Brothersong (Green Creek #4) - T.J. Klune Page 0,12
is about you. This is all on you. You always say we’re pack, but I don’t think you have a goddamn clue what that actually means. Fuck you. Fuck the Alpha of all.” He sucked in a sharp breath. Then, “Maybe it’s time for the reign of the Bennetts to end.”
“You can’t mean that—”
“I do. I mean every word. Let Michelle stay in charge. Let Osmond be her lapdog. You say you want to put Joe and Kelly and Carter first, then this is how you do it. Joe’s broken, Thomas. He’s broken. And believe me, I know what that feels like. You didn’t lift a fucking finger to help me. Don’t do the same to him.”
Mark stormed out of the office. His footsteps were loud as he stalked down the steps. He didn’t even notice me as he left the house, slamming the front door behind him.
Above me, my father stood still.
And all I felt from him was blue.
IT WENT LIKE THIS:
Mom was setting up her studio.
Dad was putting books on the shelves.
Mark was upstairs, locked in his room.
Kelly and I were on the porch, his feet in my lap. He was reading. I closed my eyes, taking in the scents and sounds of the old-growth forest around us. In the driveway in front of us were three cars. Two trucks. An SUV. Two thirty-foot moving trucks. We were supposed to be moving more stuff in, but there was plenty of time for that later.
And then a voice came, one I hadn’t heard in a very long time.
He said, “Do you have your own room?”
My chest hitched.
Kelly sat up, eyes wet. “Is that—”
“Shut up. Listen.”
A deeper voice said, “Yes. It’s just me and my mom now.”
“I’m sorry,” Joe said, and his voice was rough and gravelly.
“For?”
“For whatever just made you sad.”
“I dream. Sometimes it feels like I’m awake. And then I’m not.”
Mom and Dad burst out onto the porch just as Joe said, “You’re awake now. Ox, Ox, Ox. Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
“We live so close to each other.”
My father put his face in his hands. Deep within us all, crashing and colliding, came three words.
packpackpack
The shadows stretched as the afternoon waned.
Mark came out onto the porch, demanding to know if that was Joe, was that Joe, was that—
They appeared around the blue house.
There, on the back of a large boy, was Joe, eyes alight.
My father dropped his hands and took in a shuddering breath.
We never looked away from Joe.
From this stranger who watched us with wide, dark eyes.
They stopped before us.
“Mark?” the boy said.
Mark smiled. “Ox. How lovely to see you again. I see you’ve made a new friend.”
Joe dropped from Ox’s back, stepped to his side and took his hand, dragging him toward us. Something was shifting, and I didn’t know what. It was massive, and I was overwhelmed. It felt like the day Kelly was born. The day Joe came back to us.
And Joe.
Joe, Joe, Joe.
He said, “Mom! Mom. You have to smell him! It’s like… like… I don’t even know what it’s like! I was walking in the woods to scope out our territory so I could be like Dad and then it was like… whoa. And then he was all standing there and he didn’t see me at first because I’m getting so good at hunting. I was all like rawr and grr but then I smelled it again and it was him and it was all kaboom! I don’t even know! I don’t even know! You gotta smell him and then tell me why it’s all candy canes and pinecones and epic and awesome.”
We were all stunned into silence.
We didn’t know then what he would become.
Had I known, I would have done everything I could to push him away. To tell him that the Bennetts were cursed, that he should stay as far away from us as possible. He was misunderstood. His daddy said he was going to get shit all his life. His mother, a woman underestimated in her own right, might have survived the coming of Richard Collins.
What would he have become without the wolves?
I thought about that a lot.
Once, long after my father had returned to the moon, it was just Kelly and me. We were too old to be sleeping in the same bed, but here we were all the same.
He lay facing me, his knees bumping into mine.
He said, “It’s all inevitable, isn’t it? Everything.”
I wanted to tell him no. I wanted to tell him that there was