I tossed and turned that night, the memory of Peter’s touch still red hot on my skin. I’d showered as soon as I came home to try to scrub his scent from me. Anything to keep me from obsessing over him.

I don’t know if it was because my soap wasn’t strong enough or my nose was too sensitive, but it didn’t work. Instead, I lay in bed with the smell and feel of him covering me like a blanket. I turned my head and smelled him on the pillow. I turned my head the other way and caught a scent of him in my hair.

Finally, I must have drifted off. Inky blackness enveloped me like an old friend, pulling me into its frigid, restful embrace.

But then, I stood there in an empty glade. Oak trees towered over my head, obscuring the broad swath of the Milky Way and the face of the moon with their stretching branches. Mist coiled around the trunks, writhing like a living thing around the broad old ones of the forest. Dry, brittle leaves covered the clearing floor and rustled as I began to stalk forward into the darkness. My legs moved as if of their own will, even as I shook my head in defiance.

“No, no, no,” I whispered, “I don’t want this.”

“Just let go,” whispered like a breath of wind the voice of a woman, a woman I hadn’t seen or heard since her death two years before. “Just let go, Vanessa. Embrace it.”

I continued to shake my head, trying to reach down and grab my thigh and force my leg to stand its ground. “Ivana,” I pleaded to the phantom visitor. “Ivana, no. Don’t do this to me.”

“Embrace it,” she whispered again. “Embrace him.”

I was between the trees now, following an ancient rutted path barely more than a foot across. Little more than a deer trail, it wound through the twisting, reaching, grasping trees that rose above me on all sides. Branches clung to my hair and pulled at my clothes.

“Ivana,” I cried, salty tears streaking my face. “Ivana!”

“The daughter of an alpha, mate to an alpha, guide to an alpha.”

Ahead loomed a solid wall of rock. A cave opened in the side, threatening to swallow me with its chiseled and weathered edges.

The gusts of wind blew, bringing me her voice once more. “Inside, sweet child,” she whispered, using the same phrase as she had when she’d first found me near the burned down Frost Estate, holding my sister’s mutilated corpse. “Inside. Find your true meaning.”

“I don’t want to be a wise woman,” I sobbed, my voice choked and strained from tears. But, still, my legs moved me inexorably to the cave mouth. Every step took me closer to my destiny. “I just want to be me. Don’t take that away from me. Please!”

My heart grew lighter, though, as I saw him standing just inside, the darkness wrapping around the edges of his form, but not dulling that warm, welcoming smile of his that he so rarely displayed. Peter Frost, my mate. My partner. The darkness behind him wasn’t an evil darkness, either. Just the night, the shadows from the hidden world. The shadows of secrets. Secret knowledge, secret histories.

“The pack will accept you,” Ivana whispered as Peter stepped back into the darkness, fading away like a man descending into a tar pit.

My heart sank. My legs stopped propelling me forward of their own volition.

His hand appeared from the cave, entering the milky light of the autumn moon shining down on the misty, supernatural forest. He beckoned me with a wave.

I realized then that my legs were again my own. They were mine to control. I swallowed hard, terror and uncertainty filling the cavity of my chest.

My mate beckoned again.

I took a deep breath and nodded before stepping into the void.

As the darkness consumed me and wrapped me in its loving embrace, I heard Ivana’s whisper again. “You only need to accept the pack first.”

I awoke with a startled cry, sitting straight up in bed, eyes wide as saucers as I looked around the room. I could feel the aura of the old witch of a shifter woman who’d taught me to embrace myself and all parts of my being. To embrace being a lone shifter wolf in a dangerous, unforgiving world. Who’d instructed me in the ways of crime, of flying below the radar, of staying hidden from the hunters. Her presence was almost as tangible as the bed I lay upon or the drenched sheets covering my naked body.

“Ivana?” I whispered, my head whipping from side to side as I desperately searched for her. “Why now? What are you trying to tell me? Please…”

Silence.

Nothing but silence.

Only the memory of her words in my dream, her breezy whispers of acceptance, of the pack, of opening myself to him, of guiding Peter forward.

I swallowed hard, still panting a little. The memory of the vision-like dream still loomed in my mind, pushing all other thoughts to the edge.

I didn’t entirely know what the dream had been about or what its purpose had been. It was as if Ivana was reaching out from the beyond, trying to guide me forward. Or was she just some part of my mind trying to make sense of this crazy world and everything going on inside it?

Whatever the purpose of the dream was, it had felt realer than any I’d ever had. Realer even than all the ones I’d experienced about Peter over the years.

I might not know what its source had been, or what it ultimately entailed, but I did know one thing.

I needed a drink.