Chapter 4

Liam

“Shit, are you okay?” I asked the short little she-wolf that crashed into me, her gentle honeysuckle and pear scent invading my nose. She looked up, her hand covering the tiny upturned pink tip protruding from her face. She was shorter and curvier than the other she-wolves around the place. It made her stand out.

I was surprised to see she wore glasses. Photochromic lenses obscured her eyes, but they seemed to be the most interesting shade of bluey green. Said glasses didn’t appear to be a prop or some fashion statement either. They seemed to be corrective lenses. What the fuck? Wolves didn’t suffer declines in vision.

I breathed in her scent again. As the intoxicating honeysuckle and pear notes swirled around, I managed to take in the undertones of her canine heritage—definitely a wolf. Wait, what’s that smell? I sniffed again; her wolf seemed tainted. As if it was mixed with something else. Human?

Oh, shit. This girl must be the other half-breed—the older sister.

A subtle pink stained her cherub face, and she looked away from me.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you there,” she mumbled. Her voice was soft and sweet.

My wolf came forward, curious at the anomaly in front of us. She took half a step back and apologized again before side-stepping me and started to walk away. Her tiny little legs scurried as her perfectly round bottom popped in her shorts. My wolf urged me forward, intrigued. I caught up to her in four long strides.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said casually.

She spun in a fright. Surely, she should have heard me or smelled me? It’s very hard to sneak up on a wolf.

“C-Clem.” She looked around shyly as if making sure I was talking to her. Her cute button nose was red from where she smacked into me.

“Clem?” I asked unsure if that was what I heard. Even with my wolf hearing I still couldn’t make out what she had mumbled. She nodded and continued to anxiously look around. When she noticed I was watching her, she blushed pink again. My wolf was pushing forward again, his interest piqued further with her reaction.

“My name is Clementine.” She anxiously wrung her hands together. “Like the orange,” she added unnecessarily.

I laughed, and her blush went full red across her cheekbones. “Nice to meet you, Clem. I’m Liam.” I extended my hand, and she once again looked around nervously. She reluctantly took my hand, and I was surprised when I felt a low buzzing at our contact.

She snapped her hand away and looked at it curiously before she started to stumble backward. “Um, I should go.” And with that, she hurried down the street before I could say anything more.

“So that was the half-breed,” I murmured to Lucian.

“She’s cute.” He sat, swished his tail, and cocked his head as he watched her ass bounce away.

I scoffed. “You think most she-wolves are cute.”

“Okay, fair call. But this one is interesting. She didn’t have a wolf.”

“What do you mean? I smelled it.”

“I did too. Yet, she doesn’t have one. I couldn’t sense her wolf spirit.”

“Weird.”

“Like I said, interesting.”

I got in my car and drove toward the pack house with Clementine on my mind.

Dad was planing some wood, the tiny curls of wood scrapings falling to the workshop floor, when I got there.

“Hi, son. Did Sean get off to school okay?”

“Yeah, he was flashing his pathetic muscles to some she-wolves at the gate. It will be good when he finally shifts; he won’t have to try so hard. The girls will flock to him.”

Dad shook his head in response.

Traditionally we meet our wolves on or around our sixteenth birthday, but that didn’t mean we shifted straight away. It took me three months into my sixteenth year before Lucian finally wanted to run. He had burst out of me so fast I had felt like my entire body had been ripped apart. Lucian learned his lesson, though; his behaviour had knocked us out for a good thirty minutes. As my dad ran with the pack that night, my mom had stood over us on four paws. Sean was laughing hard when I had come around. He was lucky that Lucian didn’t kill him too. Lucian, like most pups, was a wee bit of a hot head.

“And Patrick’s boy? Did you see him?”

“Yeah, scrawny little runt of a half-breed.”

“Liam,” he scolded.

“I’m joking, Dad. We were all scrawny at fifteen.”

He smiled softly. “I am glad Patrick brought Vincent back after the boy’s mother died.”

“So, you think Vincent will be able to turn?”

“Well, that’s why Patrick brought him here. He said it looks like his wolf is manifesting. It’s a fifty-fifty chance, and it looks like Vincent won the genetic lottery and got the gene. His elder sister, not so much.”

“I met her too.”

“Clementine? Really?” He stopped planing for a moment, a surprised expression strewn across his features.

“She smells like a wolf, Dad.”

He shook his head. “No, you must be mistaken. She would only smell like a wolf if she got her wolf at sixteen. But it never appeared.”

“I’m telling you, Dad, she smelled like a wolf.”

He raised an eyebrow, then shook his head. “I have never heard of a half-breed smelling like a wolf if they don’t have one.”

I sat on the builder’s horse and watched my father work. “Half-breeds are rare. How would you know?”

“It’s just one of those facts that are passed down from one generation to the next. Made the elitist wolves able to get rid of half-breeds if they didn’t turn at sixteen,” he grumbled angrily, then looked in my direction, his brown eyes softening. “When Patrick turned to Alpha Jed and said that he had found his mate and she was human, he was basically run out of town. The alpha was clear that if he stayed with her and they bore children, and the children didn’t manifest wolves, they would be strung up and murdered in the square, along with Lacey for it would be her fault the kids had no wolf.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, but to be fair, he could have just killed her on the spot. He thought he was being merciful by giving Patrick a choice. His mate or his pack.”

“And he chose his mate.”

“Yeah, and he got the fuck out of Dodge while he still could.”

“But Alpha Jed died ten years ago.”

“I know, and I offered for Patrick and his family to return, but he said no.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I wanted Patrick to be my beta. He refused.”

“Why would he turn down that honour?” Lucian bristled at the thought.

“He said he needed to protect his mate and children from the people who were still in league with Alpha Jed. When Vincent started showing the aggressive signs of his wolf, he decided he had to bring him back. He was going to leave Clementine and Lacey behind, but Lacey was diagnosed with cancer. It was an impossible decision.

“Then, roughly eight months later, he buried her,” Dad said sadly. “He was in such a state. Suddenly, he had one shifter-child and one human one. He couldn’t leave. He tried to convince her to go off to university to protect her from the pack, but she was grieving, and he couldn’t let her do that alone.”

Lucian pined and started to push images of a shy and awkward Clementine in my frontal lobe. He felt terrible for her.

“So, I promised him she would be safe in the pack.” I smiled softly at my dad’s gentle nature. “Liam, she has no idea we are werewolves.”

“Sean told me the Vincent kid doesn’t know, and now you’re telling me she doesn’t either? How the fuck doesn’t she know?”

“It was Lacey’s wish that the kids grew up not knowing. It was a need-to-know basis, and with the fifty per cent chance, Patrick agreed to wait and see if his kids manifested wolves before he told them what he was.”

Dad said fifty per cent, but we both knew it was closer to a twenty-five per cent chance that a human mate could produce a wolf heir. There was very little knowledge on half-breeds, partially due to the fact that most of them were usually miscarried early on in their gestation.

“She’s going to figure it out. It’s a town full of werewolves, for fuck’s sake,” I growled.

“Patrick knows this, but he’s trying to find the right time to tell his kids about it.”

“Should have told them from the beginning,” I murmured to Lucian, and he nodded in agreement. He had been pacing in my head since Dad started explaining Patrick and his family’s history.

“I still don’t understand how he found a human mate. I mean, that is rare in itself and there aren’t any humans in this town.”

“There is one now,” Lucian smirked, flashing an image of Clementine back into my mind again. I ignored him.

“Patrick and I had gone backcountry camping in the Rockies. We stumbled across these human girls who were also camping. One thing led to another, and…” He looked at me and shook his head. “You don’t need to hear about a couple of horny twenty-year-olds. Especially when one of them was your dad. Anyway, when the full moon came, we shifted. We moved as far away from the girls as we could, but when Patrick turned, Perseus, his wolf, led him straight to Lacey.” He smiled at the memory. “She was shocked to wake up and find a wolf looming over her. I got there just as he shifted back and announced that she was his mate.”

I laughed, and Lucian joined in. We imagined a poor human girl resembling Clementine, being shocked at a wolf shifting back into a very naked male, draped on top of her.

“Yeah, then a month or two later, I found your mother, but by then, Patrick was already living in Vancouver.”

“Still should have come back to the pack ten years ago when you called.”

“He’s here now,” Dad said firmly. There was no alpha tone to his voice, but it was obvious that this conversation was over and not to be further debated.

***

I opened up my economics textbook. I had a big test coming up for one of the summer courses I was taking, and Lucian wasn’t helping me any.

“What is it?” I grumbled.

“I hate economics.”

“Shut up. I actually need to pass this test.”

“When we are alpha, what good is your degree going to do?”

“Earn us a living?” I quipped.

He flattened his ears. “Still, did you have to pick economics? Snore.” Ten minutes later, Lucian was still pacing.

“Enough, Lucian.”

“Can’t help it. I’m antsy.” Of course, I get the werewolf with ADHD. “I need to run.”

I looked down and noticed my hand was reddening where I had been absentmindedly scratching it. My hair started to stand on end as I continued to scratch, the fibers slowly becoming thicker and patchier. My skin tingled—no—it burned. I breathed and tried to stop the change from happening. Even after six years with Lucian, I still had issues controlling him. He came from alpha blood, and he was testy at the best of times.

“Seriously, Lucian?” I kept pushing him back. He growled his defiance. “Fine, you stupid mutt. Let’s go for a run. But then I have to study.”

I stripped off my clothes and walked straight into the pack house kitchen before running out the French doors and leaping off the back deck. I landed on four tawny paws and sprinted into the forest behind my house, picking up speed as I went, letting out a couple of excited yips. Okay, Lucian had been right. We definitely needed a run.