Years ago…
His wolf noticed her first, clawing within him to get closer.
He spun around, searching for a threat, trying not to breathe through his nose at all the artificial, bizarre scents dousing the human kids. Impatiently, the beast within him pulled him left, and he saw her.
At first glance, she was indistinguishable from everyone else. She wore jeans, a tank top under a cloth jacket, with bracelets covering both wrists. Her red-blonde hair was in a tail down her back.
But then green eyes met his, knowing and interested.
She had not been in school the day before or any day before this. He definitely would have noticed her.
Absently, he shut his locker, leaving his backpack on the ground as he strode toward her. She was in a pool of space near the entrance to the second math classroom. It was more proof that she was new. Teenage girls roamed around in packs as tight as werewolves with even more complicated hierarchies.
She was a lone wolf.
To his infinite regret, when he got close enough, he could tell she wasn’t a literal wolf. It wasn’t always obvious, but shifters carried an undercurrent of their animal’s scent even in their human form, a whiff of fur and predator.
His wolf forced him to take a deeper breath, and he blinked. Her scent was complex, like pine trees and snow with a hint of motor oil that he sometimes smelled on folks from the big city. Where did she come from? Why was she here?
Why was his wolf so obsessed?
“Hi,” he said, and realized he’d been scanning her up and down like he would appraise a hog ready for slaughter.
“Aren’t you not supposed to talk to me?” she asked.
He blinked, racking his brains for why. He wasn’t supposed to talk to any of the teachers or attend any history, science, or literature classes. His father didn’t want him attending the school at all, or even leaving the land of the compound, but someone had called protective services when one of his little sisters had gotten out and wandered into town, so now they were at the high school for a few months until the human police calmed down.
His older brother Pietr had insisted they could just kill the social worker, and his father had agreed, but had also explained that there were very many more humans than her. Felix could barely wrap his mind around it. Even this teeming hall of teenagers felt as though this was too many humans for the world.
For now, he wasted time learning math he had conquered five years ago, and permanently ditched any class that would pollute his education on the history of shifters with lies about human hegemony.
He realized he was staring again. “Sorry! Are you a teacher?”
She smirked. “Do I look like a teacher?”
It was another excuse to run his eyes over her. “No, you don’t.”
“You’re a Koenig, right?”
She’d been here less than a day. How the hell did she know his name unless…
“And you’re a witch,” he said, as everything she’d said made sense.
She looked around. “Don’t say that. Are you insane?”
“You’re a Griffin.”
He took one quiet step back. There was one coven in Silver Spring, the main reason his family rarely came to town. He’d been given a list of names, scents, and photos of the other major group to avoid at this school: Griffin witches.
Apparently, they’d missed one who smelled like home and looked like heaven. He had a major problem.
“I’m not a Griffin. I am staying with two crazy old ladies who are named Griffin temporarily. I mean, I’m staying temporarily. They’re permanently named Griffin. Words matter.” She shuddered. “Extremely temporarily.”
“You’re a witch,” he repeated and bolted.
Even if he left, his wolf howled about its mate
She’s not your mate. She’s not even a wolf. She’s the enemy.
Now
“You’re getting married,” a voice said.
Felix cursed and jerked up, slamming his head into the underside of the open hood of the tractor he’d been trying to fix all morning. That it was November, and they would not need this tractor until spring was beside the point.
“I’m busy,” were the first words out of his mouth, which was, of course, ridiculous.
His father crossed his enormous arms, unimpressed. “Get dressed.”
Felix’s jaw dropped. “Today?”
“The pack is weak. The alpha elect must begin his line.”
The huge man strolled away as if he had no doubt he would be obeyed, and Felix ground his teeth. He waited until his father was out of the barn and then threw the wrench in his hands as hard as he could against the wall.
There was a yelp, and he cursed as he saw a tow-headed boy try to dodge the falling wrench.
Pietr’s son was almost five, and his father was dead, so he had taken to following Felix around like a lost puppy. He wasn’t just like a lost puppy; he was literally a lost puppy.
The boy scampered away, and Felix called out, “Sorry!”
They didn’t know for sure that Pietr was dead. He went hunting a rival pack one day in a blizzard and hadn’t come back.
There was no way his older brother would’ve stayed away from the land, from his children, or from his wife. Pietr was dead.
Objectively, Felix knew that was a tragedy for the five-year-old currently spying on him through a knothole in the wall from safety outside the barn, but Felix couldn’t help thinking it was worse for him. Until a few weeks ago, he had been the third of seven children, tasked with keeping his siblings in line and the pack’s fleet of equipment running. Now he was the alpha-elect.
For weeks, his father had been in denial that his darling oldest son, his firstborn, was dead. He forced everyone to search the woods for weeks. Felix had even confronted the new pack on the other side of town alone. Frankly, he should be thrilled he wasn’t dead, too.
Apparently, denial was over. What was the next stage of grief? Delusion in which you marry off your second-oldest son to… who?
That question finally got him moving out of the barn. It was a sunny winter day, and the snow around was nearly blinding, yet the main yard was still somehow muddy in below-zero weather.
The compound they had built in the woods comprised his giant barn for equipment, the main house across from it for his father, and a smattering of other dwellings and sheds sprinkled throughout the woods on the fifty acres he and his brother had bought from the government thirty years ago to start a “tree farm.”
They were part of a network of packs living apart from any polluting human influences. Felix shook that off as he jogged across the compound towards the main hall. There was a time he bought into his father’s messianic delusions. That had been a very long time ago.
How was it going to be today? Arranging matches took years. His father had started searching for Pietr’s match when the boy turned fifteen. It took three years to find Magda, the perfect wife, and they married at nineteen.
He glanced around for his sister-in-law, who honestly looked better than she ever had since her spouse had disappeared. She was twenty-five now and already had three kids.
She wasn’t in sight, which meant he was going to have to do this alone.
He wrenched open the doors to find his father, his uncle, and his cousin Lucia alone in the huge dining room with picnic tables stretched between them. Lucia was wearing a white dress. That and her white hair made her look like a ghost.
His brain stuttered to a stop.
They all swung toward him.
“She’s my cousin.”
“If it’s good enough for the king of England,” his uncle said.
“She’s seventeen!”
“Old enough to know what’s what,” his uncle sniffed, and Lucia went even whiter. Felix closed his eyes, praying the old man would stop talking because he was pretty sure his uncle’s definition of “what’s what” would scar them all for life.
She was a mouse of a girl, terrified of her own shadow.
“I told you to change,” his father said, as if that was the most egregious part of this whole situation, that Felix was in greasy coveralls.
He could not say no. If he said no, with both of the men here, he’d be too beaten to get away.
His wolf had known the night Pietr didn’t come home. It took a couple of weeks for his human half to believe.
“Not today,” he ground out.
His father’s eyes flared dangerously.
He held up a grease-stained hand. “It’s gonna take me an hour to clean up, and then what? We have a ceremony in the corner? If you’re trying to signal to the pack that everything is fine, a hasty wedding with no guests and no feast is going to tell everyone the opposite.” It was a dangerous line to walk, implying any sort of weakness to his father, especially when he was probably already worried about it.
So many times, the old man tried to project strength, but actually made it transparently obvious to everyone else how desperate and scared he really was.
His uncle grunted. “The pup is right.”
His father didn’t move. His expression didn’t flicker for a second.
Nobody breathed.
Then he laughed a booming laugh, and joy seemed to twinkle in his eyes as he clapped Lucia on the back hard enough to send her staggering. “You want a fancy ceremony? Of course, you do. Excellent idea.”
He turned to Felix, and a glint of warning shadowed his bonhomie. “Tomorrow.”
Felix bobbed his head once. So his father was deciding to play the jovial pater familias. That was fine. Felix could work with that.
He retreated out of the main hall with another bob of his head, walking backward to keep them in sight. His last view was of Lucia’s bone-white face and enormous eyes.
He jogged toward the barracks at the other end of the clearing, where he’d moved when he turned fourteen with all the other young men of the pack. He took deep breaths all the way there. He had to keep his heart rate down and his face neutral. He couldn’t let down his guard or betray his plans for even a second.
There were a couple of wolves lounging around the main common room, but he gave them a quick nod before heading down the hall dotted with doors. He bypassed the door to his room and went straight to the showers at the opposite end of the building.
He hadn’t been lying about cleaning up. It took at least an hour to scrub off all the grease. When he was clean, he ducked into his room to pull together the last bits and bobs he couldn’t pack ahead of time.
He turned to the trunk at the end of his cousin’s bed and pulled out his clothes. He was a little bigger, but it would have to do.
“You’re running.”
He let out a short scream before cutting it off and turning, a pile of underwear in his hands, which he promptly threw on the ground.
His younger sister stood in the doorway, hands crossed over her long dress, blonde hair whiter than usual with a dusting of flour.
“And you’re not supposed to be in here,” he said. It was the first thing that came to mind. He chomped down so hard on his tongue that he tasted blood. He hated when his father’s words came out of his mouth.
Lena was the fourth oldest. It went Pietr, then Caroline, then he, then she. Lena had recently been going through a hell of her own, stepping into the role of the eldest daughter because their father had married Caroline off to a pack in Utah.
“You’re running,” she repeated, and he hissed.
She glanced up and down the hallway. All shifters had magnificent hearing, but hers was something else. He didn’t know if it was a natural talent or years of being careful. “Nobody’s here. The supper bell went off five minutes ago.”
He frowned. He hadn’t heard that either. He was too preoccupied with his plans, which was always a dangerous thing to be.
“Do I have to explain why?” he asked.
“I don’t know what they’re thinking. Your own cousin.”
Of course, she knew. Lena always heard everything. He picked up the underwear and stuffed it into his daypack.
“You could have warned me,” he said, trying to sound casual.
When she didn’t say anything, he glanced up.
“Can’t knead risen dough,” she said with a shrug.
He sighed.
“You could come,” he whispered. He’d ached to see Caroline go, but she was more zealous than their father about werewolf superiority. Felix wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen an ounce of her personality separate from what their father had turned her into.
Lena was different. She devoured every book that was approved. She took apart a radio when she was five, wanting to know how it worked. She’d learn to hide like all of them did if they could not conform, but they never snuffed that curiosity out of her, no matter how hard they tried.
“You don’t want me with you.”
“Of course I do!” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “You’re going to her.”
He froze for the second time. Lena knew everything, but he never dreamed she’d uncovered that secret.
“You’ve loved her since you saw her at that giant school.”
“You never said anything.”
“I wondered if you would choose her or the family. When you didn’t run then, I figured you’d chosen.”
“You should come anyway. You should get away from here. They’ll try to marry you off to Heinrich.”
Heinrich was the next youngest. He was twenty and spent most of his time in the far mountains, ostensibly logging, but mostly lone-wolfing it. He wasn’t all there anymore. Weird things happen to wolves when they spend too much time alone.
Lena just smiled. “What’s the other option? Waltz with the humans?”
“They’re not that bad.”
“They smell like prey and perfume.” She shuddered.
He was about to go out and live among them. They couldn’t be that bad, right? His father’s exhortations could not be accurate. He insisted both that they were wildly dangerous and irredeemably stupid. Surely if they were that stupid, they couldn’t be that dangerous?
He waved that away. He had to go. Gallons of perfume and stupidity would not be worse than moving into the big house with Lucia.
There was a shout from outside. He couldn’t make out the words, but Lena tensed. “I have to go.”
Fortunately, Felix had been missing the evening meals regularly to go for runs in the woods since Pietr had died, both out of desperation and knowing it would be the best chance he got with everyone called to the main meal that stretched over an hour with his father’s exhortations and warnings for the pack.
He pulled her into his arms, another thing that was forbidden, and whispered in her hair, “I love you.”
“I love you, too, you big sap. You’ll have a distraction in about five minutes.”
He frowned.
“I left a loaf of bread baking in the oven. They’ll smell burning here in a minute.”
The scent of fire was always a major emergency, though with snow coating the ground, it was hardly the risk it was in the summer, which meant it wouldn’t be that much time.
“Thank you.”
“They’re going to hunt you down,” she said.
“You mean search to help protect me?”
“Of course. I hope they fail.”
So did he.
When the first shout rang out about fire in the kitchen, he headed back to the showers. The buildings were arranged in a star, which meant the bathroom faced the woods.
He dove through the window like he’d practiced and opened the utility room off the back and grabbed the larger sack there with everything important to him next to the water heater. He stuffed his last emergency rations into it, hitched it on his back, and headed out along the path that ringed the residences.
This was literally the worst time in the world to get away, with snow thick on the ground showing every footprint. He spent weeks tracing trails into the snow to confuse them.
His wolf tugged within him, wanting to shift. It was so much faster and quieter, but he couldn’t arrive at her house naked as a jaybird with nothing to show for himself, so they had to stay human.
He switched from one of his trails to a deer trail leading away from the land. Few animals came this close to a pack of werewolves, but there was a good stream this way, which some animals braved.
He caught whiffs of his family on the wind, but he didn’t know if the wind was just blowing in the right direction or if they were already hunting.
He reached the stream and grimaced as he stepped out of his boots and socks and plunged his feet into water so cold it was just on the wrong side of freezing.
If he weren’t a shifter, he’d have hypothermia in minutes. Even with his superior strength, he could only do this for a few minutes. He started staggering downstream, hoping to erase any hint of scent, trying to give himself as much time as he could. The stream was at least fifteen feet across. It was the spring Silver Spring got its name from.
A howl went up behind him, and he cursed. That was less time than he thought.
He kept going, staggering through the water splashing everywhere, wetting his pants, which was a terrible idea, but he couldn’t slow down as he finally reached an overlook where human hikers liked to come to see a tiny waterfall. He heard something behind him; he couldn’t be sure if it was a deer or a werewolf, and leaped, landing in a splash ten feet down the falls.
A whimper made it past his teeth as frozen feet met frozen rock, but he forced himself to keep moving. Something was wrong with his right ankle, but it didn’t matter now. It would heal.
He staggered to the bank. He should have brought a towel, but he hadn’t figured on it for his essential emergency kit, so he pulled out a shirt and dried off his feet enough to stuff them back in his cousin’s shoes. He was wasting dangerous minutes, but if he walked barefoot in the snow, even shifter healing would not save his toes, and he’d be trailing blood like a neon arrow right to him.
When he’d planned this route, it seemed perfect, but the reality was way more painful than he ever thought. He was hungry and freezing, and his feet were on fire, which was strange because they were so cold, but he forced himself to run.
When he could see the sparkling lights of Silver Spring tucked into the valley below, he dug to the bottom of his pack for a cell phone he hadn’t touched in ten years. He charged it once a month, using a jack on a tractor he worked on.
He followed the instructions she’d given him so long ago. He hit the top left button for contacts and then call, because there was only one name in the phone.
It rang and rang and rang, and for a terrifying moment, he thought he would have to do this alone until a soft, infinitely dear voice said, “Felix?”
“Were you serious?” he asked.
“You know I was.”
“I can be at your house in twenty minutes.”
“No.”
Something shattered within him until she added, “Midnight. Everyone will be asleep.”
Convulsively, he looked behind him. Which was more dangerous, his pack finding him or her coven finding her?
“Midnight,” he mumbled.
As he hung up, the breeze brought him the faraway, high howl of a wolf on the hunt.
