Wolf's Call (Wolves Next Door #2) - Auryn Hadley Page 0,164
will help me."
"I will," I assured her. "I'm not sure what I can do..." My eyes jumped over to Lane. "I'm just a human."
"And helping," he told me. "Being a wolf won't fix this, Elena. If anything, it would put you more at risk."
"But I could - "
Trent stepped into me to pull me against his side. "Later," he said. "Right now, we have enough to worry about."
All I could do was lean into him, pressing my face against his chest. "They don't deserve this," I mumbled.
He rubbed my back even while Ian moved to address the crowd. Lane moved to my other side, Pax shifted behind me, and Seth stood beside Trent. Together, we watched while Ian laid out everything we'd just talked about - including Gabby's insistence that the chances of this being believed were low.
Then Trent leaned toward my ear and whispered, "It would kill me if anything happened to you. I want you to be a wolf, but I also want to keep you safe as a human." He tilted his head so he could see my face. "But right now, this needs to be our concern, ok? The full moon is still weeks away."
"And we probably won't be able to run at this one," Lane pointed out.
"Shit," Seth groaned. "That's going to make a little extra tension in the pack."
I just pressed my face into Trent again. "I thought a shooting at Gabby's school would be my worst nightmare. I never expected things to get worse!"
"We'll figure it out," Trent promised. "That's why Ian's such a good alpha. We always figure it out, and he actually listens when someone has a good idea."
The words were barely out of his mouth before Ian began to talk about how communities had come together to protect undocumented immigrants, and how much the Wolf's Run pack could learn from that. How it wasn't just wolves against humans, but the pack - regardless of whether we were natural-born, converted, or still human - against anyone who tried to hurt us. Together, we were stronger, and that was why wolves had survived in secrecy for so long.
I just hoped he was right.
CHAPTER 48
The pack meeting took a lot longer than I expected. That night, Gabby stormed up to her room, her eyes glued to her phone, and didn't want to talk. She said she was busy, but I had a feeling that "worried" was a better word for it. The guys said she was an alpha. That meant she felt even more responsible for this than I did.
And I felt very responsible. Roman had exposed himself to save my daughter. Had that been because we'd used their relationship as punishment for too long? But how could I not? He'd risked my daughter's life when he'd turned her. That wasn't safe, and I was supposed to protect her from bad influences.
In reality, raising a child was a lose-lose situation. Somehow, I'd always end up making a mistake. Hopefully, I'd make a lot more good decisions and end up with a happy, healthy adult one day, but it wasn't like teenagers came with directions. All I could do was make my best guess and do a lot of hoping. She'd lived through a school shooting, though. She'd been smart enough to hide, and she'd even helped others, so I should be thankful for that much.
Yet it felt like the horror just wouldn't stop. When I turned on the news, the video was the first thing I saw. Disgusted, I changed the channel, only to find that every station was playing it. What had happened at their school was the talk of the nation right now. Each station had a slightly different take on it, but the overall consensus was that the video had to be fake. The bigger concern, according to the reporters, was how someone could be so callus as to turn such a terrifying event into a joke.
Frustrated, I shut the whole thing off and decided that a massive glass of wine and a hot bath would make everything tolerable. Not better, because that wasn't possible, but it would help me get through one more day of this. But to my surprise, when I got out of the bath, I found a pair of beautiful men lying in my bed. Trent was almost asleep, and clearly exhausted. Pax looked stressed. When I crawled in between them, both men curled against me and let out the most relieved sighs.