Neither, I wanted to say, but I knew that answer wasn’t going to hold water. It almost felt like my father had set me up to take over his leadership, but I couldn’t quite believe it—I’d never heard of a female pack leader, and Haven was far too hidebound to allow one. Plus, was I really alpha material?
“You know you’re an alpha,” Wolfie said quietly, rubbing my back in the same gentle circles my sister had once used, but with far more interesting effects on my nerve endings. “Remember how you ignored me the second time I commanded you to stop running away in the city?”
It was true that I’d been able to pull away from Wolfie’s bark, but I’d thought my reaction was only possible because Wolfie hadn’t been my pack leader. That issue was academic at the moment, though, because who would challenge the Chief didn’t seem as important an issue at the moment as how that challenger would win. “I don’t want to kill my father,” I whispered into Wolfie’s shoulder, hoping the fabric would muffle my words. How’s that for proof I wasn’t pack leader material? The Chief wouldn’t have spared a thought for the casualties that stood in the way of achieving his goal.
“No one is going to die,” Wolfie said as if stating fact, putting one finger under my chin to tilt my face back up toward his and brushing a gentle kiss across my lips. “What do you think I spent the last few days doing while you were living here in the lap of luxury? I was working on my pool.”
Chapter 20
Tearing myself away from Wolfie—again—was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. But I could just imagine my nephew’s terror since the boy hadn’t grown up among werewolves and was now facing his first shift alone and in a strange place. My urge to protect Keith was nearly as strong as my yearning to take Wolfie and run away from Haven as fast as I could, especially when I considered the fact that my nephew might even now be caught midshift. Or perhaps Keith’s wolf brain had completely taken control of their shared body and was heading past Haven’s boundaries and toward the normal human population. I’d do just about anything to prevent Keith from having to live with the same guilt I bore due to my wolf’s actions during our shared teen years.
But hunting down a confused teenage werewolf seemed easy in comparison to the task Wolfie faced. The young alpha seemed confident in his ability to beat my father at pool, and my father had agreed to the proposed challenge, albeit with a mocking laugh, so the winner would be Haven’s leader. But Crazy Wilder had filled the pool room with my most scary-looking male cousins, and Wolfie had no one to back him up. Plus, my father had won 95% of the games I’d seen him play during my childhood, and I couldn’t quite imagine how Wolfie could have honed his skills enough during the last week to provide any kind of competition for the billiards master. It was traditional to put the losing werewolf in a pack-leader challenge to death, and the notion of returning from my own hunt to a world lacking Wolfie’s calm presence made me shiver. Still, this was the best plan we’d been able to come up with, and the only one that could possibly result in everyone leaving the room alive...assuming Wolfie’s skills were up to par.
“Trust me,” the younger alpha said quietly as he walked past my dithering form and into the pool room. Wolfie had gone outside a minute earlier to pick up the cue stick he’d left on the doorstep, proof that his challenge hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment decision, and now he was screwing together the two halves of his stick even as he strode toward my father. Looking over Wolfie’s shoulder, I could see the Chief frown slightly, aware that he’d lost one of his home-court advantages—knowledge of which cue sticks were perfect and which had just enough of a warp to send a ball swirling off in the wrong direction.
“Best two games out of three?” Wolfie asked, the phrase nearly a command instead of a question, and I saw the wolf behind my father’s eyes snarl as the Chief nodded without thinking. As hard as it was to believe since I’d seen my father dominate everyone in his path for my entire lifetime, Wolfie was the more alpha of the two. But my father was far from whipped.
“As the challenged party, I assume I go first?” he asked, and I could tell that the Chief’s words were meant to make Wolfie echo my father’s earlier unconscious agreement. But, instead, my favorite alpha pursed his lips and shook his head slowly.
“I thought we’d go traditional and lag,” rumbled his wolf.
I wanted to stay and watch, but I knew Keith was waiting, and there was nothing I could do now that the challenge was underway. So I turned away, the sound of pool balls on the sidewall echoing in my mind as I walked past my cousins and out the door.
***
I assumed it would be a struggle to shift, but as soon as I stepped out of my clothes on the back stoop, my wolf surged to the forefront and we became canine so easily I didn’t even notice the change occurring. After fighting against the shift and then fighting to force the shift for so long, it felt strange to realize that I was now able to change forms as seamlessly as Wolfie did. But I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I just relaxed into the transformation.
That thought reminded me of the competition going on inside, though, and my wolf and I scented the air, feeling my father’s annoyance and Wolfie’s elation as the younger alpha won the right to go first. A good sign. Let’s hope Wolfie could keep up his lead while I was gone.
Before the two of us had descended from the loft a few minutes earlier, Wolfie told me that the rest of his pack was waiting along the highway at the location where Keith had left the road and cut into the woods. The younger alpha had given his pack instructions not to leave the vehicles, knowing that my father had wolves patrolling Haven’s perimeter, and that those wolves would attack first and ask questions later. I, on the other hand, could come and go as I pleased, so the plan was for me to meet up with Wolfie’s pack and then to follow my nephew’s trail wherever it led.
I could smell the anxiety, but also the cohesiveness, of Wolfie’s crew before I rounded the bend and padded to a stop beside their cars. The yahoos were in wolf form while the older adults sported their human bodies, ensuring cool heads all around due to Wolfie’s calming effect on the wolves in his pack. As soon as I came into sight, Wade and Fen trotted up to greet me, licking under my chin, and I was so gratified by their acceptance that I shifted back to human form so I could take them into my arms like a pair of lap dogs.
“Not quite what a passing motorist should see,” Chase said gruffly, interrupting our greeting and tossing an oversized t-shirt into my arms so I could shield my nudity from non-werewolf observers. Despite his tone, though, I could tell that even the pack’s beta had forgiven my betrayal of his milk brother. Then Chase went a step further, dipping his head to me as if I were his alpha’s permanent mate, and I couldn’t prevent the blush that snuck up my neck at the gesture. Imagining what it would be like to act as Wolfie’s mate was tantalizing, but I needed to keep my focus on Keith, so I was glad when Galena pulled me into a simple hug and cut off that train of thought.
“So, what’s the plan?” Quetzalli asked, her words abrupt but her body language telling me that Galena’s partner was as glad to see me as everyone else was. She dipped her head slightly as she met my eyes, and I couldn’t really believe the pack had forgiven me so easily. I was sure there would be some lingering issues, but now was not the time to deal with hurt feelings.
“Wolfie challenged my father to a game of pool,” I said, and nods all around suggested the pack had known that was their alpha’s goal from the beginning. The werewolves kept their eyes trained on me for orders, though, so I continued talking. “Until that ends, it’s not safe for any of you to go looking for Keith, so I’m going to try to track him from here.”
A whine from Blaze brought my eyes around to the young werewolf, and my wolf had no difficulty parsing his complaint. “I know you want to come,” I answered, “but we can’t risk it. If Wolfie loses the challenge, I’m going to have a hard enough time getting Keith past the border patrol and back to you—it would just be that much harder if any non-Have
n wolves came with me.”
The pack was silent for a minute as we each imagined what would happen if Wolfie did lose the game of pool. But the werewolves’ calm energy didn’t falter, quite a tribute to their absent pack leader. “He won’t lose,” Chase said at last, and I nodded, looking both ways to make sure no cars were coming, then slipping off my t-shirt and regaining my fur. The hunt was on.
***
The last time I’d tracked a child through the woods, I’d been too scared to let my wolf loose, and even though I now realized my canine half had done her best to help me at the time, she had been virtually blindfolded by my distrust during that earlier hunt. Now, the wolf and I acted in harmony, my human mind suggesting what Keith might have been thinking at the same time as the wolf used her superior senses to pick up the teenager’s fading trail. The scents proved that Keith had come this way several hours earlier, probably arriving in the wee hours of the morning and cutting into the woods as soon as the day was bright enough to let him see where he placed his feet. Since my nephew had such a long head start, my wolf and I both knew that the sooner we found him, the better.
Despite the solemnity of the occasion, though, I couldn’t help enjoying the way my wolf’s muscles were able to stretch and push us through the forest at a trot. Dew was already coating the ground as a sunny autumn day turned into a chilly evening, and the water moistened our pads, helping us feel each imperfection of the ground beneath our feet. With the toughness of canine foot leather, acorns and twigs gently massaged our skin rather than causing pain, and we sidestepped a leafy area in favor of a patch of rounded pebbles to enhance the sensation.
Then all enjoyment receded into the background as Keith’s scent abruptly mutated just as we ran upon a pile of rags that had once been a t-shirt and pair of boxer shorts. The teenager had clearly felt the shift coming early enough to pull off his shoes and jeans, which was a plus since denim can make a change of form extraordinarily difficult, but Keith hadn’t had time to remove the rest of his apparel. I felt guilty, knowing I’d made my nephew wait too long for his first shift, and now he’d been forced to change into wolf form alone in the woods, with no pack around him.
Focus, my wolf reminded me, throwing back the same words I’d sent her no more than an hour previously. The wolf was right to stay calm, not just because there was no point in panicking, but also because we were still in the heart of Haven’s forest, so Keith’s wolf would have had nothing nearby to harm...as long as he didn’t run too far in any direction.
Sucking in a deep breath through our nose, the wolf and I noted that Keith had turned up the mountain rather than down toward civilization, a perk given the unpredictable nature of a wolf on its first shift. We put our nose to the ground and began to run faster.
Chapter 21
Unlike Melony, Keith wasn’t hard to find, although it felt like I ran in wolf form for hours through the dark before I finally tracked him down. The young wolf had passed beyond the safety of Haven’s boundaries during his wolf’s first exuberant dash, and when I smelled blood along with my nephew’s scent, my heart sank into my metaphorical shoes.
I knew where we’d ended up due to my own meanderings as a young werewolf, when I’d pushed the boundaries quite literally and had run onto our neighbors’ properties. The Clarks’ farm wasn’t the best spot for Keith to land, but neither was it the worst. I distinctly remembered Mr. Clark spraying my furred rump with BBs, chasing me back into the woods when I’d come out onto his land in my own teen years. What I didn’t know was who owned the land now, or whether the current owners had young children who might have been allowed to go outside alone after dark. I shivered, realizing that the smell of blood was making my wolf’s mouth water, even though she was letting me take the lead as we came close enough to hear Keith breathing.
“Relax, Aunt Terra,” the kid’s voice came toward me through the dark. “It was only a chicken.” My nephew’s tone didn’t quite match the nonchalance of his words, but as we advanced, my wolf and I could see that there were indeed enough feathers lining the ground to prove that the young wolf’s first kill had been of the avian variety. Heaving a sigh of relief, I quickly shifted to human form to join him.
“Whoa,” the teenager said immediately, throwing a hand up over his eyes. “I don’t think I’m ready to see you naked quite yet, Aunt Terra.” For the first time since smelling blood, I was able to take a deep breath—if my nephew could joke around, he was going to be okay.
“Oh, yeah, because familial nudity is much worse than tearing out a chicken’s throat with your teeth,” I muttered, but sank to the ground and pulled up my knees to shield my bare breasts from view. “Okay, I’m moderately decent,” I continued, my voice calm as I tried to soothe the shakes out of Keith’s body. I could tell that my nephew’s wolf was pushing against the boy’s human form, begging to be let back out, but that Keith was afraid to set the canine loose after its round of chicken killing. And while I didn’t blame his human brain for worrying, I needed the teenager to be able to shift back to wolf form as quickly as possible so we could return to Wolfie’s pack. Plus, the sooner my nephew got back on the horse, the less likely he was to end up shiftless like me. “You know you’re going to have to pay for that chicken out of your allowance,” I added in mock rebuke, and was gratified to hear a faint chuckle coming from the teenager in front of me.
“I couldn’t change back,” Keith said just barely loud enough for me to hear after we’d sat for a few minutes in companionable silence. I hummed a gentle assent, but let the kid talk since he clearly needed to get the trauma out of his system. “The wolf wanted out, and then we ran and it was brilliant, Aunt Terra,” my nephew said, excitement coloring his words, then dropping away just as quickly. “But after the chicken, we shifted back to human form and I realized I didn’t know how to find the highway without my wolf’s nose. And the wolf wouldn’t come back.”
“That’s really normal, Keith,” I told him, taking my nephew’s hand in mine, an action that would have felt thoroughly inappropriate for a human aunt and nephew pair if they were naked in the woods, but which gave us both comfort since we were touchy-feely werewolves at heart. “The first few times you change, it’s hard to control, but you’ll get better at it.”
“They say that if you’re lost in the woods, you should just sit down and wait,” Keith continued. “So that’s what I did. I knew that you and Wolfie would come for me eventually, hopefully before I froze to death.” He feigned shivers, which made my heart lift yet further. Keith’s teen cockiness was apparently uncrushable, and I was glad. “So how’s Wolfie doing against Grandpa?” he finished, and I sighed—even my teenage nephew had known more about Wolfie’s plans than I had.
***
It turned out that Wolfie had started practicing pool with my sneaky nephew nearly immediately after the two of us began hanging out with his pack. I did recall several times when Wolfie had taken Keith aside, presumably to give the teenager one-on-one lessons on shifting, and now I realized that the lessons had actually gone in the other direction, with Keith sharing the Wilder knack for pool with a worthy student. Unlike every other man I’d ever known, Wolfie had apparently listened to every word I’d said and had filed the data way for future reference. So when he learned the Chief was a pool aficionado, Wolfie figured the game was a skill he’d better perfect.
The news made my heart a little less heavy at the notion of having left Wolfie alone in Haven...but not much. Even if Wolfie managed to pull off a win against the king of pool, I couldn’t quite imagine my father and cousins submitting to the outsider. “We need to get back there as quickly as possible,” I said, once it had become clear that Keith was feeling more himself in spite of the chicken blood drying on his face and hands.
“Obviously,” my nephew answered impertinently, and I rolled my eyes and paid him back by shifting without warning. The young werewolf was pulled into fur alongside me, but he clearly hadn’t been shaken up by the abrupt transformation. In
stead, the youngster pranced around me, making my own wolf seem old and slow in comparison, but cheering us both up with his antics. And once I began racing back along our trail, Keith fell in behind me obediently, almost like a dog trained to heel.
It was pitch black by the time we reached Wolfie’s pack along the side of the highway, but the werewolves were still on full alert. While I was gone, they’d traded off wolf duty, with three of the yahoos sprawling out asleep in human form in the bed of the pickup truck so that Quetzalli and Oscar were the ones to greet us four-footed this time. Despite the collapse of the rest of the yahoos, Blaze came bounding along close behind the older adults, still in wolf form, and he immediately wrestled Keith to the ground in a show of male affection that transcended species boundaries.
“No sign of Wolfie?” I asked, having shifted back to human form the instant my toes hit pavement. Now that I was so close to Haven, every hair on my body seemed to be standing on end, itching to hotfoot it back to the village and check on my mate. Keith and I had been gone long enough that the pool-game challenge should have been long over, and I knew that no news wasn’t good news. If Wolfie had won and the change of leadership had gone smoothly, Haven’s new alpha should have come out by now to collect his original pack. The fact that they were all still present and waiting made me shiver.
“Nothing,” Chase said quietly without getting up from the driver’s seat of one of the cars. A plume of smoke rose into the night air, and I was shocked to realize that the beta was smoking. I’d never known a member of Wolfie’s pack to partake of the habit previously, and to see the beta smoking now was a clear sign that I wasn’t the only one with nerves. The realization only made me more worried.
“Okay,” I said, taking command of the situation. I hadn’t meant to, but I realized I was using the pack leader voice, which immediately pulled every eye to me. “I’ll see what’s going on,” I told Wolfie’s pack. “The rest of you wait here for half an hour, then go home if you don’t hear from us.”