Total pages in book: 23
Estimated words: 21482 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 107(@200wpm)___ 86(@250wpm)___ 72(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 21482 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 107(@200wpm)___ 86(@250wpm)___ 72(@300wpm)
Will do. Kiss Emma for me.
I just covered her face in kisses for you. See you at 7
See you
I put aside my phone and stare blindly through my rain-splattered windshield at the highway ahead. I’m parked on the shoulder, speed radar on, but there’s not much traffic in either direction and they all slowed when the deluge hit them.
Mentally I rifle through my bathroom vanity for perfume. I’m not sure if I have any, but I have some lotion that might do the trick. Because I can still smell myself, and any other human can smell me if I get ripe enough or close enough—but shapeshifters can’t.
To Alicia, me not having an odor was a little odd now that she’s gotten used to associating a scent as part of someone’s identity. Like knowing someone’s voice or recognizing their face. But I didn’t realize how much someone like Ranger linked a scent to a person until he saw me but didn’t smell me. It was as if I wasn’t really there. Before Ranger took hold of my hand—and felt how solid I was—and until I told him about the potion, he wasn’t fully convinced I hadn’t been killed and was appearing to them as a ghost.
And all the while Alicia laughed until she hit the snorting, gasping stage of not even being able to look at us without laughing and gasping and snorting all over again.
Which I was glad for, really. Better to have a hilarious reaction to focus on rather than explaining the sad truth of why I erased my scent. Because I’d made the decision last week after Alicia told me that Brandon had finally replied to one of Ranger’s emails and would be in town soon. At first I thought, Fuck him. I could rile up the anger in myself so that it overwhelmed anything else he might smell. Even if I got hot, who the hell cares? It just lets him know what he missed out on.
Except…sometimes it still just hurts. I can hide that hurt on my face but I can’t hide it in my scent. Alicia was the one who told me about that, too—how Ranger always knows how someone is feeling, no matter what face they’re putting on. And I simply can’t deal with Brandon knowing. I don’t care if he finds out that his leaving hurt me. But that I still hurt?
Nope.
The irony is, it’s because of Brandon that I even knew about the potion…or whatever it should be called. It’s not magic. It’s just a specific wildflower made into a tea.
But we first learned about it not long after Ranger and Alicia hooked up. While they were doing their thing, Brandon and I took a quick roadtrip to Idaho. There’s a whole lot of shit online about werewolves and berserkers, no surprise. But one site we discovered matched much of what Ranger and Brandon knew, though they were called wolfkin and bearkin instead of werewolves and berserkers—and we were searching for anything that might help rid Alicia of her curse.
At their ranch outside of Fortune City, we met Makena Laine and her husband, Ethan Grimmson, who is one of the wolfkin. Like Ranger, Grimmson was born a werewolf instead of cursed. But Makena’s father had been a werewolf hunter before he was killed by berserkers, and his research held plenty of answers. Nothing that helped Alicia, except to confirm how her beast could be tamed, but plenty of other bits of information. Including how werewolf hunters hid their scent from their prey, based on an old legend of how a priest fed wildflowers to a stag, hiding the stag from the wolves hunting him.
After Alicia told me that Brandon was coming, I used my days off for another roadtrip to Idaho. Makena had some of the wildflower on hand, since she’d considered using it once herself. Her uncle had also used it long ago while hunting berserkers, and Grimmson confirmed that he still couldn’t smell him—so the effect is permanent, which suits me. I love my sister, but I don’t need to share everything I’m feeling with her. Or with Ranger. So even after Brandon leaves again, I won’t be sorry for this.
But there’s no getting around that my primary reason was so Brandon won’t know anything about how I feel. I hate that it matters to me at all.
One day, it won’t. But that day isn’t here yet.
I’m about five minutes from heading back in for the end of my shift when I spot a motorcycle in my rearview mirror coming up fast. My patrol car is in plain sight, so usually drivers will see me and slow down quick. Not this asshole. He blows past me doing ninety.
The spray from his tires and the heavy rain combine to prevent me from getting more than a glimpse of a big fucker, Caucasian with a heavy beard and dark hair—no helmet, there’s a tidy fine right there—but we’re about to get a real close face-to-face. I hit my siren and my lights and radio in to Dispatch.