at her throat. “Thomas?” she asked, voice wavering. “What is… what’s wrong?”
“Joe,” Dad said. “Something’s happened to Joe.” He glanced back at me. “He was with you. Where did he go?”
I hung my head. “I don’t…. Dad. I didn’t—”
A man appeared as if out of nowhere. He stood before my father, bowing low. “Alpha,” Osmond said. “What’s happened?”
“My son,” Dad said through gritted fangs. “Lock Caswell down. No one gets in or out. Now.”
Osmond hurried away.
“Joe!” Mom shouted as she came off the porch. “Joe!”
He didn’t answer.
And later, as we moved through the forest at night through the pouring rain, all of us screaming Joe Joe Joe, I promised myself that when Joe came back, when he came back and he was fine, I was never going to let him out of my sight again. I was going to hold him and hug him and shake him and yell at him for scaring me, for scaring all of us, how could you do that to me, Joe, how could you do that to us?
But we didn’t find him.
Joe was gone.
“Please,” my father said into the phone, gripping it so tightly that I thought it would break. “Please, Richard. Please give me back my son.”
And Richard Collins said, “No.”
I GASPED AS I AWOKE.
“Hey, hey,” a voice said near my ear. “Carter. Stop. Carter. Carter.”
I struggled against the arms around me. They were stronger than I was, and I was getting crushed. I couldn’t breathe. I was caught.
“Joe!” I shouted. “Where are you, Joe? Come back! Please come back!”
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m here. I’m here. We both are. Carter, open your eyes. Open your eyes.”
I moaned, still trying to get away. “No. This isn’t real. None of this is real. I need to wake up. I need to wake up—”
“Carter.”
I opened my eyes.
I was in the cabin on the bed.
Kelly kneeled next to me. His hands gripped my legs, holding them down.
“That’s it,” Joe whispered in my ear, and I sagged back against him. “That’s it. We’ve got you. We’re here. You’re awake. We’ve got you.”
Kelly said, “Look at me.”
I was helpless not to. I sucked in a deep breath, greedy for the scents of pack and home, knowing if this was a dream, it would be the end of me. I couldn’t come back from this if it wasn’t real. It’d always been Kelly I saw. If it were Joe too, and they were ghosts, I wasn’t going to recover.
Kelly nodded. He took my shaking hands as I reached for him. His skin was warm, familiar. His heart was loud. He looked tired, and his hair was longer than when I’d seen it last. And there was green there, so much green between the three of us, but it was wrapped in blue, and I wanted to take it away from them both, wanted to keep them from ever feeling like that again.
I said, “Yell at me.”
Kelly blinked. “What?”
“Yell at me,” I begged him. “Both of you. Yell at me. Shout. Scream. Tell me you hate me. Tell me how angry you are. Tell me how stupid I was. Please.”
Kelly shook his head. “I’m not going to—”
Joe squawked when I jerked away from him. Kelly fell back on his ass in the dirt. I stood from the bed, the blanket falling off me. I was wearing clothes that weren’t mine. They were warm and clean and smelled like packpackpack. I squeezed my eyes shut.
When I opened them again, Kelly and Joe stood a few feet away, looking unsure. Joe was bigger than he used to be. Power radiated from him in soothing waves. My throat closed when I realized he was just like how Dad had been. A king. He looked like our mother, but he felt like our father.
The Alpha of all.
Discordant. Everything. Joe, tiny little Joe following after me, telling me that he couldn’t keep up, he wasn’t as big as me, wait up, wait up, wait up!
And then there was this man, this great man standing before me, and all I wanted to do was fall to my knees in front of him, to bare my neck and beg for him to understand, beg for them both to yell at me so I knew they still loved me.
Joe said, “I hate your beard.”
I gaped at him.
He shrugged. “It looks terrible. You need to shave.”
I said, “What.”
Kelly said, “And you need to cut your hair. Probably wash it too.” His nose wrinkled. “Probably need to wash a lot