my eye. I had no pride. I whimpered and flattened my ears back, trying to submit, but she wasn’t interested. There was a snarl rippling out of her that vibrated through my skull. My eye would explode with the sound if she didn’t puncture it first.
Her teeth slid closer. My muscles were trembling. Bracing themselves already for the pain.
Suddenly she cried out and released me. I backed up, shaking my head, blood matting the side of my face, my ear still screaming pain. In front of me, the white wolf cowered submissively before a large gray wolf. A black wolf stood just behind him, ears pricked with aggression. The pack had returned.
The gray wolf turned toward me, and behind him, I saw the white wolf’s ears instantly lift from their position of surrender. Without his gaze on her, everything about her bristled with rebellion. Everything said I give up, for now, while you’re watching. Her eyes were unflinching on me. It was a threat, I understood now. I was meant to take my place below her in the pack, or someday fight her again. Maybe the pack wouldn’t be around then to stop her.
I wasn’t ready to back down.
I stared back.
The gray wolf took a few steps to me, passing me images of my torn face as he did. He nosed my ear cautiously. He was wary; I was smelling less and less of wolf and more and more of the thing I was when I wasn’t a wolf. My strange body was working hard to heal my face and to pull me back into a human. It wasn’t cold enough to keep me in this skin.
The white wolf stared at me.
I could feel that I didn’t have long. My brain was stretching again.
Beside me, the gray wolf growled, and I jerked until I realized that it was directed at the she-wolf. He stepped away from me, still growling, and now, the black wolf was growling, too. The white wolf stepped back. One step, then another. They were leaving me.
A shudder twitched through my body, ending just under my eye, stinging. I was shifting. The gray wolf — Beck — snapped at the white wolf, pushing her farther away from me.
They were saving me.
The white wolf met my gaze one last time. This time.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
• ISABEL •
I spent the weekend waiting for Grace to call and invite me over to Beck’s house, and when I finally realized that she was probably waiting for me to invite myself as usual, it was Monday. And by then, Cole’s box of dangerous toys had arrived and I figured I could deliver it and see Grace at the same time. Then it wasn’t like I was going over specially to see Cole. I knew what was good for me. Even if I didn’t like it.
When Cole answered the front door of Beck’s house, he was shirtless and faintly sweaty. He looked like he’d been excavating with his bare hands and he had a bit of bruising around his left eye. He wore a smile across his entire face, wide and benevolent. It was a very grand-looking expression, even though he had bedhead and was wearing only sweatpants. There was something undeniably theatrical about Cole, even when his stage was the mundane.
“Good morning,” he said. He peered at the warm day. “It’s so Minnesota out here. I hadn’t realized.”
It was a gorgeous day, one of the perfect spring days that Minnesota seemed to have no problem inserting in between weeks of frigid weather or into the middle of a summer heat wave. The lawn smelled like the boxwoods that were planted unevenly in front of the house.
“It’s not morning anymore,” I said. “Your stuff is in the car. You didn’t say what kind of sedatives, so I got the worst I could find.”
Cole rubbed his filthy palm across his chest and stretched his neck up as if he could see what I’d brought from the front step. “How well you know me. Come in, I was just making a fresh pot of uppers. I had a helluva night.”
Music was blaring from the living room behind him; it was hard to believe that Grace was in the same house as it. “I don’t know if I’m coming in,” I said.
Cole laughed, a very cavalier laugh that completely dismissed my statement as fanciful, and walked barefoot to my SUV. “Front seat or backseat?”
“Very back.” It wasn’t a huge box and I could’ve carried it, but I preferred