Page 6 of Wolf Found

Just how much of Graham’s life had been a lie if the alpha had felt a need to lie about something so inconsequential to the pack as why Hannah was gone?

“You okay?” Hannah asked, for probably the hundredth time since he’d taken her back to his room to pack the bag. Like he had then, he didn’t really answer her, just nodded and kept moving.

Even the nod was enough of a lie, because he wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. The alpha had lied, and Hannah’s boyfriend had thrown her outnotbecause she was a werewolf—he’d known about that before she got pregnant—but because his own child was a werewolf as well. It was unconscionable to hate one’s own child for being born what they were. Right?

But of course, if he combined that with the fact that the alpha was a liar, it made everything he’d ever learned suspect.

Get to Kismet, he told himself for more than the hundredth time.Get to Asher Martingale, and everything will make sense.

He didn’t know why it would, it just would.

It had to.

Something had to.

“Do you need to stop for the baby?” he asked, glancing back at Hannah when Paige let out an annoyed little noise.

Hannah sighed and shrugged. “She’s hungry, but I’ve got nothing left to feed her.”

Graham flinched at that. It was his fault. He should have given Hannah all the food, and not just two-thirds of it. The baby eating was more important than him, and he should have put that first.

“But we’re close, right?” she asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You said it should be today, and the sun’s going down, and...”

She looked so pitiful that even if Graham hadn’t thought they were close, he’d have told her they were. But they were. The problem was that he was going off memory from his Google shenanigans and a map they’d bought in a gas station outside of Denver. It was just as likely that he was off course and had led them to the wrong town entirely as that they were anywhere near the right house.

They’d kept to the hills, far from the road, not wanting Graham’s pack bonds to give them away if any of the Martingale pack came looking for him. And they had. The bonds with whomever they had sent weren’t his strongest, but he’d felt them approach.

They were within miles even now, and he was terrified they knew right where he was. How else could they be so close? Was he doing something that gave him away?

Hannah was lucky that her pack bonds had broken when she ran away. Though it would have been nice for him to be bonded to her. Graham had never felt so alone as he did now. He’d never even been off pack land before, let alone so far from everyone he knew. The terrifying feeling of nearby pack members was almost—almost—welcome.

There was a child somewhere in him that wanted to sit down, howl for his pack, and wait for whoever it was to come get him. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t fend for himself and navigate without a current map and be the person Hannah and Paige were counting on. What if he led them into a snowstorm, didn’t find food, and got them all killed?

The sun was dipping in the sky. They wouldn’t be able to move much farther that night—he wasn’t going to miss their target because he went bumbling through the woods in the middle of the night. Plus Hannah had to be exhausted from having spent half the day carrying Paige, and Paige couldn’t have slept well being passed between Graham and her mother all day.

He wondered if the Martingale betas who were nearby would take Paige, if he claimed she was his daughter. They would know he was lying, but apparently lying was what packs did.

That was when he smelled alpha.

Not his alpha, no, but there was a trace of something familiar in it. Asher?

He tracked the scent to a tall stone wall that ran high up the mountainside, enclosing a huge area that smelled so strongly of alpha, he almost wanted to show the wall his neck. This had to be right. How many alphas could be living in the mountains of Colorado?

Graham scurried up the wall, using his claws to keep a firm grip as he went, and reached down for Paige when he got to the top.

“You think this is the place?” Hannah asked. She was as breathless as he was, no doubt the alpha scent appealing to her senses as well.

He looked around the forest inside the enclosure. It looked much the same as the outside; the amount of forest enclosed must be enormous. Why close it off, if not to keep hapless humans away from wolves? “Yes. This has to be it.”

Hannah clambered down to the ground first, took Paige back, and Graham hopped down to hurry ahead again.

They took a slight turn toward the down slope, since that was where the town was. Graham assumed a house would be closer to the town than the back of the property. Most packs weren’t as antisocial as the enclave. He knew that from previous experience with visiting betas who always seemed to think the Martingale wolves hopelessly backward.

He had always thought them arrogant, but... the alpha had lied. For no good reason.

The back of a smallish building came into view, and a few seconds later voices drifted up.

A deep gravelly one first, sounding very alpha and very annoyed. “So what, they think gay equals pedophile?”

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