But lack of sleep made me single-minded, and I couldn’t stop turning that last line of the poem over and over in my head. “Sister matebrand formed on the fifty-second day.” Did that mean my matebrand to Orion would recreate itself without our permission? Or was sister meant more literally? Was Celeste in danger of creating a matebrand with Finnegan? Would the half-glyphs merge into a magical tether like the one I was working so hard to steer clear of?
What I needed was the opportunity to dig for more snippets of poetry clarifying what was going on. Vega had said her pack only knew the beginning of the prophecy; the rest, shared within that sand box, had been channeled directly out of the desert itself. Similarly, Orion had shaken his head when I asked if his clan might be privy to extra information. But didn’t it stand to reason that some other pack might know what those two did not?
Beyond Orion and Vega, there were three alphas whose territories butted up against the unclaimed desert we called the outpack. Orion’s friend Prince was one, but his pack was newly formed and none of its members were native to the desert. Which left two clans with a possible heritage related to the halved glyphs, where additional poetry might be known related to the sister matebrand.
The connection felt unbearably tenuous until I realized that both of those packs were located in the same direction the hook in my gut indicated. North. Yes, that was definitely the thread to tug.
Lost in thought, I barely registered Finnegan’s growing unease as we approached the housing unit. Shadows lay sharp across the otherwise empty sand, the sun so bright it hurt to open my eyes fully. At this point in the afternoon, everything smart was hiding from the pounding heat, so the desert around us lay eerily quiet.
Like my new clan mates, I’d learned to nap through the hottest hours since moving in with Vega. Which made life more bearable…but wouldn’t our siestas create the perfect opportunity for the Council to attack, especially in this isolated location? Or for power-hungry neighbors to invade?
That’s when I saw it. A wolf crouched in the sharp-edged shadow cast by the housing unit. Just one wolf there, but the intentness of the beast’s gaze made me spin in time to catch two more barreling toward us with fangs bared.
Forget the hook tugging me north. I needed to focus on the here and now.
They surrounded us in a blur of fur and snarls. No, that’s not quite right, they split me and Finnegan apart then fixated upon him as he stumbled backward, his eyes widening with fear.
Which is when I recognized their scents. Two males I was intimately familiar with due to living amid their messes. Plus Hailey, the only female who shared a house with us.
This wasn’t an attack. It was a werewolf-style hazing. Part greeting, part test.
Not that Finnegan could handle either facet even as well as I had a month ago. “Guys, stop it!” I demanded, trying to thrust myself between Nash and Sterling.
Neither relinquished so much as a millimeter of space. Instead, they pressed in closer, snapping their teeth just shy of Finnegan’s skin. His back was up against the wall already or he would have retreated further. He had no way of knowing this was more teasing than anything else.
“I mean it!” I continued, but Hailey was the only one who shifted upward to join me in humanity, completely ignoring her nakedness the way werewolves were prone to do.
“Don’t be a party pooper,” she admonished, speaking to me rather than to the guys.
“A party is generally enjoyed by everyone, not just by the hosts,” I rebutted, trying and failing to angle myself between the snarling wolves and the man I’d promised my sister I’d protect.
And, to my surprise, Finnegan stopped trying to press himself into the adobe wall at that point. In fact, he even went so far as to join in the banter. “You have to admit, things are getting rather hairy around here.”
The terrible pun turned out to be exactly the right thing to say. Nash, our resident punster, ceased his attack and shifted upwards so he could laugh, something that wasn’t really possible lupine. Then he tacked on a few words amid his chortles: “Hairy. Nice one.”
Despite his jovial tone, Nash’s slap on Finnegan’s back was far rougher than was appropriate among humans. For werewolves figuring out a dominance rank, however, it was exactly right.
And Finnegan didn’t take offense. Just measured out his return slap to be, if I had to guess, the tiniest bit lighter. He was accepting a lower status while not rolling over completely. He had good instincts when facing wolves, I’d say that for him.
The tension was starting to defuse, but there were still so many ways this could go wrong. Back when I’d first moved in, I’d made dozens of mistakes despite having been trained to understand shifter culture…or at least as much shifter culture as my handlers wanted me cognizant of. Finnegan was quick on the uptake but he hadn’t given me the impression of being particularly socially adept. Meanwhile, his gender worked against him with everyone except Hailey…
I took a step forward, but Hailey’s hand clamped down on my wrist as she tugged me in the opposite direction. “Vega didn’t babysit you and you can’t babysit him,” she murmured quietly enough so the guys we were leaving behind wouldn’t hear her.
The mention of our alpha relaxed me a little. “Vega told you Finnegan was coming?” If so, she would have also warned them that our new housemate was mostly human, not up to wolf-level roughhousing.
“Of course. Otherwise he would have received a very different sort of welcome.”
Hailey’s wolf rose behind her pupils then, and I caught a glimpse of the fierceness that she often kept hidden beneath her deceptively youthful appearance. With her short, spiky hair and delicate features, she could easily pass for a teenager even though she’d been adamant during our introduction that her age was a not-so-teenaged twenty. Five years younger than me and already considerably more comfortable in her own lupine skin.
Despite that difference, the two of us shared an ability to soften our exteriors while holding tight to who we were underneath. Which, in Hailey’s case, was a born leader. It was why she was clearly in charge of our little subgroup, even though she wasn’t the oldest and being female worked against her. Which was a long way of saying—if she thought Finnegan was safe with the guys, then he was safe with the guys.
Still—“Celeste will have my hide if anything happens to him.”
“If you’d talk things out with your sister,” Hailey countered, “then you’d sleep better. Which means I’d sleep better. That wall between us is thin.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Elspeth, Elspeth, Elspeth.” Hailey shook her head slowly as if she was an elder doling out wisdom. “You make it sound so hard.”
Our conversation left me twitchy enough that it seemed the lesser of two evils to abandon Finnegan to the guys’ not-so-tender mercies and follow Hailey into the sprawling house we all shared. There, I changed the subject, telling Hailey the full story of Finnegan’s rescue all the way through to Vega’s recitation in the sandbox.
Only then did I hesitate.
My aunt had been clear about the power of words. I knew without having to ask that she wouldn’t approve of me repeating what she’d recently shared.
But Hailey was my closest friend here. It felt wrong to hold out on her.
Plus, I needed someone to bounce ideas off of. Orion would have been the obvious choice, but he was too deeply invested in the outcome to be entirely clear-eyed about the matter. He wanted to rebuild our mate bond so intensely that everything he said and did was filtered through that lens.
Hailey couldn’t care a fig about the matebrand. So I shared the last two lines of the poem with her: “Where the glyphs lie halved, null shall overlay. Sister matebrand formed on the fifty-second day.”
We were standing on carpet when I spoke, but there was plenty of sand here. Our wolf feet tended to track it in and Sterling and I were the only ones who cleaned, him briefly and lackadaisically and me mostly in my own private quarters.
Still, the grainy remnants of the desert stayed put beneath our feet as I spoke this time. No glowing magic swirled through the air between us either.
Which should have meant repeating the words hadn’t been a problem. But my right arm hurt like the dickens as soon as the last syllable was uttered. I glanced down and realized the tendril of ink that used to curl up the inside of my elbow was fading. Soon, that entire chunk of tattoo had disappeared, leaving unblemished skin behind.
Chapter 6
