Five years later.
Running a pack is probably hard enough on its own but I found it to be impossibly more difficult to run a pack of predominantly children. I owned a pack property way up north, where it snows more than half of the year and on a side a hundred miles away from my home in the event Vallory Valeriano tried to come looking for me. We had three wood cabin style homes and Emerald and Donte had recently started undergoing the process of building their own on a lake tucked off nicely adjacent to the central packlands when they discovered they were each other's fated mates.
I kept one log cabin for the pack's youngest as tradition typically dictates, which Jesse Turner seemed to have a natural knack for keeping in check. Many of the kids had started to age out of nursery range and one such troublesome kid had started to give me hell.
"Where the hell is Lance?"
I let a quick exhale escape me and met the probing eyes of Jesse. I opened my mouth to sass him and closed it again. Finally, I settled on remaining as calm as I could.
"I thought he was helping you with combat training."
We met each other's eyes and Jesse let out a graceful, "for the love of fuck" before I rose from my chair and he pulled a pair of keys from his pocket. Since we left the southern territory, Jesse and I had become essentially a platonic married couple who argued constantly and shared all responsibilities for the pack's children evenly. And Lance was the problem child of our loveless marriage.
"What did he tell you we were doing?"
Jesse chuckled as he started the car and we pulled away from the cabin I resided in. He would physically turn around in the driver seat to back out when there was a perfectly good rearview mirror.
"He said you were enrolling him in university."
I sighed and rubbed my brow, irritated. Lance wasn't a bad kid, he was just too smart for his own good. As he grew older he'd developed an obsession with hunting witches the same way they had systematically hunted lycanthropes for years. It was a trend out west and he wanted more than anything for me to let him go out there and join the hunt. And maybe I would have, if he wasn't barely sixteen years old.
"He's probably in Stalova by now."
Jesse hauled ass, pressing the petal down into the floor of the car. I grabbed the handle and he scrunched his nose up at me.
"You know if you resent my driving, you should let me teach you how to drive."
I scoffed, staring out at the greenery racing past as we shot down the rinky dink gravel roads towards the Western cities. I retorted teasingly, letting go of the handle to throw my hands up for dramatic effect.
"What use would I have for you then?"
Jesse laughed and we entered a silence as we travelled. I had found out two years into running the pack with him that Jesse had come out here in hopes of finding his fated mate. He was thirty years old now and had never so much as caught a whiff of their scent. I was fairly sure he had lost all hope and it made me a little bit sad, but also comforted the sick part of my mind that didn't want to be alone.
I mean, if both of our mate situations were doomed at least we could enjoy that misery together.
We weren't in love, we didn't kiss or take long walks in the woods. We laughed together and struggled together and were a family in our own right. Jesse had shown an incredible resilience to difficult situations that I leaned on whenever I had started to lose my own composure. Our first year, the crops withered and nothing would grow and the kids started to get hungry. We had only one cabin for the entire pack and the older ones had started to become restless.
It was Jesse who found an unorthodox solution. He went into town to market and bought a cardboard box and lots of potatoes. We ate more potatoes than any sane person could handle that first year and had to grow them inside from how frigid the winter was, but we survived.
The beat-up van slowed as we rolled into the town of Stalova. It was a college town with a healthy fifteen thousand people whose local mascot was the black bear. We cruised the streets mindfully, nodding as passing strangers and headed towards the bar towards the edge facing the woods, where Jesse parked and cut off the car.
We strolled into the bar, scanning the heads until my eyes landed on Lance, with his dirty blonde hair pulled back out of his face in a hair tie. He was at the bar's edge with an old woman, interrogating her about witch sightings when Jesse snatched him up by the red hoodie of his jacket.
"Oh, come on!"
Lance exclaimed as he was dragged back to face me. I sighed loudly and scanned him for any sign of damage. He had stowed away with a leather backpack full of loose pages and a dream.
"Lance, you're fucking killing me. You know the witches will kill you when you find them, right?"
He scowled angrily. There was a fire in his eye that comes with being sixteen. He felt invincible and he had grown to see me as the personal opposition to all things enjoyable or awesome.
"You cannot possibly know that. Do you have any idea how well I've excelled in combat training?"
He crossed his arms in defiance. In terms of being a werewolf, Lance was small. He stood at an underwhelming five feet and five inches and was skinny as a light post. I wanted to be delicate in my response but truthfully if anyone would be instantly murdered in a witch fight it was Lance Ripley.
"Do you have any idea the things witches can do? The things they can summon?"
My words dripped with warning. I tried not to grimace at my own memory of the oiling black creature from the woods. Five years later and just the memory alone still made my skin crawl. Lance frowned and met an equally stern look from Jesse who had let go of his hoodie and crouched to meet his eyes seriously.
"If you want to join witch hunters when you're seventeen, by all means, Liana and I will drive you to their camp ourselves. But right now you're still too young and too stupid not to get yourself killed, do you understand me?"
His harshness wasn't lost on Lance as he tsked his tongue in annoyance and started to make long strides away from us and out of the bar. The old woman at the bar reached a hand out to touch mine and met my eyes like she could see my soul through them. She asked gently, a coo on her lips.
"Your son, does he know about the war we fought back in Salem?"
I met her all-knowing eyes, squirming at my own nakedness under them. I nodded and responded.
"That's actually why he's so eager to fight them."
The old woman smiled into her fruity glass of liquor and swirled it, turning back to Jesse and me. She looked between the two of us and chuckled.
"That boy's got gall. If he knew firsthand what they could do to him he might think twice."
I opened my mouth to retort in some way when I noticed her missing leg from underneath the bar counter. I shivered and nodded at her warning, turning quickly to catch up to Lance before he ran off again. Jesse was hot at my heels as we approached the van where an impossibly angry Lance was sitting in the back seat. He refused to look at either of us and wore his stringed headphones the entire way back home.
"You never did tell me what you saw at Sleeping Hollow."
The hairs of my neck rose and I physically recoiled, keeping my eyes locked on the gravel path we travelled. Jesse looked over every so often until I finally caved under the pressure of his probing and answered him honestly.
"I don't know how to describe it. It looked and sounded like hunger. Like it was a starving thing that wanted only to eat and devour forever."
Jesse's lips tugged in a tight line as his dark blue eyes returned to the road. He debated to himself for a minute before he mused to himself aloud.
"And they say the witches used Rosaura's body as a conduit. Like those things passed through her."
I felt nauseous and nodded. It wasn't as though I managed to go five years without thinking about it all- about Val. I had been fortunate enough to have twenty five little distractions occupying my mind at most every free moment. But late at night when I was awake and alone in my bed, thoughts of her would haunt me. I dreamed of the curve of her smile. The high of being tucked inside of her arms. I dreamed of her coming to find me and tried to convince myself the thought of it terrified me.
I missed her so much the idea of touching another person made me sick. Even as the years passed and I told myself I would eventually forget she ever existed, I couldn't. I couldn't manage to forget a single detail about her.
I rubbed a tired hand over my eyes and tried to drown out my thoughts with worries about Lance and the triplets and I ignored the aching in my chest the way.