Page 69 of Dark

Love is not surrender.

Love is earned.

“Hays,” I whispered, heart thrumming wildly.

Her eyes fluttered closed, fingers shifting fluidly through the chords, as if across the hundreds of bodies separating us, she’d somehow heard me.

Love is fairy kisses in the mornings when it’s dark.

Midnight texts and barbeque and dancing in the park.

I’ll wait for you forever.

My heart was always yours.

Love is not surrender.

Love is earned.

The crowd went wild as she drove into the chorus, swaying, whooping, trying to sing along even though this was the first time any of us had ever heard this. Breath sawing in my chest, I gently, oh so gently traced the scar at my wrist. Act to draw her stalker out into the open or not, I’d had a sick feeling in my stomach ever since our fakebreakup. How many times had Hayden told me she loved me? And every time, I’d hesitated to say it back, convinced if we took that permanent, irrevocable step, everything broken about me would wind up destroying her. Now she was up there, singing right to me in front of thousands of people, putting herself out there. Utterly unafraid.

My phone buzzed, a signal finally getting through. I glanced down, seeing a text from Hays. I clicked on the image. The pale length of her arm stretched across the neck of her guitar, the cobalt-blue daisy tattoo wending its way up her wrist. At the tips of its petals, she’d written in black pen:

Y-O-U-R-S

She must have done it just before walking out on stage. I stared down at the screen, trying to think of what to text back as lightning flashed off in the distance. My gaze flicked towards the approaching wall of clouds, which was how I came to notice the woman with the dark bob standing with her phone raised, recording the performance.

Meera.

I cursed under my breath. Hayden’s aunts and sister weren’t supposed to fly back until sometime tomorrow. Pulling out my phone, I tried to text my brothers. No signal. Adrenaline slamming in my veins, I reached out through the pack bonds. Brody was on heightened alert, Dallas pacing out by the parking lot. Up near the stage, assigned to guard Hayden, West was getting antsy. August was working the perimeter, Cal somewhere out in the corn maze, lying low. And every last one of them was in agreement on one thing. There were too many humans. It was too damn windy. If someone did move in, it would be impossible to get a scent trace until they were right on top of us.

Hayden finished singing to thunderous applause. By then I was muscling through the crowd. Arms and elbows jostled me from all sides, beer sloshing down the front of my shirt. Cursing, I stumbled.

When I looked up, he was directly in front of me, fifty feet away, twitching like a pale, wasted skeleton. My breathing picked up. At a distance, vamps could pretty much pass as your typical meth addict, particularly when they needed to feed. If he was a prickhead, the fact that he was out before sunset made him especially dangerous. He would had to have recently fed from a shifter, giving him near-limitless regenerative abilities coupled with the vamp strength to flip a car into a crowd, then ghost out before anyone was the wiser.

Which meant I had to be careful how I played this.

Me: Company. With dentures.

“Thank you.” Hayden tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, frowning, searching the spot where I’d been standing moments before.

Pushing through the crowd, I sent her the image of her aunt, phone raised against the ominous sky. The man, forty feet away now, gaze tracking her. Through the mic, I heard her sharp intake of breath, her eyes searching for me in the sea of faces, lips silently forming my name.

“Hayden,” I said urgently, a sick feeling twisting in my gut. And sure enough, just as the first faint raindrops flicked the back of my neck, a howl sounded from somewhere out in the corn.

Half the crowd, the people I would have actually bet on in a zombie apocalypse grabbed their coolers and picnic blankets and beelined it for their cars. Everyone else pulled out their phones and started recording. Because apparently #WerewolfAteMyFace must have been trending on Twitter. With the storm coming in, it was nearly dark, but there would be no getting around three million video retweets of a feral pack of werewolves exploding out of a cornfield.

“That sounded totally real, man.”

“Think they’re bringing back zombie week?”

“Move. This is an emergency,” I snapped, shoving some douchey YouTube influencer wannabe out of the way.

But when I looked up, Meth Head was gone.

“God—” Snarling, I plowed my way through to where he’d been standing seconds before. Had he flashed out? Disappeared in the crowd? Was I just amped up, seeing things where no threat existed?

Brody’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker.