I turned to him and found him looking at me, eyes gleaming, all muscle and power and—threat. A little frisson went down my spine. Yeah, okay, I could see his point.
“What kinds of things are on the table?”
He raised a sardonic eyebrow at me and grinned, showing all his teeth.
I swallowed hard.
Right.
“Okay,” I said. “Fine. I guess I’ll—head into the woods?”
“See you soon,” Colin said, his voice a low alpha rumble that didn’t reassure meat all.
Which was the point of this, I reminded myself. I was supposed to be on edge. A little scared.
I shouldered my backpack of supplies and headed out without another word, and without looking at him. I couldn’t. At that moment, he felt like a stranger.
Which was good, I reminded myself again. It was supposed to feel like that. I’d have to keep on reminding myself, because it also felt like shit.
The backpack weighed me down a bit as I scrambled over fallen branches and maneuvered around long, spiky twigs, and it kept catching on things and pulling me up short. But I’d opted to take it with me today, since we hadn’t set a time limit on when he’d be coming after me. Colin had argued, pointing out that in a real chase through the woods, getting hungry and thirsty and lost would be part of the process.
I shot him down. I could pretend to be a well-prepared hiker getting chased by an alpha were just as well as someone who’d ended up in the woods some other way, right? Screw it. I wanted to have my socks with me, and I wasn’t taking no for an answer.
The first half hour wasn’t so bad. The air had a distinct October bite to it, but walking quickly and climbing over and around obstacles kept me warm. The lack of sun was actually nice. I thought I probably would’ve been too hot without the clouds.
But then I got used to the rhythm of the forest, and I had a little more focus to spare.
What the hell would Colin impose as a ‘consequence’?
I couldn’t stop dwelling on it.
And it didn’t help that the only sounds were the rushing of my breaths, the crackle of twigs under my feet, and birds calling from the treetops.
I’d hear Colin coming, right? He’d been loud enough the day before.
But he also hadn’t been trying to be stealthy. He could walk damn quietly. But in the pathless woods, with all the leaves and sticks and branches…?
I stopped and had a drink of water, listening to the forest for a minute.
Nothing.
I kept going, now completely, hopelessly lost. It’d gotten close to noon, but sun direction wouldn’t do me much good anyway—with the overcast, I had no points of reference at all. And forget that moss-growing-on-trunks thing. I was convinced no one could actually follow the moss thing.
About an hour into my bumbling hike, I heard something. Barely. It hardly registered as a sound, but the hair on the back of my neck stood up like I’d been electrocuted.
I stopped dead and looked around. To my left, an enormous pine tree, one of those ones with the widely-spaced branches that looked like long, unfriendly monster fingers. To my right, a rubble of underbrush with a fallen tree in the middle of it sprouting a crop of undoubtedly toxic orange mushrooms. Beyond that, more forest in all directions.
I started to relax.
And then I heard it again: unmistakably a low growl, so low it almost escaped my hearing range.
Panic spiked in the base of my spine. Colin, right? It had to be Colin.
But what if it wasn’t? Oh, shit, I hadn’t eventhoughtabout that. Yeah, most non-shifter predators would avoid an alpha shifter in the wild.
But other shifters wouldn’t, necessarily. Or other creatures. There was a lot of land not claimed by any pack, or by any other supernatural entities that maintained official relations with their neighbors. And those places were a free-for-all. Half-feral shifters on the run from the authorities, whether supernatural or human. Trolls. Various fae species, which might or might not ignore a human interloper.
Did any of them growl like that? Colin might growl like that. But we’d talked about him staying in human form. He’d told me explicitly he’d be staying in human form.