For Miles Serial Teaser

Episode 0 | Homecoming

For Miles | Episode 0 “Homecoming”

The dry chill of Colorado approaching winter after half a year of humid Florida summer was brutal. I felt my skin drying up and lips chapping the second the wind slapped me, and my lungs ached with the higher elevation’s harsh lack of oxygen. But even in the misery, I loved it. This—the Rockies, the high plains—was my home.

Returning to Boulder brought a bizarre sense of un-reality with it, these days. My childhood was here, but very little remained the same as it had been back then. Many of the familiar faces were gone—death or relocation—and so many of the old shops and restaurants I’d once loved had not stood the test of time. Those that did remain had a pull to them that kept me revisiting in a ritual order every time I came back, usually just in time for the winter solstice celebrations with the den of my childhood.

This year, though… the gap between my memories and my reality was wider than I could have imagined possible, and I’d avoided coming home as long as I could manage to avoid what waited for me. My mother’s empty house. All the history, her scent, the traces of her life left untouched since she’d died. No one, my former alpha had reassured me, had gone in there to touch anything except to remove garbage and food so nothing would spoil. Everything else had been preserved for me to sift through myself, frozen in time so I could step back into her last moments and everything that came with them.

Like that sharp ache in my chest when I thought about the fact that I hadn’t seen her face-to-face in almost seven months before she passed. I hadn’t known—of course I couldn’t have—that she would leave me. But I felt the ugliness digging a hole in my heart every time I thought about the joy in her voice when I called, and how I knew every time that she hoped it would lead to a promise to return home—and it never did. I’d left Boulder when I was in my early twenties, trying to stem the restless, driving itch of an unmated male shifter. The longing that sent me wandering far and wide, making my living taking odd jobs any place I landed and somehow, eventually, by writing about my experiences. One day the writing became my life, and then there was little chance at all you’d find me back in my hometown except on special occasions. The wandering was a coping mechanism for the pain of an untethered male craving a mate, until it became a lifestyle, and then an addiction in its own way.

And now, here I was, home again, but absent the central axis that had kept my world spinning longer than I had realized. My dad had passed when I was a kid—Mom was all I’d had for almost as long as I could remember.

Unsteady, heavy, but still exhilarated with the nostalgia of homecoming, I passed the neighborhood Mom had lived in—where we’d lived together for so many years—and headed straight for the den. I wouldn’t stay in the house yet. Not yet.

A sharp tug yanked at me, the abrupt force of it bringing my hand to my chest to rub where it hurt. I sucked in a deep breath, holding it against the insistent pull trying to draw my attention. Releasing that breath, rubbing my chest like I could make the sensation disappear, I pulled over a moment to reorient myself.

The raw, unfinished edge where my mate bond was meant to exist was loud, and I felt its call like a physical thing. That primal magic had always been present and alive in a way that made most shifters unsteady without the influence of a family or a mission to focus on. I’d turned it into a driving need to move at any cost.

Now, it was demanding attention.

I sighed, laying my forehead against the steering wheel. “We’ll move on as soon as this is settled. Just gotta get through this. Once the solstice is done, we’ll get back on the road.”

I couldn’t let the weight of what was ahead of me take away my purpose. Or sweep me off-balance. The den couldn’t take me in—I couldn’t stay put there and obey like I might once have. I’d be a burden to them. If I were a mated man, I’d be an asset. Steady. Committed. As I was, I’d only cause friction with the other males and cause disruption.

I’d pay my dues and go. I’d give them my love the best way I could. By taking my pain off their plate as soon as possible, and back on the road.

Just had to survive the next couple weeks.