Chapter 63 - The Alpha Dire Wolf

Flames that yearned for Lincoln.

Getting dressed, I met him at the bottom of the stairs. We were quite the pair. Me with my clean black tank top and jeans, looking mostly fresh and alive, hair pulled back in a pony, and then Lincoln. Ripped and tattered shirt, barely holding itself together. Matching pants that showed enough skin to be scandalous a hundred years ago. Blood stains on both thathadn’t fully come out, and bruises and cuts on his face that looked like he’d been on the losing end of a group beat-down.

“Thank you for this,” I said, slipping on my shoes and pulling open the front door.

Crack-boom!

Thunder exploded unexpectedly.

I flung myself at Lincoln with a yelp despite silence from my intuition.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, confusion in his voice.

But not in his actions. Even as he asked, he was sweeping me behind him with one arm, the other curling into a fist, ready for anything.

“Thunder,” I said, peering around his shoulder at the handful of clouds in an otherwise blue sky. It was broad enough I had to lean way over onto one leg. “But no clouds.”

“Maybe we just can’t see it?” he suggested.

“This happened last time,” I whispered nervously. “It’s what brought the tree-thing about. The sky went black without warning followed by a single blast of lightning.”

My spine was still, however, no warning claws scratching their way down my vertebrae. Still, it hadn’t gone off right away the first time either.

“Stay here,” Lincoln rumbled, walking out the front door and down the steps to the driveway where he could look around.

“There. See. Storm is coming in.” His eyes narrowed. “Looks like it’s going to be a bad one.”

Tentatively, but trusting him to keep me safe, I went outside, following his arm. There, just as promised on the far side of town, storm clouds were brewing.

Lightning flashed again, and a split second later, the crack of thunder followed. I flinched, but I didn’t jump into his arms this time. It was improvement.

“We should head out now, though,” Lincoln said. “Get moving before it hits.”

“Yeah,” I said in agreement, watching the clouds come boiling in. “They’re moving awfully fast.”

Again, my instincts were quiet. No warning of danger.

“It does,” Lincoln agreed as we got in my car. “Doesn’t it?”

“Should we wait?” I asked, trying to keep my nervousness from showing.

It’s a normal thunderstorm. You get those. You like those, always have. This is not what happened yesterday. You’re fine. You can do this.

“No,” Lincoln said, pulling open the door. “We should get going.”

I started driving, following Lincoln’s directions. It quickly became clear why he didn’t want to delay.

“We’re heading right at the storm,” I pointed out a few minutes later. The sky above us was still blue, but it wouldn’t be that way for long.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have much choice. That’s the direction I live. To take you there, we have to go that way.”

It’s just a storm.

We drove on through town and then out the other side, where all that greeted us was a skyline of green treetops beginning to bend under the wind of the oncoming storm.

“We’re not going to make it,” Lincoln pronounced uncomfortably a few minutes later. “It’s going to hit us before we get there.”

I spared him a glance. He was staring straight ahead, focused on the storm. But his fingers were clenched into fists, and his jaw bulged as he continued to clench it.

“You sound nervous,” I told him, once more searching myself inside for signs of danger, but finding none. It had to be something else then. Did he not like rain? Then it came to me. “Lincoln, are you afraid that I’m going to be put off by the smell of wet dog?”

I grinned at him, hoping he would be impressed with me for the acceptance of his true nature to the point of being able to make a joke about it.

Lincoln took one look at me and then grunted. “You are way too proud of yourself for that joke.”

Then we both laughed.

“Humor is a big step in accepting a massive shift in your worldspace,” I told him. “Often that relates to tragedy, but this qualifies too.”

“So you’re adjusting.”

I giggled. “In less than twenty-four hours? Heck no. Actually,hell no. But I’m trying to, and that’s the big one. This is so unlike anything anyone ever prepares for. In our darkest dreams, we think of the loss of loved ones. I’ve lived that, am living that. But youexpect that. As a child, you know at some point your parents will pass. Was mine more traumatic and unexpectedly early than most? Yes. But I was old enough to know it was going to happen. This? This is something else entirely. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. I’m having a very hard time believing it.”

Lincoln nodded. “I understand.”

Up ahead, lightning flickered several times in rapid succession. The wind was shifting. The storm didn’t look like it was going to hit New Lockwood anymore but rather moveslightly east, over the mass of the forest. We continued driving straight toward it, the safety of town now well behind us. All around was nothing but trees and emptiness for miles.

“No,” I told him slowly after some more thought, “I don’t think you can ever understand.”

He frowned.

“I’m not being mean. But I just think, you’ve grown up with knowing all of this, Linc. You know my worldand your world. It’s always been that way. It’s impossible for you to truly have your world absolutely shattered in a way like this.”

“Maybe not like this,” he admitted. “But I-“

Up ahead the sky absolutely lit up with lightning, the strikes so plentiful and so close together it was dazzling my vision. The sky itself grew from dark gray to absolute black in a fraction of a second.

At the same time, my spine began to tingle.

“Lincoln-” I started to say, but he cut me off.

“Drive faster, Vee.

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