Page 40 of Ensnared by the Pack: The Complete Series (Destined Realms #3)

AUDREY

We walked all morning, took a quick break at lunch for water and a handful of rations — since wolf shifters with an awakened wolf could live on one meal a day if they needed to — and walked for the rest of the afternoon.

After we’d left town, Deacon and his hunt team had spread out into the tall grass, searching the area for trouble and letting Cyrus and Whil take the lead, while Knox remained out of sight.

I’d hung back — and downwind from Cyrus — with Bishop. By his sniff and the darkening of his eyes the moment I’d opened my door this morning, he’d known I’d done some serious masturbating in an attempt to ease the aching desire of my heat, or my mating bond, or whatever the hell it was that was driving me crazy.

Thankfully, he hadn’t commented on it then and didn’t bring it up during our walk. Instead, he talked about safe stuff like the pack’s territory and trade with a seaport on the other side of the mountain.

My feet had been sore when we’d stopped for lunch and they, along with my legs, were killing me by the time we stopped at a wooden shed forty feet off the road. Hell, all of me was sore. My pack that hadn’t been heavy at the beginning of the day now weighed a ton and I was hungry and exhausted, and we’d only been walking for one day!

I had no idea how I was going to make it the nine days it was going to take to get to the death god’s altar.

Except I was just going to have to. Cyrus was already pissed at me. It would be better to prove I wasn’t completely pathetic and figure out how to pull my own weight on this journey. I wouldn’t be able to help in a fight, but I could still?—

God, I had no idea what I could offer. I’d never camped before, had no idea how to start a fire without a lighter or a match, and didn’t know the flora well enough to scavenge for food to help make our rations last.

It looked like the only thing I could do right now was keep up, follow any orders Cyrus gave me, and not complain.

“Drop your pack in the shed, grab the bucket just inside the door, and draw water from the well for the hunt team,” Cyrus said to me.

“Right.” I trudged to the wooden structure and opened the door.

The shed was… a shed. One door and no windows. It was a fifteen-by-fifteen wooden structure that was smaller on the inside because of trunks and shelves and a tall rack filled with firewood along the back wall and left-hand corner. The ground was hardpacked dirt, which wasn’t comfortable but safer than a wooden floor, and there was a small hearth and fieldstone chimney against the righthand wall.

I found the bucket, grabbed it, and set my pack where it had been, then headed to the well a few feet away.

Cyrus still stood on the road with Whil beside him, scanning the sea of grass and wildflowers all around us. He said something to her, too quiet for me to hear, and she nodded, her attention locked on something far off in the distance.

Their expressions were grim, but I didn’t know if it was because of what we were planning on doing, the grimalkins that had attacked the town the other day, or the strange magic the hunt team had found.

And really, it didn’t matter. I doubted they’d tell me, and even if they did, I wouldn’t be able to help. The most I could do was follow Cyrus’s instructions and draw water for the hunt team… whatever that meant.

I went to the old-fashioned well, complete with a rope-bucket pully system, and drew up a bucketful of water then dumped it into the bucket I’d taken from the shed. I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to do with the water and was on the verge of asking Bishop — who was building a fire in a firepit halfway between the shed and the road — when one of the sleek brown hunt team members came out of the grass, dropped a dead rabbit at Cyrus’s feet, and went straight to my bucket. She murmured a thanks in my head and drank deeply then headed back into the grass.

Bishop got the fire going, Cyrus took the rabbit and thankfully headed away from the shed into the waist-high grass to skin and gut it where I couldn’t see, while the other hunt members visited my bucket and drank.

I wasn’t sure what else to do so I made sure the “drinking” bucket was always full. But it was a hurry up and wait kind of job and the exhaustion from walking all day sank into my body and mind, dragging me into a heavy numbness.

Around me, the breeze, starting to cool as the sun set, ruffled my hair and made the tall grasses shush .

Stillness.

Shush.

Stillness.

Shush.

The icy hollowness dimmed and so, too, did my achy need as if I was softly separating from my body.

A flurry of birds that looked a little like sparrows but not quite took off from the grass stalks, tugging me back to myself, strengthening all my unwanted emotions. They chattered with each other and scolded whatever had disturbed them then flew away, leaving a heavy, peaceful near silence in their wake.

I’d only experienced the near-silence a few times before since the only place I’d been able to find it had been in the heart of my old pack’s forest and it usually hadn’t been safe to be there.

There was an energy in the silence, a gentle vibration that filled the air and called to me.

It said I belonged, that I was home.

There was too much noise everywhere else, too much energy from others. But in the silence, I could feel my primal connection with nature and could imagine that connection came from the wolf asleep inside me.

I let my mind and body drift again and the gentle vibration changed, my senses zeroing in on a ferocious feral power. It was just a whisper, his power was fully contained, yet somehow I could still sense it.

Of course, my soul would always sense it, would always be drawn to it, and would always recognize it.

Because he was my mate and every fiber of my being believed he always would be.

Knox.

I hadn’t even caught a glimpse of him all day and I knew if I turned around to look, he’d stay hidden in the grass.

The icy hollowness and the grief of rejection fluttered in my chest along with my achy need to seal our bond, but the sensations didn’t overwhelm me, and I’d never been so happy in my life to be too exhausted to feel anything.

“Audrey,” Cyrus barked.

I jerked, my eyes flying open. I hadn’t even realized I’d closed them.

“Fill up the bucket and bring it.” He strode past me and headed into the grass away from our makeshift campground.

The bucket was already full, so I picked it up and followed him.

He turned so the breeze was at his back — reminding me that he didn’t want to catch the scent of my uncontrolled desire — squatted and held out his bloody hands.

“I didn’t get a chance to talk to you before we left,” he said his voice gruff as I hefted the bucket and poured a stuttering stream of water onto his hands so he could wash them.

My heart did a strange flipflop that I attributed to my perpetual state of semi-arousal. Maybe he wasn’t as angry at me as I thought. Gruff did seem to be his natural state. Even during the dinner with his betas where he’d lightened up a bit — mostly because Nova kept teasing him — he was still kind of surly. Maybe I could actually trust him not to turn on me the second my bond with Knox was broken and that there was a place for me among his pack that didn’t involve me being a slave.

“You can’t fight and you can’t shift, so I doubt you can hunt,” he said, crushing the flicker of hope I’d had that he thought I was actually worth something. “How different is our realm from yours? Would you be able to tell what plant is and isn’t poisonous?”

I wouldn’t have been able to tell what plant was poisonous back home. “Probably not, but I?—”

“I’m guessing the stars are different, too,” he said, cutting me off before I could say I could learn. “If they were the same, would you know how to find your way back to town?”

“No.”

His eyes narrowed and a hint of his power rolled over me. “How basic do I need to go? If you don’t have a starter, can you start a fire?”

That was basic? I was pretty sure most people didn’t know how to start a fire without a lighter or match. Sure, they’d probably seen the stick thing on TV before, but I doubt they’d tried it and I had a feeling it was a lot harder than the movies made it out to be. But that was my realm. Maybe every child here learned how to start a fire without a starter in preschool.

His gaze bore into me, his wolf rising to the surface and darkening his eyes, reminding me that in this situation, I was prey and he was the predator. Hell, in every situation I was prey.

“What can you do?” he growled, the pressure from his power growing, demanding I answer him.

But as he so aptly pointed out, I couldn’t fight and I couldn’t hunt. In this situation, there wasn’t anything I could do. I didn’t know anything about surviving in the wild. I hadn’t even watched any of those survival TV shows. If we were back in the town though?—

I thought about what I could and couldn’t do that didn’t involve creating a spreadsheet for a computer they didn’t have or writing an essay on a history that didn’t exist in this realm. My possible list of skills was far too short. All I could really do was clean and cook, and I wasn’t sure my cooking skill would be helpful in this situation since I’d never cooked over a campfire before. Hell, I couldn’t even read and write anymore since I didn’t know this world’s language and the magic that let me understand them and be understood only worked with verbal communication.

The thought made me sad and frustrated. What had I been doing with my life? Nothing. Not a damn thing.

No.

I shoved those feelings as deep down as I could before they fully woke the grief from Knox rejecting our bond.

I wasn’t lazy or stupid. I hadn’t been allowed to do anything.

“Anything?” he pressed, his power compelling me to answer.

“No.” My throat tightened and my grief gained strength despite my determination to ignore it.

Damn it. There had to be something I could do. I couldn’t be completely useless.

Except, right here and now, I was.

“There’s nothing,” I forced out.

Cyrus grunted and straightened, glowering down at me as if he’d suspected what my answer would be and still didn’t like it.

“The first few rabbits should be ready soon,” he said and took the mostly empty bucket from me and strode back to the well. He refilled it then headed to the campfire and sat.

I stared at his broad, straight back, fighting to regain control of my emotions before following him. But I was exhausted and the best I could manage was to hold back my tears. Because damn it, I was not going to cry just because Cyrus, like everyone else in my life, had pointed out I was useless.

I should have been used to it by now. Sterling and his friends had reminded me almost every day that I was worthless. But no one knew me here and a part of me had hoped even though I was next to powerless and couldn’t shift that the shifters here would see me in a different light.

With a sigh, I waded out of the tall grass to the hardpacked earth and stone area where Bishop, Cyrus, Whil, and two wolves — one of them Deacon — sat around the campfire. Two rabbits had been skewered on a long metal stick which was propped up by metal stands on either side, creating a rotisserie, and the smell of roasting meat wafted over me.

“Here,” Whil said as I approached, and she dipped a metal cup into the water bucket and held it out to me.

“Thanks.” I took the cup and scanned the area for a place to sit, preferably away — and hopefully downwind — from Cyrus.

“Come,” Bishop said, patting the ground beside him. “Sit with me.”