Page 28 of Bullied Pretend Mate (Silverville Firefighter Wolves #3)
This time, I’m already looking at the fire when my phone goes off, the alert sounding at the same time as the other guy’s phones go off, too.
Xeran, Soren, Lachlan, Kalen, and I walk together through the trees. We’re lucky our eyesight is better than humans’, or we might get lost out here, even with the moonlight coming in strong through the trees.
“Just got a text about more fires cropping up in the east,” Kalen says, his voice breathless. “They’re small, but there are a lot of them.”
“Ignore it,” Xeran says, though there’s nothing else I would have done. It’s not like I’m doing anything but looking for Maeve. “I have another group of guys going out.”
Even if Xeran ordered me to turn around and go to the firehouse right now, get ready to fight one of these wildfires, I would not obey that command.
Because Maeve is in these hills somewhere.
And apparently, she’s not alone.
“Phina and Valerie were at yoga together,” Xeran said after he called Phina and couldn’t get in touch with her. Lachlan tried Valerie, too, but the call went right to voicemail.
“What the hell do you think is going on?” Lachlan asked, glancing at Xeran. They shared a look, then Lachlan added, “Do you think it’s something to do with that night?”
Even with all the time Maeve and I have been spending together, I never thought to ask her about what happened that night. It seems like Xeran and Lachlan have a better idea than I do, but I don’t want to ask.
So instead, I just follow them up the side of the mountain, each of us tracking our mate’s scent, trying to catch up with them before the trail goes cold.
“They were moving so fast,” Lachlan says, shaking his head. “Damn magic.”
That’s how Maeve got away from me—using her magic. Another thing we haven’t talked about is the time she’s been back in Silverville.
Guilt and shame are still rolling through me at the realization that I hurt her so bad in high school. Bad enough that it drove her to that night, to whatever happened with her and her friends. To whatever led to the first daemon fire, to the flames that have plagued this town since then.
Xeran, Lachlan, and I move at a fast clip through the forest, shifting between forms, trying to move quickly and keep the trail before it falls away. The girls have to be far up in the mountains, given how their scents are fading now.
“Guys,” Soren says, trailing along behind us. “The fires on the northern ridge are getting closer to town. Maybe we should—”
“You can join up with the other unit,” Xeran says, not turning to look back at him. “But we’re heading this way.”
Soren should know better—that’s the luna up in these hills, and even with how much he cares about the pack, Xeran has made it clear that his family, and his mate, are the most important things to him.
“Nah,” Soren says, glancing between us and the fire on the other side of town. “I’ll stay with you guys.”
We trek on, pushing through the dense forest, the smell of the daemon fire filling the air. A scent that we’ve all gotten familiar with over the past ten years.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on,” I say quietly as we make our way through the woods. “But I think I have something to do with this.”
“With the fires, or with the girls?”
“Uh, both,” I say, glancing at them again. “Or just Maeve, I guess. I think I’m part of the reason all that shit happened back then.”
Xeran and Lachlan share another look, and Xeran speaks, his voice level like it always is. “Phina told me that the magic wielders always felt on the outside, back in high school. The ridicule they faced made them feel they had no other choice but to practice in secret.”
“And for some of them, like Valerie, not casting comes with consequences,” Lachlan says, running a hand through his hair. “When she goes too long without using her magic, she says it pushes against her skin. Makes her feel like she’s going to burst.”
“I think it might be more than that,” I whisper. “You guys remember the shit I used to say about Maeve?”
“Yeah,” Soren says. “I remember.”
“We heard it in my grade, too,” Kalen says. “We already knew who she was when all the fire stuff went down.”
Xeran swats at his younger brother’s arm, but it’s not like Kalen was the one talking shit about Maeve back then. That was all me.
“Well, I didn’t know the stuff about the magic,” I say. I knew that Maeve could use magic, but we never really talked about it, and she didn’t wield it around me. At least not that I could see. “But she said all that stuff from back then, it’s part of what led to that night. Me, being an asshole.”
The other guys are quiet—Lachlan and Xeran trudging forward steadily—and I get the sense that I’m not alone in this. That maybe even back then, we were all more interconnected than we thought. That our friend group had more to do with the fires.
Maybe Holden Sorel should have punished us, too.
Suddenly, my head perks up, and I realize I’ve caught Maeve’s scent again, strong and sure, heading up through the trees. The other guys look to me, eyes widening.
“I’ve got it,” I say, shifting, already running along the path of jasmine in my mind’s eye, the trail of crumbs leading me to Maeve.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get her to forgive me. But I’m going to keep her safe and get her off this mountain in one piece.
The others shift, too—Xeran into a sleek black wolf, his brother Kalen into a slightly smaller version. Lachlan with golden fur, and Soren with a copper coat that’s a little richer than Maeve’s strawberry-blond.
It makes me miss her with a strong pang, and I push myself even faster, outpacing them, lungs and muscles screaming for relief as I race up the side of the mountain.
Together, the five of us come to a stuttering stop in a clearing. When I see Maeve, it settles my heart and riles up my anxieties all at once.
Because she’s okay, physically sound and in one piece, but something is still very, very wrong. She stands with Phina and Valerie at her sides, the three of them facing down another person in the clearing.
Someone who stinks of daemon fire and is looking at the girls like she could eat them alive.
She’s tall, lithe, with sharp hips and blue shaggy hair that looks almost like a lick of daemon flame itself.
“Who the hell is that?” Lachlan breathes, and this close to Maeve, I remember what she said the first time I caught up to her, when she ran out of the wedding.
Do you realize that it was all that shit with you that drove me to that group? With Phina and Tara? That it all led up to that awful night that ruined everything?
“Yeah,” Xeran growls, shifting back next to me. “Who is that woman with the blue hair?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, even as I know—maybe through my bond with Maeve—that it’s the other girl. One of the friends in her group. A girl I’ve never seen before in my entire life. “But I think her name might be Tara.”
“Tara?” Lachlan says, shaping the name strangely in his mouth, and I know why. I don’t remember a girl from our school with that name. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t one. I would have remembered someone like that, with the blue hair, the way she walks, the commanding tone she uses.
We all would have remembered that.
The women are talking, their voices getting more shrill as they rise into the night, and the five of us inch closer, desperately trying to hear what they’re saying.
“What’s the good part?” Valerie asks, her voice faint.
The girl with the blue hair hops down off her perch and starts to walk toward the girls, and we all glance at one another. Xeran holds up his hand, watching to see what happens. Maybe thinking his wife can take the girl, Tara . And, based on what I’ve seen from Phina, she can.
“The good part,” Tara says, grinning thirstily, her side profile flashing in the light from the moon, “is when I take your power from you, just like I used to do back then.”