Dutifully, Liam and Elijah laughed.
“Come on. Crawl out of there.”
Gregory’s command was barely enough to send the weakest wolf scurrying to obey him. Nose emerged from the cabin door Becca had been about to open, vomit staining his fur. He pressed past us, swaying as he made his way toward the stronger werewolf. I stepped between him and Becca. At this moment, the youngster was no more than a puppet on a string.
But Gregory didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to harm my cousin. Instead, he continued talking while turning in a circle so his voice invaded all the cabins. “Come out and choose me as your alpha. Then I’ll dole out the antidote.”
He raised his hand high. A glass bottle glinted in the sunlight.
I could shift to wolf form and grab it...but to do so I’d have to leave Becca’s side. Would she be safe if I shoved her into Nose’s cabin and locked the door behind her? Or would she come right back out and dive into the battle I intended to start?
While I debated, Tattoo Kid made my decision for me. I’d been wrong. His cabin didn’t smell of vomit. Instead, it had a four-legged werewolf standing on its roof.
Tattoo Kid had no cousin to protect, and no compunction against killing either. So he didn’t warn or posture. Gave no request for explanation or time in which to beg.
Instead, he fell from above and bowled his opponents over while they were still gloating. His teeth were at the assholes’ throats one after another. Chomp, chomp, chomp.
Gregory, Liam, and Elijah were dead before they hit the ground.
Chapter 10
“I don’t want to be an alpha. That wasn’t my plan.”
This time, Tattoo Kid and I were the ones sitting on the porch digging our feet into the dust at the edge of the driveway. We’d doled out the antidote and seen immediate improvement in the poisoned shifters. Becca was treating the recuperating campers with cool washcloths on their foreheads and other useless shit that nonetheless made them feel loved.
Which meant it was time to do my job and come up with a similar placebo for Tattoo Kid’s internal crisis. “You came here to join a pack,” I countered. “Now you have one.”
Okay, so that was less of a sugar pill and more like tossing vinegar into his eyes. Nonetheless, Tattoo Kid accepted my answer like a man.
“Yeah.” We sat in silence for several long minutes. Then, out of nowhere, the story he’d hugged to his chest for the last month came tumbling out.
“I was a wildling,” he said, starting with what I’d guessed already. A wildling was a werewolf born in lupine form whose parents left him in the woods to die. Sometimes, against all odds, they survived until they were old enough to shift into human form.
“But I wasn’t alone,” Tattoo Kid continued. “An old man found me, raised me as his pet. He was a human hermit, lived off in the woods with just me and his garden. He hunted if he wanted meat. Then, when he got sick, I brought home deer and squirrels to strengthen him up.”
I hummed a lupine sound of acknowledgement. Tattoo Kid smiled. “He called me Prince.”
The reason Prince had never offered his name before was obvious. He didn’t want to sully the memory of a connection as simple as it was profound.
The rest of the story turned into a tearjerker. The man was old, ailing. Tattoo Kid—Prince—shifted to human form in time to bury his only pack mate. Over the course of the next year, he taught himself to read using books in the hermit’s cabin. Gradually, he came to understand the existence of the larger world.
The cash squirreled away in coffee cans was initially used for fire-starting. Eventually, though, Prince learned about money and about Death Camp.
“So you didn’t rob a bank.”
“I told you that.” Prince’s eyes, when they met mine, were so naive that I worried for a moment he’d never make it as alpha.
Then he grinned, shrugged, let the naivety fall away. “Yeah, I might have let you believe otherwise. Good for the image.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” It was the only thing worth saying.
“It was a long time ago.”
Oh, to be so young that a few years was considered a long time.
I shook my head, then returned us to the current point. “You needed that old hermit the same way your pack mates need you now. It’s time to step up to the plate and help them grow together.”
“But I’m not ready to take on that responsibility.”
The deer-in-the-headlights look was what clinched it for me. “That, right there, is what proves you’re alpha material. If you don’t want the role, then you’re perfect for the job.”
Chapter 11
We gathered in the cafeteria, the space large and echoing with only five Death Campers scattered around the tables. 38% survival rate. I’d have to hope next year raised my average back up.
“Congratulations,” I told the assembled campers. “I’ve filed your paperwork and you are officially a pack, sanctioned and protected for the first year under shifter law. If you need me, you can come back here in eleven months and ask for assistance. But, instead, I recommend you take your sugar momma and get the heck out of Dodge.”
“Sugar momma?” Becca was the first one to pick up on my altered patter. Of course she was. She’d heard me say the same words—minus those two—for the last ten years.
“Yeah.” I let my eyes smile even though my mouth remained grim. “You’re fired. Go back to the human world if you want to. But I think you have pack mates who need you—and all that hoarded cash—much more.”
Because Becca took home half the haul each year, but she never spent it. She just squirreled it away, waiting for her pack to materialize.
A pack that I’d created for her. Better late than never. Now she wouldn’t have to draw any more sad pictures in the dust.
True to form, Nose and Matthew pressed up against her in immediate acceptance. Oliver and Aiden glanced at each other then nodded their heads in assent.
And their alpha? Tattoo Kid looked relieved, as if I’d lifted half the weight off his shoulders. Little did he know my bossy cousin would remove more like two-thirds.
Which left Becca as the only one needing to be convinced of the new game plan. I expected eye daggers. Literal punches maybe. But, instead, her bottom lip quivered. Tears welled up at the corners of her eyes.
“Don’t hate me, Becca.”
“I don’t hate you, you idiot.” She took a step forward and I braced myself. She had a mean right hook.
Instead, she threw her arms around my neck and squeezed.
I bent my knees so our bodies fit together better. She was so small and human. Could she survive in a werewolf pack?
“Don’t second guess yourself.” Becca released me as fast as she’d turned limpet. “I should have figured something like this was coming. You’re never cruel except when you know it will help.”
She was right—my combined strength and weakness. Expert manipulator. Time to finish what I’d begun.
“You are my pack no longer.” The tethers twining out of me and into the nearby werewolves splintered. My stomach turned over. “You now belong to Prince.”
The aforementioned shifter’s tattoos glowed as the connections I’d held in an iron fist wove themselves more artfully around him. I’d taken the pack by brute force. He was granted the honor willingly.
Their alpha. Their leader. Their mentor.
Prince was wise in ways his pack needed. Even I had grown during the few short weeks we’d spent in Death Camp together.
Because now I could admit that the packless hole in my stomach needed filling. And even though permanent bonds to other werewolves were beyond me at the moment, attaching myself to a human clearly was not.
Becca was needed elsewhere. But a simple relationship of pet to master like the one Prince had indulged in? That sounded like something I could handle here and now.
And in eleven months, maybe I’d be able to follow Becca’s advice and turn Death Camp into somethin
g different. A recruiting ground to form my own family? A way of creating a different sort of pack?
I shivered, flinching away from that possibility. I wasn’t ready for it...not today or tomorrow.
But maybe I would be in eleven months.
Prince, on the other hand, was ready now. He jerked his chin upwards, the only farewell I merited. Then he turned away to face his new pack members. “Grab your stuff, Sugar Momma. We’ve got a territory to find.”
Unfortunately, my cousin never could take orders, and today was no exception. Her hand lifted as if she planned to grab me by the scruff of my neck and force her dream into a reality.
She’d wanted me to be part of her future. But could she really turn down perfection when the scenario she’d hoped for was handed to her on a silver platter?
Becca might not have a mate, but she’d be pack mother to five needy shifters. She’d have a den of her own. Plenty of wolves playing in the yard.
“Are you sure, Luke?”
“I’m certain. When happiness comes knocking, you have to seize it.”
She raised her eyebrows. Oh yeah. She wasn’t the only one that advice applied to.
“Live by that,” my cousin demanded. “Promise me.”
“I promise, Becca.”
Then, finally, my cousin turned away. My last contact with my birth family. The only one I’d loved after my brother perished.
My vision was watery as the last graduating class of Death Campers—all six of them—filed out of the cafeteria and out of my life.
WANT TO SEE MORE OF Luke? He’ll reappear as a major secondary character in an as-yet-unnamed novel coming out in December 2019. To ensure you hear about my buck-off sale during launch week, please sign up for my email list here.
In contrast, Prince doesn’t have a story of his own. But the flash fiction piece that follows mirrors what he must have experienced during his early life.
Bloodling Song
The ocean sipped against the sand, wet my paws and threatened to drag me down into the muck. This close to the breakers, the roar was endless, a white noise that lulled me into a muscle-loosening sense of quiet.
I’d come here seeking an easy dinner—preferably a jellyfish, jiggly and salt-infused as I gulped it down my gullet. Instead, I was drawn to the deep bass undertone of the ocean. Padding closer, I raised my chin and howled out longing for something I couldn’t quite put my toenail on.
Wind whistled counterpoint—that much was audible once I turned my head to ease the tickling of long hairs inside the pockets of my ears. And as I did so, something else rose out of the background murmur. Another howl emerging from the west, the tones higher pitched than any I’d heard previously and so much better defined.
Instinctively, I crept dunes-ward. Left the calming vibration of waves for the wind-swept hills that separated beach from scrub thicket. My neck swiveled as I scanned for one of my pack mates. Or possibly a stray canine who had newly swum the strait that separated our secluded island from others to the north and south.
Nothing.
Sand stung my eyes and nostrils, so I slitted my lids and paced forward blindly. Scratched clawed feet into unruly hillside that worked against me as I scrambled upwards, sending me not up but rather sliding down.
“Oh.” Soft exhalation ended the melody, the loss so intense it pulled a whine from my lips. Why had the howler ceasing singing? Had my approach come across as a threat?
I lowered my body closer to the earth despite cactus spines scraping my belly. With my actions, I promised I hadn’t come to harm, only to hear. Only when I was certain the singer understood me did I blink open my eyes and peer up.
The alien was strangely vertical, balancing precariously on two massive hind feet. Long waves of fur flowed off its head and trailed behind it. Its neck cocked once, then it returned to song.
Visions of bird trills drifted behind my eyelids. The soft touch of spring mornings when fog turned blue sea to gray. The being sang of blood sparkling in the sunlight. Of a yearning I was only beginning to fully comprehend.
Then, shimmering between nodding heads of sea oats, it fell forward and burst into fur form. Long snout, longer tail, scent so rich it pulled me closer.
She was the being I’d come here to discover. The Other I’d dreamed of but had never been able to find.
Our eyes met. Tails wagged. Scents embraced each other.
Then she leapt back vertical. Losing fur, losing claws, losing identity...and pulling me along with her.
I staggered on bare feet, yelped as a sand bur burrowed between furless toe clefts. Behind her arched a rainbow, full of colors I’d only dreamed of. Before me, she bared her teeth. Then, together, we sang.
THE PROTAGONIST OF this short piece has no longer story. But the setting does! During my childhood, my family spent one week per year camping on Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. When I was a teen, my older sister tempted me to join her on a canoe trek across the water to an even more isolated island. The solitude of that place turned into this story.
And now it’s time to change gears and meet Fen, whose story spans three novels. First, though, let’s meet her when she’s a little younger and a lot less secure....
Tough As Nails
Author’s Note
Tough as Nails is set about a year before Shiftless begins and is told from the point of view of the protagonist of Half Wolf. But the story doesn’t contain spoilers, so it can be read at any time.
Chapter 1
He looks like Wolfie.
My lupine half was right. The stranger in front of us did resemble the handsome alpha who had rebuffed our advances eight months prior. Both were broad-shouldered and held themselves with that not-quite-cocky stance that promised their inner wolves could easily protect us from all comers. Both had an awareness of their surroundings that put mine—even while four-legged—to shame. And both had smiles that seemed to change my usually mild-mannered wolf into a starving sex-addict.
Only one, however, was hanging around the meat-processing plant where I’d taken to hunting for free meals. Yes, I know it sounds gross, but grabbing entrails out of the slop bucket seemed like a better choice than the way other teenage runaways made a living.
Much safer too, as long as I kept my face averted so the plant employees never caught a glimpse of my yellow, lupine eyes. So far, both men seemed to have fallen for the notion that I was just a harmless stray.
Not so with this stranger.
But when I made my move, I had yet to notice the uninvited company. Instead, I listened until the pair of employees chatted their way toward an old pickup truck, heading out to lunch. Then the crunch of tires on gravel and the growling from my stomach pushed me toward stupidity. I didn’t even look both ways before stepping out into the open parking lot...only to have my gaze met and held by this enticing alpha.
“They’re gone,” he said in a conversational tone, knowing my wolf ears could easily pick up the sound even from thirty feet away. “You can come out now.”
He looks kind, my wolf whispered. And, through her eyes, he certainly did look kind. Too bad my wolf had all the street smarts of an autistic princess.
Before us, the alpha squatted down, reducing what had seemed like a menacing height even to my intrigued lupine half. She whimpered as the stranger pulled the clincher out of his pocket—a Big Mac all wrapped up in shiny paper, the rich aroma wriggling up through the folds to drift into our nostrils. My weak wolf wasn’t a top-notch scent-hound, but she sure as heck could smell that.
My animal half took a step forward without permission, and I yanked from deep inside her fur to shift back into human form. Better to deal with this naked than at the whim of a wolf who’d never dream of using her claws. Proving my point, the canine in question didn’t snap at my snark, having already tucked her tail between her legs and disappeared deep into the recesses of our shared body.
I emerged from fur bent over and gasping from the effort, and as I str
aightened I was startled to find myself nearly eye to eye with the stranger. How did he get so close so fast? The alpha must have leapt toward me during the seconds required to complete my transformation. The seconds when I was completely vulnerable. I shivered. Good thing I’m a fast shifter, despite my useless wolf.
I’d seen other werewolves bristle when subtly crowded as this stranger was doing to me now, but my own animal half remained silent and peaceful. So I was the only one noticing how the alpha’s eyes drifted hungrily across my unclad body, making me clench my teeth in annoyance. Yep, my earlier positive assessment of this stranger had definitely been clouded by the wolf’s desires. I didn’t like my uninvited companion nearly so much as my inner animal had.
My immediate urge was to cover my bare breasts and crotch. But I wasn’t willing to let the stranger win this round of intimidation, even though his wolf could have beaten mine at arm-wrestling...with both hands tied behind his back.
Not so much an assessment of his strength as of my wolf’s weakness....
Worthless wolf aside, my human brain had learned to bluff like nobody’s business. It was a necessary trait if I didn’t want to get run over by every single shifter I met. So, rather than shrinking into myself, I instead straightened and glared up at the alpha, forcing him to take a step backwards using the weight of my eyes alone.
“Hey, now, no need to get defensive,” the stranger said. Or, rather, growled. His canines had subtly lengthened, and I thought for a moment that his light brown eyes were turning a lupine amber.
But then the predatory expression faded so quickly that I figured I must have imagined it, and his face broke out into what appeared to be a self-deprecating grin. “I was just bringing you some lunch,” he said, jerking his chin toward the hamburger that still sat on the ground between us. No longer aggressive, the alpha’s current photo could have been featured in a psychology textbook under the heading “nonthreatening behavior.”
Thirteenth Werewolf and Other Stories Page 3
