17

For the first time in years, Lydia overslept. (She even found a small drool spot on her pillow: that was how out she’d been. Thank God Case had been the big spoon, or he would have woken up with a wet shoulder. She shuddered just thinking about it.) She couldn’t remember the last time she’d woken up feeling rested down to her bones. In this soft, luxurious bed, with Case holding her, all the worry and exhaustion of the last few months had completely disappeared.

Then she glanced at the clock on the bedside table and saw that it was already half-past noon.

Even with the late checkout timer the lodge had generously given them, they were still supposed to be out of here by one.

She would have liked to have spent the first morning of her married life lolling lazily around in bed with her new husband, not frantically rushing around trying to get out the door, but she was in too good of a mood to care about needing to spring right out of bed. Right now, it would take a hell of a lot more than that to jolt her out of her little bubble of contentment. She didn’t even mind that they’d missed the continental breakfast, even if she was a little curious if it had come with rosemary-sprigged waffles and rosemary smoothies.

She rolled over, turning carefully in the circle of Case’s arms. “Case.”

He opened his eyes at once, not looking remotely sleep-fuzzy. Like her, he’d probably been awake for a little bit and content to lie there, cuddle, and have some pleasant daydreams.

“Good morning.” He kissed the corner of her mouth. “You look gorgeous.”

“I think I probably look like I’m in desperate need of a hairbrush, but thank you. So do you.”

“Look like I’m in desperate need of a hairbrush?”

He did have a little bit of bedhead, but Lydia thought it was more adorable than messy. “No. People with short hair get off easy on that front.” She ran her fingers through the silky hair at the nape of his neck, like she was illustrating her point. “I meant the gorgeous part. But also, on an unrelated note, it’s about twenty minutes to one.”

“Seriously? Wow, we really—” The realization hit. “Oh, shit.”

“Yep. Want to start throwing things in our overnight bags? I’m going to take the world’s fastest shower.”

After that, she pulled her wet hair back into a ponytail, brushed her teeth at the speed of light, and flung herself into some clean clothes. To her surprise and delight, Case handed her a paper to-go cup of coffee. Cream and two sugars, the way she not-so-secretly liked it.

“You’re incredible,” Lydia said.

He shrugged. “I made it in here, but it’s surprisingly decent for hotel room coffee.”

She didn’t care what it tasted like. Not really. What she cared about was that Case, in the middle of a hectic rush to get out of here on time, had somehow still taken a moment to brew her a cup of coffee the way she liked it. He’d even slid the little cardboard sleeve around the cup to keep her from burning her fingers.

He was incredible.

They dropped their card keys off at the checkout desk with whole seconds to spare, and they even managed to snatch some leftover chocolate croissants from the remains of the breakfast buffet. They headed outside munching on them, and Lydia didn’t even care that she was getting little flakes of pastry all over her shirt. She still felt like she was on cloud nine.

“I know we have to go back,” she said, with a reluctant pang, “but do you want to go see the waterfall first?”

“If you used to come here to look at it, I definitely want to see it.”

It was only a short walk from the lodge, and Lydia knew the woodland footpaths around here like the back of her hand.

“I used to come here sometimes when I needed to think,” she explained. “Before you came along, though, I was getting too stressed to even do that, so it’s actually been a while. But I couldn’t forget this. And if you take a sniff—” She gave an exaggerated one, hoping the sight of her nostrils flaring wasn’t too unlovely. “Your wolf might be able to pick up on the scent of running water.”

Case took a deep breath. A frown creased his face. “I don’t know.”

“Try to relax.”

The frown gave way easily to a smile, and Lydia suspected that was always the case with him. She liked it. She’d grown up in a family that took everything seriously, like it was always life or death, but Case seemed to know what actually mattered and what could be shrugged off. Learning how to use his new senses properly mattered to him, but his momentary irritation at not getting it right the first time out didn’t.

“I feel like I’m in a superhero movie, figuring out my powers,” he said.

He would look good in an old-fashioned Superman cape and some spandex. Lydia decided to file that thought away for later.

She watched as he closed his eyes and breathed in again. His dark eyelashes were longer than she’d realized before, and they made a delicate fringe of shadow. She hadn’t had the chance to really see him asleep and relaxed, and it was nice to have this glimpse of him like this. He was so open and unguarded.

What do you really want? Lydia wondered, looking at him. Do you want to stay with me? Could you really be happy here, or would you just agree to it because you know how much I want you to?

“I think I’m getting it,” Case said. He opened his eyes, and Lydia did her best to school her face back to some kind of normal expression. “It smells sort of crystalline, doesn’t it? Really fresh and bright.”

“That’s it. Delicious, right? If I’m not paying attention to where I’m going and sort of wandering around, my wolf will always wind up leading me to running water. Want to try to lead the way?”

“As long as you tell me if I’m about to take us off the edge of a cliff,” he said dryly.

It only took a minute or two for Lydia to see that he was in no danger of doing that. Case’s instincts were good, even if he was still finding and honing them. He paused a few times to reorient himself with grounding sniffs, but otherwise, he mostly seemed content to trust his wolf. Lydia suspected the two of them would get along well, which was lucky. That wasn’t always the case. Even though an inner animal was more of an expression of your subconscious than a completely separate creature, people could and did wind up at odds with theirs. Freud would have a field day with shifters.

But now that she thought about it, it made sense that Case would connect well with his wolf. Case might practice restraint, but he was probably the least repressed person she’d ever met. She was pretty sure he knew exactly who he was and what he wanted, and she admired that about him.

That did remind her of something she really should ask him about, though.

“When I turned you,” Lydia said—after a quick look around and a thorough sniff of the area had confirmed they were as alone as she thought, “I really thought your body was going to reject the transformation.”

“So did I.” He pressed his lips together for a second, his face turning a little ashen even from thinking about it. “That part hurt.”

From the look on his face, Lydia was going to guess it had been a whole lot worse than he would ever admit. Even as a bystander, what he’d been going through had seemed hellish. And she’d always heard it was agonizing. She certainly hadn’t hesitated to run and get some of Ruth’s morphine for him, because even if he wanted to downplay it now, he’d sure needed it then.

“I don’t know what else would’ve been happening, if it wasn’t that,” Lydia said.

“I think it was that,” Case said to her surprise. “I could sense my wolf for a while, but he was fading away.”

The few accounts Lydia had read of failed transformations had mentioned people sensing their animals on the horizon and then losing them as their bodies fought to get the strange new shifter “virus” out of their system. It had haunted her a little to think of a silhouette of her wolf slowly dissipating into the mist. If you already had a connection to your animal, losing it sounded like the worst fate imaginable. Luckily, the people who’d survived their bodies’ rejection of the bites never had much chance to get to know what they were missing. They were mostly just grateful to be alive and on the other side of all that pain.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Before I bit you, I read all the accounts on turnings that I could find. I asked everyone about it. And I couldn’t find any record of a failed transformation that somehow reversed itself at the last minute. What was it like?”

Case’s face went still as he thought back and Lydia watched the shadows of wind-rustled leaves move across it.

He wasn’t just gorgeous. He was beautiful. He belonged out here, in the natural world, with other wild and free things, and if she chained him to one small and dying town ....

Don’t think about it , she told herself. Not right now.

“It hurt,” he said—that same understatement all over again. “And like I said, I could see my wolf, but it was fading away. And I could hear that you were in trouble outside. My wolf could sense it too, and that had it on edge. I asked it ....” He drew his hands into fists. “I asked it to go help you, if it could. I was pretty out of it, and I thought maybe it could manifest somewhere else like a friendly ghost. Don’t laugh at me.”

“You were in agony, and you were trying to think about how to save my life,” Lydia said bluntly. “I’m not going to laugh at you for not knowing how inner animals work.”

“It told me it couldn’t go anywhere without me. So I asked it to finish the job and—leap into me, I guess.”

Lydia’s breath caught in her throat. “To force the transformation to take?”

“I guess. I didn’t know if it would stick forever, but I thought it might work long enough for me to help you with whatever was happening outside.” He half-laughed. “Not that I even knew what that was. But I knew you’d been gone too long.”

“But it must have—Case, I know you were already in a lot of pain. Overriding all your body’s natural precautions like that to brute-force yourself to turn ... your nervous system would have gone haywire. No one’s equipped to take that.”

Case shrugged, like he hadn’t accomplished something no one else in the world ever had. Something no one else in the world would ever want to accomplish, for that matter.

“It hurt, yeah.”

That wasn’t a good enough word for any of this, but especially not for this last part. He must have felt like his body was being torn apart sinew by sinew.

“Your wolf should never have agreed to it,” Lydia said fiercely. “I can’t believe it let you down like that. It’s still a part of you, even if it hadn’t manifested all the way back then. I know you have trouble putting yourself first, but your subconscious should at least do it. It’s a survival instinct!”

Case didn’t think his own survival mattered as much as she did, apparently. He only shrugged again. “It was on my side. It warned me it would probably hurt, but I told it to go ahead, and it did. It wanted to protect you too.”

It didn’t make any sense. Your wolf was your instincts and your senses and your primal needs. Those things usually weren’t all that altruistic. They couldn’t afford to be: no species could live very long if its members didn’t do their best to stay alive.

There were complications, obviously. Lydia’s wolf recognized and respected the pack structure, like she did. It was willing to follow Ruth’s orders, even to its own detriment, and if she ever needed to trade her life for the safety of the pack, it would never force her to hesitate. But that was about survival too. It was about knowing that her people came first and that her self-respect would never last if she shoved them all aside to save herself.

But other than that ... well, Lydia would still run into a burning house to save a stranger’s child in danger. But it would be hard to get her wolf to cooperate with her on it. It would have an animal’s instinctive fear of fire without enough biological incentive to override it. Going ahead with that kind of risk would mean bottling her wolf up until she could finish the job. At best, she would have convince it, using a lifetime’s worth of practice.

That was fine and normal. Humans had to do the same thing in that kind of situation; they just thought of it as overcoming their own terror or anxiety.

But somehow, even Case’s primitive instincts had said that saving her life was worth all the pain and risk. He hadn’t pushed his wolf aside to do what he’d needed to do, because then he would never have turned in the first place. His wolf had gone along with the plan completely, hurling itself fully into him and taking over, all to save her life.

Why? She didn’t understand it at all. Case’s wolf hadn’t even met her at that point! There hadn’t been any burgeoning sense of pack loyalty to deal with.

He had been in unimaginable pain, and both he and his wolf had agreed to make it worse, because that meant there was a chance they could help her.

“That’s not how it works,” Lydia said. She couldn’t explain why the idea left her feeling so tumultuous and unsettled, like there was some huge idea she wasn’t getting. “You shouldn’t have been able to get it to do that. It shouldn’t have wanted to.”

Case frowned. “Is it bad? Does it mean something’s wrong?”

“No! God, no. But it’s like ... lifting up a car to save someone trapped underneath. I’m surprised it was even possible.”

“People do that sometimes.”

Lydia waved her hand. “Sure, to save their wives or their kids, maybe. But I’ve never heard of anyone doing it to save a stranger.”

To her surprise, he stiffened, and he took a few quick steps ahead. All she could see was the suddenly rigid line of his back.

“Well, you’re not a stranger, are you?” he said without looking back at her. “We’re married now, even if we weren’t then. We’re ... mated. That seems like a pretty good reason to override a survival instinct.”

Dammit, she’d hurt him. She hadn’t meant to, but she clearly had. It was one thing to be stunned or confused that he’d managed to fly in the face of nature to save her life, and it was another thing entirely to imply that they couldn’t possibly mean enough to each other for that to happen.

Yes, that was stupid , her wolf said.

Thanks for chiming in, Lydia thought in what was barely short of a snarl. You know you’re a little late, right?

It flicked its ears at her, annoyed. I would have done what his wolf did. You would have wanted me to.

Of course I would have wanted you to! But I want you to do lots of things you don’t want to do, like—

It cut her off. This is different , it said firmly. Don’t you realize that? He’s different.

I do realize that . The words sank in, along with a fresh and sickening realization of how badly she’d messed up. I guess I didn’t realize that you knew it too.

In retrospect, though, she didn’t know how she could have missed it. Her wolf didn’t usually show that much interest in the people around her, but it had paid attention to Case from the start, even when he’d still been human. Lydia had taken it for granted that her wolf had been focused on how Case could help her protect the pack from Reeve, but now she thought it was more than that.

Maybe a lot more than that.

She and Case had been attracted to each other right away. He was exactly who she wanted and who she needed, even in the weirdest and most desperate of circumstances. They wanted to help each other. They couldn’t get enough of each other. Spending time with him was easy. Lydia’s world had always been hard and demanding, but Case was restful and kind and exciting all at once. He made her feel better by being near her.

And he had already taken crazy chances for her. He’d agreed to get turned into a werewolf and have a shotgun wedding! He’d gone through hell for her! He’d given her more than her fair share of the macarons!

There were some things in life that Lydia had never even let herself think about. They were so farfetched, so impossible for someone in her position, that they would be like wistfully daydreaming about living in a castle in the clouds. And one in particular had seemed especially unreachable since she’d reluctantly decided that she would have to marry any werewolf even remotely willing to help her face down Reeve. She hadn’t even let herself think the word in question. It was too ridiculous. Too unbelievable.

They say your inner animal realizes it, and usually sooner rather than later. It takes it a little time, but when it knows, it knows.

That was what she’d always heard. She’d just never thought it could possibly apply to her.

She watched Case walk out ahead of her. She couldn’t believe that she’d hurt him. It was tearing her heart to pieces to think about it.

She gathered up her courage and turned her attention back to her wolf.

Do you think , she said, that Case could be my true mate? My fated mate?

Oh , it said, with a surprised delight that resonated through her, like a gong strike reverberating on all her nerve endings. Joy seemed to ring through her body. Oh, you’re right. He is. That makes sense now. We belong to each other. Of course he’s our true mate. Of course he’s your true love.