Page 41 of Lost and Bound
A Place Here
Calder nudged me awake as we passed theLaceyville: Population 19,229sign, and I blinked as it whipped by. Well, went by at a normal pace, really, since Matt had taken the wheel when we left and hadn’t relinquished it since. Ian and Arik, strangely, had been allied in their vociferous complaints about that, with phrases like ‘drives like my grandma’ thrown around.
Even more strangely, I’d been the deciding vote.
“I doubt this van even goes over a hundred, Ian,” I’d cut in, when Nate started to get involved in the argument too—standing right next to Matt and backing him up, of all things. “So why would you even want to drive it? Besides, I’d rather not start puking again.”
Ian had shot me a death glare that warmed me all the way down to my toes, since it was exactly the way he’d used to look at me when we all squabbled and I didn’t take his side immediately.
Anyway, he’d given in, mumbling a couple more insults about Matt’s Prius, Arik had made a bid for the keys that’d been shot down by everyone in a chorus, and we all piled into the old blue van that’d clearly been resurrected from the Armitage junkyard. Arik took shotgun, and Nate and Ian climbed in the back, leaving me and Calder in the middle seat. If having Ian breathing down his neck bothered him, Calder didn’t show it. He settled in silently.
Everyone settled in silently.
Matt pulled into a fast-food drive-through after a little while and sent the place into a flurry ordering sixteen animal-style double-doubles. The cute little human girl taking our order would’ve been even more startled if she’d seen how quickly all of them vanished.
Meat. Real meat, and cheese, and onions…and meat. I tore into my burgers like a feral beast, dropping the trash into one of the paper bags and flopping back in my seat, feeling like an anaconda.
And then I fell asleep, my head tipped back and my whole body as heavy as lead.
I woke up curled into Calder’s chest, his arm around me and my face pressed to his bare skin, his heavy, steady heartbeat echoing in my ears, with no idea how or when I’d moved. When I levered myself off of him, he didn’t even twitch, just laid his arm along the back of my seat to let me go. I wiped the drool off my chin—and how had he not even reacted to that, Christ, how fucking embarrassing—and sat up just in time to see the Laceyville sign.
Then I was fully awake. More than awake. Panicked.
We’d be home in a few short minutes.
The last time I’d been on the Armitage pack lands, I’d been leaving them to meet Jonathan Hawthorne, creeping down the long driveway late at night with my headlights off, hoping no one would notice me leaving and want to know where the hell I was going—just like I’d been doing for most of a year before that, when I went to fuck Nate.
I was nearly vibrating out of my skin by the time Matt turned the van off the narrow highway and onto the road leading through the pack lands that would end at the pack house near the center.
And I felt it. The subtle change in the air, in the quality of the ether, that told me we were on our own ground. Everyone else did, too, except for Calder; Matt, Ian, and even Nate and Arik all let out a little sigh as we made the turn and crossed our territory boundary.
Ifeltit. That had to mean something. It had to mean I wasme, didn’t it? Jared Armitage, the prodigal cousin, coming home at long last, in his actual real body and everything.
Arik rolled his window down, and the cool breeze hit my face, a wall of the scents of home. Redwoods and water, grass and mushrooms, rocks and dirt. All of it smelled exactly the way I remembered it. Night had fallen as I slept—and I couldn’t believe I’d crashed that hard, after having slept all of the night before, but maybe nearly dying could really take it out of you—and the forest on either side of the long driveway lurked in total gloom, only picked out by the faint light of a setting quarter-moon. An owl hooted in the distance as we rumbled along the road. Nothing looked different, even though I practically plastered myself to the window like a kid coming home from a long summer vacation. And nothing smelled different. It looked so similar to the night I’d left home for the last time that it felt like a dream.
No one came out to greet us when we pulled up in front of the pack house. In fact, the whole place seemed eerily quiet for a normal evening. I cleared my throat. “Where is everybody?” My voice sounded thin in the silence.
“I called ahead,” Matt said, obviously going for nonchalance but missing by a mile, tension infusing every word. “They’re having a run out at the other end of the territory. You know, down by the stream near the southern boundary? I think they put all the little kids to bed a while ago and a couple of parents volunteered to stay behind and hang around the cottages to keep an eye.”
I did know, and I could picture it all too clearly. The pool we all used to jump in, with a tire swing hanging out over the middle, so that someone had to make the first leap for it and swing it back to the giant boulder before anyone else could use it. A lot of the time that person missed, and we all laughed. A lot of the time, it was me missing, and I laughed as much as anyone when I went splashing down, my hands scrabbling for the swing and not quite making it. Everyone shifted back and forth from human to wolf, depending on whether they were swinging, or swimming, or singing, or telling a story, or running around chasing critters in the underbrush. Even in this chilly weather, some of the younger guys, at least, would swim, coming out with their hands over their groins to hide their cold-shriveled dicks.
Werewolves didn’t have a lot of modesty. I’d skinny-dipped plenty of times with the whole pack, including my great-aunt and a bunch of kids, and never thought anything of it, just like they didn’t. Nudity in human skin or in fur didn’t bother anyone. But no guy wanted everyone seeing his junk after immersion in forty-degree water.
They’d have thermoses of coffee to pass around. Luke, Ian’s and my other closest crony, would always have a bottle of cheap bourbon.
“Anyway, the pack house is pretty empty tonight, and almost everyone’s moved into the cottages lately anyway. Let’s get settled in, yeah?” And with that, Matt shoved his door open with a creak, clearly done explaining.
Maybe because he didn’t want to say straight-out that he’d gotten everyone out of the way so they didn’t see me, even though we both knew that’s what he meant.
Ian had hugged me. Ian had…forgiven me? I doubted it’d happen that fast. But it had seemed like he meant to try. Maybe he was regretting that moment of affection he’d shown me, and maybe he wasn’t. But he’dshownit. I held on to that as we all got out of the van and headed up the front steps of the pack house. Matt wasn’t ready to trust me, but I had to believe Ian would have my back, like he always had. There were a few new gouges on the porch railing, and the steps sagged slightly more in the middle. Paint peeled off the front door. Christ, they hadn’t done much maintenance while I’d been gone, had they? My fingers itched for a hammer and a paintbrush. Ian would have my back. Maybe he’d help me paint the porch. Normal. I could go back to normal.
That little flash of optimism evaporated as Calder prowled up the steps right behind me, wariness in every line of his big body, looking at everything suspiciously with those silver eyes.
No, I couldn’t go back to normal. I couldn’t forget or deny what had happened to me. This wasn’t a normal homecoming.
“Come on, let’s go upstairs,” Matt said, sounding incredibly weary. I tried not to take it personally. He’d done an eighteen-hour round-trip drive in a shitty van, and that’d make anyone fucking tired, even if the circumstances had been otherwise ideal. Which they hadn’t. “Do we have extra sheets?”
Nate sighed heavily. “Gods, this pack. I’ll deal with the bedding. Arik can help me. He knows where everything is in this house.”
