Chapter 2-Slade-ten years ago

“I still can’t believe Uncle Alder let you come. I’ll bet your balls haven’t even dropped yet,” my cousin River ends with a laugh.

“You’re just jealous because Willow stole yours cuz,” I counter, “everyone knows she’s the dominant in your relationship. And you’re just the little bitch.”

River throws back his head and laughs in a mocking way. Though I don’t hear him deny the words I’ve spoken about his mate back home in Shadow Ridge. In the parking lot of a big rig friendly gas station, twenty miles outside of Camden, Indiana, he leans against the open truck door lazily. He’s the lightest of my cousins, his human skin a shade that refuses to darken much no matter how long he spends in the sun, long fire red hair, and freckled skin from his head to his toes. He’s leaner too, and shares no features with the other Ironclaw’s, so much it’s a long running family joke that he got his name from being found by the river as a cub, abandoned for being the runt of his own pack.

 This grimy truck stop is next to a fast-food joint with burgers so greasy it bleeds through the paper bag onto the bucket seat of the truck. It’s a good thing I have an iron stomach, but food on the road actually makes me miss my stepmother’s mediocre cooking. But that wasn’t the only thing from home I’d begun to miss after three weeks on the road, particularly one redheaded she-wolf with creamy skin and thick thighs I loved getting in between. Beryl and I weren’t true mates, not like River and Willow, but we enjoyed each other’s company, and I’m not sure how I felt about leaving your life and fate up to the fickle whims of the moon. Many moon favored pairings had ended badly, including that of my own parents, so I’m just fine with never finding my mate. I want to have a choice in my own destiny. A say in the fate of my own life.

That’s partly what brought me here, to this small rundown town across the country from my home in the beautiful forests of Northern Oregon, to hunt down rogue wolves. I decided to join the hunts as soon as I turned eighteen, like my father before me, to find any wolf that breaks pack laws, human laws, or threatens the exposure of our kind. This is my calling in life, I’ve decided, my true purpose. Father made me wait until I reached the age of maturity and became an adult in the eyes of the pack. And out of respect for my stepmother Iris, I’d stayed on pack lands for a whole week after my birthday to say my goodbyes and give the members of the hunt some down time to spend with loved ones. They were gone a good part of the year as their work was never done, but frequently returned to mark special occasions with the pack. I had been waiting for my eighteenth birthday as long as I could remember so I could carry on with the Ironclaw legacy.

I’d come to discover it was far more boring and less action filled than I’d believed. It was a lot of waiting around until the moon came up to do our work. Lots of greasy food and hard hotel beds, long hours on the road in cramped vehicles with cousins who smelled like ass, bad daytime TV, scrolling the internet until my eyes felt like sandpaper, and missing the feel of grass against my bare feet, the view of trees as far as the eye could see out my bedroom window. The stars shined brighter, the air smelled sweeter, and the women were much prettier back at home. At least the moon seemed to remain the same no matter where our travels took us, both to beautiful country and shit holes alike.

Across the country, we followed reports of animal attacks on humans, or unusual animal activity, some leads panned out and some didn’t. So far of the three investigations that taken place since I’d joined the hunters, one hiker’s death had truly been caused by a bear, and a mountain biker was mauled to death by a panther. We’d used our unique skill sets to investigate their places of death and followed the scent trail back to the natural killers.  In the case of the panther, we put the big cat down because it tried to attack us and was a danger to society. We let the bear live when we discovered she’d been protecting her cubs deep in mountain country and the hiker had likely gotten too close to the animal. Photos found on the dead man’s phone proved this and he’d lost his life due to his own stupidity. The moon would not like us taking the mama bear’s life because of it, so we spared her.

Last week, I’d also gotten to sit in on the Stonetooth Pack’s council meeting when they’d asked our pack for aid in helping to hunt down one of their own rogues. Most packs prefer to deal with putting down their own when a member breaks a serious law and goes on the run, but if the rogue is particularly dangerous, or the pack small, they may ask for an alliance to take down the threat to us all. Werewolves cannot be allowed to risk the pack by exposure to humans by breaking their laws of rape or murder in particular, or harming fellow pack members, there must be consequences. That’s where pack councils come in, to keep law and order, and keep our pack secrets safe from outsiders. Certain laws every wolf is raised to abide by for the good of the pack.  Transforming in front of a human unaware of our culture, turning a human without consent of the Alpha and werewolf council, telling pack secrets to human outsiders, or murdering of wolfkind or humankind, are all punishable offenses by death according to pack law.

Stonetooth Pack is on the verge of dying out, but they are proud and loyal. Their numbers have fallen in recent years, as many members are close to their last seasons, and too few cubs have been born. Also, a long and bloody land war with a rival pack thirty years before decimated a good number of their pack warriors and they never fully recovered. It was a mighty blow when in present day, one of their own turned feral, killed his mate, then went on a murder spree of locals in the nearby town, tearing through two homeless men, and one prostitute in a single night of carnage. With too few able-bodied wolves left to protect the pack if all the best warriors went on the hunt, they reached out to us to give aid in capturing the rogue and putting him down before more blood was spilled.

My father’s band of hunters is eight wolves strong, mostly made up of my cousins, and family friends I’ve known my whole life. Three warriors also joined us from the Stonetooth Pack, including the brother of the feral, who felt it was his familial duty to neutralize his kin. Four days ago, we tracked his scent deep through forest country, into Canada, and cornered him not far from Niagara Falls. Before we’d shifted into our own wolf forms, Father gave me instructions to hang back and watch how things were done, as I was new and untested at this.  But I wanted to be right in the middle of the action, to prove myself, knowing my natural instincts would guide me.

Needless to say, I fucked up, and got myself in a tight spot. The rogue led me into a trap when I blindly followed him through unknown terrain into a cave. A cave system he knew apparently and soon had me separated from the rest of the pack in a maze of confounding twists and turns.

I learned a valuable lesson that night and nearly got myself killed on my first real hunt. This wasn’t the playful fights or even training fights I was used to growing up among the pack. This wolf was not here to guide me or teach me how to survive, how to protect my vulnerable areas in a fight, the rogue was going in for the kill as soon as the bastard had me right where he wanted me all along. Cornered, alone, cut off from the rest of my pack, the hunter becoming the prey. My cockiness and stupidity had led me to believe I could best him and that his human side was far too gone for higher reasoning. I was wrong. And it had nearly cost me my life in addition to my pride.

The rogue was in between myself and my escape and I had nowhere to run even if I had wanted to. He was far bigger than me in wolf form, older, better trained, and more aggressive. He fought like an animal with nothing left to lose but the most important thing of all to beasts, life. I had only ever been in one serious pack fight growing up, with a rival wolf making moves on the first girl I mated with a couple years back. We’d both been about evenly matched in skill and size, but I had bested Flint and made him submit. I’d gotten a few bites to brag over, badges of honor that healed quickly, and much to my dismay had never scarred. But in that cave near Niagara Falls, I was left with not only wounded pride, but a nasty scar deep in my throat just above my collar bone.  Some bites were too deep to heal without scars even for a wolf. If the rogue had gotten his teeth into my neck just a bit higher, he would have opened up my jugular, weakening me from the blood loss, before ripping out my throat. And my career as a hunter would have come to an abrupt end.

My father had saved me. He’d attacked the feral in all the vulnerable areas to get him to lose his grip on my neck. I was abandoned on the cave floor as it turned on the bigger threat. But Alder Ironclaw had once been the alpha’s second in command for a reason, because he was the second-best warrior of the Shadow Ridge Pack. The only fight my father ever lost was to his Uncle Fennel, the current Alpha, twenty years ago, when he challenged him after a nasty fight between them. The fight had been over my mother.  Perhaps things would have gone differently for my father if he’d taken the Alpha’s advice, but then again, I would have never been born.

In that cave, Father fought the rogue into submission, but allowed his brother to have the kill. To restore the family name and do what was right, the rest of us hunters gave him room to do it. Well, I was bleeding heavily and trying not to whimper like a pup as the rogue was put down by his brother. My arrogance cost us all an extra night in the woods far from home to allow me to remain in wolf form to heal. We healed quicker than humans, no matter what skins we wore, but the fastest in our fur. Come dawn, the wound was still scabbed, and the scar had faded some over the past few days, but it was a mark I would always bear.

My cousins had made light of it, my first battle scar, but Father wasn’t pleased. I got one of his infamous lectures on the importance of following orders and knowing when to submit.  A stern warning that if I disobeyed a direct order again, he’d send my ass packing back to Oregon with my tail tucked between my legs. He said in that way, my stubbornness and disobedience were traits I’d inherited from my mother Caralee.  But I had no memories of her because my birth had killed her.

 Humans and wolves didn’t belong together for many reasons, but the fact human women tended to suffer more birth complications carrying a wolf’s child, should have been reason enough.  Wolf blood was dominant, any child produced between a human and wolf union, would be a Lycan. While human women were more fertile and fell pregnant quicker than she-wolves, they had a higher chance of dying while birthing the cub or losing the cub than she-wolves did. Another reason human and wolf mating were frowned upon was the risk it brought along with bringing an outsider into the pack and risking pack secrets. Humans were weak, fragile, prone to sickness, and liabilities to the pack more than anything else. 

The issue had been raised many times at council meetings about allowing more human women into the pack to help populate it. But luckily, the majority of the council kept voting against it, though Alpha Fennel had the final say. Our pack numbers were steady, and we had a couple cubs born each year, far more than most packs we knew of. We’d lost few to battle or old age in recent years, so the Alpha had tabled the matter for now. His personal experiences watching a nephew lose a human mate to childbirth, and it nearly destroying my father in his grief, probably helped in his decision to not accept any new humans into the Shadow Ridge Pack. In our pack, humans were dying out as only a couple remained. Older women past childbearing age who’d survived the birth of their cubs, unlike my own mother, and were living out the remainder of their shorter lifespans with their mates.  Wolves tended to have an average lifespan of about a hundred years, but those mated to humans tended to live about seventy. Another reason why humans and wolves didn’t belong together in my opinion as the mating bond cut years off the wolf’s life.

I didn’t need a mate period. I could get that sexual need fulfilled by many willing mateless she-wolfs back in Shadow Ridge, and in welcoming host packs during our travels. I was a little child back then, but old enough to be aware the toll losing his human mate had on my father in the early days. He was practically lifeless, barely leaving our home, barely eating or washing himself or socializing with the pack and would stare off in his own thoughts for hours at a time. My Gran had me most of the time. Until I saw some spark of life in him when Iris came along.

 Thank God the she-wolf was nosy, pushy, and didn’t take no for an answer. My stepmother helped him come out of his shell and live again, though he was never exactly the same as he’d been before losing his true mate. Their pairing was moon favored when Iris got pregnant with my brother Mace unusually early into their mating, within a year, and now he is an annoying little 12-year-old pain in the ass. But I wouldn’t trade Mace, even if he gets into my shit when I’m on the road, or never shuts up on the phone pestering me with questions about life as a pack hunter. Mace wants to follow in our footsteps when he’s of age. I’m not sure if this is the life I want for my little brother.

River, the oldest of our pack of cousins at twenty-four, continues to shoot his mouth off about me as our other cousins Clay and Wolfe approach. My Uncle Reed thinks himself a self-professed comedian and laughed at his own joke by naming his firstborn Wolfe. His daughter got off a bit easier with Wren, and hopefully my uncle doesn’t breed again as that branch of the family tree aren’t the shiniest apples in the bunch.  We hoped Wolfe would grow out of his lack of common sense and not great higher reasoning skills, mature and wise up, but he’s twenty-three, and the family has lost hope of that happening. He’s a great fighter so we keep him around, good to have watching your back, and a decent tracker.

Even though I just watched Wolfe scarf down four double cheeseburgers and two large fries, my cousin’s arms are loaded with a plethora of gas station offerings. Bags of chips, snack cakes, beef jerky, a giant foam cup of soda, candy bars, that he balances across the parking lot. He probably told the clerk he didn’t need a bag, the macho guy that he is. He has a piece of jerky hanging out of his mouth that he chews across the parking lot.

Wolfe is aptly named in many regards, from his hairy body, including his facial hair which seems to be taking over his entire face, as if always caught in mid-shift, and dark locks of matted fur on his head. He doesn’t believe in razors or toothbrushes and only showers routinely when at home to impress an older mateless she-wolf Fauna, who doesn’t know my cousin exists. We don’t tell him it will never happen because we appreciate his self-grooming habits around her. It’s no surprise why he hasn’t found his true mate for his usual stench, especially in the heat of summer, probably offends the moon.

 Clay is making a game out of trying to get Wolfe to drop his junk food haul by poking him in the ribs on the way. He is the instigator, the one who likes to cause the fuckery and chaos. Clay Ironclaw’s picture could be found next to hellion.  The girls, both human and wolf alike, go crazy over him. He’s all blonde curls, grey eyes and too many nauseating muscles to count. His muscles have muscles, and he is a fucking vegetarian in his human form. I thought that would be grounds for the pack to ban him alone, but nope. He’s only a year older than me, we used to be super close as cubs, but we grew apart once puberty hit. Clay just became interested in chasing girls and I wanted to train to become a hunter.

 His morals are blurry when it comes to issues of human/wolf relations. Clay is an equal opportunity fuckist. If he vibes on a female, he’ll lure her into his bed regardless of the consequences, whether she’s human, or that one time in his younger days he hooked up with a mated she-wolf from another pack. Clay was her revenge fuck against her own mate whom she thought wasn’t giving her enough attention. River claims that Clay joined the hunters because he had to leave pack lands or the wolf’s spurned mate would kill him. I believe that story to be true.

 There’s a good chance Clay and Wolfe’s playful fight will turn physical, and they’ll throw down in the middle of this truck stop. I’m pretty partial to my beef jerky myself and if anyone makes me drop it, there’d be hell to pay. Their horsing off is the product of three days of boredom, confined to vehicles, and being pent up by not allowing our wolves enough time to run free through forestlands at night.

 And also, well none of us had gotten laid in several days either. Sex or lack thereof wasn’t something easily hidden among those with keen sense of smells. Clay had several different scents on him by the time we’d left the lands of the Stonetooth Pack last week. I had chosen to mate while in wolf form one night as I ran under the moon with a she-wolf by my side. I didn’t care much for her when she wore her human skin for many reasons. But that night we both let our wolves take over and fulfill that animalistic need. Come dawn, I nearly chewed my own arm off to escape from her as she and I had very different views on pack politics, and I didn’t like her face. The feeling was mutual apparently, though our wolf sides didn’t have the same standards.

It seems River was thinking what I was thinking as he chews on a hangnail and watches our loud ass cousins trample towards the truck. “I’ll bet you twenty bucks Wolfe throws down in less than one minute from now.”

I smirk, “I’ll accept your bet and raise it. Forty bucks says two minutes and Wolfe will win. Money up front.”

I’d been burned by him before on unpaid bets.

River digs into his jean pocket and slaps forty bucks on the hood of the truck, “It’s on like Donkey Kong little Cuz. But I got sixty that says Clay will come out on top on this one.”

I roll my eyes, “You on crack? Clay hasn’t won a fight against Wolfe since, fucking never. Easy money.”

I pull my wallet out of my tactical pants and pony up sixty bucks to add to the pile on the hood. The scene before us plays out much in the way I guessed. When Clay makes Wolfe drop the soda and it splatters on the pavement at his booted feet, it’s game on. My burly cousin drops the rest of his stash on the ground to free up his arms and charges at Clay. Clay laughs like a maniac during their deranged version of London Bridge Is Falling Down as they wrestle one another. A few bystanders have stopped to watch the wrestling match. I hope they don’t do anything stupid to draw more attention to themselves like glowing eyes or shows of superhuman strength, but their better trained than I. They won’t lose control or let their wolves out in public with a crowd.

Soon enough, Wolfe has Clay pinned on the cracked lot, Clay still grinning through blood-stained teeth where Wolfe head butted him in the mouth. The onlookers are clearing out as the fight has died down, as Clay taps against the ground in submission.  It is a lucky thing no one called the cops. Father won’t be happy when he finds out. He is currently doing his business in the gas station and looking to buy a new map. Wolfe spilled a milkshake on it the night before. Father is old school like that, even with all the new tech, he prefers paper copies of everything.

 I grin in victory at my cousin before I slide the stack of bills off the hood and into my wallet. “Pleasure doing business with you, asshat.”

River grins wider before he digs his knuckles across my scalp, messing up my hair. I hate my hair to be touched by anyone except Beryl while we get it on or during that after sex cuddle she likes. I work hard to keep my brown spikes in place, my smooth face pimple free from washing it daily in the cream my stepmother secretly ordered for me, which I got lots of slack over when my cousins found out I used it.  But the joke was on them as my face was as flawless as a peach’s skin, my eyebrows fleek and tidy from watching YouTube videos on grooming. Clay might have had his share of willing girls to drop their panties for him, but I did alright myself.

“I owed you a Birthday present,” he confesses, “sixty outta cover it. You’re all grown up now cuz. Thank God you grew into your head, for a while it was touch and go there and you had the whole fam worried. You could barely carry it on your shoulders it was so grotesquely big.”

I punched him hard on the arm and earned a laugh from his lips.

“I grew into my head alright. Willow wishes you would have filled out yours. You have to fuck with the lights on so she knows when it’s in.”

I was a bit of an awkward little kid for a while. I look like my dad mostly, but everyone says I got my mother’s emerald eyes and her smile. I wish I could have seen that for myself. I wish I could have met her. I wished the moon didn’t sentence her to die by being my father’s true mate.

Mace looks like Iris, the little shit escaping the curse of an oversized head in early childhood. His hair is night black, and his eyes nearly as dark. He has our father’s hard, straight jawline, my jawline, and the Ironclaw typical youthful flaw of often acting before thinking. Mistakes were made during our childhoods and likely to continue for the foreseeable future as we share the same bloodline, and my little brother is unlikely to learn from my mistakes and also learn life lessons the hard way.

Our Father comes out of the gas station with a map tucked under one arm and holding a newspaper open. Even being occupied scanning the local headlines, he’s still on alert as he makes his way across the lot. His keen eyes and nose miss nothing. Not the smell of wolf blood from his nephew’s mouth, the dirt and gravel smudged on their clothing even though they are both on their feet when he arrives, or the smell of their hormones lacing the air. He shoots them one disappointed look and doesn’t have to say a word. They straighten up real quick afterwards, though Clay doesn’t look all that remorseful.

My father would make a good Alpha of the pack.  The pack listens to him, he has what it takes to lead, and knows how to get betas to fall into line quickly. I wonder if he’ll ever challenge my uncle again. It’s just not respect or family loyalty that holds him back. It’s also shame. Because he made a terrible mistake five years ago. It not only cost him rank of second in the pack, but also innocent lives. For that reason alone, Father doesn’t challenge the current Alpha. He can’t forgive himself, even though most of the pack has already forgiven him. Father wouldn’t take back his place as second even if his Uncle offered him the rank back. He has unfinished business that won’t allow him to forgive himself until it’s seen through to the end. The loss of my mother is not the only ghost that haunts my father.

He opens the map up and spreads it upon the hood of our truck. We know better than to interrupt him while he works, as he puzzles things out in his head. He grabs a felt tip marker from his pocket as he studies the map. Wolfe and Clay stand around their own vehicle at the next pump like obedient pups at their masters heel, awaiting that next command. The one in charge of their group in absentia of my father, is Hawke. He is a middle aged, the strong but silent type, with a deadly cool demeanor, and calm under pressure. His skin is dark like the night, his eyes clear grey like the moon, and he’s the best damn tracker in the pack. Hell, probably in the country. He doesn’t talk much, like words shouldn’t be wasted, but when Hawke speaks, you listen. His mate Azure, is his perfect other half, as she does enough talking for the both of them. And they seem to be freakishly in tune with one another, so much in fact there are pack rumors the mated pair can hear each other’s thoughts.

Leif and Hollis are twins who don’t even look like brothers but seem to share a single mind. They are in their thirtieth season, mateless, and are fucking creepy. I believe they can teleport because they just seem to appear places and you never hear them coming. Even with super attuned hearing, they don’t make a sound wolf ears can hear stalking across forest beds whether on two legs or four. That makes them invaluable as scouts and well assassins too.

 I know little about them because they aren’t the sharing and caring type. Even on our pack lands, they prefer to sleep out among the trees and prefer their wolf forms. Whenever possible, they stay in their wolf skins and roam the forests even when the rest of us prefer a bed and a shower for the night. They were adopted into our pack, hardly more than cubs, after their own violent and nomadic pack left them behind to die one winter. Game was scarce in those lands and their Alpha was trying to create a harem of sorts by killing off rival male wolfs and abandoning male cubs so he had all the she-wolfs to himself.

Leif is thin and brown, his human hair in dreads, his skin a map of scars from his rough start in this life. Hollis is several shades lighter, tall and broad, and bears as many scars as his twin with the addition of the one across his right eye which blinded him. He got that mark from his Alpha while trying to defend Leif from his wrath. He was luckier than most who crossed the sadistic brute as for most it was a death sentence. Hollis was suffering with a fever and nasty infection by the time the cubs were found by our pack out hunting game. Pack healers couldn’t save his eye and had to remove it to spare his life. They pledged their lives to the hunts to repay the pack for taking them in and swore to reject any mates to better serve. At least on that, I could agree with them. I still didn’t like those fucker’s sneaking up on me though, if you heard their approach, it was because they wanted you to.

The stealth twins wait in their own Jeep as Father does his thing. I swear they don’t breathe or blink sometimes for hours, and it’s definitely not normal. They can be unnaturally still like statues and Clay thinks their robots. As cubs, he’d dare me to cut one of them to see if they bled oil. I never worked up the courage to do it though and it wasn’t as if I could get the jump on them anyway. He likes to call them creepy and creepier.

River’s phone buzzes in his pocket and I shoot him a shit eating grin. It’s Willow, doing her nearly every hour check in. He doesn’t answer which I’m sure she’ll give him grief over later. She’s been pressuring him to stay in Shadow Ridge for more of the year so they can get serious about making a cub of their own, to expand the pack. I expect any day now he’s going to tell Father he’s retiring from the hunts to start a family and I don’t see Willow as the type to let her mate go off anymore once she’s expecting. Not that I can blame him. And I’d be happy for them both bringing a new little Ironclaw into the world.

 I miss home, not that I’d admit it to anyone, and it’s only been three weeks since I left Shadow Ridge. River and the others have been out doing this for years off and on. They sacrifice so much, time away from family and friends for the greater good. Because we have a job, a responsibility, both for the humans and wolves alike, to protect us from each other and ourselves.

Father makes an x on the map, “Here is where the dead hiker was found two days ago.”

“Are we sure there isn’t a natural explanation for this Uncle?” asks River.

“Seventeen pets have been reported missing or dead in the last three days in a town of just six hundred people. Also, a missing person’s report filed the same day for a man last seen taking his dog on a walk at ten p.m. the evening before. Does all that seem like a coincidence to you?”

River shakes his head, “No sir.”

“The papers think Camden has a coyot problem. In fucking Indiana,” laughs Wolfe.

No one else laughs because it’s not funny and not a joke. Even though coyotes are found in all the lower forty-eight states, they aren’t common to places like Indiana. It definitely warrants checking out, which is why Father has brought us here. It could be a bust, but even my gut is telling me this isn’t the work of a coyote.

“This is only the second reported animal attack in the last fifty years to this town. The last being a dog who bit a mail carrier. One dead, another missing under similar circumstances. This is no coincidence,” says Hawke.

Father has marked the map over Camden, on the city limits, near a wooded area. We all fall silent into our own thoughts for several seconds. But I know we are all thinking it.

 “Do you think it could be him?” I finally dare to ask.

Father lets out a long breath, “There’s always the possibility. We knew he’d reemerge sometime. But this doesn’t fit his typical pattern.”

“Or he’s just getting started here,” adds River, gnawing on his hangnail again.

It’s a nervous trait of his. Clay tends to go quiet when he’s deep in thought or scheming something. When he goes quiet, you need to be on high alert around my cousin because he’s often planning something and fuckery is afoot. Wolfe laughs when he’s worried, which he does now. It makes no sense, but that is just one of his quirks. And he’d never admit that Bale scares him, it’s not a manly or wolfy thing to do. Hunters especially are supposed to be calm, controlled, and fearless. I pretty much suck at all three and I’m sure the others can smell my anxiety and hear the frantic beats of my heart.

The twin’s expression hasn’t changed, you never know what either of them are thinking. I don’t think they have normal emotions or feel things at all. Hawke is a bit easier to read in that regard, though not by much, as his face often gives little away. Now his stance is set, his face determined. He doesn’t look scared, but relieved, eager to try and end this thing. But he should be scared, because Bale is fucking dangerous, cunning, and more than one hunter over the years has fallen to him.

“He adapts. He changes the pattern, so anything is possible when it comes to Bale. I would question why he’d be here in Indiana, but that’s exactly why he would be. Because he has no ties to this area that we know of. Most rogues tend to go places they have some kind of connection to,” muses Father.

But Bale Fangman breaks all the rules. The rogue always seems to be one step ahead, the one rogue that got away, and has been for the past five years. Four months ago, he went dark, no evidence of his murdering spree, but none of us had hope we’d be lucky enough that it was because he was dead. Over the past half-decade, he’d left a trail of bodies in his wake, campers, hikers, a forest ranger, a Cub Scout leader, a mountain climber, three teenagers partying, vagrants, most of his crimes were in wooded areas with victims in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in recent years he’d grown bolder, or perhaps more feral; a mechanic mauled to death in his garage in broad daylight, a bike cop in an urban area, and a gas station clerk in the middle of Vegas with plenty of witnesses to the deadly wolf attack. It was almost as if Bale was taunting us. Even the most crazed rogues typically avoided heavily populated areas and did their crimes in the cover of darkness.

Bale was the reason my father lost his pack rank. The reason my father’s dreams are so haunted, his greatest mistake. They grew up together, were born in the same season, were pack mates and inseparable most of their lives. It was that bond that blinded my father, made his emotions cloud his judgement. Bale Fangman broke all the rules, because he’d help establish them, because he had once been one of us, a rogue hunter…