Chapter 107

Zane POV

I’m no coal mining expert, but it was clear even as we set down that something was very wrong. A thick, dark plume of smoke was coming from one of the many holes in the ground, and I couldn’t help but notice the dozens of dead or dying trees all around us.

When the door swung open, I smelled death and fear—not the thrilling smells of the hunt, but the sour, heavy odors of long-term sorrow and festering loss. By the time my work boots hit the greasy soil, I knew this was going to be very bad.

I got my phone out. “Travis, send a dozen betas. Now. Crowd control.”

I hung up before he could answer.

“Alpha Zane, right?” asked a man to my right. Danielle moved between us, but I could still see the human male clearly. He was skinny to the point of emaciation, and I could hear the wheeze in his lungs.

As if in punctuation, he coughed.

“Come here, please,” I asked, looking at Danielle not to interfere.

The man came up to me. I could tell he was deathly ill, and my stomach dropped to my knees.

“Keith Parker, sir, uh, Alpha.”

“When were you last in a hospital?” I asked.

His brown (which for a human meant nothing more than that they were brown) eyes were rheumy and bloodshot as he stared at me.

“Sir?” he asked, and then I saw he was even unsteady on his feet.

I swiveled around to the pilot. “You’re in contact with the area’s medevac?” It was the law in my territory that there had to be a medical ‘copter for every radius of a hundred square miles.

But the pilot, oddly enough a male gamma, looked uncertain.

“Get in contact,” I growled. He got back into the helicopter and threw on his headset. I looked back to the human miner. “Mr. Parker, what physician onsite is treating you?”

“We see Dr. Baschan twice a week, s—Alpha,” he said, and then he coughed again.

I closed my eyes, took a breath, and opened them again.

“How many of you have black lung?”

He shrugged. “A few dozen.”

“Can you get them here, now?”

He nodded.

I made another call for transport.

I knew what he was thinking: that black lung was incurable. In truth, it was just expensive. I thought I’d made that clear in my territory and that those with terminal lung scarring diseases could apply to my household for treatment by a recent development in anti-fibrotic agents, commercially known as Pulvasic®.

It was impressively effective, though yes, it was just as expensive.

To think, humans working in this mine thought their pack alpha wouldn’t pay for their treatment. How could I possibly ask them to serve my community and then not use the resources of my community to serve them in kind?

Human males and females with rasping, obviously scarred lungs began appearing from the three small buildings around me, which looked like a foreman’s office, a grander (probably the project manager’s) office, and some sort of equipment shed. Wherever the workers slept at night, it was far from here.

I had quite a crowd around me when Tellis showed up, looking pinched and officious. I could smell the anxiety and officiousness from a (literal) mile away.

“Alpha Zane,” she said. “I didn’t—”

“No, you obviously didn’t anything,” I snapped. I looked at Danielle. “Keep her in check.”

With a nod, Danielle walked over to Tellis and slapped handcuffs on her before the manager could blink.

“What the hell?” Tellis shrieked.

“I’ll gag you, and you know it,” Danielle said.

More humans shuffled toward me, but I was also listening to the medevac helicopters coming toward us. I thought about weight distribution for the ‘copters, but they were all skinny. They could sit on each other’s laps for all the difference it would make.

“Where’s Foreman Reynolds?” I demanded of the crowd around me.

No one answered with words or body language.

“I will find Foreman Reynolds,” I said. “And if I find out that someone here could have led me to Reynolds quicker, I will come back and deal with them.”

Oddly, this didn’t shift the mood of the crowd. I reminded myself these people probably hadn’t dealt with a pack alpha for decades.

More shame to me.

“Let me make myself clear,” I said next. “When I talk about ‘dealing’ with someone, I mean stripping them naked, setting them off before me and my hunting pack, and ripping their aortas from their neck to feast on.”

I felt the scent turn. Most satisfactory.

“Do I know what’s going on here?” I asked the crowd. “No, but I will, and those who have been responsible for it know they’re already dead. Those who want to join me won’t help me now.”

“Foreman Reynolds is in Equipment Shed #6,” said a beta woman whose face was covered in black dust that I committed to memory. Then she pointed northwest.

I went that way, smelling the honesty of her answer like freshly cut grass, and my bodyguard Luke and the pilot, to my surprise, followed me.

Everything was, at least, properly labeled, so we found Equipment Shed #6. The little padlock over the door was nothing to snap, and then we were inside. I followed the smell of a worried Beta to a man tied up in a chair.

“Gerry,” I said when I saw him.

“Alpha Zane!” he exclaimed when he saw me.

“Did you think I wouldn’t come?” I asked him, feeling some slight amusement as Luke went to untie him.

He met my eyes seriously. “A pack alpha should command loyalty from his pack, but sometimes that doesn’t happen, and then there’s nothing there, no recourse or safety net, especially for humans.”

That rocked me back on my haunches, and I made myself think about what had prompted that statement. Then I stood there for a moment to make sure his lungs were clear.

“Stay with me during this,” I told him. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you have a phone call or a visit. You stay with me.”

Reynolds stood from the chair, lightly rubbed what I saw were raw wrists, and nodded. “Yes, Alpha Zane.”

I nodded and looked around at the rusted, dilapidated excavators, loaders, and mining drills. “This is the junkyard?” I asked.

Reynolds snorted. “This a working equipment shed, Alpha Zane.”

“Goddess,” I whispered.

In a moment I had torn through the place. It was a disgrace. The “equipment” was ancient, rusted, decrepit, unmaintained, and thoroughly unusable. I met a lone mechanic—human—who was trying to coax a basically medieval blasthole drill back to life and brought him with me.

Finally, I was standing there amid hundreds of humans with what were supposedly their werewolf “supervisors,” being told by some Reynolds lackey that the problem was that the wolves in the area were angry that humans had “taken their jobs” because they were working for a fraction of their real pay.

But I had already seen a slavery ring. I knew what they looked like, even when covered in coal dust.

I opened my mouth to start to set things right when I heard from the back of the human crowd, “It’s that damn goddess-mother’s fault.”