Total pages in book: 254
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
On my lap, Duncan leaned to the side to peek out the window. I had already talked to him about how careful he needed to be around them. I didn’t want to scare him or be so strict, but it was a necessary evil. I rolled the window down a crack. His shiny nose started twitching, taking in the air that somehow felt even more magical than before. Against my hand, his little heart started beating faster, so I stroked his chest. Did he sense the same thing I had when I’d gotten out of the truck? Nobody else seemed to be reacting to it, but….
Slowly, the gates finished opening, and Matti drove forward, giving me a close-up view of the black ironwork. Part of me had expected to see the outline of a wolf on them or something kind of catchy like that, but the only decoration on the iron was a half-moon on each side, which formed a whole one when closed. A full moon.
Duncan’s nose kept twitching, twitching, twitching.
I glanced over at the kids and found Shiloh looking nervous. He was wringing his little hands. “Are you okay?” I asked.
Huge brown eyes blinked in the least convincing way ever.
“What were you all doing running away from home?” Matti asked from the front seat.
Those adorable eyes almost bulged out of his head as the most nervous laugh I’d ever heard came out of his body. “We weren’t running away! We were going to look for—”
“Shh!” the werewolf boy hissed, putting his index finger up to his lips.
Shiloh gritted his teeth before offering almost glumly, “Stuff?”
That sounded real believable.
Sienna turned around in the seat as much as she could. “Were all of you born on the ranch?”
“No,” the werewolf boy answered at the same time as Shiloh said, “Me, yeah. Agnes, no. Her mom—”
From the floor, the white puppy barked.
The satyr stopped talking.
I was learning real quick he might be sweet but couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. I think I loved him already.
It was Pascal who leaned forward so his head would have gone between the seats if he was bigger and wasn’t wearing a seat belt. “Are you really Henri’s cousin?”
In the rearview mirror, Matti’s face brightened. “He’s my older cousin.” He paused. “I’m his only cousin.”
I wasn’t sure Matti even knew the technicalities of their relationship, but I wasn’t going to bring it up. If it had never mattered to him, why would it to me? I knew next to nothing about his dad’s side of the family, and that was all right. If he’d wanted to talk about it, he would have by now.
“The one who used to pee his bed?”
My mouth dropped, and I leaned forward too, my head over Pascal’s to get a good look at Matti’s profile in person. He was focused on the road, but he wasn’t beaming anymore. “What?”
“Henri said you used to pee your bed because you were scared,” the boy explained.
“You were fourteen when you moved here….” I couldn’t even finish my sentence. I started cracking up.
“No!” Matti shook his head. “I never—”
“He said you did it all the time.”
Sienna reached back to blindly grab my hand, and then we were both cackling.
“No.” Matti’s face…. “Why would he…?”
“All the time,” the werewolf pup insisted, just in case we hadn’t heard him. “Lots of pee.”
Sienna and I were too busy trying to breathe to make a single comment.
Why would he make that up about Matti?
I couldn’t stop laughing. Henri had said that? The teenage boy I remembered would not—would not—have said something like that. Ever. That made it even funnier.
“I don’t pee the bed, and you both know it,” he argued, way too defensively. We were still busy gasping for breath when the truck slowed down again just as Matti whistled, back to ignoring our BS. “This place has changed.”
Wiping away my tears and saving the moment for later, I sat up and peered through the windshield, the laughter leaving my body almost immediately.
The ranch, the part of it I could see, wasn’t what I’d expected.
There was no cozy farmhouse set on a desolate and dusty parcel of land. There were no pens of horses, or a riding rink surrounded by cowboys. There wasn’t a single cow or steer in sight either, like most of the ranches I’d driven by.
In front of us was what seemed like a giant gravel parking lot that could have belonged at a sports stadium. Across from it was a building that was so large it resembled an old courthouse or a mansion… or basically a billionaire’s gigantic cabin that was visited once a year. The walls were made of some of the most impressive logs I’d ever seen.
There were UTVs parked next to each other in between the lot and the building. To the sides and behind it, the woods cleared and opened a bit to show small homes in the distance. Most of them were also cabin-looking, but some of them were more traditional homes with muted neutral colors. There were multiple paths that branched out toward the dwellings from the huge building.