Page 61

This time, I don’t hesitate. I take it quickly, before my wolf can register an opinion and because I know any hesitation might cost me a decision I’ll regret tomorrow. Then I tuck the vial away and stand up and walk to the fire like last night was a thing that happened and not a thing that is still happening inside my chest.

Nash looks up when I approach. His expression does a sort of quiet assessment, reading me in the space of a second, finding whatever he finds and keeping it to himself.

“Morning,” he says.

He hands me coffee.

“Morning,” I return.

We drink in silence. Comfortable silence, despite what I said to him after, which is somehow worse than if it was awkward. Awkward I could have used as evidence that I’d made a mistake. This just feels like… us.

Don’t, I tell myself. There is no us. There can’t be.

And since my wolf immediately puffs up to start arguing with me, I glance around a bit desperately for a distraction that isn’t Nash himself.

But the clearing is empty besides us. That’s when I realize Echo isn’t on his rock. He’s not curled inside my pack either.

I scan the tree line automatically.

“He was gone when I got up,” Nash says, following my gaze.

I frown, trying to remember if my wolf even noticed it during the night. But I slept harder than I have in a while, thanks to⁠—

“He seemed agitated last night. After you and I…” He pauses. “After you fell asleep.”

I look at him. “Agitated how?”

“Going to the tree line. Coming back. Repeat.” He sets his coffee down. “I thought he was just being Echo.”

That might have been a reason, except Echo is never agitated. Excited maybe. Outraged possibly. But not anxious like Nash is describing.

We look at each other for a moment.

Then Echo crashes through the undergrowth at the tree line. Not his usual fluid materializing from nowhere, but urgent, scrambling, his small body practically vibrating. He runs to me, up my leg to my shoulder, and grabs my jaw in both paws to point my face directly at the trees.

His chittering is insistent.

“Okay,” I say. “I hear you.”

He drops back down to the ground and runs toward the tree line, then stops and looks back at us.

I get to my feet.

Nash is already setting his coffee aside to follow.

Echo leads us northeast, away from camp, away from the supply route, up a gradual slope through dense pines and brush. He moves fast; faster even than his usual theft-oriented pace. But I follow as best I can, and Nash follows me, and neither of us speaks because the stillness of this part of the woods is already telling me something, and I can’t help but listen.

The smell hits me first.

I stop walking.

Nash stops behind me, and I know he’s registering what I am.

Echo is sitting at the base of a pine twenty feet ahead, wringing his jewelry-thieving hands.

A lump sits half-buried in a pile of leaves between us.

I make myself walk forward.