Page 24

24

KAT

“P lease tell me you didn’t sneak out again, Leo?” I ask the seven-year-old boy, doing his best to talk my ear off.

He blinks up at me, innocence personified. “Why?”

Damn. This kid never gets tired of running off and getting into trouble.

I sigh, glancing back at the house.

When I left it, I wanted to be alone. My de facto spot for solitude and reflection has become this spot beside the creek. I’ll miss it when I leave, but I can’t stay here just because I like the creek.

Before Leo turned up, I was kicking myself for erupting like a volcano and telling Aren things I had no intention of ever telling anyone.

The stuff about Blaine was bad enough.

But the bet?

It bubbled out of me, and there was no stopping myself when I started.

My only saving grace was I didn’t tell him about the hell that was foster care. I don’t need the Wolf King’s pity. I don’t need anyone's pity.

“You can’t keep sneaking out, Leo. Your mom gets worried,” I tell him gently. Mostly because anyone yelling at me just made me more stubborn.

Robert, the foster dad that bodega robbers killed in a robbery one night, was one of the few people who treated me like an adult.

I never forgot that, and I don’t think I ever will.

“We should go for a run.” He’s so excited that if he were a wolf, I’m positive his tail would be wagging right about now.

“I have to work,” I tell him.

Namely, get back to the problem of finding the Gregson College Killer.

The deaths have stopped since graduation, and that probably has to do with the fact that I no longer have any exes left for the killer to target. Cris was my friend. He didn’t deserve to die.

Everyone is dead.

Only Aren is left, and even I can admit that there’s something about that guy that seems invincible, and that was before I learned he can become a half-man, half-wolf beast thing that no one can take on in a fight.

“Have you seen Aren’s third form?” I ask Leo, curious.

He shakes his head. “I wasn’t allowed to go to the Wolf King Trials. No kids are.” He brightens. “Bet it’s really cool, though.”

Yeah, I bet it is.

I need to refocus. I should be trying to figure out who the killer is and what they want.

It feels awful to even think about, but if I’d had to guess who it might be, I’d have said Cris. That has to do with his disgusting herbal remedies for his allergies that make being around him for extended periods of time torture.

Made it impossible , I correct myself.

Because he’s dead now. He helped me into my car after Doug’s wake, and someone killed him for it.

“It’s just a run,” Leo says. “And I can take you to the butterfly place.”

The butterfly place?

“Can you even?—”

He’s a small gray wolf drowning in his clothes seconds later.

I shake my head. “It’s a good thing your pack is in the middle of nowhere.”

I don’t even want to know how Dania would keep the fact that Leo isn’t human a secret. If she could, it definitely wouldn’t be for long.

I pull his clothes free, move to scratch his ear, but it seems all that excited energy is too much for him to control.

He bounds around me, and I can’t help but laugh. “You’re going to make yourself dizzy and throw up.”

He runs around me again, trips, and tumbles into the creek.

I save him just in time, laughing as I haul him back. Not that he cares. He’s disappointed, and I have to wonder if the trip wasn’t accidental but a deliberate desire to go swimming. “Leo…”

Are all the pups like this? How does Gregor deal with teaching a bunch of them? Maybe that’s why he was so eager for me to sit in on another class. He’d have another adult in the classroom to control the chaos.

“It’s okay, you can take him,” a woman calls from the house.

I turn to see Dania, Leo’s mom, standing near the bunkhouse in a short-sleeved, ankle length light green cotton dress, her long hair in a braid hanging over her right shoulder, and a warm smile on her pretty face. “He said he wanted to show you the butterfly place.”

“What’s the butterfly place?”

“One thing that makes this place home,” she says. “He’s been desperate to show you before Aren did.”

“Why?”

Her smile dims a little. “Aren showed the place to him when we came home. He thinks it will convince you to stay.”

I blink at her, surprised. “I thought this place was always home.”

She shakes her head. “For a while, it wasn’t. Have fun.”

“You trust me?” I call after her when she turns to go back into the bunkhouse.

“With Leo?” She peers over her shoulder, meeting my gaze. “I do. But try not to stay out too late. He still has to wash and eat something before he stuffs himself full of sweets at Emilio and Joy’s party later.”

I mentally wince. The Leo currently running in circles around me is the pre-sugar version. I seriously do not want to know what he’s like full of sugar. “Okay.”

She goes back inside the bunkhouse and I move to get up when Leo bumps his nose against my leg.

I look at him. “What is it?”

He gives me a playful growl.

It takes me a second to work out what he means. “You want me to be a wolf?”

He nods, his tail wagging playfully.

“I have work to do, Leo,” I remind him as my wolf whines at me.

He runs around me again, jumping on my back, his claws scraping and scratching as if he’s trying to hold on.

Laughing, I pull him off. “You’re not going to quit, are you?”

He shakes his head.

I didn’t come here to play. I came here to get Aren’s help to hunt a killer.

But..

“Is the butterfly place far?” I ask.

He shakes his head again.

And for once, I give in to the desire to play. “Okay. Give me a second.”

I briefly hesitate about stripping in front of a boy, but I needn’t have worried. He’s too busy sniffing grass, nearly falling into the creek, and chasing his tail to pay me any attention.

So I quickly strip and shift.

The moment I’m a wolf, he bolts into the forest, leaving the toy lion that’s almost as big as he is beside the water.

I follow, and although I’m faster than he is, I let him lead the way to the butterfly place he wants to show me.

He leads the way to a meadow, and he burrows into a bush.

I follow, more curious by the second.

And the boy I thought could never keep still for longer than five minutes settles down and I do the same.

Ten minutes pass in complete silence. Other than our breath stirring the leaves of the bush we’re hiding behind, we don’t move.

I hadn’t believed Leo could keep so still or for so long. I should tell Gregor or take a picture, because I doubt he’d believe me without one.

Leo’s ears prick the way mine are, and I hold my breath as I watch. In the field on the other side of the line of trees just ahead of us, a deer runs past. Thankfully, it’s not the gigantic deer that nearly trampled Leo a few days ago. This one is smaller, nimbler, and missing the antlers that could have speared him and me both.

Its ears are decidedly curved.

Female.

A fawn.

Butterflies dance into the sky, like insubstantial brown bits of nothing floating in the wind at first. As they open their wings, they hover and dart and swoop.

They are so beautiful. A clashing jumble of rainbow colors.

My wolf is growling in my head, demanding to know why we aren’t chasing and biting.

I hush her as I absorb a sight so magical, I could never find it in the city. This isn’t the botanical garden I once went to for peace and tranquility. I’m not elbow to elbow with other people in the city, trying to take pictures of everything that moves.

It’s just me and Leo, with a cloud of beautiful butterflies inches from our noses.

As the last of the butterflies find a new hiding place, Leo’s patience runs out and he scrambles up.

Leo chases me, trying to bite my tail, and I chase him back, gently and subtly steering him back toward the house so his mom doesn’t worry.

My wolf surprises me with her patience and her willingness to play with a pup.

This is one of the few times I’ve let myself shift here, and I know she loves the wide open space and the freedom to just run and run.

I’d have thought she’d be off like a shot, running until it was midnight, but she’s as eager to return Leo back to his mom as I am.

When we return to our clothes, he either can’t or doesn’t want to change back to a boy.

I shift first, pull on my clothes and just stop Leo from jumping in the creek. “ Hey ! What is your obsession with jumping in there?”

“He’s always loved water,” his mom calls out to me, a smile in her voice. “Did he show you the butterflies?”

I set him back on his feet, wait for him to wander away from the creek instead of toward it, then turn to smile at Dania. “He did. It was amazing.”

“Water and butterflies. Those are about the only things he will ever sit still long enough to appreciate,” she says with so much love in her eyes as she looks at him that I have the strangest, most painful ache in my belly.

She loves him so much. And I don’t think there’s anything she wouldn’t do for him.

What would my life have been like with a mother who loved me like that?

“Come on, Leo,” she calls out.

A lick on the back of my hand makes me laugh, and Leo tears off, nearly knocking Dania over in his eagerness to greet her. Clearly, he’s not interested in being a boy just yet.

I gather up his clothes and walk over to the bunkhouse, handing them to his mom.

“Thanks. I’ll see you at the party later, okay?”

I nod, but I’m not sure that I will be there.

I’m here for one reason—get help to track a killer.

That’s it.

Not to party or to go look at butterflies.

So what the hell happened to my sense of urgency?

“Ah! There you are.” Joy jogs down the stairs from the house. “I was looking for you.”

“ Me ?” I eye the determined stamp on her face and start getting nervous. “Why?”

“The party. You need a dress.”

“I do?”

When she reaches me, she snags my hand and starts pulling toward the bunkhouse. “You do. Something short, bright, and guaranteed to blow Aren’s head off.”

I dig my heels, but Joy is stronger than her petite frame suggests. I keep on moving. “Wait just a?—”

“Do you know what happens when people disagree with me?” she interrupts sweetly.

She’s one of Aren’s enforcers—the sole female enforcer he has. From what my dad was telling me before he left, it’s more of a male role rather than a female one.

But Joy isn’t just a quiet, meek enforcer. She actively changed Aren’s mind about me being a feral by suggesting a test to prove I wasn’t. Aren is so stubborn that I struggle to believe he would listen to anyone. Yet, she convinced him to run the test.

That tells me what I’m up against here.

And the grip she has on my wrist as she leads me toward the bunkhouse for a makeover I’m not sure I want is downright painful.

I release a sigh. “I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say nothing good.”

She laughs as she flings the bunkhouse door open and pulls me inside. “Smart woman.”