Tisper laid awake, watching the waxing moon. Three more nights. That was all they had.
It felt like a waste of time, the handful of them, curled around a dying fire, biding out the night. They’d been searching all day, around the area in the woods where they’d found Dylan. The exact place where the wolves didn’t want them. Twice now, Tisper had seen beady eyes leering from the dark, but the wolves had kept their distance and eventually left them be.
Six hours spent hiking through the backwoods for a sign of the other sentinels. Any clue of them would be better than nothing. But nothing was all they had to go by and nothing was all they found. Nothing but abandoned campsite they had taken claim of for the night.
She shifted from the makeshift pad where she slept beside Izzy and Elizaveta. The men had taken to only the leaves and dirt. Maybe that was suitable for a wolf, but Matt was curled up like a cocooned caterpillar in his red flannel sweat-shirt. Huddled into himself with the drawstrings of his hood tightened around his face. Leo had no qualms—his snoring possessed this place like a banshee.
Quentin and Bailey, though—they were missing from the circle.
She tiptoed over bodies, crept along the dirt ground, soft footsteps cracking over dead leaves. She could hear their voices, not far off. Quiet enough that it had her interest piqued.
“You’re the one who needs me,” Bailey was saying as Tisper tiptoed closer into the thicket. “Not the other way around.” She stuck behind the trees, and in the darkness, she could see their faces, and the cherry that glowed between Quentin’s fingers. He exhaled his smoke, illuminated in the moonlight.
“I never argued that. You’re my hound. Irreplaceable.”
“I’m sick of being your hound,” Bailey snarled. “This is my last fox hunt, do you get that? You told me I wouldn’t be a slave anymore and that’s all I am now. I’m done, find another bitch to drag around.”
“Just help me find him,” Quentin returned, releasing his smoke to the heavens. “It’s the thing I’ll ever ask of you.”
“You said I wouldn’t owe you. You said—”
“You don’t owe me. I’m asking a favor of you.”
“What the fuck is so special about him?” Aggression swelled in Bailey’s voice, and Tisper jumped as she heard a thud followed by the crack of broken bark. She peeped around her cover to find Quentin shoved back against the trunk of a hemlock, Bailey leering in close. “Don’t give me that lichund shit, because he wasn’t the first of them. He won’t be the last.”
“I made a promise to him.”
“Did you?” said Bailey, with a flash of teeth. The moon glinted in his black eyes. “What did you promise him, huh?”
“That I wouldn’t let anyone hurt him.”
Bailey shoved him again, hard in the chest. There was a rush of breath from Quentin’s lungs. “You promised me that too!” Bailey shouted, the echo of his ire lift into the night sky. When she looked around the tree again, he had the collar of Quentin’s shirt twisted in his fists, pressing so roughly to his lips, there wasn’t a sound escaped between them. And Quentin was reaching into his hair, fingers locking into a fist.
Tisper felt her stomach drop. She cupped her mouth to keep from gasping. You asshole, she wanted to shout. Stop kissing him, you asshole!
But then Quentin reigned him back by the grip on his locks, tore him away like a feeding leech. It was like taking a dog by the scruff of its neck, the way he held Bailey at a distance. “Enough,” he growled, in a voice that didn’t sound like Quentin at all. Deep, and cold with chilly indifference. “You of all people know better.”
The force of which he drew him away made Bailey stagger back, find his footing on the mossy ground while he wiped at the grin he’d cracked. An ironic, unsettling grin. “I should’ve stayed with the rogues,” he spat, vile like acid. Then he was stalking off into the darkness.
She watched Quentin lean back against the same tree, brushing the kiss from his lips with his thumb, drinking life into the cherry between his fingers. He tilted his head, exhaled the smoke again. And he stayed there, eyes on the sky the longest time.
Then Tisper heard his footsteps crunch against fallen leaves and she turned back around so he wouldn’t see her, might he turn her way. His footsteps faded for a moment like he was walking away—then Tisper looked up with a gasp to find his dark shadow standing just before her crouched body, hand held out to help her up. Her face burned to think he’d known she was watching all along. But Tisper took his hand and used it to heave herself to her feet.
“You smell like a skunk.” She gave a few awkward titters watched the little red speck float in the darkness. “So no cigarettes, huh? Is it always pot?”
“You’re not going to ask about that?” Quentin tilted his neck, gave it a good crack as they made their way back to the fire. It was only embers now, but the warmth was decent.
“I was getting there.” She tagged along behind, watching Quentin take a seat on the log beside the dying pit. Whoever had been here before left a cooler too, but no one dared to test the food inside.
Tisper sat down beside him, flinching away from floating embers as he used a stick to turn the cinders.
“He’s only nineteen. Did you know that?” Quentin asked.
“Bailey?” Tisper furrowed, watching the ashes rise, little gray petals on the wind. “He looks older than me.”
“He’s nineteen,” Quentin said again, “An emotional, hormonal nineteen.”
“Doesn’t explain why he just made you goalie in a game of Tonsil Hockey.”
The laugh that came from him took her by surprise. She turned quick enough to catch just the last bit of it before his smile died out, too much like the cinders he stirred. “There’s a chemical reaction. Something that happens between a wolf and its Alpha.” He paused to suck from the stick between his fingers. “Feels like you’re in love,” he spoke the smoke out, little ghosts climbing from his teeth with every word. “That reaction is multiplied when you’re in the presence of a queen. It’s nature’s way of keeping the hierarchy in check.”
“I didn’t even know he was—”
“Gay?” Quentin glanced at her, then his eyes strayed back to the fire. “In our world, sexuality’s about as fluid as water. As fluid and as necessary.”
The confession struck Tisper and she straightened in query. “So what you’re saying is…you’re all kinda gay.”
“No one cares about those things in our society. We’re whatever we are and whatever we want to be. Perverted people, really.” He passed his joint to Tisper. “Do yourself a favor. Never date a wolf.”
“Thought that was forbidden, anyway.”
“So was that,” Quentin said, gesturing to the stick between her fingers. “Until people stopped caring. There’s too much hate in this world to punish my wolves for loving.”
“So what about you?”
“Who knows,” Quentin said. “I don’t really think about it. Back in college, I’d kiss anything with a mouth. Then it was Anna—just Anna. I thought it would always be just Anna.“
Tisper wanted to ask about Jaylin—if just Anna wasn’t just Anna anymore. She bit her tongue and asked instead, “Felix?”
“Felix,” Quentin laughed. “Felix is so straight you could thread him like a needle. Through one ear and out the other.”
There was some kind of whimsy on his face that made Tisper break into her own grin. “So they’re all in love with you. Must be nice.”
“No. For most of them, that feeling neutralizes. They register it as a feeling of authority. They start to love you like family. But Bailey’s young, he hasn’t been with us long. He came to us right after Anna died.”
“I thought they feared you. How can they love you and fear you?”
“There’s a lot of emotions that come into play. Most of them aren’t real. Just the curse in us, bending our bodies to bow to our leaders. They weren’t real with Bailey. They aren’t real with Jaylin.”
Any humor that was left in Tisper vanished. “You think his feelings are all just… a ‘chemical reaction’? But he—no, I know Jaylin. He’d have to really feel something. He doesn’t do romance, he doesn’t believe in it.”
“What does he believe?” Quentin’s grin gleamed in the darkness. But as pretty as he was when he smiled, it was the same smile Bailey had shown. The kind with no happiness in it at all. “What? I make his palms sweaty? Does his heart beat faster? He and every other wolf in my pack.”
“But Jaylin’s not a wolf.”
Quentin didn’t argue that. He nudged the cinders with his stick until the coals burned bright.
“Did Anna feel these things too?” Tisper asked, the cold setting into her fingers. “I know she loved you…obviously. But was she afraid?”
Quentin shook his head. “Anna wasn’t mine. She was born in France. Even if she’d been turned in another corner of the world, she still belonged to France. Her alpha lived on an entirely different continent.”
“What about Felix? He’s not from the states, is he? And Elizaveta?”
“No. They were both alone when I found them. Adopted into our pack. My bond with them is different.”
“Wait—I don’t understand,” Tisper struggled.
Quentin looked as if he was going to explain. But all the air in him left in one deep, tired respire. “It’s late. I need to go find Bailey.” He tossed a fresh chunk of wood into the fire and pushed off of his knees, straightening out before the sparks and flares. “We’re heading into town come morning. To see if any of the local shops have surveillance cameras that might have seen them passing through. Get some sleep before the sun rises.” He started off into the forest, the direction they’d come from. But Tisper was on her feet, tagging at his heels.
“You know the most annoying thing about you?” She said as she followed him into the brush, arms crossed to fend away mosquitos. “You think that because something has to do with you that no one else is allowed to know. Jaylin is my best friend. This is about him too.”
Quentin swung around, and through the moonlight that cracked through the trees, she could only see the faint light of night hugging his face—banking over his cheekbones, rising over his definite jaw. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Jaylin,” she said, “and how he’s obviously stupid in love with you. I get you’re still mourning over Anna—he gets that, everyone gets that. But why didn’t you just shut him down to begin with? Like you just did to Bailey.”
“It’s more complicated than that. You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand? You don’t want to hurt him, I get it. But sometimes—”
“No you don’t.” He threw a hand out, gesturing to the darkness like it could somehow express the words for him. “His feelings are the ones that aren’t real, not mine!”
Tisper was speechless for a moment, listening to the echo of his shout die off in the distance. And he looked as if he was suffocating on his own words, then he turned away, wandered on ahead.
He shoved foliage out of way, leapt over rock and stone and surfaced roots, and she paced after, flinging herself under low-hanging branches and slipping over moss. “So this wasn’t really about Anna?” she asked. “This wasn’t about moving on?”
“Anna’s always there,” Quentin said. “Always there. But she’s not the reason why this can’t happen.”
“Then what is it? Why won’t you just be with him?”
Then met a clearing, where a small stream trickled between two parallel rock formations. Quentin hopped across their gap with no effort at all, turning to offer Tisper his hand. She was surprised at the gesture, how gentlemanly he was even while running on an emotional tirade. She gripped onto him tight as she found her footing on the second stone. Then Quentin dropped her hand and he stood there, strong and steadfast in the washed moonlight.
“I didn’t think I could love anyone after Anna—and then Felix came to me the night of that party, whispered in my ear that Bailey smelled a lich. Said, the one in the red shirt with the blue eyes. And when I found him…this complete stranger, just sitting in my bathroom one night, I—”
“Wait, what?” asked Tisper.
Quentin bit his lip and ran his hands back through his hair in that terribly anxious way. He dropped them to his sides and turned to her. “Could you ever bring yourself to accept love from someone who only offered it under the requisite of a spell? Because that’s all this is for him. An illusion.”
It hurt just to think about. To be loved by someone who was forced to admire you. The thought of loving them felt a thousand times worse. No. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t imagine anyone really could.
She let out a deep sigh. “I’m sorry.”
When she looked up, Quentin was peeling his shirt off over his head, tossing his shoes aside into a blanket of autumn leaves.
“It doesn’t matter now.” He turned from her and bounded down the stone, ripping the belt from his waist. And as he bent to shed the jeans from his legs, Tisper could see the muscles shifting in his back—moving, swelling like there was a creature beneath his flesh. Even as he stood tall, straightened out, flesh bare and bronze against the moonlight. It was there. The wolf, begging to come out.
“I’ve spent all this time keeping him away,” Quentin said, looking to the moon above, the thing nearly whole but for a sliver of light. When he returned to earth, there was something different about his eyes. The moonlight filled them with iridescence. He took a bare step forward on raw earth. “Now I want him back.”
Quentin burst from his flesh, blood spattering the forest floor, falling like hard midnight rain. Tisper flinched, shielded herself with her arm from the sight of it, the smell of it. And when she looked up, she saw only the hind of a wolf, sprinting into the jet-black night. Slipping under brush and between trees until he was gone, devoured by the dark, retrograding distance.
She gathered his things because it was the only thing she could think to do. Folding his clothing over her arm, carrying his shoes by the heels. And Tisper followed the light of the reborn fire, back to camp where everyone slept. She crawled back in between Izzy, who curled into a tiny ball, and Elizaveta who slept like her mission was to fling her limbs across every inch of blanket and every person within an arm’s radius. And Tisper huddled herself into the warmth between them and listened to the call of the night.
At first she only heard crickets. Then frogs, and the chitter of nocturnals. Then there it was: a howl on the wind. After a few seconds of silence, another howl sounded, far more distant than the first.
That was it. It only took a howl to find Bailey.
The red moon glared down at her, large enough that the longer she stared, the more she felt it closing in, hungry and eager to swallow her whole. That chipped cherry orb in the sky was their hourglass. And it was nearly full.
Just what would it take to find Jaylin?
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