Hi everyone! My life got very busy and I had to step away from this story for a while, so I wanted to write a recap of what's happened so far incase you need it. Feel free to skip this part if you want. It became a lot longer than I had anticipated LOL
There's a recap of last chapter & a recap of the whole book—read whichever you need.
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Excerpt from the end of the last chapter:
As I neared the Auden's home, I saw Logan leaning over Avery's jeep in their driveway, slowly pulling at something with a wrench. I didn't want to speak to him. I wanted to ignore everyone and go straight to confronting Avery, but he looked up and I immediately stuttered in my step.
His face was ghostly pale. Sweat was dripping from his forehead. His movements were lazy and slow. His eyes were struggling to stay open.
"Logan, are you alright?" I asked. I looked towards the sun and back at him and realized he might be suffering from heat exhaustion.
"Yeah, I'm—"
He gagged. I stopped moving completely. He swallowed, faced the jeep, then gagged again and puked onto the metal parts inside the car. It was pink and foamy and smelled so strongly I could smell the acid from here. I rushed over to him as he gagged again. I helped him sit down.
Looking to my left, there was a bottle of water near the garage door. I hurried to grab it and shoved it into his hand.
"Drink, drink. I think you're overheating." I helped him guide the bottle to his lips. He managed to drink some, but a minute later he threw it up again. There were chunks of food in the throw-up. It was slimy and dripped from his lips. He was too dazed to wipe it off his mouth.
I needed to get help. This wasn't normal... unless the books I've read about people like them aren't true? Do they not heal quickly? Are their bodies effected by heat the same as humans? It makes sense. Animals suffer from heat exhaustion the same as humans do. Nothing is immune to it.
"I'm going to get help," I said quietly. Logan nodded and leaned his head against Avery's jeep, gagging repeatedly as if he had the hiccups. I heard him throw up again as I left him there. The liquid hit the ground in a putrid, thick splat.
I ran inside, yelling for Jo Auden, hoping desperately she would know what to do.
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Recap of the entire book so far:
The Madison's are a troubled family that moved across the country to start a new life. Cherry (nickname for Charity) Madison suffered a miscarriage of her second daughter, which sent her into a spiral of depression and her husband, Arthur, back to the comforts of alcoholism. This fresh start was supposed to help the family back on their feet.
The Madison's new home was gifted to them by Nelly's great uncle Charles (Arthur's grandfather's brother) who passed away recently. Their cousins wanted the home, but Charles' wife, Paula, made sure the deed of the home made it to the Madison's.
When they arrive in Oregon they find their small new town is full of eccentric, interesting people. They met the Holly's--Kiersten and Keating, who run the corner store at the center of town. Upon first visit to the Madison's new home, Kiersten gave them a shotgun and told them to be weary of the monsters in the woods.
Then there's the Auden's--Jo, Logan, Avery, Bodie, and another child Jo only mentioned once in passing that Nelly has never met or seen.
Both mother's, Jo and Cherry, hit it off instantly. Avery and Nelly share a special bond, which Nelly realizes early on. She assumes it's what love is supposed to feel like, as she's never actually experienced love before. She tried with men but none of those relationships lasted very long because she was never really interested in them. Despite not being surprised she's attracted to a woman, she feels unsure of it still, because one of the first days in Oregon, her father and her went to a diner and he made a very homophobic remark to a gay couple sitting near them.
Early on, Avery poses as the Auden's dog so her wolf is able to meet Nelly and not go crazy for the time being. It was fine for a little while until the bond needed more, so Jo hosted a bonfire to let Avery meet Nelly officially. To them, meeting each other in person was magical, and eased all of Nelly's worries, until she started feeling emotions that weren't her own. She swore they were Avery's, but she pushed the thought away, because that would be crazy.
Despite the hints Avery leaves Nelly to find out about Avery being a wolf, Avery is unable to outright tell Nelly what she is for an unknown reason. Nelly has already experienced too many weird things to ignore the possibility of something supernatural going on, though.
This leads Nelly to the corner store on a very, very hot day. The night before, she saw the golden-eyed wolf at the edge of the woods and her gut was telling her it was Avery. She knew that was too eccentric to believe, but the seed of thought had been planted. Her and Keating were hanging outside the corner store, chatting about whatever, until Keating brought up Avery. She's not very good at holding her tongue, so out popped a suggestive question that confirmed Nelly's suspicions about what Avery was hiding from her.
When Nelly came home, Avery greeted her and they took a walk to the lake where they shared their first kiss. Afterwards, Jo was pissed. She invited the two girls in for some watermelon, where Avery got scolded and Nelly escaped as quickly as she could. As Nelly was leaving, she saw the giant wound on Logan's arm, but Logan told her not to worry about it.
When Nelly picked up the Auden's dog for a run the next morning, she noticed Avery's bracelet tied to it's leg. It worried her, so she ignored it and instead tuned into new feelings from the forest calling her home. She had the urge to take her shoes off and run barefoot, so she did, and she ran farther than she ever had before.
This landed Nelly and the Auden's dog in the clearing in the woods, where Nelly stumbled across a box of clothes--Avery's clothes--and had an anxiety attack over thoughts that the Auden's dog was Avery. Then, in the clearing, a smaller wolf lunged out of the trees and Nelly thought she was dead. The dog began playing with it, but Nelly didn't want anything bad to happen to the Auden's dog on her watch, so she made them go home.
On the way home, Nelly brought up the wound she saw on Logan's arm and the Auden's dog flipped out. Nelly heard Avery speak in her head. Avery didn't realize the danger of allowing Nelly to experience that without any knowledge of it. The dog ran off to check on Logan, leaving Nelly scared and alone in the woods, thinking she's gone schizophrenic because she heard a voice in her head. It made her think of the conversation with Keating at the corner store, though, and how Keating had asked her if she had heard voices in her head yet.
When Nelly reached the edge of the woods safely, she saw Jo, Logan, and Avery on their front porch and had a short conversation with Jo about the dog escaping her. Jo was putting a weird salve on Logan's arm made of strange ingredients, and the Auden's began talking to each other through the link, which Nelly was now able to hear. It freaked her out, so she made an excuse to go home, but as she was leaving, she saw one of the flowers from the clearing stuck in Avery's hair.
The next day Nelly catches her dad before he's off to work, and he asks to watch a movie with her later that night. She agrees, yet all she can think of is Avery and how that flower was in her hair and what secrets she was hiding, so she marches over to the Auden's home after her dad leaves for work.
Nelly demands answers from Avery, who takes her up to her room and shows her what she wanted to see, which leads them to their first night together. Avery shows restraint and only takes it so far, but it feeds the mating bond and makes it even stronger than before. Afterwards, Nelly asks Avery if her family are wolves, too, in which Avery says they aren't. Nelly sleeps over, completely forgetting about the movie her dad wanted to watch with her.
That night, Nelly wakes up to something tickling her, only to find a wolf laying next to her instead of a human. She's content to know it's Avery. It comforts her now. She feels safe and protected, and soon falls back asleep.
That morning, the mate bond is unnecessarily strong. Nelly is able to ignore it better than Avery since she isn't a wolf, but she still feels the overbearing need to jump Avery's bones. Avery holds herself back for Nelly's sake as best as she can. Then, they go downstairs and have a silly encounter with Keating and a snake that shows how close Avery and Keating are. Afterwards, Avery makes suggestive, seductive motions behind Keating's back, so Nelly gets flustered and goes home.
When Nelly gets home, everything goes to shit. Arthur, her father, relapsed and was so drunk he could barely stand up. Cherry, her mother, was at the kitchen counter smoking. That's when the truth comes out. Avery lied to Nelly. Uncle Charles was a werewolf. The entirety of her dad's side of the family is, except her father, who has a recessive gene in werewolves that prevents them from shifting and makes them immune to any bites/attempts to allow them to shift. Nelly finds out her father had a mate before her mother, but that no one really knows what happened to her. Her mother postulates that his mate died. Nelly sympathizes with her father, realizing that if she lost Avery, it would be so painful she also would find it extremely difficult to deal with the pain. This does not mean she forgives him for his actions, though.
At the end of the chapter, Nelly wants to confront Avery about lying to her about her family, but before she can reach the front door, she finds Logan about to pass out while working on Avery's jeep. He's dehydrated and in pain, and starts throwing up and gagging in the driveway. She runs to get Jo Auden and that's where we left off.