Slow Shift by Nazarea Andrews (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📗

days inside, reading and writing, a silent, sullen presence that his horde of cousins avoid after a week of trying to draw him out is consistently met with snarls and insults.

Granny watches him.

He knows she watches, her dark beady eyes following him as he leaves the house, as he jogs down the long winding driveway. When he returns, sweaty and breathing heavily, pink with exertion, the weight of her gaze settles over him once more.

She watches him as he struggles less everyday through his workout routine, every day the exercises growing a little less difficult for him to complete, until he comes back from the library with a smile and a new stack of papers to he curse his way through a new routine for days.

She watches him but doesn’t press for details, doesn’t demand he talk, and he doesn’t really mind it. He’s used to being watched like a sideshow freak.

He misses Tyler and Lucas, misses the quiet RV and the steady noise of Tyler working on the house. It’s nearly suffocating how much he misses them.

And how furious he is, still, with his father.

Dad calls once a night like fucking clockwork, so Chase sits in silence on the phone, listening as he fumbles through a conversation that doesn’t say anything.

Some nights, when loneliness aches in his gut and the house feels too full and loud, he curls on his little bed and thinks about the promise Tyler made. He wants to believe Tyler, that he’ll get Dad to change his mind, but as the summer wears on, endless and lonely in a strange sort of exile, he starts to wonder.

Maybe Tyler is happier with him gone.

Maybe his Dad is.

Maybe everyone would be.

~*~

“You will come here. Now.”

John huffs and rubs a tired hand over his face. “I can’t.”

“He needs you. He will not talk to me or his cousins, and he’s hurting. You will come now, John.”

“How bad is it?” he asks, and she makes a low, wordless noise. “I’ll be there by the weekend,” he says finally.

Far away, she nods, watching her grandson, Nora’s boy, sitting curled up, small under a tree in the yard, gaze vacant and lonely.

~*~

It’s a long summer.

For the first time since Chase arrived in his life, Tyler struggles with his control. He stops working on the house and sulks with Lucas in the RV. He runs, sometimes, when he thinks he can leave Lucas alone, something he feels guilty for.

The truth is, he knows that Lucas misses Chase too—and that he can’t run out the fury and loss, so he sits there, silent and unmoving.

Tyler takes up working for a local contractor. He comes home tired and pleasantly sore to a shabby RV, then his nights are quiet.

They’re quiet and they’re interminably long.

“How did this even happen?” he grumbles, slicing his steak angrily. “I didn’t want anyone else.”

Lucas is as silent as ever.

He didn’t. He’d lost enough, and given enough up voluntarily, that letting someone close enough to hurt him—he never meant to do that, but Chase didn’t really give him a choice. He arrived and never really left. And somewhere along the way, Tyler stopped wanting him to.

Sometimes, when he’s leaving work, stopping by the grocery store or the diner for dinner—Chase would be furious but then, Chase isn’t here and isn’t that the whole point?—he sees Chief DeWitt.

It’s infuriating because he knows Chase is gone, spending the endless summer with his extended family in Washington. It’s infuriating because he understands the Chief’s concern—better than anyone could, he understands.

But he can’t understand sending Chase away. He can’t wrap his head around how making Chase spend the summer with people who don’t know him, who don’t care about him, could possibly be better than Tyler and Lucas.

He doesn’t understand how John could send him away, how John couldn’t see how desperate Chase is for his father.

Thinking about it doesn’t help his anger—after he sees John coming out of a bar downtown, Tyler goes home and brings down a wall in the house.

With his fists.

He still emails Chase weekly exercise updates, and getting the one-word responses from him leaves him unsettled.

He has nightmares, and he has dreams that leave him shaken and quiet, while Lucas stares at nothing.

He wonders what Chase dreams of and if the cousins who surround him are being good to him. He wonders if Chase has forgotten him. Forgotten them.

Sometimes, when the moon hangs heavy and bright in the sky while the summer stretches endlessly on, he thinks maybe it would be better for them—for Chase—if he did forget.

~*~

He thinks that would be true if it weren't for the dreams.

~*~

When he sleeps, he dreams.

And in his dreams, he can run, the forest wild and real under his paws. The wind ruffles his ruff and ahead, his brother stands still, tail high and ears pricked.

He can hear it, the call Tyler is chasing, faint and far away, so he throws back his head and howls. Tyler joins him, an eerie, beautiful song, and from the distance, he can hear the calls and yells of—

Chase.

The boy who spoke to him, who reached for him, who read him stories and curled into him on dark nights, who made his way into their pack with nothing but a smile full of loneliness and determination.

He howls again, but it’s joyful this time, and he runs, desperate to reach the Pack member in the distance, the one he misses with an ache he can’t pronounce, the one who’s vanished. Tyler talks to him, tells him why, but it doesn’t matter, because Chase is gone and the scent of him is fading.

He bursts through the woods and skids to a stop on the ancient grounds of the Reid lands and Tyler barrels into him, bowls him over with a huff and a snarl, biting at his ear as they wrestle and wait.

He pauses when the howling comes.

Chase.

He sounds sad. Lost. Confused.

He tilts his head back and howls, calling for his lost packmate with Tyler until his eyes