My mom caused my dad to get kicked out of his wolf pack.
Or more to the point, I did.
Werewolves aren’t supposed to marry normies, of course. Aside from the expected cultural disconnect, there’s also no way to know what kind of children such a union will produce.
Not that my parents got married.
They ignored all the common-knowledge rules prescribing interspecies mingling. They didn’t pay much attention to birth control either, apparently, and lucky me—I was born a wolf. When I shifted into a wolf cub in the hospital bassinet, Mom wrapped me in a blanket and fled the premises. She dropped me at Dad’s door in a dog carrier and sped off.
That’s when they kicked him out of his pack for breaking the rules. I mean, I get that they didn’t plan any of it, but their disregard of everything has made my life really suck.
My kids, if I ever had any, would be wildcards—some normie, some wolf. If I married a normie, I’d have a twenty-five percent chance of my kid going furry. If I married a were, it would be the same odds, but the other direction.
My genetics were ruined on the very day I was conceived.
To make matters more complicated, wolves come in four varieties: shredders, rangers, nurturers, and innovators. Innovators come up with new ideas. They organize and manage and teach. That’s what I wish I was. Nurturers care for others, they fix problems, and they smooth over the rough things. Rangers explore and test and scout. Any of those would be fine. Even as a halfie, I’d be alright if I were an innovator, a ranger, or a nurturer. Someone would have taken me in.
Shredders, of course, are the worst of the lot. They do just what their name implies—they fight. Given my luck, it’s no shock that I was born a shredder.
Most wolves want to be shredders. They change quickly, they’re stronger, and they heal the fastest. They’re also the only type of wolf that can be born with the ability to become an alpha. It’s rare—maybe one in fifty or seventy shredders can even be alphas. And only alphas can start packs, but even if I was an alpha, it wouldn’t help me a bit.
No one would join a pack with a halfie alpha.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that the cons of being a shredder far outweigh the pros. There are two ways for wolves to join a pack. You’re born into one, or you fight your way in. You’d think that being what I am would help—but it means that I bring out the worst in every other wolf simply by existing. I’m not strong enough to snarl my way to the top, and no one wants me around. That makes fighting my way into an existing pack as impossible as the ‘being born in’ route.
Thanks to my spotty genetics, I’ll never be able to start my own pack, either. No wolf in her right mind would mate with a half-breed. Which is why I’ve been living as a third party contractor—an outside-edges fringe member of the Manhattan pack. It can’t last. It won’t be a permanent solution.
But I hoped I might be able to find some kind of loophole through which I could squeeze. So far, no luck.
“Three, two, one, go.”
The instinct to fight when the alpha shouts ‘go’ is so ingrained by now that I don’t even think. I just shift. Muscles melt and reform. Bones snap. Sinews stretch. Fur sprouts. Fangs lengthen.
And I howl like the deranged dog that I am.
“Come on, Cliff, get him.”
“Go, go, go, Cliff. Destroy him!”
“Rip his halfie throat out!”
No one ever cheers for me.
Cliff lunges at me, his teeth snapping far too close to my jugular. I race around the edge of the ring to clear myself some space. Cliff’s bigger than I am. He’s probably tougher than I am. That’s precisely the point, of course. No one ever thinks I might actually win.
Being beaten so that I remember my place—that’s the reason for my daily ‘training.’
Cliff chases me for a bit, until he gets tired of it. Then he leaps across the ring and snaps at me—only this time, his teeth clamp down on my hind leg. Pain radiates through me, and this would likely be the beginning of the end for any other wolf in the pack.
But this is my one strength. I’ve dealt with so much pain my entire life that I barely notice it. I can take a beating better than any other wolf in New York. Maybe in the whole US. Instead of blacking out or whimpering or begging, I feign collapse.
The second he releases my leg, I pivot on it and take my shot. I sink my teeth into Cliff’s shoulder. Blood floods into my mouth. His whimpering hits my system like a shot of some kind of illegal stimulant. I push harder then, dragging him across the mat, leaving a trail of blood behind us. I’m not even sure whether it’s his or mine. I shake my head and press down harder.
In spite of all the odds stacked against me, I might win. For once, I might defeat him—
A surge, no, more of a flex shoots through me. Like a hammer to a tuning rod, or an electric current hurtling down a live wire, my entire body shakes, and I release Cliff involuntarily. Before I have time to regroup, he’s on me. His teeth slam closed on my front paw, and he shakes like a terrier would shake a rat.
It takes him another few moments, and two more shocks from the alpha, but eventually, Cliff gets what he came for. A kill shot to my throat.
Only the intervention of the same alpha who kept me from getting close to winning keeps me from dying. Because the thing about being in a pack—the same thing that can kill you can also keep you alive.
He heals Cliff first, leaving me to slowly bleed out, becoming colder and colder and colder. This might be it, honestly. Maybe they’re ticked about the photo of Roxana on my phone. Maybe the dragona demanded I die as punishment for talking to her just before she went missing. It’s not like the pack would argue—or that they’d even do me the courtesy of telling me I was being disposed of beforehand.
They don’t owe a non-pack member anything.
But just as spots shoot across my vision, relief finally floods through my body, a cessation of pain, and then a return of movement, all courtesy of Lo Ren Fang.
“Better, halfie,” Cliff groans. “That was actually the best I’ve ever seen you manage.”
“Thanks.” I cough, blood spraying the mat even as my wounds heal.
“Now that you’ve completed training for the day, we need to talk to you.” Lo Ren Fang doesn’t wait to make sure I heard him. He turns and marches out.
“You better hurry,” Cliff says.
He’s actually being pretty helpful—encouraging even. I’m nothing more than extra muscle. I can’t ever make the pack alpha wait. It still hurts to move. It’s agonizing, really, since Lo Ren would only use enough energy to keep me from being in mortal peril. He’ll expect me to heal the rest myself, slowly, using my own reserves. Even so, I shove myself up to my feet and pull on my pants. I stumble across the mat, climb out of the ring, and head out through the door Lo Ren Fang just left.
He’s waiting in the next room.
“We gave you that apartment on the edges of our territory as a show of good faith,” Rylan says. Lo Ren’s second in command also happens to be his mate, and usually she calms him down. But today? She looks ticked.
“I’m grateful for it,” I say, sure to quickly return my eyes to my bloodstained, bare feet.
“You’ve been working with us for two years now without incident,” Rylan continues. “We thought you knew your place.”
Two years of just enough interaction with a pack to keep the madness at bay, to keep from fraying. “I am,” I say. “More grateful than you probably know.”
“But you took that selfie with the princess,” Lo Ren says. “And I specifically told you not to communicate with her in any way.” His hands clench into fists, the veins in his forearms popping. His voice is growly when he says, “I told you not to go near her.”
Rylan curls her manicured fingers around his forearm, and he visibly relaxes—the power of a mate. “If he hadn’t done that, we’d have no idea what kind of time window we were looking at. The dragona might be accusing us of stealing her away, or any number of other things. Worse things.”
“He broke my order,” Lo Ren says.
“Which he can only do because you haven’t made him part of the pack.” Her gentle reminder isn’t as kind as it seems. She wants me gone—always has. She sees third party contractors as a major liability.
“I should cut him loose,” Lo Ren says.
Rylan smiles. “Yes, you should.”
Lo Ren’s head snaps her direction.
“But not until this danger is past, and the dragona aren’t angry with us. They don’t know he’s not part of the pack—”
Lo Ren starts pacing. “They told us that perimeter security was the only important thing. They said—”
Rylan grabs Lo Ren’s wrists and snaps them downward in a possessive show of force. “Listen to me, love. We can’t display any weakness to them. You know that, so for now, we conceal this. . .” Her lip curls. “This mistake.” She sighs. “After this is over, you can terminate him.”
I wish I thought they were talking about firing me.
Although firing me might be worse than killing me. Without any wolves to associate with, I’d become increasingly more twitchy, paranoid, and unstable. Eventually, I’d either attack someone I couldn’t defeat, or I’d take my own life. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Did Roxana say anything to you, when you went in to talk to her in clear violation of protocol?” Rylan releases Lo Ren and turns to face me. She doesn’t act like she just told him to terminate me. She doesn’t act like I could hear a single thing they were saying. “Did she give you any indication she wanted to run or that she was afraid of anything?”
My brain races ahead. I need to look like I’m helping them, but I can’t give Roxana’s location away. If I was part of the pack, they’d already know what I know—they’d be able to compel it out of me.
Ironically, only my third party status is keeping Roxana safe.
I finally decide I can share some of what we discussed without harming her. “She asked me about the fire escape.”
Lo Ren swears.
“You didn’t think that might be relevant?” Rylan asks.
“She merely asked if normies would die if there was a fire in the building,” I say. “I explained there was a fire escape they could take if they had to.” I pause. “I honestly didn’t know anyone in New York City wouldn’t already know about the existence of fire escapes.”
“Of course not,” Lo Ren says. “And you’d never suspect a princess of running away. We didn’t either.”
“They still maintain she was kidnapped,” Rylan says.
“It’s the only option that keeps them from looking monstrous—that Ragar especially,” Lo Ren says. “But there’s no sign of struggle, and she clearly went down the fire escape—the last thing we’re doing is telling them that we gave her the idea.” He glares at me. “Not a word about that, clear?”
I nod.
“I know one way he wouldn’t be able to share what he said.” Rylan’s lips compress into a flat line.
Lo Ren glares at her.
It may be the first time he’s ever done something for me. It’s not much, but telling his wife she can’t kill me with a look is better than ignoring her.
They grill me for another half hour, but eventually they give up and drag me with them to the all-pack meeting. Wolves may long for companionship, but two hundred and thirty-four wolves shoved into one giant room is not a comfortable occurrence. If we didn’t have such a strong alpha, it wouldn’t even be possible.
Even Lo Ren looks like the strain is wearing on him. “I won’t keep you all here very long,” he says. “But I need to make something clear. The Manhattan Pack has a lot of plans, and we have made a lot of progress in the past few years, but everything is on hold until we can help the dragona locate Roxana Goldenscales. As you know, female dragona are already rare, but the daughter of their leader for North America, and the fiancée of the leader of all of Russian dragona? She was lost on our watch, and we have to be instrumental in reclaiming her.”
“Or there will be repercussions,” Rylan says.
Lo Ren’s scary, but his mate might be scarier.
“Whoever helps us locate her will be richly rewarded,” Lo Ren says. “If you’re not in pack leadership, it would land you a spot. If you’re already a leader, you’d get special training from me.”
“Whatever your situation, we’ll take immediate action to improve it,” Rylan says. “If we can find her and bring her back, the dragona will be very, very pleased.”
A strange situation.
A dire need.
It feels very much like a loophole.
But is it the loophole I’ve been searching for?
I’ve spent the past twelve years trying to find a pack that would take me in. I’ve begged, I’ve cheated, and I’ve fought countless times. I don’t hate my life as a werewolf enforcer, but it’s hardly the life I’d have chosen, and I never belong anywhere. The longing gives me the courage to raise my hand. I can’t imagine betraying one of my friends, but Roxana is new.
I barely know her.
“What about non-pack members? What if one of us located her?”
Rylan’s smile this time is sly. “If someone like you was able to recapture Roxana Goldenscales, well, that would be a big enough miracle to get you official membership in the pack, halfie.”