“I had to protect him. And me. So I took everything I felt for the pack. I saw the bond, and instead of closing myself off to it, I pulled. I pulled at it and I thrust it toward Chase.”

“Rather than sleeping myself, I practiced. I practiced taking everything I'd seen in the last few days-every horror, every drop of blood-and locking it away, so deep in my mind that I could pretend that nothing had happened.And then I practiced letting it out.This time, I didn't start with a specific memory. I didn't walk myself step by step through a scene. Instead, I built a room inside my head-a tiny room with white walls and no windows and no doors. No way out.In that room, I put the sound of screams, tearing flesh, and heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Everything I'd been holding back, everything threatening to devour me whole was there-in the ceiling of that room, the corners, the floor.”

“I wasn't built for running away from monsters. I wanted desperately to run toward them--track them down, kill them. Luckily, I was used to restraining myself, used to acting human even when I wasn't, and the human part of my brain reminded me that right now, preternatural beasties weren't exactly my primary concern. Someone had made a strong attempt at killing me this morning....”

“So," I said climbing to my feet and changing the subject ASAP, "I had a dream last night someone tried to burn me alive, and I'm not entirely sure it was a dream."Devon stiffened. Chase's pupils pulsed.Subject successfully changed."Now who's ready to eat?”

“I'm Chase." he said."Kind of an ironic name for a werewolf." The observation slipped easily off my tongue. The boy didn't blink. In fact, I was beginning to doubt that he'd blink once since I'd come into the room. "Werewolves do a lot of chasing." I explained."And your name is Chase. Hee.”

“Sometimes, I felt like if I could just fold up into a small enough ball, my body would collapse on itself like a star, and I could supernova myself into a new existence.”

“Luckily for me, I didn't know precisely what it was that I'd done to merit a visit from our pack's leader. There were any number of possibilities, none of which I wanted to openly admit on the off chance that there was something I'd done that he hadn't found out yet.”