The wind blew hard against him, and his body acted as a natural resistance to the onslaught of a Massachusetts winter. Three months into the school year, November had hit the northeastern part of the United States with a vengeance. Any sane person would be inside where it was warm. But she had come outside, and he’d followed—as though a length of invisible rope connected him to her.
He loved to watch her.
The way she moved. The way she sometimes didn’t move.
He rubbed the stubble on his chin. How long had it been since he’d shaved? A day? A week? A month? The longer he spent with the humans, the more his body adapted to their form, which was exactly what he’d planned and why he’d risked everything to come to Northern Tide University. The more time he spent in this dimension, the less he had to try to resemble them.
Not understanding total assimilation was exactly what he craved, his father had warned him this would happen as if blending would deter him from his plan.
Only he hadn’t counted on her.
Alexandra Morgan.
She stood staring up at a white sorority house at the very top of the Greek hill the university was so proud of. Queen House—the one to rule them all—where dreams of young girls were crushed on a regular basis. All the female students desired to be Lambda Chi Sigma. The smartest, prettiest, strongest-willed women the university produced came from the sorority housed there. But first, they had to be accepted into the hallowed halls.
Unbeknownst to the human population of the school, LCS took only one type of student—female werewolves. No matter how many human girls threw their best smiles, hopes, dreams, and money at LCS, they would never be offered the opportunity to pledge. Unless they shifted under the full moon, they were no one.
If he wasn’t mistaken, Alexandra met that particular requirement.
So, why was she so nervous?
“Hey, Alexandra.” The others in her dorm called her Alex, but the nickname didn’t suit her. She embodied the nobility of Alexandra. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed with the cutest cleft in her chin. He wanted to run his human hands all over her luscious curves until he made her squirm with pleasure. Another symptom of his apparent internal change. Sex had been the last thing on his radar when he’d arrived on campus.
“Kieran.” She jerked, placing a hand over her heart as she laughed.
Jumpy for a werewolf….
“What are you doing out here? It’s cold.” For a human, she meant. She’d not feel the chill any more than he did. But she couldn’t know about his resistance or that he knew her secret.
He shrugged and pushed the glasses he didn’t need back up on his nose. He might need them soon with the way his body had changed—continued to change—but for the moment, they were for show.
“That’s what jackets are for.” He pulled at the sleeve of his leather coat.
“Oh.” She blushed. He resisted the urge to rub his hand over the touch of pink on her cheeks. Weird behavior wouldn’t do.
“What are you doing out here?” A repeat of her earlier question. She seemed to want an actual answer. Alexandra smiled, and for a second, he forgot to breathe.
“I could ask you the same thing. Planning on pledging there tomorrow? You freshman girls are all the same. Dreaming of your Greek letters and the privileges associated with them.”
She snorted. “I could say the same to you. You’re a Sigma guy, aren’t you? And a senior. So when you started, you must have been standing in line to rush with all the other freshman guys.”
Well, no, that hadn’t been him. His body, yes, but he would never have bothered with the show. As it was, he barely refrained from committing mass murder every week at his fraternity meetings. “That was then. This is now. I have other…interests taking up a lot of my time.”
“Such as?”
He grinned. The woman needed to learn to watch the growl in her voice if she didn’t wish the humans to find out about her. A lot of the newly arrived wolves had the same problem. They’d never lived anywhere except around other wolves before college.
“Are you okay? Something in your throat?”
“Oh.” Her face heated up again. “Maybe I have allergies.”
“Ah. I see.” He nodded and stared at the house she watched. Why was she worried? She was a werewolf. They took werewolves as their pledges. Boom. Done deal. Moving on.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
He cocked his head to the side. “What question?”
“What do you do if you’re not invested in Greek life anymore? I really need to know. In case I don’t get in. What will I do for the next four years?”
“I study.”
Her frown said she’d been hoping to hear a different answer.
Kieran had his goals, and nothing would get in his way. Studying fell into the required category. Maybe he didn’t have to make it so dour for her. “And I’ve gotten very involved with politics on campus. It’s good positioning for later in life.”
“If you say so.” She pointed at LCS. “My mother was a sister there. My grandmother, too.”
“So then what are you worried about?” And why did he care? This werewolf woman was taking way too much of his time and energy. Five hundred new freshmen every year and he fixated on this one? Why? Tons of women were beautiful. It wasn’t as though he could ever date her. A werewolf wouldn’t work for his ultimate plan.
“My mother didn’t leave on good terms.” She sucked in her breath. “But I guess it shouldn’t matter. I’m a legacy; they’ll take me.”
Her words resonated in his brain. He knew what his body had suffered during pledging. The hell his so-called brothers had put him through before he’d been initiated into his letters were stored in his mind. And those frat brothers had liked him, had asked him to be a brother. What would happen to this little werewolf if they didn’t wish for her? If they were forced to take her because of legacy rules?
He shook his head. “Well, I guess…good luck.”
“Ah…thanks.” She blinked rapidly, and he knew he’d been rude, but who gave a shit? Her feelings couldn’t matter. She was a werewolf and not appropriate.
He turned on his heel and marched toward his fraternity house. Taking the stairs two at a time, he arrived at his room in less than ten minutes. Having an advanced position in the House came with some perks. He didn’t have or need a roommate.
Lying down on the bed, he tried to breathe through his nose. He’d watched werewolves for thousands of years. The same way he’d watched vampires. Lion shifters. Phoenixes. Humans.
That’s what demons did. They watched. Until they surfaced on Earth and took a body. What they did with their time depended on the demon, and so help him…his shot would count for something. He’d be twice the demon his father was.
Before this body turned thirty, he would be more powerful than any other of his kind had ever achieved.
He closed his eyes. All of his planning meant he needed to stop thinking about her. So what if the day she’d arrived for freshman orientation, she’d stared up at him with the bluest eyes he’d ever seen while he signed her in? So fucking what? Who cared if she giggled for a second before she laughed?
He was a teacher’s assistant in one of her classes. Alexandra had a brain in her head to rival any of her fellow students, but she stood on the side of the road, staring up at a sorority house that, by all rights, should desire her. Yet he knew the so-called sisters might not. Not his problem.
Werewolves were not part of his plan. Particularly not some sorority wolf whose kind didn’t wish to have her around.
His phone rang, and he rolled over to stare at it. Human feelings were seeping through into his consciousness, and he couldn’t allow the leak to continue. His hair could grow, but his lack of sympathy for humanity had to stay neatly tucked away as someone else’s problem.
Right then, he had to answer his phone. “This is Kieran.”
“Son.” His father’s human voice travelled over the wireless network to reach him. He flinched at the sound.
“Why are you calling? Bad enough I have to take calls from this vessel’s human parents every week. Are you planning to be a nuisance, too?”
A snicker echoed over the connection. “One call in three months and I’m stalking you?”
Kieran rolled his eyes. “What do you want?” If his father didn’t come up with a reason for this call soon, Kieran would hang up. Screw the man. Demon. Whatever.
“A favor.”
Kieran sat up straighter. “From me?” He’d never been in a position to help anyone before, and he didn’t really think anything had changed. He lived as a co-ed. “What can I do for you? Chiefs of police don’t usually need something from pre-law students. Need me to look up a statute for the District of Columbia?”
“If you could put away the snark for a minute, I’ll share something I think you’ll find very interesting.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Go ahead.”
As he listened to his father’s voice, his headache got worse. Kieran. He slammed his hand down on his side table. Stay out of my head. You’re dead, got it? Humans don’t master the Demons. We master you.
And yet sadness flooded him, and he knew it couldn’t be his own emotion. He didn’t feel sadness. Ever. Some twenty-two year old kid couldn’t beat the son of one of the most powerful demons in hell.
***
“Honey.”
Alexandra O’Henry stared at her reflection in the mirror. Should she stay in her black skirt, or would it be better to meet the sisters for the first time wearing something funkier? What said “accept me as your sister even though my mom’s a whore” better, a skirt or floral pants?
“Honey, are you listening to me?”
No, at the moment, she wasn’t listening to her mother who blabbed on the phone. “Sure, Mom, talk to me.”
“You don’t have to do this. Plenty of wolves are lone wolves. You weren’t raised around all of this nonsense, and you don’t have to play all their games now. We were fine. We were happy, right? Why are you doing this to me?”
Alexandra sat down on the bed. This was hard, a lot tougher than she thought it would be. Lying to her mother for months and months about where she had decided to go to college was one thing. Coming clean about it the day before she left had been hellish. But the sheer pain in her mother’s tone every time they spoke had to be the most difficult of all.
Why couldn’t the woman understand this was something she had to do? She was a werewolf—one who had never known the sanctity of pack, who had never felt the embrace of that kind of family.
Lambda Chi Sigma would give her all of that and more. The werewolves who were sisters there moved on to become members of any pack they chose. They did not have to petition an alpha for admittance; the alphas came to them. She could pick a future, pick a life, pick a pack. And, finally, for the first time in her life, take a deep breath.
“Mom. This is just something I have to do.” She rubbed her nose. “Why can’t you understand? You made a choice. You—”
Her mother interrupted. “I chose you. I chose your father. We were lone wolves. It was okay. I had a pack. If I haven’t made this clear over the years, what you really need to understand is a pack isn’t the Holy Grail answer to everything. The concept, sure, it’s fantastic. The reality? It sucks. I’ve never seen one that hasn’t ended up in the dirt. Your father knew—”
This time it was her turn to interrupt her mother. “My father? He left us. He was such a lone wolf he couldn’t even stick by his own wife and child. I’m sorry you had such a horrible time. I really am. But this is my turn. I’m not spending one more second talking to you if you can’t at least promise to respect my decision to try.”
“Sweetheart,” her mother growled. “You have to understand what you are doing. You are putting them in a terrible position. You are a legacy. They have to take you. It’s in their bylaws. They have to respect them. At least pretend to. But I left my mate for another wolf. I disrespected my pack, and in their eyes, I disparaged the sorority name. They will take you, and they will make your life hell.”
She took a breath. “My economics class is really hard, but I’m doing well.”
“Oh, Alex.” Her mother’s breath hitched. “Sweetheart.”
She disconnected the phone and bit down on her cheek to stop the tears threatening from actually falling. It would be so easy to do what her mother said, so simple to fall back into the routine where her mother said, “Jump,” and she said, “How high?” For all intents and purposes, her mother had been Alex’s only pack for so long they’d fallen into an alpha-subordinate relationship.
But her mother wasn’t the pack she desired, and finally she could do something about it. She was nineteen years old. If humans could break away, so could she.
“Ah.” She lay back on the bed. None of the shit with her mother was new. It had been happening since she was old enough to realize other werewolves didn’t live as she did.
Her roommate was out at a rush event for a human house Alex had never heard of. She couldn’t even remember the names of the other houses. If she didn’t get Lambda, no others mattered.
Alex’s mind drifted. Seeing Kieran the night before had thrown her. He was right. There would be things to do on campus if she didn’t pledge a house. Her course load was nothing to sneeze at, and even when she found a pack, she needed to be able support herself and pay her dues. She needed good grades if she ever hoped to have an MBA.
Not to mention maybe she could do some of the things Kieran did just to spend time in his presence. If that made her pathetic, so be it. Some people Facebook and Instagram stalked. She took classes with hot TAs.
“No.” She sat back up. The plan had been Lambda. She had lied, schemed, and even sought out her father to pay her tuition at Tide so she could pledge Lambda. Nothing could get in her way.
Not even doubts put in her head by a hot senior who was a walking, talking hypocrite. He’d pledged a house and joined a frat. He could hardly tell her she shouldn’t do the same. Kieran was a human. He didn’t even fully understand the ramifications of what he’d said. With the other houses, it was about socialization and status; for her, it was about the makeup of the rest of her life.
Screw his dark hair, green eyes, and dimple. And why had he been so mean and run off? Guys just got in the way. They should all go take a long leap off a short dock.
The alarm on her phone beeped, and she got up. The skirt would have to do. It was time to go. It wouldn’t do to be late to her first rush, even at Lambda. Her mother was right. The sisters might be tough on her, but only until they got to know her. If there was one thing she’d always been able to do, it was to charm the pants off people. By the time she was finished, they would be thrilled to give her a bid, and ecstatic to make her a sister.
She set her back and walked with her head held high out of the door. It was a short distance between her freshman dorm room and the Greek Houses. The school didn’t let anyone rush or pledge a house until three months into the school year. It was supposed to give the new students time to decide if they wanted to be Greek or not without the pressure of the first few weeks weighing down on them.
The whole campus set up for the rush week as if it was a giant party. Every house on the hill—some of them built similarly to Lambda with Corinthian columns and fresh white paint— were classic statements of good taste and established history. Other houses seemed to go out of their way to show just how artsy they could be. Spray painted murals on one house and the actual American flag covering the front of another illustrated the feelings of the members who lived inside.
She didn’t spare them a glance. With eyes on her target, she reached Lambda House without shaking. That had to be a good sign. If not, she would pretend it was. This was her night, the first step on the path to the rest of her life. If she needed to see a sign, then, damn it, she would see one.
Several people were in front of her in line. Earlier, she’d turned in her rush forms. The sororities would all know her story. The basics would tell them she’d had a 4.0 in high school, and her favorite food was steak. They’d also know her mother was a legacy of Lambda, which meant Lambda would know, too. They would have looked up her family. They’d know her mother’s story, which saved her the problem of having to lie.
Alex would tell the truth; she’d be up front, and all would be well. A positive attitude went a long way, and given they were three weeks from the Full Moon, she wouldn’t feel the overwhelming urge to rip someone’s face apart if they pissed her off.
She smiled at the woman in front of her, sniffing the air when she did. Human. She’d never get into the Lambda.
The line continued to form behind her, and by the time the music started over the college loudspeakers to indicate the beginning of Rush Week, she had steeled her nerves. This wouldn’t get away from her. She was in charge of her own destiny.
One by one, they filed through the door to the clapping and smiling of the Lambda sisters. They chanted their sorority sound, and the whole thing deafened her ears. Every werewolf in the room must be in hell from the experience. But if they could smile, so could she.
Finally, they ushered the hopefuls into a main room. The walls were brightly colored with pictures of sisters, both current—she could see some familiar faces from around the room smiling from the walls—and alumnae. The bell-bottoms were a distinct give away along with paddles bearing the names of pledge classes and the written names of every sister who had ever pledged the house.
A smiling blonde woman stepped in front of her. She extended her hand. Alex caught the immediate scent of a werewolf and almost melted into a pool on the floor with the relief of being around another of her kind. Even knowing there was a house at school filled with werewolves, she hadn’t encountered many others since she’d gotten there. Yes, this was why she’d come; this was what she needed
“Hi,” her fellow blonde werewolf said as she shook hands. “I’m Mellee. “
“Hi.” It wasn’t hard for Alex to smile. She’d be lucky if she ever stopped. “I’m Alex, well Alexandra. I’m so happy to be here.”
Mellee laughed, a low sound. “Yes, well, Rush is exciting. I’m the president of the Lambda chapter at Tide University.”
“Oh, wow!” The actual president? Her first time in the house? Incredible.
Mellee leaned over, a smile still plastered on her face. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but if you force my hand in this, if you make me give you a spot in my house, I’ll make your life hell, she-bitch. Do you hear me? H-E-Double L. Hell. So at the end of today, you will march out of here and forget this house, forget me, forget you are any kind of a version of a werewolf. Live with the humans. Pretend. Because you’ll never be welcome here. Do you understand?”