Chapter 54

The forest was dark. Weak moonlight passed through the branches in thin shafts, too weak to fully illuminate the path in front of us. Jack didn't seem to have a problem with it, moving us through the darkness with expert efficiency.

I, on the other hand, struggled to keep up despite his arms supporting and guiding me. I could hardly see anything. Every now and then my foot would snag on a dead branch or crash into some stray rock, and I'd stumble, hissing as the effort to remain upright pulled at my injured shoulder.

The fifth time I stumbled, Jack let out an audible grunt, and the next thing I knew, the earth disappeared beneath my feet and the world rolled sideways as his arm slipped beneath my knees and he lifted me up in a motion so swift and easy it felt as if I weighed no more than an ounce.

"What are you..." I yelped. "Put me down!"

"Keep quiet." His tone was firm. "You were going to break a leg stumbling around like a blind mouse, and then we'd have one more problem on top of everything else." There was exhaustion edging into his words.

Knowing that arguing with Jack was pointless, I gritted my teeth, swallowed my pride, and let him carry me like a child.

Jack didn't speak the rest of the way. He moved through the trees faster now, the shadows and silver slipping past us in a blur. He kept one hand firm at my back and the other beneath my knees, his posture straight and alert even now.

I didn't speak either.

There was too much in me. Pain. Cold. Aftershocks of fear. The lingering heat of Ethan's skin against my shoulder. The look in Jack's eyes when he had seen me beside him in the clearing.

Everything sat inside me in separate pieces, not yet willing to become one whole thing.

The trees thinned, letting more of the moonlight through.

The road appeared in slices between trunks. And there, crooked in the ditch, was my car.

For a moment, I stopped breathing.

The front end was buried nose-first in scrub and mud. One headlight was dead. The other cast a weak slant of light across tangled branches before cutting off completely, the battery finally giving up. The driver's side door was open wide. The windshield looked wrong, starred in one corner where my head must have hit.

My stomach turned over.

A few feet behind it, angled badly across the shoulder, stood Jack's truck.

I stared at it.

He almost never drove that thing. It was old, dented along one side, the kind of vehicle that smelled like rust. Most days it sat unused unless he had a reason that usually involved hauling.

The driver's door was still hanging open.

Jack took two more steps before he realized I was staring.

"What is it?" he asked.

I looked from the truck to him and back again.

Nothing, objectively. A truck. Open door. Mud sprayed up the side from where he must have come in too fast and braked too hard.

And yet I knew exactly what I was looking at.

He hadn't even parked it properly.

He had found my car in the ditch and gotten out so fast he had forgotten to shut the door behind him.

Something tightened painfully in my chest.

For all his hard edges, for all the distance and the rules and the way he spoke like every word had to be wrestled into place before it was allowed out, he had seen the wreck and panicked.

Because of me.

The realization landed with a strange heaviness.

I had understood, in theory, that Jack cared on some level. But seeing proof of just how much, in something as ordinary as open truck door, hit me like a brick.

He frowned faintly when I kept staring.

"Kelsey."

I dragged my eyes away from the truck.

"Nothing," I said, though my voice came out rougher than I meant it to.

His gaze lingered on my face for a second, as if he knew it wasn't nothing and was choosing not to press. Then he came back to me, slower this time.

"Can you make it from here?" he asked, putting me down.

I looked down at my legs, then once more at the open door of his truck and nodded.

"My things..." I looked toward my car. "My bag is probably still in there. Can you please get it?"

Jack didn't answer. He just went over, grabbed my bag, then helped me into his truck.

He didn't speak for the entirety of the drive.

After a couple of minutes, I could see the porch light burning warm and yellow in the distance through the trees.

When we pulled up, I saw Elise and Hailey standing on the porch, Elise's hands firmly on Hailey's shoulders.

They must have heard the truck, or maybe they had been waiting and looking out every other second since Jack left. Either way, the moment we came into sight, Elise moved so fast she nearly missed the top step. Hailey darted after her, pigtails bobbing in all directions.

"Kelsey," Elise said, and there was nothing composed in her voice now. It was low, yes, because she was Elise, but the words came too quickly, tripping over one another. "My God, darling, what happened? Are you all right? Did you hit your head? Are you nauseous? Can you stand properly?"

"I'm fine," I started automatically.

Elise gave me a look so sharp it almost made me laugh.

"Don't say fine when you look like this."

Her hands hovered in front of me for a second, not touching yet, taking inventory the way Jack had. My face. My shoulder. The dirt ground into my jacket. The blood dried near my temple. Her own hands were trembling slightly.

Hailey stopped dead two feet away and stared up at me with huge eyes.

"Kelsey," she whispered. "Did you fall?"

That was somehow the worst question anyone had asked all night.

Before I could answer, Elise made a small, impatient sound at herself, like she had reached the end of her ability to stand still.

"No, no, never mind, don't explain out here," she muttered. "You'll tell me inside. We need to get you warm and cleaned up first."

She reached for my elbow.

Hailey reached me a second later and wrapped both arms around my waist.

The contact hurt enough to make my breath catch, but I swallowed the sound before it could become anything else. She buried her face against my jacket.

"Did you fall and hit your head?" she asked again, muffled.

"Something like that," I said, because I had no idea what else to tell her.

We had just reached the bottom of the porch steps when the entire structure of the barn shook under impact.

The sound was so sudden and so violent that for one split second my brain gave it no name at all. Just force. A massive, echoing slam that cracked through the night and shook straight through the ground under our feet.

Hailey screamed.

Elise went white. "Oh, God! Gabriel."

Jack was already moving before she finished saying the name. One second he was beside us, the next he was off the porch and crossing the yard at a run that turned into a blur.

Another impact hit from inside the barn. Wood cracked.

My skin went cold all over again.

"What, what's happening?" I asked, but my voice came out weak and thin beside the ringing in my ears.

Elise was already turning us toward the house, one arm around Hailey, the other catching my wrist.

"Inside," she said.

"What happened?"

"Kelsey."

"Elise, what's happening to Dad?!"

She stopped just long enough to look at me.

Fear had stripped her face down to something raw.

"He heard you were hurt," she said. "He smelled the blood. He panicked." Her voice broke on the last word, then hardened with immediate self-reproach. "God, how did we not think of that? How did we forget?"

The barn shuddered again.

Hailey clung harder to me.

"Why is Daddy mad?" she asked, starting to cry now in earnest.

Elise pulled her closer and physically guided us over the threshold and into the house. Warmth rushed up to meet us, obscene and wrong after the cold outside.

"He's not mad, sweetheart," she said automatically, though her eyes were still on the window over my shoulder, listening for the next impact. "He's just... upset."

That was one word for it.

She shut the door too hard behind us and turned the lock with trembling fingers.

For one second all three of us stood there in the entryway, breathing too fast.

Another slam rolled through the night, fainter.

I went toward the kitchen window.

From this angle I could only see part of the yard, the porch rail silvered by moonlight, the corner of the barn roof beyond the dark mass of the oak.

A horrible, icy feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.

Dad had been so much better. He had been speaking. Holding on. Using my mother's scarf like a thread back to himself. He was almost there.

And now this.

All because of my stupid, stupid blood.

Because some part of him, the deepest and oldest part, sensed me hurt and reacted first and wrong.

From the window glass, the ghost of my reflection seemed to mock me.

My gut twisted. It wasn't my fault, I knew that. I knew, and yet a part of me that didn't think but feel rose with the urge to slam my fist into the glass.

Elise was already steering Hailey toward the living room with one hand while reaching blindly for the medical kit with the other. She moved on reflex now, on practiced competence.

"Kelsey, come here and sit down," she said.

I didn't move. I stood there by the window, fists clenched at my sides, waiting for another impact.

Nothing came. Only silence.

Somehow, that scared me most of all.

I stared at the barn through the glass, straining to see through darkness and reflection, and felt the full weight of what had happened finally settling over me.

The road. The boys becoming wolves. The wet tongue on my temple.

Ethan.

The cage of him around me.His breath fanning across my neck, his head resting on my good shoulder.

Our promise.

Then Jack's face.

And now this, the house not even holding for a single hour before violence found its way to it.

Not my fault , I repeated to myself. Not mine.

The weight in my gut remained.

I pressed my hand unconsciously to my sore shoulder.

The barn stood silent and black against the sky.

And for the first time since leaving the woods, what I felt strongest was no longer fear for myself.

It was fear for Dad.