Four Best Friends Forgot I Exist for the New Girl, Bless Their Hearts, I Forgot Them While I Glow Up novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Fifth Stone

Devon climbs to Highridge Point and finds Kellan Merrow, Alpha of neighboring Stonefall, waiting on the blank fifth stone; he tells her four heirs said the oath and the stones stayed dark, waiting for someone else.

I went up the ridge trail anyway.

I wanted to see the circle with nobody in it.

It took me an hour and ten minutes to climb, and I did it in my running shoes with my jaw tight the whole way.

The old dog trotted behind me for the first mile.

Then he sat down at the tree line and watched me go.

Highridge Point is bare granite above the trees, with wind that comes straight off the snow.

Five grey stones stand on it in a ring, as tall as my shoulder.

Four of them have a name cut deep into the top: Dane's, Emmett's, and the cousins'.

The fifth stone has never had a name on it.

When I was little I thought the pack had run out of money.

The fire pit in the middle was still warm.

Someone had left a crushed paper cup beside it, and four sets of boot prints went down the far side of the slope, fast and wide apart.

A man was sitting on the blank stone.

He was tall and lean and dressed in black, and he had a thin scar through his left eyebrow.

He did not get up when he saw me.

"That one isn't for sitting," I said.

"Nobody told it." He looked me over, and his eyes stopped on my shoes. "You walked up here."

"It's a trail. People do."

"You walked up here in the wrong shoes, and you haven't slept, and you haven't eaten."

"Are you the trail inspector?"

"Kellan Merrow." He slid off the stone. "I run Stonefall, across Cold Creek."

I knew the name.

Vernon called Stonefall the creek pack, in the voice he used for things that did not matter.

"Devon Verrall," I said.

Something moved in my chest.

My wolf, who comes up for no one, lifted her head and looked at him.

I put my hands in my pockets so he wouldn't see them.

"Vernon invited me to watch the oath at dawn," Kellan said. "As the neighbor Alpha. I got here at five. He never came."

"He's an Alpha. He sleeps in."

"His son came. And three others, and a blonde girl in muddy boots."

"Brianna."

"Is that her name." He said it flatly. "They stood in the ring and said the words. Then they ran down the mountain."

I looked at the five stones.

The names on four of them were dry and grey and had been there since before I was born.

"I was meant to be here," I said.

I had not planned to say it.

He waited.

"All five of us were. Dane, Emmett, the cousins, me. We planned it in March. I sat on the packhouse steps from four o'clock until the sun was up."

"Alone."

"With a dog."

Kellan didn't say he was sorry.

I was grateful.

He looked down the trail where I had come up, and then back at me.

"I've been sitting on that rock for two hours," he said. "I told myself I was waiting for Vernon."

"And?"

"My wolf wouldn't leave the ridge. He kept saying someone was coming up the trail."

I laughed, because it was that or something worse.

"It was me."

"It was you."

The wind pushed at us both.

I looked at him and he looked at me, and neither of us pretended we were doing anything else.

"What did they say?" I asked. "In the circle."

"The oath of the heirs. Four of them speak it and a fifth stands in the gap. When it takes, the ring lights." He nodded at the dead fire pit. "Nothing lit."

"Brianna stood in the gap."

"Brianna stood in a gap." He took a step closer, and I let him. "I've watched that oath twice, for other packs. When it takes, the whole ridge hums. This morning it was silent."

The cold had got into my teeth.

"What does that mean?"

"It means that four boys said their words to a ring of rocks," Kellan said, "and the stones were waiting for someone else."

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