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“That was such a rookie mistake,” Stooge ribbed me as we walked into our favorite bar that evening. My first impulse after virtually blowing both of us up had been to go home and lick my wounds. But that wasn’t how a team worked. When one of our own failed, we took him out on the town...and teased him mercilessly.
“Worse than Duckie,” Ian agreed, punching me on the shoulder with enough force to knock a civilian backwards. I, of course, stood my ground.
“Really? A slip of the fingers is worse than hitting your head on every single lintel between here and China?” I countered.
“I can’t help it that I’m tall,” Samuel grumbled. But, true to his call sign, our team mate ducked unconsciously as he passed through the doorway we were all filing through. Yep, the nickname had done its job admirably—I doubted Duckie would knock himself silly due to carelessness ever again.
And while Samuel might have preferred a different nickname, I knew our newest team member was pleased to have been given one in the first place. Because call signs were more than just a warning. Instead, they were the human equivalent of a werewolf pack bond—audible signposts displaying our shared brotherhood. As a result, I couldn’t help hoping that the current round of mocking was finally going to land me with a title other than the one I’d walked in with.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. My team mates groused about my ineptitude and grumbled about my fumble fingers, yet no call sign materialized out of the ether.
Tamping down my disappointment, I flipped my companions off and headed over to Ian’s favorite bartender to buy the first round of drinks. Before I reached her station, though, my inner wolf came entirely alert with a vengeance. The door to the street had opened half a second prior and now the air eddying around my head was filled with a hint of fur, a touch of wild, and a heaping helping of alpha dominance.
Not good. Not good at all.
I spun, checking on team mates and intruders in the same breath. The former were safely distant, their attention focused on the pyramid they were building out of empty beer cans snagged from a nearby table. But the latter were close enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck and set my teeth on edge.
I thought you were gone for good, I growled silently, taking in the sight of that redheaded outpack male who I’d cowed into pissing his pants two days earlier. Only as I more fully rolled his aroma around in my mouth did I realize the error of my ways.
The drifter hadn’t backed down then because he wasn’t a drifter. He was a fledgling pack leader trying to set up shop in the town I called home. And as such, he wasn’t willing to let a little thing like an uber-alpha werewolf ruin his plans.
In the days we’d spent apart, in fact, my opponent had rustled up four other shifters to even the odds. They now stood five abreast just inside the bar’s entrance, looking every bit like Old West gunmen gearing up for a final showdown. Meanwhile, the sour stomach I’d developed as a result of the day’s disappointment actually made the upcoming confrontation sound like a pretty darn good idea.
Down, boy, I told myself. The same reasoning I’d applied earlier in the week for avoiding territorial clashes was still very much in effect. After all, I was doing my best to pass as human. And no one-body in this bar needed to have his grasp on reality shaken by being caught up in a werewolf turf battle.
“This is a very bad idea,” I muttered, wishing I had a beer in my hand to keep my fingers from curling into fists. Without the aforementioned prop, I was forced to maintain my focus the old-fashioned way, forcing my shoulders to relax and my muscles to slacken.
A human wouldn’t have been able to pick up on my words from that distance, but the lead male immediately grinned a toothy werewolf challenge by way of reply. “What’s a bad idea, Hunter Green,” he answered, “is going up against me.”
Despite myself, I flinched back away from his reply. As soon as I’d seen his familiar face, I had expected a threat...but not such a personal one. How had this upstart alpha discovered my identity on such short notice?
And what else, exactly, had he managed to nose out?
Most shifters who’d crossed my path recently hadn’t even managed to find my name during our short acquaintance, much less discover anything else about my history. After all, I’d spent the last eight years doing everything in my power to float beneath the werewolf radar.
I’d thought I was pretty successful too...until now. The question was, had my opponent stuck to the basics or had he managed to disinter the foundations of my not-so-kosher past?
“Hunter Green,” the other male repeated. “Naval Spec Ops. EOD technician. Twenty-four years old.”
He grinned and I felt my whole face heating up with the force of my anger. Was the dickhead really going to blackmail me about the highly illegal and borderline treasonous hoops I’d been forced to jump through in order to join the U.S. military?
The trouble was, as a bloodling shifter born in lupine form and raised outside any established pack, I didn’t possess a legit birth certificate or social security card. So when the time came to create a human persona, I’d figured I might as well fudge a little.
Adding two years onto my age hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. At sixteen, I’d been far more buff than my eighteen-year-old human counterparts. I’d certainly amassed enough life experiences to pass for an adult.
Plus, I needed those extra twenty-four months under my belt if I wanted to sign up for the Navy and enter a werewolf-free arena. So I’d paid for the fake documents and banked on no one running a background check on a country boy who joined up as a plain old sailor.
Sure enough, upon transferring over to the EOD division a couple of years later, I’d slid right under the military’s terrorist-sniffing radar. It had been worth it, too, since my new human crew mates filled the cavernous hole in my belly that yearned for pack, lulling my wolf into complacency for the first time since discovering our human skin.
Meanwhile, my military role had allowed me to make a positive impact on the world, sniffing out mines that threatened civilian ships and defusing wrecked missiles before they could go off in friendly territory.
And now this drifter thought he had the right to ruin my good thing on a whim? Could you really blame me for the fact that my hands found their way around the stranger’s neck and commenced to squeeze?
