Despite what Casey had said, Adam stayed at the hotel that night. His odds of finding an immediate flight out would be better in the morning, when flights weren’t filled up with people who’d missed or been bumped from earlier ones. Anyway, he knew he was in no state to drive.

Besides, there was a chance that Casey might call him, or just come walking back through that door.

His phone stayed silent, and the door stayed closed. Eventually Adam undressed for bed. He couldn’t bear the thought of that big bed without Casey in it, but he grabbed a pillow to put on the floor.

He froze, staring at the t-shirt revealed under the pillow. It was Casey’s—he’d worn it the day before, so he hadn’t had a chance to wash it yet. Adam wanted to grab it, press it to his face, breathe in his scent, but he was also hideously reminded of the shirts he’d taken from the hamper, one by one as the scents faded, in the weeks after his dad died.

Had his father left those clothes unwashed for him, or had he been doing the same thing, building a nest of scent in the bed they’d shared, now empty?

It wasn’t a goodbye, Adam told himself. Casey had his dad’s notebook; he had traded this t-shirt for it, that was all. They would trade back when Casey was done visiting the pack.

Adam found a plastic bag in his suitcase and used it to scoop up the t-shirt, sealing it before he tucked it in among his own clothes. He pulled the covers off the bed, checking for anything else Casey might have left behind before he bedded down on the floor with his back against a wall.

He thought he wouldn’t sleep at all, but as soon as he lay down he felt drowsy and warm. It occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten any dinner, but he didn’t feel hungry at all, just comfortably on the brink of sleep. He didn’t quite doze off, but he lay there pleasantly drowsing until the thought suddenly darted into his mind that he should check his phone. Casey would want to say good night, and Adam couldn’t let himself really go to sleep until he knew Casey was okay.

There was no message waiting on his phone—as if he could have missed one coming in, even floating half-asleep as he’d been. He stared at his phone, frozen with the certainty that Casey was going to text him.

And then he did. It hardly even seemed strange; it had been inevitable that he would.

It’s weird going to sleep without you.

Adam sat up, feeling dizzy with relief at the sight of those words. Casey really wasn’t gone forever. Casey had reached back for him. Adam felt a swell of love and a certainty, even deeper than his weird conviction that Casey would text him, that he wasn’t alone.

It took another moment for him to remember to actually reply to Casey’s text. He had to make sure Casey knew he wasn’t alone either, after all.

Very weird. I don’t like it at all.

That was awfully close to I miss you, please come back, and he couldn’t leave that hanging there for Casey to have to say yes or no to. He sent another message. How is it there?

His mind raced with possibilities for what to say next. If Casey claimed it was wonderful, perfect, then it would have to be a lie—but he’d already said it was weird, so...

Too soon to tell. But I promise I don’t plan on staying longer than I need to. I miss you.

Adam let out a shuddering breath. It was everything he needed to know, if he couldn’t have Casey here with him. It freed his fingers to say what he needed to: I love you. Call if you want me, anytime.

The message came back quickly. I love you. I promise.

Adam curled down into the blankets again, with his phone tucked against his heart, and slept. He dreamed he held Casey close, too close for Casey’s dreams or nightmares to reach him, so they could both sleep peacefully all night.

He jolted awake on a burst of formless panic; he was on his feet, looking around frantically, before he was even aware of being awake. It took a few seconds to recognize the hotel room, and then he lunged for his phone, lying on the floor. He was gripped with the awful certainty that it was Casey.

Casey needed him.

But there was no message, and as he knelt there the panic cooled. Adam shook his head, rubbing his eyes. Casey would be all right; Casey had his phone and his wolfsbane. He could look after himself. Casey had told him to go back to Maryland.

Adam went to take a shower, as the necessary first step to going anywhere, but he found himself hurrying through it, filled with the need to move. He rushed through dressing and packing up, and when he got in the car he tried to picture going to the airport, asking for a standby seat, and waiting, and then sitting on a plane taking him farther from Casey, and waiting, waiting, waiting.

He’d have to pack up all the accumulated stuff in the back seat and trunk, everything Casey had promised to help him clean out—excavate, practically—before the car had to be returned. He’d have to decide what he could throw out, what to ship somewhere—to himself, to the Niemis? To Casey?

He couldn’t do it. Not now. He had to move. He had to go somewhere, and he couldn’t stand around and wait. He couldn’t stop.

He thought for a moment of driving all the way back to Maryland, but the thought of turning the car east and south jolted his whole body with something like physical pain.

Adam thought, very clearly, That’s not normal. That’s not me.

The feeling didn’t go away, though, and the need to move didn’t lessen. He turned the car north, and then west, and tried not to think about where he was going. He was going, and going there as fast as he could. That would have to be enough.

He was on the familiar dirt road by the time he let himself think even so much as I’m in the same car, they’ll recognize the sound, and Papa will have kept the road clear for me, he said I could come back anytime.

Adam was distantly aware of people coming out onto porches as he drove, careful and slow, through the Hathaway pack’s main settlement. He nodded or waved back, on autopilot, focused only on getting to the other side, to the road that only led to one house, out by itself in a stand of trees.

A little snow had drifted into the marks where he’d parked the car before, but the spot was still clear enough. Adam shut the car off and got out, and then had to pace back and forth a while before he could make himself stand in one spot long enough to get his things from the car.

Inside, the urge to move suddenly slackened, leaving him standing utterly still in the silent house that was and wasn’t the place where he’d grown up. After a while he noticed the chill in the air and turned the heat up from the don’t-let-the-pipes-freeze baseline to something a little more comfortable.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten anything that morning, so he set his bags down on one weirdly pristine couch. His mind was flooded with the memory of the ancient squishy four-cushion monstrosity that used to dominate the room, full of the smells of his dad and papa and himself and the foods they cooked and, faintly, despite everyone’s best efforts, the time Adam had gotten sick all over it when he came down with the flu at four years old.

He shook off that memory and turned away to go into the kitchen. There were would be at least a few emergency staples in the cupboards, he was sure.

He stopped short at the sight of the bowl of apples on the counter, just where they had always been—it was even the same wooden bowl, he would swear, though everything else in the kitchen had been redone. The apples were the same jumble of colors and sizes they’d always had on hand; Adam plucked out the weirdest-looking one, oddly striped in red and yellow, and breathed in the sweet-tart scent.

It took him back, with vivid suddenness, to a different memory altogether: most of the houses he’d visited on the Niemis’ pack lands had had bags and baskets and buckets of apples around, because they were grown by the pack. Some of them had smelled just exactly like this.

It made sense; the Niemis had very obviously produced more apples than the pack themselves could consume, and who better to trade with than other werewolf packs, who would appreciate produce grown to a werewolf’s standards? It was only his own overwrought imagination that made this a message, a sign that the Niemis were still reaching out to him and Casey no matter how far away they went.

Adam set the apple down gingerly and looked for some other food he was less likely to choke on when he didn’t know where Casey was. When he was failing to watch over him, or to raise the alarm to all the other wolves who had been his backup for months now.

Casey had his phone, and was obviously able to use it. He’d said he would explain to his pack. Casey was fine; Adam was the one with alpha instincts running wild, being too protective, worrying when there was no reason to worry. Casey was visiting family, a werewolf pack probably not that much different from every other werewolf pack they’d visited together.

Adam managed to eat something—he didn’t remember, thirty seconds later, what it had been—before the urge to move took hold again. He paced all over the house then, learning all the little changes and the things that were still the same.

He inevitably wound up in the former lab, pacing up and down and studying those locked cabinets. Casey had added a new key to Adam’s key ring days ago, so he knew he could open every door, look at everything. It was all his now, after all.

Maybe he should. Maybe that was why he’d come here, really. Casey had gone to face his own history, the pack he came from. Adam could do the same, so that when Casey came back to him he’d be ready for whatever came next.

The thought of what might come next flitted through his mind—the thought of being someone else’s father—and he shied from it. But his eyes went to the pictures he’d been trying not to look at, the family photos he hadn’t known he still remembered. His father, holding him as a newborn. Would that be him, next year? Or someday?

He couldn’t fathom being ready for it, but he’d already let that decision out of his hands. All he could do now was try to address the things he knew about.

Adam unlocked the first door and crouched down, pulling out the boxes without hesitating to decide if they were what he was looking for. When he had them both on the countertop he looked at the labels—GLASSWARE and CLOTHES—and went for the glassware box. It was less likely to hold scent, and he had fond memories of washing glassware. It wouldn’t be too overwhelming. It was just lab equipment.

Adam found himself unpacking the entire box; there were memories attached to every beaker and test tube, and when he started finding parts of the distilling apparatus he had to dig through and see if everything was there. There were boxes of pipettes and eyedroppers, stirring rods and syringes.

He opened one small plastic box and discovered that it was a set of empty plastic capsules, large enough that the resulting pill would take an effort to swallow. Each pair of capsule halves rested in a little indentation in the packaging. Two capsules were missing.

He was brought up short by that, wondering what his dad had used those capsules for. What had he filled them with, and when had he swallowed them?

Adam picked up two halves and pushed them carefully together. He turned the empty pill between his fingers, staring at it in awful fascination. The package held a hundred. Was it the smallest size available? Or had his dad had plans for the ninety-eight capsules he’d left behind?

Adam squeezed the pill between thumb and finger, and the thin soluble plastic snapped, shattering almost into powder. It shouldn’t have been so brittle, but the package was at least sixteen years old, probably well past its expiration date.

He brushed his hand off and looked around for a trash can, but there wasn’t one in sight. No one had been here enough to need to throw things out in a long time. Adam set the plastic box aside and packed everything else back into the box. He put it back in the cupboard and, after a few seconds with his hand on the top, he put the box of clothes back with it. He could save that for another day.

He unlocked the next cabinet and pulled out the top box, labeled NOTEBOOKS. He just stood and looked at the box for a while, fighting the urge to sniff around the outside of it: he knew Casey had opened this box a few days ago, to take a notebook out for him. But the waxy, impervious surface of the cardboard was meant not to hold or absorb scent well, and if there had been any hint of Casey’s scent here, Adam would have been aware of it instantly.

The jolting urge to move hit him again, as sharply as if someone had shoved him, and Adam stumbled forward and caught himself on the box. He opened it quickly, bouncing on his heels, his heart beating fast. He picked up a medium blue notebook in a heavy plastic bag, almost perfectly identical to the one he’d given to Casey to bring back to him.

For a moment he managed to hold still, gripping the notebook tight through the plastic, and then he had to turn away from the counter and pace again. He walked up and down along the windows, looking out at the gloomy day and the unbroken snow stretching away from him. Then he forced himself to sit, perching on the edge of a chair, his hands shaking a little as he unsealed the bag and breathed in the scent of the book. Of his dad, and sweet wolfsbane smoke, and the lab as it used to be.

His eyes filled with tears, and then he couldn’t bear to keep still anymore. He pulled the notebook out of the wrapping and got up to pace again, flipping the notebook open to look through it as he walked.

A stronger scent wafted up from the pages when he opened the book: his dad’s hands and ink and something chemical. Adam felt small for a second, holding it, and guiltily certain that he was about to be caught and scolded for snooping in Daddy’s notebook. At the same time he found himself smiling at the cartoon of a wolf pup surrounded by flowers that took up a quarter of a page. The page was otherwise covered in what looked like notes on reactivity tests, all too elliptical to make much sense of. He’d opened the book in the middle, but of course the notebook had only ever been meant to make sense to his dad.

Adam flipped through pages, not really reading or attempting to make any sense of the notes, just reveling in the sight of his dad’s handwriting and the scent of him rising up.

Then he turned another page and found a block of neat writing. His eye caught on a line toward the end.

G must be having a good day—I’ve been smiling all morning. As much of a shitshow as it most of the time, being bonded has its moments.

Adam stopped, forcing himself to stand still, and felt the way his legs wanted desperately to keep moving.

“Oh, fuck,” he said aloud. “It’s really not me.”

He didn’t know how it was possible—he’d never bitten Casey, they had never even talked about bonding, let alone made any move toward doing it—but he couldn’t ignore the evidence of his own body.

He pulled his phone out and called Casey, and he didn’t even have time to start fidgeting: it went straight to Casey’s voicemail message.

“Fuck,” Adam said, and then remembered to hang up. He texted Casey. I need to hear from you right now or I’m going to do something kind of stupid.

But the text didn’t even show as Delivered, just Sent. Which meant Casey had his phone off—which he might well have done on purpose, for any number of reasons. Or he might be somewhere with no service. Or...

Adam scrolled through his contacts, wincing at the sight of the entry for Alpha Niemi. He should call; he should have called already. But if this was just Adam driving himself crazy, if Casey was perfectly safe...

He had to know, first, if there was any reason to think he was really feeling what he thought he was feeling. He scrolled through his useless list of contacts again and then walked out of the lab and back to the kitchen. There was a landline phone on the counter, and when he opened the cupboard directly above it, there was a piece of paper taped to the inside, right where he expected it. The first entry on the paper said GREG CELL and the number.

Adam punched it in and resumed pacing. The phone rang twice before his father said, “Hello?”

“Papa,” Adam said, wincing a little as he heard himself say it but unwilling to stop and correct himself to anything else, “I need—I need to know something.”

“All right,” his father said, slowly enough that Adam wanted to scream with impatience. “What do you need, Adam?”

“I need to know about,” Adam took a breath. “About bonding. About how it works. I need to know if there’s a way people can get bonded without meaning to, or without a bite.”

“Ah,” his father said, and then, “Well, I mean, the, uh, traditional way can be a bit of a surprise, I guess.”

“The traditional way,” Adam repeated, stopping to stand absolutely still. “What—”

“Well,” his father said. “There’s one way you get deeper inside your partner than a bite, huh? To stay, I mean, not just for a night.”

Adam closed his eyes. “You’re saying... a pregnancy can make a bond.”

“Yeah,” his father said. “Not always, but—when your dad was pregnant with you, we’d done the other already, obviously, but it made the bond a lot stronger. Which was...”

“A shitshow?” Adam supplied, remembering his dad’s phrase. He looked down at the notebook still clutched in his hand, pressed against his chest. He tried to imagine everything his dad must have felt about being pregnant, transmitted like this to his father.

His father gave a startled laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what Dare always called it. Are you—”

“I’m at the house,” Adam said, although that was probably not the question his father was asking; everyone in the pack must know he was here. “I—I don’t know. I have to make another call.”

“You do that,” his father said, sounding fond. “Let me know if you need anything else, Ad.”

He hung up without even trying to come up with a response to that and hit Alpha Niemi’s number.

“Adam,” he said. “How’s—”

“Can you track the location of Casey’s phone?”

There was a little silence, and then Niemi said, “Yes. Hold on one minute.”

There was a faint sound of clicking keys, and then, “About twenty miles outside Bismarck. And I hear you showed up at the Hathaways’ a little while ago, by yourself. Did you and Casey have a falling out?”

“No,” Adam said. “We should’ve, I should’ve—fuck.” Adam shook his head hard. The need to move was turning painful as he resisted it. “I need you to give me the exact location, and then... I think it might be time for you to come running.”

The drive felt like it took years, and also was over much too soon. It ended in nothing, just a churned up field of snow.

Adam walked around the edges of it, trying to find tracks, but the pack had made enough of a muddle of it that he’d have to be a hell of a lot better at tracking than he was to discern anything.

They had been here. Casey had been here. His phone might not be anymore. If it had been turned off—or destroyed—then tracking would just list its last known location. But Adam couldn’t shake the sense that he was looking for something, that there was something important here.

He stopped and stood still, listening, waiting, and the wind sent something tiny and purple skittering past him.

Adam turned to look toward the wind, saw another glimpse of purple, and started running.

He stopped short at the little pile in the trampled snow: wolfsbane, a dozen different varieties, dried or powdered or made up into pills. Everything Casey had had in his kit had been dumped out into the snow.

Just the wolfsbane. None of the containers it had been meticulously stored in, nothing else from Casey’s kit. But there was no way Casey would have willingly left behind his wolfsbane—the tool of his trade, his protection against his own fears and against everyone around him.

Adam squeezed his eyes shut for a second and then started patting his pockets, searching for anything he could use. There was a plastic bag folded up in one of the inner pockets of his coat—the plastic a heavy gauge, meant to block scent.

Adam didn’t know if any of this would be useable when he returned it to Casey, but he couldn’t leave it here like it was nothing. He swept as much of it as he could into the bag, focused on not crushing any of it against his skin since he had no idea what varieties they were or what they could do. Just brushing against the wrong kind of wolfsbane had burned and blistered Casey’s skin, after all.

But everything to do with wolfsbane was chased from his mind by what had been hidden underneath it. Casey’s phone lay in the snow, pressed down in the center of a neat bootprint, like someone had deliberately stepped on it. But it had only been pressed into the snow, not broken. The screen wasn’t even cracked.

Adam snatched it up and turned it on, or tried to; it blinked a low-battery icon and went dark again. Adam tucked the phone into the inner coat pocket he had taken the plastic bag from, then finished gathering up the stray bits of wolfsbane as best he could. He sealed the bag and then washed his hands in snow to be sure no trace remained.

Adam stopped, staring at his hands, as the memory returned to him: Casey packing snow against his burned hand. Casey scrubbing his hands with sand at the edge of the river.

Adam was going to have to find Casey. He even thought he could, if he paid enough attention to the bond, instead of fighting the sensations so he could focus on what he was doing.

He was going to have to find Casey. Once he did, he was going to have to get Casey away from the people who took his phone and his wolfsbane from him and then forced him to keep moving for hours and hours on end with only the briefest breaks to rest.

Those people weren’t going to just say, Oh, our mistake, of course, off you go.

They weren’t people who spent their time driving around in cars, asking people questions, doing research. If Adam was going to fight someone like that—knowing Casey was on the line, knowing that he must not lose—then Adam couldn’t fight fair, alpha to alpha.

Adam was going to have to fight like an omega. Like Casey would fight, if they hadn’t disarmed him.

Adam pulled out his phone and dialed his father for the second time that day. “Papa? I need your help. I need you to meet me somewhere with all the wolfsbane the pack can spare—the kind that burned Casey. Fresh, dried, whatever they’ve got, I need it. Casey needs it. Please. And I need you to bring me something from the house.”

His father was silent for just a few seconds, then said, “Of course. I’ll go speak to the midwives as soon as I’m off the phone with you, I’m sure they can spare plenty. Where do I meet you?”

Adam stood up, looking around, and then closed his eyes and thought of Casey, his scent, his warmth, his fury, everything that had brought them together. Everything that had gone into the tenuous bond strung between them.

“I’m not sure yet exactly,” Adam said. “I think it’s... west.”