Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Maeve

The first thing I saw when I opened my parents' front door was my own suitcase.

It was standing right inside the doorway, the big purple one with the broken wheel that I'd used for nursing school, zipped all the way around and leaning against two cardboard boxes with my name written on the sides in Mom's handwriting. On top of the boxes, in his little gray carrier, Whiskers was meowing at me through the bars like he'd been waiting for an explanation for an hour.

I stood there in the doorway in my ruined emerald dress, mascara probably all the way down to my chin, and stared at it.

"Mom?"

"In here, honey."

She was in the kitchen, wiping down a counter that was already clean. Dad was sitting at the table with his phone propped up against the sugar bowl, and I could hear it from the doorway. The crowd noise. The cheering. Mia's voice saying something about how she couldn't believe this was happening, she was so blessed, thank you all so much for being here for this moment.

He was watching the stream.

"Dad," I said. "Turn it off."

He didn't turn it off. He turned the volume down, which somehow felt worse, and looked up at me over his reading glasses like I'd come home late from a party.

"Sit down, Maeve."

"Why is my suitcase by the door?"

"Sit down."

"I don't want to sit down. I want to know why my stuff is packed. I want to know why Whiskers is in his carrier. I've been gone for three hours, Dad, why is my whole life sitting in the front hall?"

Mom stopped wiping the counter. She didn't turn around. She just stood there with her back to me and the rag in her hand.

"The Alpha family called," Dad said. "About twenty minutes after."

"After what? After Zayne told a thousand people I need a forklift?"

"Better for everyone."

"Better for Mia," Mom said quietly to the counter.

"I'm sorry, did I do something? Did I reject somebody on a stage? Did I livestream my own sister crying to twenty thousand people?"

"Nobody is saying you did anything wrong."

"You packed my suitcase, Mom!"

She finally turned around. She'd been crying too, I could see it, but she wouldn't look at me. She looked at a spot somewhere over my left shoulder, the way she always did when she was about to say something she'd practiced.

"Your cousin Ellen has a spare room," she said. "Up in Pine Ridge. Two hours over the pass. I already called her. She said you can stay as long as you need. It'll be good for you, honey. A fresh start. Away from all of this."

"Away from Mia, you mean."

Neither of them answered that.

I looked from one of them to the other.

"Did you know?" I said.

Silence.

"About them. About Mia and Zayne. A whole year, she said. Since his birthday. Did you know?"

Dad put his glasses back on and looked down at the phone.

That was the answer.

I put my hand on the back of a kitchen chair because suddenly my legs weren't sure about holding me. They knew. They'd known for a year. Every time I came home from a double shift and sat at this table talking about Zayne coming into the cafeteria, about how he remembered my patients' names, about how maybe, maybe this year at the festival, they'd sat right here and nodded and passed the potatoes and known the whole time.

"Your sister is going to be Luna, Maeve," Dad said finally, not looking up. "That's a big deal for this family. Bigger than anything that's ever happened to us. Don't make this harder for her than it has to be."

Harder for her.

I didn't say anything else.

"Hey, buddy," I whispered. "Hey. It's just us now."

I carried the boxes out to my car first, two trips, then the suitcase, dragging it across the yard on its one good wheel. Nobody came to help. Through the front window I could see Dad still at the table with the phone, and Mom standing in the kitchen doorway with the rag in her hand, watching me.

On my last trip back in for Whiskers, I stopped in the front hallway.

There was a picture on the wall there that I'd walked past every single day of my life and never really looked at. An old black and white photo in a wooden frame, a little curled at the edges. Grandma Rose. Mom's mother. I'd never met her. She was gone before we were born, and the one time I'd asked about her when I was little, Mom had changed the subject so fast I never asked again.

I don't know why I stopped. Maybe because it was the only picture in the whole hallway that didn't have Mia in it. Maybe because the woman in it looked the way I felt right then, like someone standing very straight so nobody would see how tired she was.

I reached up to touch the edge of the frame.

"Don't."

Mom's voice came from the kitchen doorway, so sharp and sudden that I jumped and pulled my hand back like the frame was hot.

She was standing there with her face completely white. Not angry. Scared. Her knuckles were tight around the rag.

"What?" I said. "I was just..."

"Don't touch that." Her voice shook. "Please. Just leave it alone, Maeve. Just go."

I stared at her. She stared back. And then she turned around and walked back into the kitchen without another word, and I heard the water start running in the sink.

I picked up Whiskers and left.

The mountain pass to Pine Ridge was two hours on a good night. It wasn't a good night. The snow had started before I even got out of town,

"I know," I told him. "I know, buddy. I hate it too."

My phone was in the cup holder, face up, and it would not stop lighting up. The comments slid up the screen faster than I could stop reading them.

Mia's sister is HUGE lol

no wonder he picked the other one

the half blood actually thought she had a chance 

I should have turned it off. I should have thrown it in the back seat. Instead I kept glancing down at it, one quick look, then back at the road, then another.

The last thing I saw was a comment that said somebody should put her out of her misery, and then the car was sliding.

There was no sound at first. Just the steering wheel going loose in my hands like it wasn't connected to anything anymore, and the headlights swinging sideways across white trees, and Whiskers screaming.

When my eyes came back, the engine was dead.

The headlights were still on, pointing down into a wall of snow.

"Whiskers? Whiskers, hey."

A furious yowl from the passenger side. The carrier had flipped onto the floor but he was still in it, still mad, which meant he was okay.

I pushed my door. It didn't move. The whole driver's side was buried in the snowbank. I tried the passenger door and it opened two inches and stopped against the ditch wall.

I grabbed my phone. No signal. The battery was at four percent and dropping.

I tried calling anyway. Emergency. Nothing. Just the beep of a call that wouldn't connect.

The heater was off because the engine was off. I tried the key. Nothing. The battery light flickered and died, and the headlights went with it, and then it was just dark and the sound of snow hitting the roof.

I'm a nurse. I know what cold does to a body. I know the stages. So I talked myself through them out loud, because talking was the only thing keeping me awake.

"Okay. Shivering. That's stage one. That's good. Shivering means your body is fighting."

I pulled Whiskers' carrier up into my lap and wrapped myself around it. He'd gone quiet. I could feel him warm through the plastic.

"Fingers going numb. That's normal. Keep them moving."

I couldn't feel my feet. The emerald dress was thin and my coat was in the trunk with the boxes because I hadn't wanted to stop and get it out.

"Confusion. That's next. Don't get confused, Maeve. Stay awake. Stay awake."

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the shivering to slow down, which I knew was bad. Long enough for my phone to die. Somewhere in there, I saw lights above me on the road. Headlights, slowing down. Stopping. I tried to sit up and wave and my arms wouldn't lift right.

The lights sat there. Somebody up there was looking down at my car in the ditch.

Then they moved. Slowly. Pulled away. Kept going.

Somebody had stopped, and seen me, and left.

I think I cried then. I don't remember. I remember thinking about Mom saying don't, and Dad's phone on the sugar bowl, and Mia's smile when she tilted her head to find a better angle. I remember my eyes getting heavy. I remember thinking, this is stage three, Maeve, this is the bad one, and not caring very much.

Then the window exploded.

Glass sprayed across my lap. Cold air rushed in like a wave. And something huge pushed its head through the broken window. Black fur, thick and wet with snow. A long muzzle. Teeth.

A wolf. The biggest wolf I'd ever seen in my life.

It looked at me. Its eyes were amber and burning, and they didn't look like an animal's eyes. They looked scared.

It grabbed the front of my dress in its teeth and pulled.

I came out of that car like I weighed nothing, and Whiskers' carrier came with me because I would not let go of it. The last thing I remember was snow against my face, and being dragged, and those eyes above me, and then nothing.

Warm.

That was the first thing. Warm, all over, so warm it almost hurt.

Then the crackle of a fire. Voices. Lots of them, low and tired. The smell of wet wool and coffee.

I opened my eyes.

I was in a big armchair in front of a huge stone fireplace with a fire roaring in it. There were people everywhere, sitting on couches and on the floor and leaning on the walls with blankets around their shoulders, travelers stuck on the mountain like me. A ski lodge, I realized. The old one halfway up the pass. Somebody had put a heavy jacket over me like a blanket. Navy blue, with a wolf logo on the chest and a big white C stitched over the heart.

Whiskers was asleep in my lap. Out of his carrier. Purring.

And in the chair across from me, so close our knees almost touched, sat the man from the back of the festival crowd.

Tall. Broad. His dark hair was soaked and dripping onto his shoulders like he'd just come in from the storm. His knuckles were scraped raw and bleeding a little on both hands, the way your hands look after you punch through something made of glass.

He was watching me like he'd been watching for a while.

He leaned forward, picked up a mug off the little table between us, and slid it across to me. Hot chocolate. Steam curling off the top.

"My cousin's an idiot," Rowan Ashcroft said. "Want to make him regret it?"