The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(6)

“Come on. YOLO.” Kennedy grins at me. I taught her YOLO.

Well, isn’t my mate supposed to be around? You snooze, you lose, right? I hop to my feet. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

Kennedy whoops. I dash back to my bedroom for slippers, and by the time I’m back in the living room, the front door is open, and she’s gone. I bound after her.

She didn’t go far. She’s standing in the middle of the path leading to our cabin, nose quivering as she sniffs the wind. Her sense of smell is the best of all of us since she’s shifted.

“This way,” she says, and we head away from the commons, up the rolling hills that lead toward the western boundary of pack territory. A few yards up the path, she cuts away into the woods, winding around mossy trees and thorn patches, down a shallow gulch, and into a small glade by an oxbow creek so narrow no one bothered to give it a name.

The gibbous moon casts everything in a ghostly blue. A cool night breeze rustles the leaves newly budded on the high branches above us. Although it’s an hour past sunset, there’s a strange daylight scent lingering in the air, and it stirs the excitement in my belly.

We stand, facing each other, grinning. These are not the first shenanigans Kennedy and I have embarked upon. I shove away the strange, new, reaching feeling anchored near my heart, and Kennedy and I grin at each other, partners in crime.

“Can you feel her?” she asks.

I close my eyes and focus inward. My wolf is on her feet, alert, listening, watching. “Yeah. What do I do?”

Kennedy blushes. “Uh, so, I usually take my clothes off.” She clears her throat. “You don’t have to, but if you don’t, you’ll ruin them.” She thinks a second. “Well, I guess it depends on the size of your wolf, and like, if your pants have elastic.”

My pajama shorts have a stretchy waistband, but the silk cami doesn’t have much give. I peel off my top and bottoms and set them on the cleanest exposed root I can find before I toe off my marabou slippers. The feathers are wet and matted with dew. Probably not the best choice of footwear.

When I hustle back to the middle of the clearing, Kennedy has shucked her clothes, too. She’s still smiling, and it’s so wild to see her happy and excited. She’s definitely the sarcastic, emo one in our little family. She’s kind of made crabby and bitter her life philosophy.

“You are so stoked.” I grin back at her.

“We’re going for a run, baby,” she says, clapping her hands together.

Not for the first time, it occurs to me how freaking awful it must be for her when she shifts. She can’t run with the pack. Not with how narrow-minded and backwards our males, and females, can be. Una sets her up with a rental out past Chapel Bell for the full moon so she can run in peace, but it has to be lonely as hell. Wolves run in packs. That’s our whole thing.

Nothing pisses Kennedy off more than pity, though, so I keep my feelings off my face.

“Okay, what do I do?” I shake out my arms.

“Uh.” Kennedy grimaces. “You, uh, shift.”

“Like, how?”

She opens her mouth to explain. I take a deep breath. I’m so ready for this.

She blows out a breath and screws up her face. “You just kind of do.”

“I just do?”

She shrugs. “Here. I’ll show you.”

She cracks her neck, does a quick quad stretch with both legs, and then that weird, shifter-life thing happens when your eyes and your brain lose sync, and one moment, your best friend has arms and legs and a face, and then there’s a glitch in the matrix, and he’s a big-ass wolf with a silky black pelt, his head cocked like okay, your turn.

“You know that didn’t help at all, right?” I say.

Kennedy’s pointy ear flicks. I sigh and shake my arms out again. I want this. The rest of it—Darragh and mates and nests and all of that—I don’t know if I’m ready for that quite yet. But this, I want. I want to run free for the first time in my life.

I squeeze my eyes shut and reach deep inside. My wolf is there, so close.

“Come on,” I mutter, and I don’t know what to do next, so I just want as hard as I can, focusing with all my effort on her royal highness, the dainty wolf standing expectantly at the border between us, waiting on tenterhooks—waiting for what?

I draw in a deep breath, expanding my lungs to capacity with night air, filling myself to the brim with the mustiness of changing leaves and the tang of a distant woodstove, and then the wind shifts, and suddenly, I’m surrounded by the scent of broad daylight. Rolling lawns, bursting bulbs, mellow sunlight streaming through antique wavy glass.

My wolf comes alive. She leaps for the source of that scent. My bones crack. I scream.

The pain is bright. My muscles rip, joints pop, arteries sever, and in the same instant, I’m knitted into another shape, lower, horizontal instead of vertical, tuned into an entirely new and different frequency.

Vaguely, I hear a strange baying from an indistinguishable distance and direction, and I raise my voice to call to the wolf making the sound, but there aren’t words in my mouth, there’s only a wild and joyful howl.

Kennedy trots to where I’ve collapsed in the wet grass and noses my flank, urging me to my feet, adding her howl to the one in the distance, inviting me to run. Oh, yes. I want to run.

I stagger to my feet. No, my paws. My white paws. I’m white. Silvery white. I look up—and up—at Kennedy looming above me. And I’m small.