove it away. Because I must.
I hear the guys talking about me as I roam in wolf form, nose to the ground, searching. For what? Answers.
I left in the middle of the night and got here not long before dawn when my truck broke down and then I got lost in my own fuckin’ town. But this isn’t hours later. It’s days later.
There has to be something else. Some reasonable explanation for why I’m feeling both drawn to and confused about the scent of Tyson Savage’s mate. And the visions in my head. Black wolf staring down white wolf. White wolf wanting what’s between them. The woman. Wanting her? Do I want her? I don’t know.
Is fate so cruel to bring our full pack together, finally, after all these years, only to throw this inexplicable twist into it?
And how did I lose the weekend? Get lost in my own town and just lose time like that? Something is fucked up here.
Something is very fucked up here.
I’m completely fucked up. And ravenous suddenly.
I look around and my gaze stops on the three co-alphas who eye me with concern. They aren’t concerned with themselves. It’s only me that’s having an issue here.
What’s my issue?
I spot a rabbit from the corner of my eye. I chase it, catch it, and devour it. And it’s not enough to sate my hunger.
I haven’t hunted animals in wolf form since I was a teenager, consumed by the surge in testosterone as I matured, the urge to hunt. But now – now there’s a deep call inside me to bring down something bigger. A buck maybe. Or something that will give me a fight. A bear? I force my thoughts to lock on that instead of what my inner wolf tells me, that he craves battle with a large, black wolf.
2
Mason
Friday
The inner voice taunting me all week – it isn’t my wolf. It’s something else. The wolf in me feels muted right now, confused. Following his tail. The man in me feels much the same. This other sense in me – and that’s what it feels like, an extra sense that I’ve never had before – not only is it foreign, but it’s also not right; it doesn’t belong.