I don’t have a family to worry about trusting,” Colt said, holding up a finger.
“That’s not exactly what I—”
“Then, you say it’s too bad I’m just the variant ghoul equivalent of a white girl who likes pumpkin spice lattes and cozy sweaters in the fall, like there’s fuck-all I can do about that.”
“I’m just trying to prepare you for what you’re up against,” said Stan. “Sooner or later, you will face enemies you can’t kill, and you will experience betrayal. I just don’t want you to be helpless when it happens.”
“Yeah, well, the picture you’re painting is pretty fuckin’ hopeless.”
Stan smiled. “The cold sting of reality usually has that effect on people. Your job as a leader is to move past it anyway.”
“So my job is to be insane.”
“Pretty much, but you’ve got a great head start. Everything you’ve done up until this point is quite certifiable,” Stan mused. “Not turning and running the other way when a bunch of strangers told you that you were a thing you’d previously thought only existed in the worst fairy tales, risking certain death to become an Alpha just to protect us, keeping Jason in your life even when there was a near-zero chance of it ending in any way other than tragedy…”
Colt winced. “Yeah, I get it. I’m crazy and I make bad choices. Preaching to the choir here.”
“Everyone who’s ever accomplished anything worth doing in this world was crazy. So was everyone who made this world a darker place.”
“Which one am I, then?”
Stan stood up and stretched his back. “That, son, is for you to decide.” He held up the dusty old volume. “Thanks for the book.”
Colt grunted in acknowledgment. When Stan shut the door on his way out, Colt fell back into his chair. With those words of encouragement in his mind, he had the urge to go back to the one place he knew he would always be able to call home. No matter what Stan said, there were people he could trust. The Jagers had spent years convincing him of that, and he’d come too far to go back to believing otherwise.
Chapter 5
When Colt pulled up to his parents’ house, the quiet little street in Narragansett was as idyllic as always. He was overcome with nostalgia the moment he walked up the misshapen cement path he’d helped Renee pour more than a decade earlier. He shook his head as he passed his own smaller handprints. He’d rolled his eyes back then at the sentimental project. Like most of Renee’s projects, that one had been accomplished in the middle of the night, when she’d dragged him out of bed on a whim of inspiration. They’d laughed loudly enough to set the neighbors’ poodle off as they poured cement under the floodlights.
There was a car Colt didn’t recognize in the driveway, but while Renee was an angel on earth, she drove like she was possessed by the devil himself, so it might easily have been her new ride. She had been through three cars in the last five years. If she’d gone to some used car lot without him and gotten screwed over on the price again by a shady salesman, someone was gonna have shit to pay.
“Hey, Ma. I saw—”
Colt broke off as he found himself staring at two of the women who’d taken on the role of his mother over the years. Anette was a petite woman with thick brown hair in braids that reached all the way down to her waist. Colt had never once seen her cry in the nineteen blissful months he’d spent at her house before being transferred to another for reasons beyond Anette’s control. The fact that her russet eyes were bloodshot with recently shed tears was the practical equivalent of an air-raid siren.
Something was going on, and it wasn’t good.
“Anette. Hey, sorry I barged in, I didn’t know Mom and Dad had company.”
“Oh, it’s alright, kiddo,” she said, standing as she wiped her tears on the crumpled tissue in her left hand. Colt went to hug her, and despite the fact that the top of her head barely even came up to his chest, he knew he’d always be “kiddo” to her whether he was twenty-six or eighty. “It’s good to see you. You’re a hard man to reach these days, and look at you.” She pulled away to look him over. Her smile was genuine, but it didn’t touch the grief in her eyes. “I always knew you’d be one of