Brothersong (Green Creek #4) - T.J. Klune Page 0,46
said Kelly. Kelly sad. Kelly happy. How do you know his name?”
He glanced toward the door like he was looking for an escape. “Heard you say it. Crazy. You’re crazy. Talking to ghosts.”
“And Robbie? You said his name too. You remember, don’t you. The pack. The people. Do you remember everything?”
He looked like a cornered animal, eyes panicky. “No, no, no.”
“You do. Because I remember being an Omega stuck in all that violet. It wasn’t like it was as a human. It was… broken down. Base instinct. But I knew. I could hear them. I could feel them. My pack. My Alphas. My tether. Voices in my head through all that rage. I wanted to hurt them, but I loved them still.”
He rocked back and forth, hugging himself.
“When? When did you know? What did you know? Did you know about Gordo? That he was your—”
He seemed to seize, nearly falling over. He caught himself at the last moment, hands against the floor, claws digging into the dirt. “Gordo,” he growled through clenched teeth. “Gordo. Gordo. Not brother. Not brother.”
“I don’t know how to break it to you, man, but he kind of is. Half brother, at least.”
My throat was raw. “If you didn’t want us, if you didn’t want a pack, then why did you stay with us? Years, Gavin. You were there for years. You can lie to yourself, but don’t think it’s working on me. You could have gone anywhere. But you knew, didn’t you? About Gordo.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “About me.”
He reached for the door.
“I’ll follow you.”
He paused again.
I didn’t know what else to do. I needed him to hear me, to understand. I needed to understand. “I don’t know where you’ll go, but I’ll follow you.”
He leaned his forehead against the door, panting. “You can’t. You can’t.”
“I don’t care.”
“You can’t.”
“Because your father is out there.”
He nodded against the door, hands in fists at his sides.
I stood, staying where I was so I didn’t spook him. “We can leave. The both of us. We’ll go back to the truck. If it hasn’t been damaged, we can drive out of here. Gavin, we can go home.” The words tasted like ash, a burning dream of all that I’d left behind.
And he said, “I have no home.”
I grunted as if gut-punched.
But he stepped away from the door.
He dropped the shorts, stepping out of them and leaving them where they fell. He inhaled deeply, and I barely made a sound when he shifted into the timber wolf.
He shook his head, ears against his skull.
He went to the bed and hopped up onto it. It creaked dangerously under his heavy weight. He lay down, his paws hanging off the edge. He closed his eyes. He looked ridiculous, the bed too small for something his size. I wondered if he’d always slept there before I arrived.
“Just because you’re shifted doesn’t mean I’ll stop talking.”
He turned his head into his stomach, paws over his head.
“…AND THAT BRINGS US TO SENIOR YEAR,” I told him, hands behind my head as I lay near the fire. I’d been talking for the past three hours, hoping to get some sort of reaction out of him. I knew he wasn’t sleeping because I’d feel his eyes on me every now and then. When I’d look, he’d snap them closed, but if he was trying to be subtle, he was failing. “Which is probably my favorite of all the school years, because that’s when I lost my virginity to a nice girl named Amy. She had the biggest—”
He growled.
I grinned at the ceiling. “Something you’d like to add? Oh shit, sorry. You can’t talk right now. Sorry, dude. Where was I? Ah, right. So, Amy. She was… pretty, you know? And she laughed real loud. And Jesus Christ, she probably could suck a filament out of a lightbulb without breaking the glass.”
He growled louder.
I looked over at him.
He closed his eyes quickly, taking in slow, deep breaths like he was asleep.
“And then after Amy was Tara, and she could do this awesome twist with her wrist—something in your throat? You keep making weird noises. You all right? Yeah, you’re all right. Now where was I? Oh. Tara. Man, say what you will about small-town girls, but they sure know how to—”