Page 4 of The Wild Moon
Chapter Three
“Out with it,” I grumbled as we made our way up the graveled laneway to Aldridge Manor.
“What do you mean?” Jo asked, keeping step with me easily, though she needed nearly two steps for every one of mine. Normally, I slowed down to meet her halfway, but today I was distracted.
I did so now, however, and tried my best not to look around. There wasn’t much to see yet anyway, though I knew what was to come.
“I can see you staring around, and I can all but hear the disbelief in your step, Jo,” I accused. “You’re my best friend, loser. You can’t hide shit from me. What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said as we walked past the line of trees that ran level-straight parallel to the road, blocking all view onto the property.
“Liar,” I muttered.
Jo shrugged, the movement visible in my right peripheral. I didn’t look at her, instead keeping my attention focused outward, away from us. We shouldn’t be in danger here at the heart of Seguin packterritory, but I was still uneasy.
Part of that would be my wolf. She knew the Wild Moon was almost here, and she longed to be set free. It had been a month since the last time. Living in a city didn’t give me much in the way of freedom to shift on my own and let her bleed off some energy.
Probably yet another reason the Wild Moon shifts are always so, well, wild. A captive freed at last is going to go wild. Why should my wolf be any different?
“Wow,” Jo said, taking in the house in front of us. “It’s beautiful.”
I lifted my eyebrows. Beautiful isn’t quite the word I would use to describe the Aldridge place, but unlike Jo, I’d been here before.
“I keep forgetting this is your first time here,” I said. “To me, it’s just a big building full of bad memories.”
“You gave all this up?”
Now I did turn to stare at my best friend. Maybe I should say I glared at her. Harshly.
“Gave it up?” I repeated. “Seriously, Jo? He was a huge asshole. Besides, we were just dating until he had his Soulshift. I made that clear from the start. I don’t know what changed in him, but he knew that going in.”
“Maybe,” Jo said with a shrug, glancing at the lamps that flanked the driveway every so often, leading all the way up to the house itself.
Mansion would probably be the more accurate term. Lars Aldridge was the latest in a long line of Aldridges to rule the Seguinpack, and somewhere back in the line, one of his ancestors had decided that a giant mansion was a necessary part of that.
“I couldn’t have kept seeing him even if I’d wanted to,” I reminded Jo. “Lars wouldn’t have let anyone do that if they were Soulbound. Not even his son.”
“I guess,” Jo said, though I could feel her soft disagreement. She had always lusted after the finer things in life more than I, so it made sense, I suppose, that she would want this sort of life.
Not me, though. No fucking way. The grand lifestyle the Aldridges tried to lead was tiring and boring. Not to mention fake as fuck. They all pretended to be polite and gracious, but in reality, they were just a bunch of assholes.
As I’d found out when I’d dated the youngest of them, who proceeded to ruin my life when I wouldn’t give him what he wanted.
We passed along the side of the house, where several darkened rooms were barely visible through the windows even with the clear skies overhead. Though the sun had set hours ago, the moon hadn’t come out. Not yet. Soon though, very soon.
I trembled at the reminder that my wolf would soon be free, and once more, we would fight for control. A battle of the minds to see who would control the body. I had thought it only happened that first night, the Soulshift, but it seemed my wolf was hellbent on escaping from me every Wild Moon.
Just something else that wants nothing to do with me. My wolf, my family, my mate, whoever they are.
I was a reject on multiple levels, and it was growing harder by the day to keep it all categorized.
But today wasn’t about me. Today I had to keep my shit together. For Jo.
“What are we doing?” Jo asked as I led her toward the back of the crowd forming at the base of a rock formation.
“Hanging out back here, away from our dear leader’s altar of bullshit,” I muttered, earning me more than a few looks from other members of our pack.
Most of them looked at me, realized who I was, and then looked away. They didn’t care about me, and I didn’t care about them. A few stared longer, however, and I fixed one of them, Derek, with a vicious glare.
