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a hell of an interesting ride.
     
    * * *
     
    Hope woke up to a bright stream of sunlight on her face, and the sound of incessant hammering. She blinked a few times and looked around at the one room cabin, surprised to find it completely empty. She had no idea what time it was, but it looked like everyone except her had already started their day. She sat up slowly and rubbed her forehead. Usually, Hope was a light sleeper, and woke up at the smallest stirring from one of her many roommates. But she must have slept like the dead last night, exhausted from an emotional day.
    And, of course, there were no electronics out here to wake her up. This had been one of the biggest adjustments for Hope. She had become so accustomed to the constant whirring, beeping, and buzzing of modern life that the silence out here in the woods was almost deafening. Hope stood and went to look out the window. Grant, Calum, and Storm were working on the cabin addition, which was probably only a day or two away from completion. Hope felt a pang of guilt as she looked over at the addition, because she hadn’t done any work on it for several days. Instead, she had sulked around in the forest and then run off to town to drink beer.
    She told herself that she had already done her fair share of work at the beginning of the project. For several days, Hope, Mia, and Juno had been the hardest workers on the project. Hope smiled, remembering the fun days of laughing with the girls while exhausting herself from hard labor. Then she frowned, looking around and wondering where Mia and Juno were now. Or any of the rest of the crew, for that matter. The only shifters she could see right now were the three working on the cabin.
    Hope grabbed a muffin from the kitchen, and then threw on a hoodie before heading outside. Calum looked up as she walked out, and got a big, mischievous grin on his face when he saw her. Hope braced herself as soon as she saw that grin. She’d seen it hundreds of thousands of times over the years, and she knew it meant he was about to make a teasing jab at her expense.
    “Well, well, well,” Calum said. “Look who finally decided to grace the day with her presence. I was about to come check on you and make sure you weren’t dead.”
    “Very funny,” Hope said, rolling her eyes. “It took me a long time to fall asleep last night, so I guess I slept in a little to make up for it.”
    “A little ?” Calum asked, letting out a big roar of laughter. “You call sleeping in until 1 p.m. sleeping in a little?”
    Hope’s eyes widened in surprise. “It’s one o’clock?” she asked, looking back and forth between her brother, Grant, and Storm, as though waiting for one of them to start laughing and tell her it was actually only ten o’clock or something like that. But the three of them just stared back at her with amused looks on their faces.
    “Uh, yeah, Hope. It’s after one,” Storm said. “I can’t believe you slept through all the hammering we’ve been doing out here for hours.”
    Hope looked up at the sky, and realized that the sun, while still very high, was dipping ever so slightly toward the west. Her brother wasn’t kidding. It was definitely well past noon.
    “Where’s everyone else?” Hope asked, looking around in confusion.
    “The rest of the shifters went on a hike. Supposedly there’s a long trail that goes all the way to the lake, and they wanted to check it out. Drew went into town again to order supplies.”
    Hope narrowed her eyes. “He just went to town to order supplies yesterday.”
    Calum frowned at her in response. His expression was genuinely angry, something Hope rarely saw. “Yeah, I heard,” he said. “But you would know better than me since you apparently were also in town yesterday.
    Hope bit her lip and tried to keep herself from making a snarky remark back to her twin. She wanted to defend herself, but he had a right to be angry. She had put their whole clan at risk by going to the bar.