Page 17 of Hunter Moon

“I know,” I whispered. I didn’t need her to tell me that I didn’t have anything with Aspen anymore. If I’d really meant that much to him in the first place, he’d have left me with more than nothing.

“I don’t suppose you know where he’s been staying?” Linden asked Claudia quietly. Her mate, Birch, had been Aspen’s best friend, basically a brother.

I blinked. “He’s still not staying at Grove House?”

Linden shook his head. “No, and he’s not staying at The Honeysuckle Inn either.”

Even Claudia looked uncomfortable then. She shrugged. “No, but I’ll see if Birch can find out.”

Shiloh came over, wearing a hard, annoyed look. She sent a glare at the door, like Aspen could feel the heat through the wall and whatever distance he’d retreated.

“Can I take your order?” she asked, whipping a little pad out of her apron pocket. When we were done, she nodded at the flowers. “You want me to hold onto those for you?”

“No, thanks. There’s plenty of space.” I put them on the corner of the table, right beside me, and far away from everyone else. They weremine.

But truth was, I thought even mild-tempered Shiloh would drop them in the trash the second she got behind the counter. As pathetic as it was, I wanted to keep my one nice gesture that’d proved Aspen cared.

“Fine.” She spun on her heel and marched, too fast, off to place our order.

As I leaned over the flowers, Linden was giving them a weird look too, his brow furrowed. Curiosity clouded his gray eyes, like he didn’t understand his brother. But Linden had always been measured and calm. Aspen was a wrecking ball who hoped for the best, hurtled clumsily through life, and—and had left a big fucking mess in his wake.

But Linden was looking for meaning, and maybe he hadn’t given up on his brother, so none of us should either.

9

Aspen

There were people in the valley, and it set my teeth on edge.

Not that I thought only pack members should be allowed. On the contrary, my family made a lot of income from tourism—lots of people paid a surprising amount of money to be allowed to pick apples for themselves. We thrived on having tourists in town.

But, like, day trippers. People who lived in Richmond or DC, and drove out to the idyllic werewolf apple farm for a day because it was somehow both quaintandnovel.

We didn’t get campers. First and foremost, all the land in the valley belonged to the Grove pack, so strangers in the area were technically trespassers. Secondly, Grovetown wasn’t convenient to approach through the woods from any direction. It was surrounded by hills on all sides, and those hills weren’t a piece of cake to hike, even for werewolves.

The campers were human, my nose told me as I sniffed my way through the site where the strangers had made camp the night before.

I hadn’t noticed a campfire before dark, so they must have lit it after, and kept it small, so that the smell didn’t get far. The campsite itself was tiny, and would have been easily overlooked under other circumstances.

In fact, it looked like they had gone to great pains to keep it subtle. They hadn’t just smothered the fire, they’d covered the pit in dirt and packed it down, trying to hide any indication that there had been one at all. They hadn’t pitched tents, or cooked food, or left trash behind—not even the kind that nature would handle itself, like apple cores.

Was it people actually being good caretakers of the planet, for once?

The wolf in my brain sure as hell didn’t think so.

Invaders, it growled at me.Interlopers in our territory. Thieves. A threat to our pack. Hunt them down, find them, chase them out.

A feat easier demanded than done, it turned out.

I found the camp in the early hours of the morning, just after six a.m., while running the border of the valley.

Yeah, it was an old-fashioned thing to do in the modern world, but I’d been doing it every morning since I’d arrived back in Virginia. The first time, I’d convinced myself that I just wanted to see it again—to look at the valley from every angle, smell the apples and the trees and the ground I’d grown up on.

The next morning, I’d told myself it was good exercise. There was a reason former SEALs gained weight when they retired. Stop exercising, but keep eating the five meals a day you needed to offset that exercise, and the result isn’t pretty.

By the time the fifth morning came around, I had stopped bothering with excuses. Yes, I needed exercise, but taking to four legs and running the over twenty-mile perimeter of the valley was overkill for the amount I ate. I was eating even more because of the increase, in fact.

Maybe it was the loss of Dad, or knowing that someone had come into Grovetown and kidnapped Brook right off the street, or maybe it was just the uncertainty of whether Lin was going to accept me back. Whatever it was, my protective instincts were in overdrive, and I was struggling to rein them in.

---