Page 94 of Wretched Thorns

Jasper’s hands closed slowly at his sides. The wolf was too close to the surface now, visible in the hard set of his face. He pushed off the wall.

But he didn’t argue.

“Dex, Jasper, and me,” Callum said.

“And me,” Tara answered immediately.

Callum looked at Dex. Dex nodded.

“I don’t need any wolf’s fucking permission, and I sure as hell ain’t askin’.” Tara’s temper flared hotter than an August afternoon as she pushed past both of them through the screen door onto the porch.

Dex blew out a breath. Callum pulled a face that could only have been an apology. The remaining women in the room had suspiciously turned away and grouped together.

Callum looked back at Eli.

“You lose the read, you tell me immediately.”

“I know.”

“Eli.”

That pulled Eli’s eyes back to him.

“I mean it, immediately.”

Something moved hard through the bond then. Fear beneath command. Fear for all of them.

Eli gave one short nod, and he kept his hand pressed flat to the top of the table while the sigil beneath it began pulsing.

***

They went out to the trucks.

The light had come up enough that the cypress at the back of the preserve was again a black wall against gray. The air was thick. The barometer had been dropping since Eli came up the basement stairs, and the storm sitting in the gulf had decided sometime in the last hour that it was coming inland today.

Bodie had already left. Dex drove with Tara in the passenger seat; Callum and Jasper in the back.

Callum did not speak for the first thirty miles.

Jasper did not speak either. Callum’s eyes were on the road. The bond had been running steady on Serena’s signal all morning, and as they crossed the parish line and got into the marsh country south of the lake, the signal shone clearer than ever.

He could pinpoint her now. Bearing south. Distance closing.

“She’s still alive.”

“Yes,” Jasper said behind him.

“Eli’s holding.”

“Yes.”

The first lightning was a low slow flash over the gulf horizon. The wind shifted. The rain that had been holding in the south came across the marsh in a gray sheet and met the truck on the road five minutes later.

Dex did not slow down.

The dark clouds of the gulf storm rolled ever closer to the narrow back road.

The truck moved south.