Chapter 163

“Not a chance,” Sideburns said in an unnecessarily harsh tone. “Jay will

carry the girl.” He gave me a decided look and added, “Pip.”

Going-gray looked very unhappy, but he nodded and shifted into a big

brown wolf.

Sideburns, my supposed fated mate, wasn’t planning to act on that role

and was shedding his supposed responsibility for me, which was fine. I preferred no one to carry me anyway, but I didn’t want to get into the middle of their arguments.

Sideburns came to help me get on the back of the brown wolf, but I leapt onto the back of the wolf just fine before he touched me. Then Sideburns and Shade also shifted, one massive black wolf and one smaller golden beast.

Going-gray shot forward like an arrow, and I had to grab his fur tightly to stay on. At some point, I thought of leaping off the brown wolf’s back and running away again, but the river was too far away now.

I guess I’d just have to stick around and play it by ear. I had nowhere to go anyway. Plus, Shade might look after me for a while. He seemed to have taken a liking to me.

As for Sideburns, I would shove my attraction to him aside, pretend that he didn’t exist, and stay out of his sight as best I could.

 And he was out of my sight at the moment, as he led the pack in a race at the front.

Shade ran beside the brown wolf and me for a while before his wolf turned into his warrior form, which was half-beast and half-man in his eight-foot-tall glory. I didn’t shudder one bit but grinned at the golden monster.

“What’s the plan, Canary?”

I leaned forward and clung tightly to the brown wolf like a tough cowgirl.

The warrior wolf narrowed his corn-blue eyes in displeasure.

“Don’t call me Canary. It’s a horrible name,” he said gruffly. His pronunciation sounded a bit off with fangs filling his mouth.

“You prefer me to call you Man Whore?” I asked sincerely, arching an eyebrow.

Going-gray grunted. Maybe it was a wolf version of a chuckle? “You haven’t told me which human city we’ll stay in,” I pursued. “Do you even know where you are?” he asked.

“No idea. I feel like I dropped onto Earth from the stars and met

you.”

“I feel like that all the time, Catnip.” Shade chortled. “We’ll stay in

California for the night. You do know that we’ve just passed the border of Mage Town in Oregon and will head toward Shifter City in Nevada?”

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T hose city names sounded vaguely familiar, but none of them struck a chord. I had the ability of weighing my predicament and coming up with the best solution. I believed that I had a

sound mind instead of a damaged one. But why could I remember the feel of a spring rain on my eyelids but not any events or faces of the people from my past?

I took inventory of all the names Shade had mentioned and gathered intel for later use as we trotted through the expanse of grass blades and colorful shrubs. They’d placed me in the middle of their formation.