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Chapter 2 - Skye
I knew a setup when I saw one. And this one was led by my two best friends. My alleged best friends. Because I was dumber than a sack of bricks and I would follow them just about anywhere.
Jada and Laurencia stood on either side of me in case I got any bright ideas about running off. At this point in her pregnancy, Jada was
sensitive to shifting, which meant she would do it less often. But given that her legs were accustomed to bouncing and jumping with all that interpretive dancing, I had no doubt that she could chase me down in a heartbeat.
Pregnant women could be scary. I wasn’t about to test her.
I wandered after Laurencia, who had bounced ahead. Her bubbly
attitude was getting on my nerves. And that juniper she insisted on burning was irritating my nostrils. Patience was my bread and butter, yet my friends knew just how to chafe it.
Much like I was chafing my own arm. Less out of anxiety, more out of irritation.
One more sigh. An eyeroll. A gaze that could burn like a toaster overheating bread. “You two think you’re slick, huh?”
“Alpha’s orders,” Laurencia chimed. She waved the smudge stick in front of me. “Must make sure you’re protected.”
“I’ve showered, you overzealous twat,” I snapped.
She rattled to a halt—which was a funny thing to witness, I had to admit. The way her spine went rigid, her arms stiffening at her sides, made
her look like one of those cyborg puppet things I saw on the AI art channels all the time. A quick wave of the smudge stick had incense burning the hairs right out of my nostrils.
Overzealous as hell and ready to get smacked in the head, that was what was happening. Full stop.
“Girl, if you don’t drop that in the ocean, I’ll—”
Jada touched my upper arm. A soothing energy dragged me right back to the earth and forced me to plant my feet firmly on the ground. Call
it magic. Call it motherly energy. Whatever it was called, I didn’t care. It just worked.
Alright, so maybe I cared a little bit about how she managed to
wrestle me into gear. She spared me a sympathetic gaze and then nodded to the path that snaked into the wall of trees. Waves crashed on the other side. That thin veil of forest leading to the ocean would spit us out onto the dunes.
Just a month ago, Jada had gotten married out there. Proposed, ritualed, married. Whatever the terms were, they weren’t important, and not necessarily in that order. She was a smart cookie with a sharp mind and a heart like one of those fancy Build-A-Bear stuffed animals. I swore her heart was made with stuffing, like somebody had patched in enough love for three lifetimes.
Like someone had taken the time to stuff her properly and mend her
seams.
It’d be pretty nice if someone could do that for me. I’d seen better
days. And while brighter days were ahead of me, I was sure, I had plenty to juggle on my plate already.
Adding a mate to the mix wasn’t going to ease my worries. It was going to exacerbate them.
“Wipe that sour look off your face now,” Jada teased gently. “That’s no way to meet your future mate.”
“You’re the one who should be backing me up here,” I complained. And I knew I was whining. Pretty soon, I’d probably start griping.
But somebody had to stand up for me aside from my brother. While he had
been off fighting vampires, and later on slaying those lab-created dire
wolves, I was shoved into a bunker and told to protect my ovaries. Because somebody had to carry on the family name, according to him.
This was just another one of those plots to get me to reproduce. Every boyfriend from my past had gone about it as sneaky as anybody,
setting up fancy dinners and bombarding me with gifts and such. No doubt this Troy fella would be doing much the same.
Jada squeezed my forearm while nudging me toward the path. “It’s dinner. You’ll get used to him. You might even fall in love with him.”
“You hated this.”
“I won’t deny that.”
I grabbed her hand, winding her fingers up as tightly as she’d allow, because I was frightened and I didn’t know what to do. Admitting my fear to her wasn’t going to do anything. The gods couldn’t do anything about it. I just had to trudge ahead and hope the alpha of the Bravecrests wasn’t one of those weird guys who wanted me to become a traditional wife and never speak to my friends again.
Sure enough, I’d met plenty of those guys in the past. Humans
weren’t the only ones who were weird about their lifetime partners. Wolves could be a hoot about it too. Older folks in particular were heavy on the
commitment part—for the wife, of course. The husband could do whatever he wanted because he was in charge, he protected the family, he was
stronger, blah, blah, blah.
My alpha wasn’t like that. And if Blake was assigning me to another alpha—a truly wide gesture, that was for sure—then he had likely vetted the guy ten times over. I had to hope. I had to hope beyond hope that my alpha wouldn’t toss me to the wolves. Both literally and figuratively.
“Come on,” Jada encouraged. “Not too much farther.”
“So, just dinner?” I asked, trying not to chafe anymore. My skin was starting to burn. “Nothing else?”
She grinned while ducking under a low-hanging branch. “Whatever you want to do with him is up to you.”
“Bang him if I want—heard.”
Laughter bubbled around us. Laurencia had heard, of course, and she was waving that smudge stick like it would prevent the end of days. Funny enough, it was like she was heralding the end of my days with that stinky thing. With all her blessings and protection chants, I didn’t feel one
lick closer to being safe from the expectations of this Bravecrest alpha, my brother, and my alpha.
All the men in my life wanted me to reproduce. Wasn’t that just creepy?
Jada patted my upper back, guiding me off the path and away from the beach. Well, that was a twist I hadn’t anticipated. Was this a setup
within a setup? The turducken of setups?
“Just ahead,” she whispered. She paused on the path and nudged me forward. “Go on with Rencia. She’ll be your guide.”
“She’ll give me a nosebleed with all this smudging,” I whined, yet I followed Jada’s instruction because she would never lead me astray.
Even if it felt that way sometimes.
I sighed as I marched through the cloud Laurencia left in her wake. She skipped and hopped, danced, and trotted, stopping near a patch of thick bushes, and waving her stick extra hard. Clouds billowed up from the burning juniper and thickened the air. She wiggled her fingers through the tendrils of gray and whispered, “Just over there.”
“Where?”
“The ladder, stinky.”
I shook my head. “You’re the one stinking up the whole dang forest with that smelly nonsense. Don’t forget you’re not a witch.”
“Tell that to my hybrid ancestors.”
“Don’t get me started on your ancestors, girl.”
While sliding past her, she tapped my shoulder lightly, two gentle pats that encouraged me to reach through the bushes and grab at whatever was back there. Which happened to be nothing. As I turned to protest this ridiculous stunt, Laurencia shoved me through the bushes, and I tumbled forward like one of those roly-poly things when they get offended by
someone touching them.
Leaves stuck to my hair. Twigs jammed into my t-shirt collar and stuck to my butt. I stood up and swiped my hands over my legs, giving
them a good once-over so I didn’t look crummy for my fake date. That was pretty much how I saw this whole thing—fake. Setups were always fake things. Blind dates were false pretenses.
Besides, what would an alpha like him want with a girl like me? I wasn’t even out of college yet. I was probably ten years younger than him, maybe more, which meant that my earlier assumption about reproduction had to be on the nose. Older guys only wanted younger women for two things: social status and babies.
And since I didn’t have social status… “Up here, stinky,” called a faint voice.
My right eyebrow went up, then my left eyebrow, then I tilted my chin to the canopy above. Amber eyes stared down at me from an open
hatch in a treehouse. A rope was tossed down, dangling in front of me like a limp snake. More than anything, I felt the strong inclination to yank on the rope and pull that conspiring jerk down to the ground.