“I just wanted a chance to talk to you and your brothers,” he said. “And apologize for the way things went last night.”
“Last night?” I asked, forgetting about the careful tone. I grabbed the guy’s throat, my eyes burning with the change I felt coming over them.
Professor Pervis grabbed my forearm with both hands, his eyes bugging as words poured from his mouth. “My associate—well, he’s really more like a benefactor. What I mean to say is, maybe he approached this in a more aggressive manner than was strictly necessary.”
“You think?” I snarled, shaking him. I could feel the muscles and tendons in his scrawny neck, and the burnt sugar smell swelled to fill my nostrils. My brothers were clamoring in my head, but I ignored them and tightened my fingers until Prof’s face went purple. “Who the fuck are you?” I asked. “And who’s your associate? Because if you know what he knew, you should also know to leave us the fuck alone.”
Suddenly, my head was filled with an eerie calmness, and a command washed through me.
Don’t kill.
Before I could release my grip, there was a quiet pop, and the man vanished in a puff of sugar-scented smoke. I spun around, the spark of light that had burst between my fingers when he disappeared making a ghost behind my eyelids with every blink.
My heart thundered in my chest as I cast my eyes around the little room. The professor was slumping against the wall, breathing hard and touching his throat, his eyes accusing as he glared at me. “I said I just wanted to talk,” he said. “You didn’t have to attack.”
“Tell that to your friend,” I said. Not holding back for once, I leapt the entire length of the room, crashing into the wall where he’d been. I stumbled back, my head throbbing from the collision. I spun around again, only to see the guy back in the chair where he’d started.
“I’m no threat,” he said, holding up both hands. “I won’t hurt you, even if you keep attacking. There’s no point in this little game, unless it amuses you.”
Before I could answer, the curtain was yanked back, and my brothers burst through. Donovan growled at the bouncer not to come back there, then closed the heavy velvet curtain in the bouncer’s face. Rick was already across the room, fisting a handful of the prof’s thinning hair.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” the guy blubbered, his voice high and terrified.
“You were threatening my brother,” Alarick growled, his voice low and deadly.
“I wasn’t, I swear,” the guy said, lifting both hands in a supplicating gesture. “I’m only here as a liaison.”
“For who?” Alarick growled. “Who sent you?”
“Mr. Wolf,” the man said. “Mr. Wolf sent me.”
“Who the fuck is that?”
The guy went still, his eyes moving between the three of us before he answered in a low voice. “Don’t you know? Mr. Wolf is your father.”
6
Alarick
A long silence met the little man’s words. At last, I spoke, my voice as hard as ice. “We don’t have a father.”
“For all his faults, he is your blood,” the man said, almost apologizing. When I stepped back from him, he scurried away, straightening his jacket and brushing at the sleeves. “I see now that I went about this the wrong way, and you’re on the defensive, but I only want to help.”
“We don’t need help,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew I would listen to what he had to say. Not for me. I didn’t need anything I didn’t have. But I couldn’t keep my brothers from finding whatever they perceived was missing from their lives. Just because I had all I needed didn’t mean I could be selfish and deny them the things I couldn’t give them.
“You may not need our help, but we need yours,” the guy said.
“Who is we?” I asked.
“Mr. Wolf and myself,” he said, offering a hand while keeping a watchful eye on me. “Herbert Underwood. It’s nice to meet you.”
I gave his hand the briefest squeeze, pulling back without shaking it when the intolerable buzzing Adolf had communicated came rippling up my arm, making my skin contract with a repulsive itch.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ve been told my touch is unpleasant for your kind.”
“Let’s take this outside,” I said, glancing at the curtain. The pulsing rhythm of the music would drown out our voices to human ears, but now that we’d met these two men, I didn’t trust my world anymore. If there were more of us, and more things other than us, I couldn’t trust that the music would cover what we had to say.
A minute later, we emerged from the back door of the club, marching Herbert Underwood in front of us like a sacrifice. “Where is he?” I growled, gripping the back of his neck.
“I’m here,” said a voice, materializing just as my internal radar became aware of another presence. I spun, holding Herbert in front of me.
Our father had appeared next to the door, grabbing Donovan and dragging him against him, holding him as a shield just as I held his accomplice.
“Let him go,” I barked. “Your fight is with me.”
“We had our fight last night,” said the thuggish bald man—our father. He held a hand around Donovan’s neck. My brother looked small next to the meaty, hulking form of our father, though I hadn’t known it was possible for any of us to look small until that moment.
“What do you want?” I asked, thrusting Herbert toward him. “Here’s your minion.”
“I want to take you home,” said our Dear Old Dad.
“About ten years too late,” I snapped, raising my fists and crouching in a fighting stance. “Now, if you want to settle this, let my brother go and fight me like a real man.”
Our father, Mr. Wolf—I would die before I called him Dad—sneered at me. “A real man? You can challenge my manhood when you’ve fathered three werewolves, buried your wife, and survived the near-extinction of your species.”
The knife of our loss twisted deeper into me. We’d lost our mother twelve years ago, when she and this guy ditched us. Knowing she was dead shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. I ground down that pain, putting it with the rest of the shit I didn’t think about.
“Let my brother go, and we’ll listen to your demands,” I said. “What do you want from us?”
“I told you,” Mr. Wolf said. “There are only a few of us left in the world. Supernatural wars, vampire plagues, human interference, and infertility have decimated our population. You can help bring back our people. That was your mother’s dream. She would have wanted that for you.”
“The difference is, I have no interest in saving anyone,” I said. “Or my shitty mother’s dream for us. She should have thought of that when she dumped us on the side of the road like strays.”
“Looks like you’ve done okay for yourselves,” Mr. Wolf said. “You certainly look like big, healthy boys.”
“You’re not doing a very good job selling this,” Adolf said. “The last time we saw you, we were toddlers. We don’t even remember you.”
If he expected our father to look upset by this, he shouldn’t have bothered. Mr. Wolf obviously hadn’t been too guilty about abandoning us to move on with his life. The guy stank of money.
“That was a necessity,” Mr. Wolf said. “I’m talking about your people here, though. Don’t you want to help them?”
“Why should we?” I asked. “They never helped us.”
“Yeah,” Donovan said, his soft voice edged with bitterness. “The only one of ‘our people’ we’ve met left us to the system twelve years ago. No one like us came for us. No one even told us what we were. We had to find out the hard way. And trust me, it was hard.”
“I’m here for you now,” Mr. Wolf said. “I hope I can make things right.”
“And save your species,” I growled.
“And see, we have no loyalty to you or whatever species you’re talking about,” Adolf said.
“You should,” Mr. Wolf said. “It’s your species.”
“Blood means nothing to us,” I
said.
“Wonder where we got that from,” Adolf added, crossing his thick arms and smirking at Mr. Wolf.
“I couldn’t come for you sooner,” Mr. Wolf said. “I had to ensure everything was ready before contacting you. For your own safety.”
“You didn’t want us… For our own safety?” Donovan asked, putting up no resistance to this man who was supposedly our father. The man whose fault it was that we were these monsters, these animals inside.
“In those times, the world was not safe for our kind,” Mr. Wolf said. “It’s still a dangerous place for you, but I couldn’t wait any longer before contacting you.”
“So, you didn’t have a change of heart and decide you wanted us,” Donovan said, sounding somehow disappointed. I hadn’t thought adults could disappoint us more than they already had, but I must have been wrong. Donovan, at least, still had it in him to believe some of what this asshole said to us.
“If I’d tried to keep you, you would have wound up dead, just like your mother,” Mr. Wolf said, his voice turning hard. “I gave you up because I knew your only chance at survival was blending in, living a normal life among humans. I always meant to come back for you.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice low. “I remember.”
That was the one thing I remembered about our parents. The promise he’d whispered when he sent us away. That it wouldn’t be long, and he’d come for us, take us home again. I hadn’t realized he meant twelve years. After only a couple years, I’d forced myself to accept that he was never coming back. For the next ten years, I’d lived for my brothers, doing everything to protect them and provide for them the best I could. When I couldn’t, when I failed them, and they were hurt by words and fists at home and at school, by parents and siblings and classmates, their pain had ripped into me two-fold. I felt every blow twice—once for them, and once for myself, for my own guilt and shame at failing them.
And it was his fault. He hadn’t stuck around to protect us, hadn’t felt that hurt.
“Let go of my brother, you coward,” I snarled, leaping at him. I slammed into them, and the three of us toppled to the cracked asphalt beside the Dumpster. Donovan rolled free, and I leapt to my feet, facing off with my father, who stood ready to fight me now, with no shield.
“I guess every father reaches this point sooner or later,” he said.
“You’re no father to me.”
I threw the first punch. It connected with his jaw, sending a searing pain shooting up my arm. Before I could recover from the shock of how much it hurt to land a punch to a werewolf, his fist connected. A wrecking ball couldn’t have hit harder, couldn’t have done more damage. Stars exploded behind my eyes, and the sound of a train went barreling through my brain as I struggled to keep my feet. I swung wildly, instinct alone guiding me to my target. My fist sank into his gut, and Mr. Wolf doubled over. For a second, no one moved. Then he dove forward, slamming the top of his head into my groin.
The pain of the hit brought me to my knees, the ache so intense I found myself heaving, fighting back waves of nausea. An iron fist connected with my skull again, and I toppled to the ground, gasping for breath and curled into the fetal position.
“You always fight that dirty, old man?” Adolf growled from somewhere far away.
Mr. Wolf snorted. “What a romantic notion,” he said. “All fighting is dirty. The sooner you learn that, the better. I guess being on your own, you haven’t learned much about wolves. It’s time that changed, don’t you think?”
“What do we get out of it?” Donovan asked.
“We can get you out of here,” Herbert said, standing a few paces off. “I run a school for…gifted students. I’m offering a way out.”
My brother hesitated before answering. “You consider what we have… What we are… A gift?”
“This is worse than I anticipated,” Mr. Wolf said.
“What did you expect?” Adolf asked. “That we’d remember stuff from when we were practically babies? Who did you think was going to teach us? Were we supposed to find out from the internet? Believe me, we tried.”
“Don’t worry,” Herbert said patting his tweed jacket pockets nervously. “We have a few others like you at the school. You’ll catch up in no time.”
I wanted to let my animal out, to let it tear him and father to shreds. But if my father could heal from what I’d done the night before, he was practically invincible. I had no illusions about my skill. He would kill me long before I killed him. And he wouldn’t look out for Adolf and Donovan the way I did. So, I dragged myself up, my nuts still feeling like he’d kicked them straight up into my intestines.
“So nice of you to join us,” Mr. Wolf said. “Now that your tantrum is over, and you’ve proved yourself, I hope you’ll be more rational about this decision.”
“Is it really a decision?” I asked. “Do we have a choice?”
“Of course,” Herbert said. “Enrollment at the school is very small and very exclusive, though. If I were you, I’d jump at the chance to attend.”
“We haven’t been in school for a while,” Adolf admitted. “Not since we’ve looked like this.”
“And I suppose stripping for money is more appealing,” Herbert said, the corners of his mouth turning down in distaste.
“We don’t need to be saved from our lives,” I said. “We chose this.”
“Now you can choose to do what’s best for your future and the future of your entire species,” Mr. Wolf said.
“That’s it?” Donovan asked. “You’re just going to leave us alone?”
“We trust you’ll make the right choice,” Herbert said, handing me a business card.
Dr. Herbert Underwood
Headmaster
Ravenwood Academy for the Exceptionally Gifted
“You have until tomorrow evening at six to make a decision,” Mr. Wolf said. “We have to catch a flight back then.”
“The school doesn’t run itself,” Herbert said.
“We don’t need this,” I said, handing back the card. “If it’s a choice, the answer is no.”
“Keep it,” Herbert said, holding up both hands. “I have a feeling you’ll change your mind after discussing it amongst yourselves.”
“And why would we do that?” I asked.
“For one thing, you must be curious about others like you,” Mr. Wolf said. “You must want to know if you’ll ever find a mate.”
I could feel Donovan perk up through our connection, and I silently cursed him. What did he need a girl for? We had plenty to deal with before adding complications like that.
The two men started to walk away, and I could sense my brothers both holding back, wanting to show solidarity even though their interest was piqued.
“One more thing,” Mr. Wolf said, turning back when he reached the corner of the building. “The school has an…enriched curriculum. In addition to learning what everyone else in the country learns, you’ll be able to pursue your own passions in addition to being trained for combat by the most skilled masters in the world. Maybe next time you hit me, you’ll only have to do it once.”
7
Donovan
“What is this place?” I asked, glancing around at the plush leather living room furniture in the cabin. Real curtains hung over rows of small, pill-shaped windows, and a long, sleek oak conference table was set up with ergonomic chairs toward the back of the plane. When I’d boarded, I’d expected what I’d seen in movies—rows of seats.
“It’s my plane,” our father said. “The Sea Wolf.”
“Shouldn’t it be the Air Wolf?” Alarick said with a smirk.
“You know, you just might be right,” Mr. Wolf said, gesturing for us to make ourselves at home in his plane that looked like a house on the inside. I wasn’t sure what to think of our father yet. He looked like a mob boss on steroids, but he was trying to save a species, and that didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Maybe we’d been wrong about having to live with this second creature inside us. Whe
re we were going, it sounded like it was treated as a gift, as our instincts had told us when we first found our wolves. Humans had taught us to hide the beast, to be ashamed of it, to doubt ourselves.
If we found others like us, they could teach us how to be good wolves. We didn’t have to hurt people just because we were big and filled with deadly predators.
“Will anyone else be joining us, Mr. Wolf?” asked a girl, appearing from the back of the plane. She looked to be in her early twenties, with a figure straight from a porno and legs for freaking days. She smiled up at our dad like he was a king.
“This is all, Cardi,” Mr. Wolf said. “Go ahead and get ready for takeoff.”
“Pick your jaw up off the floor,” Adolf whispered, elbowing me.
“Is that his girlfriend?” I asked, trying to stop gaping.
“And human,” Alarick muttered, taking a seat in one of the leather armchairs. Adolf and I followed suit. Alarick was still suspicious of our dad, but he’d relented sooner than I anticipated. Maybe he was tired of hiding, too.
“Cardi is human,” Mr. Wolf confirmed, taking a seat in one of the recliners. “But not my girlfriend. She’s a one-woman courtesy committee. She’s here to serve us if you need anything on the flight.” He smirked at me like he knew exactly what I’d been thinking. “Anything at all.”
Was this dude offering me his personal prostitute? I wasn’t sure what to think of that. On the one hand, I was a red-blooded fifteen-year-old boy with a body that even Cardi would appreciate. On the other, she was human, and I had no idea how to do it with a girl who was a physical match, let alone a human. And then there was the fact that my father had almost definitely been there, done that.
I cleared my throat. “Cool,” I said, but my voice cracked, making me sound anything but.
Adolf was cracking up beside me, so I punched his shoulder. Our father watched our exchange with calculating eyes, but I saw approval there, too. He liked how we’d grown up—no thanks to him.
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