We walk for a long time before Rafe finally speaks again.
“I was so close to home.” Rafe’s adam’s apple bobs as he stares through the trees at a gray wood house with smoke curling up from the chimney. “This group of guys, wolf shifters who graduated a few years ahead of me, stopped me right here. I should have shifted back into human form. Then they wouldn’t have been able to get me in that cage.”
Anger rages up from my gut and threads tension through my jaw. I grind my back teeth together, trying to breathe through the furious red haze screaming in my mind and focus on Rafe’s story.
Rafe’s pocket clicks again and he shakes his head. “They threw me in a trunk so I couldn’t see where we went. I have no idea when or where they grabbed Paige, but they took us to this cabin. Told me they’d kill her if...” He trails off, then moves forward, hovering just above the ground as if a force beyond his control is dragging him toward the house.
Maybe he’s finally feeling that unfinished business tug.
I follow, passing through a shabby fence and gliding just behind Rafe. Dirty snow lays in clumps throughout the backyard. Dusty camp chairs sit on the wide back porch. A light inside illuminates a patched gray couch and dinged up furniture. The woman standing in the kitchen, drinking from a glass tumbler, has a hard face and high cheekbones. I don’t see any of Rafe in her features.
I edge a little closer to get a better look into the room, stopping beside Rafe who now stares at the woman with an expression I can’t quite read. His brows wrinkle and his lips are pressed together so tight they lose their normal color.
Inside, pictures hang on the wall above the round table in the breakfast nook. Three older boys who share Rafe’s jawline and dark hair smile out of their frames. Just below them, a little girl with his dimple displays a wide grin. But there’s a spot next to her that’s clearly empty. The wallpaper is faded around a perfect square space where another picture must have hung.
A new wave of anger ignites in my chest, but when I look at Rafe and see the pain twisting his face, sadness adds its wail to the raging fury. “Rafe…”
“I’ve always been a disappointment to her,” he says in a voice so quiet I can barely hear him. “But I didn’t think…”
Rafe mashes the heels of his hands into his eyes, the muscles along his forearms laced with tension. When he looks up again, the pain tilts toward anger, twisting his lips into a sneer and pulling his brows low. He drops his fists to his sides and the glass in his mother’s hand shatters.
We both jump almost at the same time she does.
As she shakes her head and starts to clean up the glass, Rafe covers his mouth. Grabbing his arm, I haul him away from the windows, dragging him back into the forest. When we’re almost to the creek, I stop and take Rafe’s shoulders.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” he says. “I didn’t know I could do that.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you had. Though I probably would’ve broken every window in the house. Guess you’re a step ahead of everybody in corporeal telekinesis.” My attempt at a smile falters.
“She’s right to hate me though.” Rafe squeezes his eyes shut and tears slide down his cheeks. “It’s my fault Paige was kidnapped. I should’ve taken better care of her.”
I cup his face, grazing my thumbs over the scars he still carries around from when he died. All at once images play across my vision. Like my own life flashes, they’re translucent, but still painfully clear.
A much younger Rafe shifts out of fox form alongside a little girl with pigtails, obviously Paige. Tiny bits of blood splotch one of her knees, but she laughs, dancing toward their mother and waving her arms in the air.
“Mommy, shifting is so much fun! Rafe showed me the best places to chase frogs. But-”
“What on earth happened to your knee?” Rafe’s mom asks, sinking down to look at the scrape.
Paige waves a hand. “Just bumped it on a rock. I know my awesome new shifter powers will make it heal real fast, but do we have the Band-Aids with the race cars on them? I still want one.”
Rafe’s mom purses her lips, throwing a glare at her son, before sending Paige off to patch her rapidly healing knee. The second the little girl disappears into the other room, his mom springs upright, claws out. They draw blood across Rafe’s bare chest. He barely reacts other than to step backward.
“How dare you let her get hurt? You are so irresponsible.” She lashes out again, this time dragging marks down his shoulder blades when he sinks to the floor, covering his head. “It is your job to take care of her.”
As the memory fades away, Rafe swallows. “Did you see that?”
A lump forms in my throat. “Yes.”
It takes every ounce of my self-control not to float back to his house and break every piece of glass she owns. What kind of mother does that to her kid? I get protecting the youngest, and I understand that the shifter community is different, but what that woman did is next level messed up.
Another thought smacks me in the forehead. How did that waste of good oxygen deal with Rafe’s body? And how in the realm of the dead do I ask a morbid question like that? At the very least, we have to find it, protect it from the Xers. I can’t watch him burst into flames and lose his sense of self.
“Rafe, we should probably try to find—”
The sound of a gunshot cuts me off. Rafe and I spring apart, turning to face
