“Come on. Let’s get you help,” I mutter.
“You don’t have to…”
“Mandi.”
“You don’t have to do anything for me. I’ll be fine. I need to catch my breath.”
I scoff. “Do you know what attacked you?”
The poor thing is broad shouldered and muscled, the kind of physique you see in a sports player. And human through and through. At least, he used to be.
“Werewolves aren’t real.” He says it like he’s begging me to call his bluff.
“Sure. Werewolves don’t exist.” I swallow over the dryness in my throat. “All the stories say so. They also say that no one gets out of a bite or a scratch unchanged.”
“So you’re telling me to buy stock in shaving cream?”
Grayson takes a shuffling step forward before another moan wracks through him and he falls forward, pulling me with him.We go down together. My knees hit an exposed tree root and I wince and swallow the jolt of pain.
He has no idea what’s going to happen to him. And although the Ironwood pack hates the bitten, the turned, any other shifter besides those born?—
Leaving him is wrong.
Sometimes the right thing to do isn’t the easiest.
I clench my jaw and somehow find my feet. “It’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t have to do this…” he trails off. “You don’t even know me.”
No, but I understand. He’s probably out here for the same reason I am, to watch the meteor shower from the hill and the cluster of rocks with an open view of the valley. One of the local boys at the high school, probably a jock, the kind who wouldn’t look twice at a girl like me.
“I know I don’t.” I drag him through the woods, towards home, the meteor shower lighting the way. “But my father will help. He’ll know what to do now that you’re a…a?—”
Grayson chuckles. “You can say it. I’ve read enough science fiction to get it. Plus, I really hate sugar coating. If honesty is brutal at least then I’ll know what I’m dealing with.”
I shake my head. “Werewolves don’t exist, right?”
It’s the lie we need the public to believe.
He’s silent another moment before saying, “No, they don’t.”
It’s unspoken, my hesitance and his reluctance pointing to the same truth neither of us can avoid. If he survives this, I’ll probably end up telling him the truth, the history, the strict guidelines for life in a pack.
For now, Dad will know what to do, how to save this boy. Loyalty is everything to wolves.
Especially when one of our own needs help. Like it or not, Grayson has been bitten. He’s one of ours now until the moon madness takes him, if that’s what really happened.
So I’ve either done the bravest thing of my life, or the stupidest. We’ll know in a few days. I can make a thousand wishes on a thousand shooting stars and it amounts to the same thing for us.
Nothing.
Chapter
One
Afrigid dampness seeps into my bones.
They’ve warped, bending into the shape of this cell, like I’m a plant with no room to grow and no oxygen or sunlight.