My family has gotten very good at packing. Since a lot of the stuff they’d be needing was still in boxes in the garage, when Max got back to the house with the rental moving truck he’d found a few towns over just before noon, Mom and us girls had a lot of it moved out of the garage and positioned near the back porch so we could start loading it in. Max would need to get the bigger stuff himself. I’d asked Sam to come over and help with that, even though we still hadn’t talked about what had happened. He’d agreed to help out. Ben was at work, and Joshua was finishing up those few lawns he had needed to work on.
It took several trips to bring Gray’s boxes downstairs. We made a pile by the truck. By the time we were done, Max and Sam had everything else loaded up and were able to put the boxes right into the truck. Only the suitcases they’d left for the minivan so that they’d know exactly where their toothbrushes and other necessities were when they got to Great Falls remained to be loaded up.
After a couple of hours of meditation, I felt more calm than I had before, though I was still upset at Sam. Or disappointed. Or frustrated. Or something.I decided I’d spent enough time on myself, and it was time to go see if Ben was available to help me test out the staff. At least, with my parents gone, I didn’t have to worry about anyone trying to take
“Where are we?” I asked Ben, staying pretty far back from the edge of the hole.“It’s a quarry,” Ben said. “I thought it would be best to get away from as many life plants and animals, etc. as possible.”
Back in the forest, I spent a few hours recharging the staff. It was so hard to tell whether or not it was fully charged when I had no idea how much power I had used up. I really wished there was a little battery gauge on the staff, like there is on my phone, where I could see how much of its power was gone, and how much I had left. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t the case.
I couldn’t believe what I was looking at, and I didn’t know what to do about it either.Sam was standing in the back yard, wearing only the shorts he had on when he’d just shifted back into his human form, throwing pebbles at my window, trying to get my attention.
I did dream of Sam that night. I awoke as the sun was rising, remembering only that my dream had consisted of the two of us together, in bed, but I couldn’t remember the details. I fully expected to open my eyes and find him gone, but he was still there.He wasn’t asleep either. I glanced at the clock and saw it wasn’t even 7:00, so it was quite early for
The next few days were full of me spending time in the forest, trying to build up my powers so that they were as strong as possible while the rest of the pack was out in the community trying to build support for our endeavor against Verina. Sam didn’t come back to my room at all, and I hardly saw him. I spent a little time with Ben and Joshua, and our relationships continued to strengthen, but neither of them took me as far as Sam had. Still, kissing them, spending time with them, getting to know them all better made me more and more confused and nowhere close to making a decision about an Alpha.
My eyes scanned the back yard as I tried to understand what I was looking at. I saw my four pack members standing closest to the porch, but they weren’t the only wolves that had come to help us face off against Verina. Across the yard, there were dozens of other wolves, some standing by themselves, others in small packs, all of them looking up at Grandma and I where we stood on the porch, all of them appearing to pledge their allegiance to our cause.