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)
It made me want to choke up thinking about how good they’d been to me. I’d gotten so lucky that of all the people I could have ended up with, it had been them. Two older werewolves who had never had children of their own, with hearts bigger than the state of Alaska.
Continuing to love others in the way that they had shown me by example was the most important thing I had learned from them. It was the best way I could honor their thousands of sacrifices. By raising Duncan.
And that’s why, when the screen on my phone said it was eleven thirty, and I could sense my pup starting to get restless as he rolled onto his back on top of the bed of the room we were assigned to, I figured maybe now we could restart our nightly routine. We hadn’t been able to do it since his physical changes. The risk of getting caught had been way too high.
I gently pulled his tail as his legs and paws stretched toward the ceiling of the room that was an exact replica of the one my friends were in. Duncan had crawled under the bed and checked everything out under there when we’d come in.
“Wanna go outside for a little while?” I asked.
A black head rolled toward me, his bright eyes so intelligent. “Yes.”
It didn’t take long to slip him into his harness, put my fanny pack on, and grab a leash I rarely needed. I helped him off the bed. As quietly as possible, I opened the door and went out first with Dunky-Dunk right on my heels, nightlights set up along the hallway at every outlet lit up the unfamiliar space.
Fortunately, as big as the building slash clubhouse was, the layout was mostly easy. It had seemed intimidating when we’d first walked in, but whoever had designed it had set it up to make a lot of sense considering its size. Franklin, or as I had called him in my head “Glasses,” had given us a brief tour after we’d left the meeting. On the first floor, he’d gestured one direction and explained that the kitchen was there, along with other bedrooms—he didn’t say whose. If you went the opposite way, there was a nursery and offices, along with a laundry room and supply closets.
Apart from the five spacious guest bedrooms on the second floor, with us taking up two of them, the uptight elder had explained that some of the community members lived on the third floor, but he didn’t take us up to it or explain who those people were either.
At the staircase, I picked up Duncan again and went down them, taking in even more nightlights. He was still just slightly too small to take stairs easily. The front doors were down the hall, and we crept out, the building so silent.
I thought it was a little strange that they trusted us enough to let us stay on their property without supervision so soon after meeting us. I hadn’t seen a single camera inside, and I wondered if there were any around the perimeter. There wasn’t an alarm system set up either, I’d noticed when the four of us had gone to get our things from my truck. They must be really confident in who they allowed around here. That or maybe they had more faith since Matti had lived here in the past.
That had to be a good thing, I decided, as I cracked the door and Duncan snuck out first.
My donut waited as I closed the door. His head was tipped back. The moon was full tonight. I took a deep, deep breath.
My lungs expanded like I’d gotten a hit of that good oxygen casinos pumped through their systems.
My skin tingled.
The forest and village around us were mostly silent, other than an owl hooting nearby and a cool breeze moving through the trees.
It felt so good here.
What was it about this forest that felt like this? I wondered as Duncan backed up enough so that his butt settled on my foot, and for a few, quiet, calm moments, we took in the sweetness in the air that shouldn’t have been so noticeable to me considering I didn’t have a good nose. But that seemed to be the magnitude of this place.
Trees rustled.
Something big howled in the distance.
And my little donut gave me a loaded look over his shoulder right before he took off running into the evergreens.
“How are you so fast?” I panted a while later, lying on my back in the middle of some trees to the side of the clubhouse building. You’d figure I’d be used to running after him since it had been our daily game before his change, but I wasn’t. We’d had to replace outside time with indoor mental stimulation for weeks, and my lungs weren’t used to anything harder than a speed walk at this point.