Wild Moon (Kingdom of Wolves #1) - C.R. Jane Page 0,1

the practicality and the gas mileage of a Honda, Alistair wouldn’t get in one no matter the circumstances, even if it was the only way to catch me.

My breathing increased however as the terrain began to rapidly ascend and I realized I was no longer approaching the mountain, I was going up the motherfucker.

There was a guardrail off to my right, but that didn’t calm me down. I was now hyperventilating as I white-knuckled the steering wheel and leaned forward, trying to make sure I stayed right on that white line. If I was on that white line, then I wouldn’t go off the edge. Right?

A loud honk had me jumping in my seat, swearing, and swerving the car. I hadn’t handled unexpected things with grace over the last few years…but could I really be blamed for that after all that had happened?

I tore my eyes off the white line and glanced in the rearview, only to see that there were now a few cars lined up behind me. The driver behind me seemed to be waving his hands around.

Whoops. A glance at my speedometer showed that I was going about ten miles per hour right now. I highly doubted that was the speed limit, based on the cacophony of angry honks I was beginning to hear.

I rolled down my window, continuing to keep my eyes on that white line since my brain was filled with images of my car tumbling down the side of the mountain and bursting into flames fit for an action movie. I began to wave my arm out the window, trying to get them to go around me. Was there etiquette for this? Besides the obvious move of not driving forty miles under the speed limit.

The car behind me finally got the hint, and it swerved around me, honking loudly and rudely as it did so.

“Jerk,” I muttered. The rest of the cars followed their leader, their brittle horns filling the night.

And then finally, it was just me.

Which maybe I hadn’t been thinking through, because now that there weren’t any other angry drivers to worry about, I was more aware than ever that I was painfully alone.

“What will it be like, Mama? When I find him,” I whispered to my mother as she curled up beside me on the bed, a copy of Harry Potter laying in her lap just as it was every night.

“He’ll make all your dreams come true, baby,” she said with a gentle smile. “He’ll see all the parts in your heart, and he’ll accept them no matter what he finds.”

“Why are there different parts in my heart?” I asked, the six-year-old me very confused about the words my mother was saying.

She giggled in that magical way of hers, and I watched entranced at the love I could see in her eyes. Was every mother that wonderful?

“I just mean, sweetheart, when you find him, you’ll feel complete,” she said sweetly as she brushed a piece of hair out of my eyes.

“Did you feel complete when you met Daddy?” I asked, sadness creeping down my throat at the blurry memory of a man as big as a bear who always smelled like peppermint and those cigarettes he used to smoke constantly as he anxiously paced around the room.

Something in my mother’s eyes flickered and changed. There was a look there that I didn’t recognize, but which made my little heart uncomfortable because it was so unfamiliar from the gentle looks my mother always gave me.

“Do you promise it will be like that?” I spit out, suddenly desperate for that look in her eyes to go away and for her to give me the reassurance I could always expect from her.

“I promise,” she whispered, that look in her gaze fading slowly away.

I settled back into my pillows, ready to hear what Harry, Ron, and Hermoine were up to next, confident that the future was bright because my mother had said so.

Too bad my mother turned out to be a liar.

“Holy shit,” I screeched, swerving out of the lane as something black…and furry, sprinted across the dim light of my headlights, startling me out of my journey to the past where I had no business spending time in the middle of the night in the freaking mountains.

“What the hell was that?” I whispered as I slowed down even more and tried to look around.

An even larger furry beast suddenly sprinted in front of my car, and this time, I yanked the steering wheel way