Page 82 of Wolf's Fate
“You want to stay?” Maybe she was the one who was insane.
“I don’t quit.” Willow picked up the water bottle and unscrewed the cap. “If all your enemies are dead, then that means they’re after me, and that makes no sense.”
“I’ll still protect you.”
“By sending me away?”
My back teeth ground together at her stubbornness, and I broke eye contact with her before she saw my anger at her recklessness. The silence between us was thick with tension. “It’snot what I want. It’s hardly ideal,” I finally said. “But I think being away from me is what is safest for you.”
“Safe,” Willow repeated, her voice dripping with disdain. “I hate that word. And I hate how every time you say you are keeping me safe by staying away, something horrible happens to me.”
“You go to the shaman; you tell him to tell Luna to sever the tie.”
“That easy?” she scoffed. “Will I order chicken nuggets and fries at the same time?” Seeing my blank expression, she rolled her eyes. “If it was as easy as ordering at a drive-thru, I imagine you would have done it by now.”
“That was a shit example.”
“Bite me.”
We fell back into an uneasy silence. “It’s getting colder.” I tried to change the subject. “Even if you refuse to sleep, can you just get into the sleeping bag?”
“I want to keep my boots on.”
“Um…okay?”
“There could be bugs.”
Biting the inside of my cheek, I struggled not to laugh, knowing she wouldn’t find it funny, and it was really inappropriate to find anything amusing right now. “I put a spare bag in the side pocket for the boots.”
“Oh.” She searched for it and found it and, without another word, took off her boots, put them in the bag, securely tying them, and then got in the sleeping bag.
Taking the seat on the stump, I focused on the tree line, waiting for her to fall asleep. She would eventually. Her illness would make her if nothing else did.
“Sending me away doesn’t solve anything,” she spoke softly, her words muffled by the sleeping bag. “Whateverthisis, it won’t stop if we’re apart.”
“Willow—”
“No.” I heard her move in the bag; no doubt she was glaring at me in the dark. Or glaring at where she thought I was. “If they’re all dead, then it’s me they’re after. You need to stop treating me like a paper doll and accept that I can handle this. I’m not leaving. Not until this is over.”
“And if it’s never over?”
For a long moment, she said nothing, and then finally she spoke, her voice empty of emotion. “Then we deal with it.”
I didn’t tell her what I thought of that idea, but then I decided why not? I had nothing left to lose. “So, your idea is we face it together, regardless of everything I told you tonight?”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere, so that’s not changed.”
Onlyeverythinghad changed, and we both knew it.
TWENTY-FIVE
Willow
I didn’t sleep right away.I was surprised I slept at all, given what he had confessed to last night. My mind was still reeling from the revelation. No wonder the shaman and others worried for him. How much hate did it take to kill so many?
The first light of dawn was breaking through the trees, casting a pale, almost ethereal glow over the rough terrain of the mountain. The cold air nipped at my nose, and I remembered waking in the night, shivering, until a large, warm,furrybody had lain down beside me and shared its body heat.Was I freaked out that the man I had sex with yesterday morning was a wolf when he lay beside me last night? No. Should that feel strange to me? I no longer knew what the definition of the word meant. What I did know was that what Caleb had shared with me the night before, the weight of it still felt heavy in my chest.
I still couldn’t digest most of it. Part of me still wished I was in the dark, that there were still unknowns between us. Having it all laid out bare, I had no idea how to process it all. What I did know was that the certainty I had felt between myself andCaleb was gone. I didn’t know what to do with the information, and I was hesitant to ask myself if it made a difference, because I was scared the answer would be no. What that said about me, I wasn’t sure.