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“Hey, Fiona.” He hugged back with his hands staying up around her shoulder blades. At least someone had some common sense. He slung her bag off her shoulder and put it over his own. “You doing okay?”

“Yeah.” More eyelash-batting. “I guess? What the hell is going on, anyway? Mom said Newton got some pictures in the mail? Of me?”

“Of both of us,” I said. Why was she asking Colin? Hello? I was right there. “We’re not sure who sent them or why, but Mom and Dad are worried.”

So was I, but older siblings needed to keep up a strong front. Fiona might be a baby alpha, but to me she was still the little girl who’d climbed me like a tree whenever she saw a spider.

“Mom sounded totally freaked. And you were worried enough to call Colin, so don’t try to pretend you’re not too,” she added, with disconcerting insight.

“It’ll be fine. C’mon, let’s get in the car. It’s freezing.”

Colin and Fiona shared a quick glance, and Fiona opened her mouth—and Colin cut her off with a quick shake of the head.

Don’t remind Newt he’s not a werewolf, and he’s the only one of the three of us who thinks a chilly fall night qualifies as freezing.

“Shotgun,” Fiona said, instead of whatever remark Colin had forestalled.

And what was I supposed to say to that? Argue with a teenager over who got shotgun? Sit in the back seat and feel like a third wheel for an hour and a half?

The heavy knot in my stomach was back with a vengeance. Gods, I was so damn tired. I’d been up since six in the morning—yesterday, given that it was now pushing dawn. Nearly twenty-four hours. My head ached, I still had two midterms to write before Monday, someone was after me, I just wanted…

“Nope,” Colin said, popping thep. “My car, my rules. Newt gets permanent shotgun.” He shot me a wide, mischievous smile that had me smiling back, helplessly.

“Oh, come on,” Fiona whined, sounding every minute of her age and not a second more. That made me nearly as happy as Colin standing up for my rights. “I called it! And aren’t girls supposed to get the front seat?”

“No one gets the front seat when Newt’s around. You can stretch out and sleep in the back, so that’s even better, right?”

He set off for the car, parked just up the block in the loading zone, ignoring her pout. He might’ve looked nonchalant to anyone else, but I could tell how wary he was by his posture, a little tense and ready for trouble.

I slung an arm around Fiona’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. I thought she might shrug me off, but she leaned into me, wrapping her own arm around my waist. She had the same boring medium-brown hair that I and both of our other siblings did—being an alpha didn’t make everything better, at least—and it tickled my chin as I bent my head down to breathe her in. She felt and looked and smelled like home.

“Mom said you’re staying too. What are you doing about your classes? She said she’d help me figure it out if I had to miss my midterms, but what about you? Can teachers just skip out like that?”

“If I had to, yeah, someone would cover, but I’m not staying. We’re dropping you off and coming back.”

She twisted her neck to peek up at me. “Uh, yeah. That’s not what I heard.”

“I’m coming back,” I gritted out. “I have responsibilities. Not that you don’t,” I added quickly, to appease her. Freshman classes didn’t really count in the grand scheme of things, but I could remember being nineteen. They wereherresponsibilities, which made them important. “But if you skip your midterms, it’s just you. If I skip my midterms, a couple of hundred students might get screwed. I’m coming back to school after we drop you off. It’s not like they can force me to stay.”

“Want to bet?”

A few steps ahead of us, Colin opened the back door of his beat-up blue Cadillac and slung Fiona’s bag inside. “No one’s making Newt do anything, he’s a grown-ass man. Besides, I’m coming back and sticking around here for a while to watch his back while he fosters the future of science, or whatever nerdy shit he gets up to.” He winked at me to take the sting out of that.

Fiona stepped away from me. “Uh-huh.” She looked back and forth between the two of us, a funny look on her face. “I’ll make some popcorn for the fight with Mom and Dad. Not getting in the middle of that.”

Her voice sounded a little weird too, like she was trying not to laugh, or maybe cry? I couldn’t tell.

But she dropped into the back seat next to her bag without another word, and a glance at her face as I opened my own door showed her looking totally calm. Whatever. Sisters were weird sometimes, and as long as she wasn’t afraid or too upset about having to leave school, I’d take that as a win.

Colin and I buckled our seatbelts, settled in with a creak of cracked leather, and turned to exchange a speaking glance. This was going to suck.

“Ready?” He stuck the key in the ignition.

“Stop for coffee?”

Colin turned the key, and the Caddy came to life with a purr. The car looked like shit, but he kept the engine in tip-top shape. He called it his undercover-alpha-mobile. “You know it.”

I leaned my swimming head back against the head rest and let my eyes fall closed for a second.