––––––––
Rusty wrapped a towel around his hips—for the sake of Sam and Mike’s sensibilities, not his parents. Two showers were running inside, and Rusty knew that Sam and Mike would be scrubbing off all the delicious happy-pack-sex smell they’d worked up in the last hour.
Well, they could always make more.
In the meantime his parents were coming around the house to the backyard. He could hear and smell their amusement well before he saw their faces. His dad—dressed perfectly unobjectionably to humans, in khakis and a polo shirt—laughed out loud at the sight of the towel around Rusty’s hips. Rusty was surprised to find himself laughing effortlessly along, feeling a warm and uncomplicated pleased my alpha sensation he hadn’t experienced since he was too young to really know he was an alpha himself.
His dad’s laugh fell away into a warm smile as Rusty walked right up for a hug, ducking his head to let his dad grip the nape of his neck and scent him as he was folded in close.
“If it wasn’t worth it for watching your pack rule you,” his dad murmured, “it’d be worth it for seeing you finally put your hackles down. Good to see you, boy.”
“You too, Dad,” Rusty muttered, marveling at how easy it was to take his place in the pack hierarchy now that he had a pack of his own, a position no one could take from him.
“Two bitten wolves at once, though,” his dad said, letting Rusty go enough to look him in the eye. “Your pack’s gonna be more human than wolf for a long while.”
Rusty shrugged and sidestepped to hug his mother, who was wearing clothes as human as his father’s, though hers were soft and flowing. It was a little disconcerting to recognize an echo of Sam’s alpha’s-mate heart-of-the-pack scent in hers, but her mother-scent was as soothing as it had ever been.
“They’re wolf enough to be mine,” Rusty said when he straightened up. “The rest is just details.”
Both his parents laughed at that.
“Oh, Rusya,” his mother said, cupping her hands around his cheeks and shaking him gently. “You do have a way of making life interesting for yourself.”
***
When Sam was sure he smelled only like himself and the normal layered-on scent of Rusty and Mike and pack—but not like fresh sex—he ventured back downstairs to meet Rusty’s parents. He was barefoot, but the jeans and t-shirt he’d pulled on were the most clothes he’d worn since Rusty bit him, and he was pretty sure this wasn’t going to be a normal meeting-the-parents thing anyway.
Whatever normal was, for meeting your alpha werewolf mate’s parents. Sam hadn’t even done that kind of thing with casual dating, so the most he had to go on was stuff he’d seen on TV. It didn’t really apply.
He followed the sounds of werewolves and low-voiced conversation to one of his favorite areas of the house, the little half-sunken space around the fireplace, open to the rest of the main area but satisfyingly den-like. Mike was already there, but Mike was like Rusty and habitually took no more than five minutes in the shower. Sam wasn’t going to feel bad about taking a little longer.
Rusty was talking as Sam came down the stairs. “We finally tracked down the pack he came from—Grauman, not Schwartz. He was bitten as an adult. They hadn’t cast him out, but only because he ran off before things got that far. They’d warned the packs nearby, but nobody got the word out quite this far.”
Rusty raised his arm as Sam came into view—he and Mike were sitting on the couch together, Rusty’s parents on a loveseat perpendicular to it. They looked like perfectly ordinary people—he’d been half-expecting them to share Rusty’s military style and bearing, but they wouldn’t have looked out of place at one of the neighborhood dinner parties Sam was occasionally invited to. They were both old enough to ping a sense of real grownups; Rusty’s dad was going gray, his mom had brown-blonde hair in a smooth chin-length cut. They both had brown eyes, bearing no resemblance to Rusty's icy blue. They were both smiling at him.
Sam made a beeline for his alpha, but Rusty’s mom stood up before he got there, holding out a hand to stop him. Sam froze in uncertainty.
“Let me just get your scent first, honey,” Rusty’s mom said.
Sam supposed that that would take the place of being actually introduced, for werewolves. Sam nodded and stood still, looking toward Rusty to see if he was supposed to do anything in particular. Rusty tilted his head to the side, and Sam echoed the motion as Rusty’s mom walked up.
Somehow it was still a surprise to be hugged as she touched her cheek to his, breathing in his scent. Sam drew a startled breath and was flooded with her scent in turn—familiar somehow, though he’d never smelled it before and her scent wasn’t blood-similar to Rusty’s, since he was adopted. But there was still something about the scent of her that told him she was pack, in some less-immediate sense than Rusty and Mike were.
And more than that there was the warm-safe-home smell of her. Mother, Sam recognized, closing his arms around her and cuddling in as her hand came up to cup the back of his head.
Sam remembered his own mom, dimly, as a whirl of chaos and frantic affection. You know I love you, Sammy, I love you more than anyone—and then she was gone, and then back, and then gone again. This mother-scent was something different, safe and sound and strong. She was the heart of her pack, if in an entirely different way than Sam was the heart of his—and she was mother to all of their pack, through Rusty.
“Can I have him back, Mom?”
Sam picked his head up, feeling dazed like he’d been dreaming. Rusty stood just out of arm’s reach, one hand extended toward them. Sam looked at Mom and found her smiling fondly at him.
“Well, it wouldn’t do for me to keep him,” she said, brushing Sam’s hair back. “But welcome to the family, Sam, honey. I’m so glad you’re here.”
Sam smiled back, vaguely aware that this shouldn’t feel so easy and natural even as he said, “Thanks, Mom.”
Rusty made an amused little noise and put his hands on Sam, tugging him away from Mom and over to the couch to sit tucked against Rusty’s side. Mom went back to sit with—Dad, Sam recognized, even from across the room. Senior alpha, pack-father. His scent wasn’t only like Rusty’s in being pack-related, but in the fact that they were both alphas—both fully adult alphas, both heads of their own packs, not like Mike, who was an alpha still coming into his strength and content to be junior for now.
“Good to meet you, Sam,” Dad said warmly, but didn’t come closer.
That seemed right. Sam and Rusty’s bond was too new; their pack was too new. Another alpha, even their pack’s senior alpha, shouldn’t be scenting Sam just yet.
Sam nodded against Rusty’s chest, rubbing his cheek against warm bare skin to get properly scented again as he said, “You too, Dad.”
“Am I the only one who thinks Sam is kind of high right now?” Mike asked.
Sam blinked across Rusty at Mike, who looked and smelled as fond as everyone else, but a little concerned. Sam reached out to touch him reassuringly.
“The pack alpha’s mate has a soothing effect on their pack,” Mom explained. “It’s especially pronounced in omegas, because they usually have the most soothing to do in a pack full of bitten wolves, but mothers do it too—and omegas are just as susceptible as they are good at it.”
“And it’s been a while since Sam had a hug from his mom,” Rusty murmured in Sam’s ear, low enough that although everyone in the room could hear it perfectly well, they wouldn’t reply to it directly. Sam cuddled contentedly against Rusty’s side.
“Where did you grow up, Sam?” Mom asked. “Rusty told us you were wolf-born, but you don’t have the scent of any of the packs I know, and I’m at least passingly familiar with most packs in California and a good stretch of the west.”
Not related, then, Sam thought. He hadn’t been really worried about it—Rusty would have noticed if they were closely related, and they wouldn’t have reacted to each other like they did when they met—but knowing that Rusty was adopted and Sam’s father was probably a werewolf, it had been at the back of his mind.
“Maryland,” Sam said. “Kind of... all over Montgomery County. My parents—” he stumbled over the word, which seemed wrong to speak to Mom and Dad, but they both nodded encouragingly. “My adoptive parents are in Silver Spring. I go back there a couple of times a year.”
“I’ll see who I can get in touch with out that way,” Mom said. “When you’re ready to visit again, you’ll want to know who the local packs are—and some of them might know who you are.”
Sam shook his head and breathed in the scent of his alpha, the scent of his pack all gathered here together. “They might know who my father is. I already know who I am.”
***
Mike was reassured to see that Sam shook off the effects of hugging Rusty’s mom as Rusty continued his debrief to his parents. It didn’t take long before Sam pulled out his laptop and started talking shop. It had become pretty rapidly obvious to Mike that, teasing aside, Rusty’s folks hadn’t just shown up to vet him and Sam like Rusty had married both of them in Vegas last week.
Rusty’s parents represented the senior pack with authority over their fledgling pack; the Jamisons belonged to a well-established family constellation of packs down in San Diego. The more Rusty talked about their situation with the local Bay Area packs, the more it became obvious that in his and his parents’ estimation, have not incurred any serious vendettas was a pretty good track record for a week-old pack with no local standing. To be truly secure, they needed backing, and Rusty’s parents were here to supply it.
It was also obvious that this was one of those things Rusty had told him and Sam werewolves couldn’t lie about, because werewolves didn’t trust to words for matters of pack standing. The only way for Rusty’s parents to demonstrate that they supported Rusty’s new pack was to actually show up and be present, mingling their scents with Rusty and Mike and Sam’s.
Which meant this wasn’t going to be a short visit.
Rusty’s parents volunteered to stay out in the guest house and leave the main house to the new pack for the night, which suited all of them just fine. Other than that first night, Mike had been staying in the main house anyway, sleeping in the furthest bedroom from Sam and Rusty’s so the sex noises—and smells—were at least slightly muffled.
Tonight was different, though. Mike didn’t want to let Sam or Rusty out of his sight. It was nothing like the way he hadn’t been able to walk away from the kitchen that morning—this was the edgy feeling of being in a combat zone, if not actually under fire.
“It’s having another alpha in the house,” Rusty explained, when it became obvious that neither he nor Sam wanted to let Mike out of their sight either. “A senior alpha. As long as you’ve been a wolf the buck stopped with me, and now there’s somebody around who can make me bend my neck. That’s why they’re not staying in the house—it’s why Dad won’t touch Sam. It’s fine, just means we sleep in one place while they’re here. We need to break in the pack bed anyway.”
There was a bedroom suite on the first floor, private and set apart by the logic of human design. Mike would have used it all the time, but it was almost directly beneath Rusty and Sam’s room, and one of the worst spots in the house for being able to hear absolutely everything they were doing. Rusty had declared it perfect for pack nights—when Sam’s heat rolled around, they wouldn’t spend it in Rusty and Sam’s bed, which was only for the two of them. There had to be somewhere else to go, a spot that belonged to the pack in common.
The pack bedroom had a king-sized bed under wide windows that looked out over the pool—and, across the pool, at the guest house. Mike couldn’t help tracking the newly-familiar heartbeats and the faint sounds of their voices, though he knew better than to try to hear what they were saying. Scent was pretty well blocked by the walls and windows in between them, so the awareness didn’t raise his hackles like it had when he had a noseful of senior alpha.
They bedded down with Sam in the middle, his back against Rusty’s chest and one of Rusty’s arms firmly around him. Mike curled in close, facing Sam, and Sam leaned in to meet him. He caught Mike’s mouth in a sweet, soft kiss good night.
It was about as far as it could be from the way Sam had kissed him earlier that day, out in the pool. Sam’s scent was all drowsy warmth, pack-soothing, and his lips brushed Mike’s almost chastely. Mike scooted closer, sandwiching the omega firmly between his body and Rusty’s, and Sam made a small contented noise and closed his eyes, his steady, contented heartbeat already sinking toward sleep.
Mike looked across him to Rusty, who looked back with a wry half-smile.
“Breaking in the pack bed, huh?” Mike murmured. He wouldn’t have wanted to do much more than this—not while he could still hear the Jamisons talking in the guest house, and knew they could hear what was happening in this room just as well—but he also knew it was the first time Sam hadn’t been fucked to sleep since he was bitten.
Rusty shrugged one shoulder and reached across Sam’s body to lay his hand on Mike’s side, covering the scar of his bite. “Omega’s job to bring the pack together. If Sam wants us to sleep, I guess tonight we need to sleep.”
***
Rusty woke up at sunrise with his hard-on pressed against a sleepy, contented werewolf. That was as it should be, but the sound of Sam’s heartbeat—and his mother’s, and the scent of breakfast preparations underway—were all emanating from the kitchen. Rusty opened his eyes to find Mike looking back, drowsily amused.
“Watch where you’re pointing that thing, Alpha,” Mike muttered, his voice low and raspy.
Rusty laughed and pushed, rolling Mike onto his back and grinding down into him. Mike shoved enough to show he wasn’t going easily, but he didn’t turn it into a full-on tussle. Rusty pushed a little further, catching his mouth in a kiss.
Mike let Rusty’s lips part his, and met the touch of Rusty’s tongue without hesitation. It felt good to kiss him—it would feel good to do more—but it was just happy nerve endings, nothing more than that. Mike would do what Rusty wanted without making a fuss, if this was what Rusty wanted, but it wasn’t in his alpha nature to really yield.
Rusty pulled back from the kiss to see Mike looking up at him, still amused and barely more flustered than he’d been when Rusty first woke up. Rusty rubbed against him again, just because he could, and gave him a quick, affectionate play-bite, closing his teeth briefly on Mike’s jaw. Mike let Rusty push his head back, and Rusty pushed back, satisfied. “Come on, breakfast.”
“Aye aye, Alpha,” Mike muttered.
Rusty was grinning as he led the way to the kitchen.
Sam was just where Rusty had expected to find him, perched on a stool at the kitchen counter, meticulously chopping salsa ingredients. There was a tablet propped up in front of him, displaying detailed instructions and illustrative photos.
Rusty walked up behind Sam and plastered himself against Sam’s back, wrapping his arms around Sam’s waist and hooking his chin over Sam’s shoulder. “Missed you when we woke up, sweetheart.”
Sam leaned back into him, turning his head for a brief and faintly apologetic kiss. “I woke up at moonrise and just—needed to do something. Mom was up too, so we thought we’d do breakfast. Apparently I need to learn to cook.”
Rusty’s grip on Sam tightened involuntarily, and he looked past Sam to his mother, who had turned away from the stove to give Rusty a significant look.
Moonrise had been an hour ago, an hour before dawn—tomorrow was the empty moon, and tonight would be the waning night of the moonless dark. Rusty had meant to sit Mike and Sam down to explain it to them, but he’d been distracted—let himself be distracted. The day and night had slipped away while Rusty let himself think it was only the nearness of his parents that was drawing the pack together.
Not his most exemplary moment as alpha of his own pack.
“Mike, take that over for Mom,” Rusty said. “If you could...”
“It’s almost ready anyway, just don’t let anything burn,” his mom said, offering the spatula to Mike, who had been a perfectly competent cook even before he added a wolf’s senses and reflexes to his skillset.
His mom headed out to the guest house—Rusty could hear his father speaking on the phone, but that was a whole other set of concerns. He owed this to his pack first.
“Today is the last day before the empty moon,” Rusty explained briskly, when Sam and Mike both stared at him. “New moon, humans call it. Tomorrow the moon will rise and set with the sun. From its setting tonight until its rising day after tomorrow, the first day of the waxing moon, it will be lost to us. It affects every wolf and every pack, and we can’t know exactly how it will affect each of you and all of us until it’s happening.”
“Any hints?” Mike asked.
Sam had gone very still—not scared, exactly, but he looked like he was thinking furiously, probably analyzing his own behavior and feelings to try to guess.
“Opposite of full moons, more or less,” Rusty said. “Full moons rile us up—packs who don’t have an omega’s heat to keep them in one place spend the moon running, hunting. Empty moon usually keeps packs at home, looking to tend their own.”
“Cooking, huh,” Sam said, with a hint of humor.
Rusty kissed his ear apologetically. “You don’t have to learn to cook unless you want to, baby, you do plenty. But whatever your instincts tell you for the next couple of days, we’ll roll with it. This is your first time, it might be pretty intense.”
Sam nodded, relaxing and leaning back into Rusty’s arms. “Want you close. Both of you.”
Rusty grimaced. “We will be, once the moon’s down. Today I have to go with Dad, make the rounds of the local packs. Day before the empty moon is best for meeting with other packs—everyone wants to make peace and go home.”
Sam leaned harder into him, not exactly protesting, not begging him to stay—just letting him feel that Sam needed him to bear that weight.
“Breakfast first, though,” Rusty murmured, giving Sam another kiss.
***
“I thought that went well.”
Rusty looked up at his dad’s mild remark, breathing in the politely oblique scent of concern behind it—not concern for the day’s round of (mostly metaphorical) butt-sniffing and teeth-baring. His dad was reacting now to the fact that Rusty was hunched in the passenger seat, scowling at his phone.
“It did go well,” Rusty agreed.
It might have been simpler if it hadn’t gone well, but they’d been accepted on neutral-to-friendly terms by every pack they’d met with. Sam’s house in Tiburon was in what had previously been neutral territory, since Muir Woods and the approaches to it were strictly no-pack’s-land, kept available as a full moon retreat for all. There had been a little grumbling about encroaching so close to the common woods, but no one was inclined to make a big deal of it, and Rusty hadn’t pressed for more than the bare minimum of territorial claim. They would hold the Tiburon Peninsula south of Trestle Glen, keeping well back from the 101.
Which meant Rusty had an officially established pack and official territory to hold. He also had an empty moon coming when the waning moon set, driving him to hole up safely with his pack and look after them.
And Nick had just sent him a fucking nonsense text about coffee cake, six hours after Rusty had texted him about visiting the neighbors.
Rusty turned his phone in his hands again, trying not to think about it. But his pack was secure, after all—Sam was his as sure as the ocean was salt, and Mike was content with his place in the pack for the time being. Both Mike and Sam had, in their own ways, been experts in self-control long before they’d been bitten; their wolves would get the better of them sometimes in the waxing moon days to come, but they weren’t going to get out of hand.
And meanwhile something was wrong with Nick, who—if he wasn’t pack he should be. Rusty’s wolf was scrabbling at the inside of his mind, desperate to go and find him.
His father was still waiting for an answer, the scent of patient, implacable expectation building up in the space between them despite the open car windows.
Rusty gave up on keeping silent and tilted his phone. “Nick Bellici.”
His father nodded, unsurprised. “You know I was kind of expecting you to go straight to him as soon as you were out of the Marine Corps.”
Rusty grimaced, feeling a twist of familiar guilt. He could have gone weeks ago—but weeks ago Nick’s text messages hadn’t sounded so weird, and...
“We were never...” Rusty trailed off.
He and Nick were, or had been, close friends—best friends, although Rusty had always been aware of the secret he was keeping from Nick. He’d gone on keeping it when Nick was hurt, when a bite from Rusty might have helped him heal. He’d kept it after he finally came back stateside and visited Nick in the hospital, when Nick told him he was getting out of the Corps as soon as the hospital discharged him. And for weeks after Rusty was out of the Corps himself, he’d stayed in California and away from Nick.
“You always told me, founding a pack starts with a mate,” Rusty said finally. “Nick was never going to be that, but he’s not my brother, either. I wasn’t going to...”
Rusty hesitated to put it into words, but his father snorted knowingly, and Rusty didn’t have to explain. “You weren’t going to bring him into my pack, or ask me to bite him.”
A bite from Rusty’s father would have made Nick his brother, which would have made something sickening of the times he and Nick had helped each other out on lonely nights. And even more, Rusty wouldn’t have asked even a much smaller favor of his father, while he was still a subordinate in his father’s pack. He hadn’t even realized how much he was itching to be truly free with his own pack until he was.
“It’s true there isn’t an omega bone in Nick’s body,” his father allowed. They’d met once or twice, while Rusty and Nick were stationed at Oceanside, only an hour’s drive from San Diego. “And I can see how happy you are with Sam. The two of you are going to make a good strong pack.”
Rusty nodded, hearing and smelling enough caution from his father not to take too much encouragement from the words.
“As long as you don’t get eaten alive or driven out by the established packs you’ve set down in the middle of,” his father went on firmly. “And I gotta tell you, son, you’re walking a real fine line already.”
Rusty scowled, trying not to feel fifteen years old. “It went well.”
“It went well for your pack of three, victims of a rogue alpha, with me at your shoulder. It’s not gonna look quite the same if you don’t even get your pack through a moon before you add another fresh-bitten wolf who just happens to be a Recon Marine to your pack. You’re a professional of violence on a scale that a werewolf pack, even a pack-of-packs, just can’t muster. So is Mike, and Nick’s another. You can tell everybody you meet he’s your good old best friend and you’re worried about him, but it’s not gonna stop them from knowing that the four of you together—with Sam’s money, with the amount of gear Mike’s got for his security business, with the training the three of you have—could upset the balance of power in this valley just by thinking hard about it.”
Rusty stared out the window, watching the terrain. When they crossed into his newly-claimed territory, he said, “Nick is pack, and something is wrong. I can’t leave him alone out there.”
His father sighed. “I know, Rus. Like your mother said, you do have a way of making life interesting for yourself. Just as long as you know what you’re stepping in.”
***