The Vow (Black Arrowhead #1) - Dannika Dark Page 0,4
I need the reminder that he’ll be free of that life someday. I wouldn’t have it any other way, Freckles.”
Shaking my head, I pulled back. “Do me a favor and don’t start calling me that.”
She tamped down a smile. “He’s never mentioned it to you?”
I patted the wolf sculpture on the head. “No. I guess if he has a pet name for me, I’ll have to think of something really special for him so that the next time he comes to town—”
“No! Then he’ll think I’m conspiring against him.”
“Conspiring to do what?”
Hope grabbed the store keys. “To ruin his reputation. Lakota doesn’t live around here, but respect is important to him. He’ll kill me if you come up with an embarrassing nickname because you read his letter. Nicknames stick and not always in a good way. Promise me you won’t do it?”
“Well, I guess it could be worse. He could have called me an eggplant.” I tugged the ends of my hair.
“Don’t be silly. That’s an entirely different shade of purple.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Why, Hope, are you being a smartass?”
“Guilty as charged.” She pulled off her ponytail holder and shook out her tangled hair. “We have a long day tomorrow. Let’s go home and order a pizza.”
Tapping my finger on the wolf’s nose, I said, “Guard the palace, boy.”
Hope snickered and strode toward the door. “That gift was Lakota’s way of telling every customer that we’re Shifters.”
“Why should that matter?”
Nearing the door, she glanced over her shoulder. “It’s his way of warning people not to mess with us even though we’re not in a pack. Wolves stick together.”
Chapter 2
Three slices of pizza and a bowl of mint ice cream later, I collapsed on our hot-pink sofa, magazine in hand. My hair was tousled and still damp from my shower, and I hadn’t bothered to change out of my white terrycloth robe and blue slippers.
It was hard to believe that just one year ago, we were still living with our packs. Shifter children grow up knowing who and what they are, but most of the kids I knew didn’t go through their first shift until their late teens or early twenties. After that, they left the pack as a rite of passage. Some mated right away, but most preferred to live on their own to prove their value in the community and sow those wild oats before joining a pack. A wolf wouldn’t be considered a rogue at that age, not until they got older and openly resisted the idea of ever joining up with a pack. Hope and I hadn’t moved until we’d adjusted to the whole shifting process. Cohabitation was essential for wolves, and we had to learn to control the shift and create a routine so our wolves could run.
The scary part about shifting was not remembering anything. Usually the alphas were the only ones who remembered the entire shift, but that wasn’t the golden rule. Some Shifters blacked out right away, and others could remember a few seconds or minutes into their shift. After that, everything goes dark. And thank God for that. I couldn’t imagine trying to share headspace with my animal spirit. Sharing a body was excitement enough. Not to mention introducing our wolves to the pack. When Hope and I decided to move in together, our Packmasters facilitated a meeting between our wolves.
They got along famously.
Not long after, we found a cute little apartment in the Breed district. Since most of the people on our floor were Shifters, we didn’t have to worry about someone calling the cops because our wolves were howling. Once a week, when my wolf needed to run, I would go back home and shift on the property. My family lived only thirty minutes away, and they loved having me around. Sometimes my uncle Denver let his wolf run with mine. They were no longer my pack, but they would always be my family.
I glanced around at our grey walls, white crown molding, and eclectic artwork. We had fantastic space. The floor-to-ceiling windows on my left stretched all the way to the kitchen. A short pony wall ran from the left side to the end of the kitchen island. It seemed like a useless feature to divide the rooms since you could see over it, so Hope had set all her plants along the ledge.
The hot-pink couch was the centerpiece of the room—all the other furniture was a muted grey to match the walls. Pink accents