grinned within, while remaining unmoving on the outside.
At least Mercy’s mom did the same hugging-cuddling thing to her. And both his mom and Mercy’s mom did it to Lucas and Vaughn—who were older—so none of them could hassle one another. But these days, his parents didn’t need to come to him at night anymore. His leopard did still get out of control at times, but he didn’t scream, just woke up breathing hard and fast. Then he used the techniques Emmett’s mom had taught him to calm himself.
Keelie called it meditating.
Dorian would get ribbed so hard if he admitted to meditating, so he called it mental discipline. Just like the discipline his friends had to learn to deal with their own leopards. Only they were learning how to balance their wild instincts with the human part of their nature, and he was learning to keep his trapped and angry leopard from driving him insane.
There.
Zeroing in on the tiny movement, he used the same mental discipline to hold utterly still, so that his scent wouldn’t shift along the air currents. He’d already messed up his scent trail using a few other tricks, so if he stayed motionless . . . He took the shot.
“Fuck!” Lucas glared up at the tree as if he could see Dorian, the splatter of green on his T-shirt marking him as a “kill.”
Dorian grinned but didn’t shift position as, growling, Lucas came up his tree to lie down on the branch beside him. “How the fuck did you make that shot?” he said on a subvocal level. “From here you can’t even see where I came out.”
“I knew you were there.” Dorian had practiced and practiced until he could make these shots blindfolded. He didn’t need to see his target to hit it. “Just like you always know where we are, even if we hide our scent and stay out of sight.” The only reason he’d got Luc today was because his seventeen-year-old friend hadn’t expected him to make the shot.
“Yeah, well,” Lucas said in that same subvocal tone. “That doesn’t give me much of an advantage with you guys. I don’t even know how Mercy does that thing where she disappears from sight.”
Dorian hadn’t figured that out, either, and it was one hell of a trick. What he had figured out was that Lucas would one day be his alpha, and that these exercises were meant to hone them all. Because DarkRiver wasn’t the happy place it had been when Dorian had been a cub. The ShadowWalkers had hurt them—Lucas’s parents were gone, and he’d been wounded badly before the pack found him.
Dorian and Mercy would probably be too young to join the hunt for the ShadowWalkers when it took place, but they could help protect their packmates while the hunters were gone.
Now Tamsyn was the healer even though everyone said she was too young. Dorian thought she was amazing, so calm and gentle. She reminded him of Shayla. Lucas’s mom had trained Tammy, and Dorian was sure she’d be real proud of her student. “You think Nate and Tammy are gonna have cubs?” Dorian didn’t usually think about stuff like that, but his mom and Mercy’s mom had been talking about it that morning.
Lucas made a sound low in his throat. “I dunno. I heard Emmett’s dad say Nate was being stubborn because he thinks Tammy’s too young.”
“Yeah, but she’s a healer. They’re, like, cub magnets.”
“Adults.”
“Yeah.”
They fell silent for long minutes, and then Dorian felt it. A faint whisper along the air currents, a bare hint of a familiar scent. He couldn’t see Mercy but he knew she was in the trees to his left. Shifting with extreme care so as not to give away his position, he closed his eyes and listened. And then he took the shot.
The curses that sounded from the canopy were so colorful that had Mercy’s parents heard her, she’d have been grounded into the next century. “I’ll get you for this, Dorian!” Jumping down to the ground, she glared in his general direction and he realized exactly why she was so pissed.
He’d gotten her in the face, the green bright against the pale gold of her skin.
“Shit,” he muttered. “That’ll leave a bruise.” Because his job was to be a sniper, he was using relatively small paintball pellets rather than the larger ones the others had been issued, but at that velocity it would’ve hurt regardless. “Her mom’s going to smack me. I don’t even want to think