Crossing Boundaries

Chapter 3

Luin

The past haunted me.

I couldn't get away from it. It didn't matter how much I distracted myself or how much I filled my life with people and events. When I lay down to go to sleep at night, it was just like I was sixteen again. I mourned yet another day without my soul mate and I clung desperately to a hope that had been withering for over a decade.

It never got easier.

Oh, my life was better now than it had been since I left home so long ago. Almost two years ago, I met my best friend, and he had completely changed the lonely landscape of my life. See, Lachlan was a werewolf, and he had somehow incorporated me into his pack. I lived in their communal pack house and had spent the past year and a half building friendships with everyone I could. I helped in the kitchen and with training sessions. I entertained the children with magic shows and games of chase through the forest. When they decided to build an addition onto the pack house, I spent a few days studying building and I joined the work crew. I needed a lot of guidance still – there's a limit to what you can learn from a book or the internet – but it felt really good to create something so solid with my hands and I decided I would like to build more things in the future.

I did everything I could to keep busy and fill my life with people, but that didn't change how I felt when I was alone and my mind was quiet. Doubts started creeping in, and I wondered again and again if I made the right choice all those years ago when I came here.

Nearly sixteen years I'd spent in this realm and so far, I thought my life would have been better if I'd stayed in Alterra.

--

When I moved onto the Tourmaline pack grounds, I set up wards going around the whole border. They wouldn't stop anyone from coming in who shouldn't – those would cost too much energy to maintain over such a large area – but they did alert me if someone unfamiliar crossed onto pack grounds.

Since border patrol was one of the jobs I didn't work around the pack, and since I wasn't currently stationed in the guard tower at the entrance to our grounds, I had put the wards on the magical equivalent of silent mode. The guards had a color chart they could follow, so they were aware of any breaches and I wasn't bothered every time someone outside of the pack entered our territory.

Because of that, my first clue that something might be wrong came when a stream of pack warriors sprinted out of the house one after the other. They shucked off their clothes between steps and were wolves by the time they hit the tree line.

I called Lachlan, who was not only my closest friend; he was also mated to Magnus, one of the pack's two alphas. Lachlan wasn't remotely a fighter, so I knew I wouldn't be interrupting him in a similar mad dash through the woods by calling.

"Luin, have you heard?" he answered. There was a definite note of panic in his voice.

"No, what's happening?"

"There's been a breach. The wards went off but no one checked in at the guard station. You should get inside."

It warmed my heart – truly, my chest felt like it was glowing – that Lachlan was worried about my safety. It would be so easy for him to fling me at all of the pack's problems and expect my magic to fix things, but he cared too much to ask that of me. "I'm on my way in. I'll set a more targeted ward around the pack house. If anyone gets in, I'll know where they entered."

It had taken a while to figure out how to make my wards shape themselves around pack members, since there were so many of them and new people were joining and leaving all the time, but now I was extraordinarily glad I had taken the time to figure it out.