I smile warmly and I think it says everything for me just fine.

He stands up and starts searching the room again for whatever it is he lost.

I decide to drop it. I guess I’ll find out in Portland if his confidence has been misplaced all along.

9

AFTER A LONG PENSIVE moment, I get up from the bed and slip my feet down into my gym shoes and then move over to the mirror mounted on the dresser to brush out my hair.

“What are you looking for anyway?” I say, watching him behind me through the mirror.

“There was a black velvet bag, about this high,” he holds his hands out about four inches apart, “I thought I set it on the nightstand yesterday. I guess not.”

He starts to pace.

“Have you seen it around?” he says from behind.

I scan the room briefly. “I’ve spent most of the time in here today sort of unconscious.”

He laughs under his breath and stops near the foot of the bed.

“I’m sure it’s around here somewhere,” I say, walking toward him. “I’ll help you look. What’s in it?”

“No,” he stops me. “I’ll find it later.”

He seems kind of nervous, maybe even a little defeated.

“Are you sure?”

The door comes open and Zia and Sebastian are standing at it, looking at us with up-to-no-good grins.

“Zia!” I say and run over to hug her.

“Knock next time,” Isaac says, “Adria could be in here taking advantage of me.”

Zia squeals out a laugh and embraces me in a hug.

She pulls back then with her hands around my biceps. “Oh, is that how it is now? You’ve become more Alpha than Isaac is supposed to be?”

“No!” I laugh, “He’s just being a pervert.”

Zia waltzes right into the room, hourglass h*ps swaying side to side, hair spiked up with not a strand out of place, as usual. Sebastian is not far behind, though he waits for Isaac to give him that guy approval-nod before he comes in the rest of the way.

“Besides,” Zia says, “If you were busy, I’m sure you’d be smart enough to lock the door. And if not,” she shrugs, “well, I’d get an eyeful and for you it’d be a lesson learned.”

Embarrassment is slowly starting to melt me into a shell. “Come on,” I say, “change of topic, please—how was the concert?”

“Awe-some!” she says with a harmonious high pitch. “You should’ve gone with us.”

I go back to the mirror and Zia follows. She stands in front of it with me, checking herself out, making sure all of her spikes are in proper place, pressing each one between her thumb and index finger.

“No,” I say, pulling my hair into a ponytail, “the way I’ve been feeling, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t go with you.” I snap the hairband in place and pull my fingers from it, tightening the hair against my scalp in two halves.

Zia steps away from me, her expression guarded and teasing. “Ewww—contagious?”

“Shut up, Zia,” I laugh and go back to my hair even though there’s nothing left to do to it. “You wouldn’t catch it anyway if I was.”

“So true,” she says, coming up behind me and resting her chin on my shoulder. Her white-blond hair is so intense against my darker brown hair. Her charcoal-colored eyes are distinct next to mine that wear only black mascara. Her round, angelic face looks at me in the mirror with pouty mauve-colored lips, “Well you don’t seem so sick to me.”

“Nah,” I say, “I guess it was nothing because I’ve never felt better.”

She raises her head and says, “Good!” Then she moves across the room and threads her arm around Sebastian’s.

“We’ve got news,” she says, looking to and from Isaac and me. “Go on, tell them,” she urges Sebastian, but the look on his face suggests that everything about this is making him immensely uncomfortable.

Isaac raises a brow and draws back his chin just a little. In fact, I’m doing the exact same thing.

“He’s embarrassed,” Zia says looking over at Isaac with a low, secretive voice that is anything but low and secretive.

“I’m pregnant,” she says and all the air is sucked from the room through three quick, heavy gasps. Mine, Isaac’s and Sebastian’s. His eyes have gone from uneasy to outright shock, the color completely drained from his face.

“I’m totally kidding!” Zia says and she tugs on Sebastian’s arm. “That’s what you get for being chicken shit.”

The three of us let out our breath at the same time.

“Not. Funny,” I say, still a little mortified.

“Come on,” Zia says, “the joke may not have been funny, but the look on your faces was totally worth it.” She cackles.

“Anyway, Sebastian is learning how to control himself. We were right behind the front row at the concert and this drunk guy kept bumping into Sebastian from behind—rude, vulgar, stank like hot beer, white trash in training—and of course, Sebastian knocked his front teeth out.”

“Thought you said he was learning to control himself?” I say, glancing warily over at Sebastian who’s finally decided that he’s better off telling his own stories.

“Zia, come on,” he says and turns back to us to pick up where she left off. “The guy had it coming. For thirty minutes this went on, him falling into me and most of it was intentional when he noticed that I wasn’t happy about it. But I kept my cool.”

“I was gonna’ hit him if Sebastian didn’t.”

Isaac says while putting on his watch, “Sounds like you gave him more than enough time to back off, man.”

“Yeah,” Sebastian says, “but that last time, he hit me so hard in the back that I fell into a girl in front of me and banged her up pretty bad.”

“Sooo, Sebastian clocked the guy,” Zia says, smiling proudly. She pulls him closer by the arm and I notice he smiles a little too, but tries to hide it because he has always been more reserved than any of us.

“But his eyes didn’t even change, Isaac,” Zia adds and this was the real ‘news’ Zia couldn’t wait to spill.

“Really?” Isaac says, nodding once, impressed. “So you didn’t ‘wolf-out’, as Harry calls it, at all?”

“Nope,” Sebastian says. “No black eyes, no claws. Just good old-fashioned pissed off human guy with a score to settle.”

“That’s awesome,” I say from the side.

I really am happy for Sebastian, but once again, I find myself in a conversation that I really can’t add to.

But I keep this excluded feeling to myself.

“So what did we miss around here,” Zia says, plopping on the foot of the bed, bouncing gently a few times as if to test the springs or something. “Besides Nataša anyway. Saw her downstairs—wow, that woman has got some issues. Fifty bucks she doesn’t have a man.”

No one responds as if it’s probably safer that way, but I think we all agree.

Sebastian takes the chair near the closet.

“I did hear that Adria fainted?” Zia says to Isaac, but then her questioning gaze falls on me.

“Adria’s fine,” Isaac answers, but looks at no one.

“Like I said, I feel great now. It was really weird. Still is, actually….”

Zia looks over at me questionably. “Weird as in how?” She laughs at me. “Losin’ your marbles, or somethin’?”

And then something clicks in my mind and my whole body locks up.

Seven months ago, I had worried about it so much that I made myself sick letting it keep me up at night. After Isaac rescued me from Viktor Vargas, there was another secret I was keeping other than the truth about Aramei and that Isaac’s father is protecting Viktor because it is Viktor’s blood that means life or death for Aramei.

But this secret is much more close to home. This secret, if it’s true, can tear Isaac and me apart.

Shortly after that night, I noticed how quickly the wound on my side had healed. I knew it wasn’t normal. Wounds that deep don’t heal almost completely within just a few days.

I tried to think back to the night Sibyl attacked Isaac and me in the car, when Isaac shifted inside with me still in it and how I was tossed over and over again inside the wreckage. Something else happened to me that night. I try so hard to recall, to grasp some kind of memory, but all I can ever see is the eerie, lifelike dream with me and Alex in the field in Georgia. I can remember every detail of it: the lone tree, the dead horse and the blood. Alex telling me to drink the water from a creek, yet there was no creek.

And I can remember Isaac’s voice calling out to me. He said that ‘he’ was coming and I knew later that ‘he’ was Viktor.

Did Viktor do to me what he did to Aramei? Did he feed me his blood, performing the Blood Bond while I was unconscious as his prisoner?

The thought of it wrenched my insides.

For nearly a month, when I would sit or lay next to Isaac, when we were at school, or at home, or here at his house, all I did was worry. I could never tell Isaac about my fears.

I was ashamed.

And I didn’t want to lose him. But most of all, I didn’t want him to know that Viktor was alive because then he would know why and I don’t want to put him through that.

But eventually, it got to where I didn’t believe it much anymore. Slowly I began to think more sensibly. Although I learned little about the Blood Bond, I do know that after one is performed, the human will always need to drink male werewolf blood to sustain immortality.

Well, seven months later and I sure as hell haven’t been drinking anyone’s blood. So that can’t be it….

“Adria!” Zia says, standing in front of me now, snapping her fingers around my head. She laughs. “Talk about deep thoughts.”

I shake off the memory. “Sorry,” I say. “What did you ask me again?”

Zia shakes her head and pats me on the shoulder as she walks past me toward the opened window. “I don’t even remember—so are we all good for Portland next Friday?”

“I’m definitely in,” Isaac says coming up beside me. “I need to get out of this town for a while.”

Sebastian raises his index finger above his head. “I’m in, too.”

“Great!” Zia says and then she seems distracted by something on the windowsill. She moves the rest of the way over to it and picks up a little black velvet bag with a silver drawstring and lets it hang from her pinky finger. “What’s this?” She starts to open it and snoop inside, but Isaac moves quickly across the room and takes it from her, relief washing all over his face.

“Thank you!” he says, taking it from her quickly. “I’ve been looking all over for that.”

“Oooh, what’s in it?” she says, grinning hugely. “Lemme see.” She glances over at me with a wry smile and puts it in my head that whatever’s inside that bag might be for me.

Isaac walks away from her without answering.