Brothersong (Green Creek #4) - T.J. Klune Page 0,28

For your pack. For yourself.”

“I can’t.”

“You can,” he snapped, and I flinched. “Why are you doing this to yourself? Didn’t you trust us? Didn’t you trust me? We would have helped you with anything. With everything. We were moving heaven and earth to find him. To bring him back to you.”

“Were you? Or were you looking for Robert Livingstone?”

“That’s not fair.”

I tilted my head back against the window. “Do you ever think what it would be like? If we weren’t who we are. If we weren’t Bennetts.”

“Who would we be?”

I shrugged. “Anyone. No one. People wouldn’t look to us to sacrifice everything we have. We give them our blood, our lives, and it’s never enough. They always want more. And it never ends. Joe is a king, like our father. Mom is a queen. In Caswell, after everything was done and they were starting to rebuild, they looked to Joe to fix them. To fix it all. And since I was his second, they looked to me too. They called me a prince. I hated it.”

“They need hope,” Kelly said quietly. “That’s what they see in us. That’s why they need us. To fight for them.”

“Maybe they should learn to fight for themselves.”

When I opened my eyes again, Kelly was gone.

The cab of the truck was cold.

I tugged my jacket tighter around me and slept.

My dreams were green, green, green, and I was running through the trees, my paws digging into the earth. Around me, my pack sang their wolfsong, and I was home.

THE FULL MOON IN NOVEMBER fell on a Friday.

Kelly was with me most days. He would stay for hours. Sometimes he wouldn’t speak. Other times he would tell me stories that I already knew, stories about our father, our mother. About Joe and Ox. Gordo and Mark. Chris and Tanner and Rico and Jessie. It was like he was plucking memories from my head and laying them out bare. For all I knew, he was. He was a ghost, but he was part of me. A projection.

I looked in the rearview mirror a lot, not recognizing the stranger staring back at me. He was thin, his cheekbones pronounced under a scraggly beard, circles under his eyes like bruises. I flashed my eyes at him.

He flashed his back.

Blue.

Then orange.

Blue.

Then orange.

Sometimes I dreamed in violet, of a locked door where something heavy scratched on the other side. It whispered let me in let me in i promise it will be easy i promise it won’t hurt i promise you won’t regret it just let me in let me let me let me in.

I didn’t.

But it was getting harder to ignore.

As the full moon approached, I crossed into Minnesota, following the directions of a witch in Kentucky who wanted nothing to do with wolves.

The air grew colder.

The sky was covered in a blanket of thick gray clouds.

It smelled like snow.

I didn’t know then that it was all about to end.

Here, at last.

I was being hunted.

awake

Isabella, Minnesota, was barely a blip on the road. A sign announced the town followed by a couple of buildings, but it looked dead. It reminded me of a place in Virginia called Lignite, where we’d fought for a member of our pack on a bridge.

The woods around Isabella were thick. I’d seen signs telling me I was in the Superior National Forest, and I tried to remember if I’d ever heard of a wolf pack here. It seemed like the perfect place. It was in the middle of nowhere, and it felt free. But the territory was empty.

The moon was tugging on me, scratching at the back of my mind. It was getting harder and harder to ignore it.

I drove through Isabella and didn’t see anyone. Small towns lay ahead, the closest almost thirty miles away. It seemed like a good place to stop. I would be safe here. I heard deer moving in the trees, and I wanted to find them. To chase them. To eat them. But not yet. I was close. I knew I was close.

I pulled the truck onto a dirt road. The canopy of the trees hung over it, creating a natural tunnel unlike anything I’d ever seen. I almost missed it. It was hidden away, the road almost overgrown.

The truck bounced on the old road, the potholes deep. Branches scratched against the sides. It was going on four in the afternoon, but the darkened sky above made it feel much later. The moon hid behind those clouds. My gums