I’m sitting up, my back against the headboard and my head angled down awkwardly in a position not meant for sleeping. I tilt it the other way, hoping to pop the crick out of my neck. The bones crackle like rapid gunfire, and I groan with relief, sagging back against the headboard and glancing toward the window. Outside the glass, light creeps through the crack in the curtains, and I can taste dawn on the horizon. I must not have slept well, considering how hazy and exhausted I feel.
Then I jerk fully upright, adrenaline surging through my veins.
I fell asleep on watch. I wasn’t supposed to be sleeping at all.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I never do that. Falling asleep when your pack is depending on you to keep watch is the ultimate betrayal—a letdown punishable by pack law. It goes against every instinct I have as a wolf. But I did.
I fell asleep.
My heart pounds like thunder as I look around the bed and take roll call. Trystan, Ridge, and Dare are spread out on the mattress, sound asleep… but Sable is nowhere to be seen.
She’s gone.
Fuck.
I grab Trystan’s shoulder and shake him. “Hey, wake up, man.”
He mutters under his breath and rolls his shoulder to get my hand to release him, but doesn’t wake up. Just burrows deeper into the pillow.
Getting to my knees, I reach for Ridge on the other side of him. “Ridge? Wake up. Sable’s gone.”
Ridge turns his head away from me, but it’s the only source of life or movement I get.
“Guys, wake up!” I yell, lowering my voice so that it booms through the room with a note of command. No wolf can ignore an alpha’s demand, not even while sleeping.
But even though they all shift in place like they hear me, they settle back down and fall back into sleep immediately.
Panic floods me. This is all wrong. Wolves are usually light sleepers—we have to be, especially with the witch threat looming. It’s not normal for a shifter to not wake immediately. Every sound, every movement, could be the one that heralds disaster for the pack. So we sense it all, from the smallest rustle to the loudest footstep. When the lookout screams for everyone to wake up, they’re supposed to wake up.
I leap out of bed and rush to the wall near the doorway, slamming my palm into the light switch. The overhead light winks awake, spilling a harsh yellow glow over the bed. Then I go back to the edge of the mattress and give Trystan a hard shake.
He finally jolts awake, sitting straight up in bed and looking around the room as if he doesn’t recognize it. Then he squints up at me, a deep line forming between his brows. “What? What’s going on?”
“Sable’s gone,” I tell him shortly, punching Ridge in the arm. “Ridge, wake up.”
Trystan uses his foot to shove Dare, where he’s curled up asleep at his side. The two of us manage to get them moving, though it takes a few minutes for either of them to be cognizant. Then we’re all awake, and we’re all confused, caught under a fog of strange, unexplainable exhaustion.
“What the fuck?” Dare says as he staggers to his feet and sways like a drunk after a long happy hour. He rubs his eyes and then rests a hand against the wall, stumbling two steps sideways before he manages to right himself.
“I feel like I just shotgunned a fifth of whiskey,” Ridge says, smacking his lips together. He catches my eye, his own gaze bleary. “What the hell is going on? Where’s Sable?”
“Man, I cannot wake up,” Dare adds, leaning over and shaking his head as if trying to shock his brain awake.
My stomach falls out beneath me as I suddenly realize why they look as strung out as I feel.
“She used her magic,” I say, my voice low and strained. “On purpose, this time. A spell to make us sleep. Then she left.”
I remember teaching her that spell during one of our training sessions, showing her the sigils and helping her practice them. The witches who captured me as a pup used the same spell on me sometimes, and the memory sends a shudder down my spine.
Dare rubs the sleep from his eyes again, though it’s clearly not helping, and leans heavily against the wall. “Why? Because she was worried about hurting us in her sleep?”
“No.” My heart skips a beat in terror as the realization dawns on me. “Because she’s going to look for the lone witch on her own.”
It’s a testament to the power of Sable’s spell that we all stare at each other blankly for several long seconds before everyone reacts.
“Mother fuck—what do we do?” Trystan leaps to his feet and somehow manages to not fall over. “We go after her, right?”
“No question,” Ridge agrees, nodding sluggishly. “Dare, you know a bit about the landscape?”
He nods. “Yeah, I think so. Fuck, I hope so. I can get us to Wolfsbane Mountain, for sure. Navigating past there will have to be organic. Relying on scent tracking and signs. If we hit magical barriers, we’ll be shit out of luck.”
I speak up, my heart hammering somewhere in the vicinity of my throat. “The question is, does Sable have any idea where she’s going?”
“I doubt it,” Trystan says, an abnormal note of fear creeping into his voice. “I mean, she knows the general direction, because we talked about it earlier. But she has no training in tracking, and no fucking way of protecting herself.”
“That’s not fair,” I argue, even though there’s little heat behind the words. “She’s a wolf. She’s got teeth.”
“But no experience fighting,” Dare grunts. “If she crosses the wrong side of a grizzly, she’s toast.”
Ridge shoots me a concerned glance. “We need to go. Now.”
For what feels like the fourth time in as many weeks, we make quick work of packing essentials. I make the discovery that Sable
