8

If the Terrible T’s or Troy were looking for me, they would find me easily. I felt exposed as I reached the shed that sat on top of the root cellar. Once I was done here, I’d need to hurry back to the safety of the garden. The shed was made of pine, and it held a few landscaping supplies. The trapdoor that led to the root cellar had a heavy-duty brass and iron lock on it, but it was kept unlocked during the day. Today, fortunately, was no exception.

I turned back to the door, but before I stepped through it, I heard voices on the other side. A pair of women, from the sound of it.

“—mate told me that the humans just get worse and worse,” one of them was saying. “Did you hear about them?”

My eyes widened at the word human. I stepped closer to the door and pressed my ear against it.

“No, what happened?”

“Well, apparently, when he went into a nearby city, he learned there was a major sex-trafficking ring busted.”

The other woman gasped. “No!”

“Yes! They’ve been trading young girls and boys of their own kind to the highest bidder, and so many of the poor things are runaways or sold by their families.”

The second woman clicked her tongue. “That just goes to show that humans can’t be trusted. They’re so greedy and wasteful, even their own kind suffers.”

“Makes you wonder if that sort of thing is innate. It’s no wonder that girl doesn’t belong. The human species just isn’t as noble or as prideful as us wolves.”

“What a shame.”

I winced. It was obvious they were talking about me. I waited until the two women walked away before I ventured back out. I fought tears as I jogged back to the garden. If humans treat their own young that badly, maybe there isn’t a place for me among them either, I thought, biting my lip hard. Maybe I’m doomed no matter where I go.

3

NIGHT

I stood in my cabin in front of the fireplace. To my left, a window showed a night sky as dark as my swirling emotions. My home had obviously seen better days—the floors creaked underfoot, the walls were cracked, and the entire place would have thrived with a good waxing. But in the Wargs pack, my pack, there was hardly any time for those luxuries.

We were seventy-five cabins strong, making us the smallest of all the other packs in the area. The largest, of course, was the Kings’ pack, with over seven times our number of homes and the largest amount of resources.

Though there were other small packs in the area, we had to make do with much less than the others. We used candles and lanterns and old, gasoline-powered generators to power the compound. Nestled in northern Montana, our soil was as rich as could be found anywhere, and we had dozens of hot springs hidden in our woods. We had very few luxuries, but before I had taken over, we had even less.

I placed my hand on the mantle and brushed my fingers over the old, rough wood. My hand almost spanned its width. All wolves were strong, but as an Alpha, I could rip the mantle off the wall with the same amount of effort it took to pluck a weed. I’d never trash my own place. But with my mood lately, I half wanted to.

The kindling inside the fireplace was little more than a smoking pile despite the cool Montana winds blowing against the wood. I didn’t care about the cold. I didn’t care that my cabin was little more than a large pile of kindling for a much bigger fire. I liked the old, rustic look of my place—it matched me in almost every way.

I closed my eyes and pulled my shoulders back, feeling my muscles crack and ripple. Inside, my wolf paced back and forth, his hackles raised. I had let him out only a few hours earlier to go on a run, but I might have to do it again. My wolf and I were usually in sync, but lately, we had been at odds.

As Alpha of the Wargs, a position I’d held since I was sixteen years old, I carried enough responsibility on my shoulders to make a lesser wolf crumble. That was why I kept myself and my wolf on such a tight leash. That was why I expected nothing less than perfection from both of us.

So it was always such a pain in the ass when my wolf grew restless. It made me feel on edge—less in control of myself. When I got like this, anything could set me off, and it became difficult for me to keep my goals in focus. A run through the cold night air might just get my wolf to settle the fuck down.

I cracked my knuckles and my neck just to move around. Part of the reason my wolf was so out of sorts was because I’d had the dream again—the dream about her, the girl with those blue-gray eyes. I saw them even now when I closed my own, like a pair of will-o’-the-wisps tempting me to come closer. Whether those wisps lured me toward my doom or my fortune, I had no idea, but it didn’t matter either way.

My wolf growled low, and my teeth began to pull back from my incisors. As wonderful as those dreams felt when I was in them, when I was awake, I resented them for how much they fucked with my head. Including the night before, there’d been at least a dozen times I’d had similar dreams, but I had no fucking clue what caused them or what they meant.

More than once, I’d tried to talk to my mom about how the dreams plagued me. Violet Shepherd was one of the few wolves in the Wargs who truly understood the mystical aspects of being a wolf shifter. She was a voracious reader of the old ways—the ways of magic and myth made real. She worked closely with our Elders, who were each pillars of wisdom in their own right. She often performed spiritual rites for the wolves who requested her assistance. But when I told her about my dreams, I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t fucking with me.