Page 93 of Feral Werewolves
I shrieked, slamming on the brakes and ducking down behind the steering wheel.
Paladin reached over and jammed the car into park. He threw open the door and waved up at the guy in the window. “Hold your fire!”
The guy lowered the gun.
Paladin got out, came around, and helped me out of the driver’s side.
I melted into his arms, pressing my face into his chest, and I started to sob.
He clutched me against him, hand sliding into my hair, kissing the top of my head. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry,” he said, again and again.
I felt myself colliding with my own body, settling into myself again, and ithurt. Not physically, but deep inside, my chest tight with sorrow and fear and anger and helplessness.
And then the door of the farmhouse was bursting open and Kestrel and Lazarus were running for us.
I found myself pressed between the three of them, all of them holding onto me, as I cried and cried and cried.
lazarus
WE HAD HERback, and I didn’t see why we needed to play this game with Liam and the others anymore.
I held Clementine, who was curled up in my lap, cheek pressed into my chest, eyes closed, dozing in and out of things, as we sat in the living room in Liam’s place. Paladin was off with Liam and one of the other guys who’d managed to bring in his whole pack—Greg. Other than that, we’d only been able to get the individual men who’d lost mates, and about half of them were dead.
So, we had Liam and his guys—four men. And Greg and his guys, five men. Nine total, plus three other men who were missing their mates. That was twelve. If you put our pack in, it came to a total of fifteen guys. Even if all of us were armed, we were going up against more than double that at the compound. And if Red decided to call in the loyalty of all the packs in the surrounding area (they would probably support his claim since Griff was out of the way), it would be huge numbers.
I was whispering to Kestrel that we just needed to take her and go. We could go further into the wilderness, take what we could, but start over somewhere else, where no one knew us.
Kestrel kept rubbing his forehead and furrowing his brow and saying maybe I was right.
But if we were going to do that, we had to get Paladin out of playing war strategy with the other guys, and Paladin sure as fuck liked playing strategy.
Clementine was pretty messed up. She hadn’t talked much, and I’d been afraid she wouldn’t want to be near us, wouldn’t want us touching her, that kind of thing. I wouldn’t have taken offense, if so. It would have made sense to me. But it felt good that she thought of us as safe, even after everything.
It kind of broke me, too.
I guessed, deep down, I didn’t really think of myself as anyone’s safe person. But the way she was curled up against my chest right now, eyes closed, she felt safe now. Safe. With me.
It hurt and it felt good and it made me feel humbled and happy.
So, yeah, okay, I wanted to run. I didn’t want to make a stand against Red and his guys. A stand meant danger. It meant that we might die. I wanted to live now. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to keep her safe and help her heal and I didn’t want any more of any of this pain or death or fighting for the rest of my damned life.
I ran a hand gently over the back of her hair. “Kestrel, maybe go see if you can talk to him.”
“Paladin, you mean?” he said. “He won’t leave.”
“He might,” I said.
“No, when he gets like this—”
“Well, he doesn’t stay like this,” I said. “And you know how to get him to, uh, revert.”
Kestrel’s eyes widened. “You’re wrong about that. He was like this before. You didn’t know him then is all. This is the real him, and whatever he regressed into, we don’t want that back.”
I considered that. I remembered the Paladin I’d first met versus the Paladin I’d live with for years.
“We donotwant that,” said Kestrel firmly.
“But the shit he did when we took the farm, that was next-level insanity. You’re saying that’s the ‘real him’?”
