3
After washing my feet in the bathroom, I lingered, hesitant to leave in case I crossed my adoptive father again. I took my time brushing my hair and tying it back, picking plaintively at the light brown strands that framed my narrow face. The girl staring back in the mirror looked as pathetic as she felt. Gangly arms, a thin and feeble body. There was no way a wolf was hiding in this body of mine, but every now and then, I swore I felt it. Wildness that made me want to dive into the forest. Hunger for something more. It frustrated me that even after eighteen years, I couldn’t be like the rest of my packmates enough that I wanted to shatter that mirror. How long would I have to stay locked up in Hexen Manor before David let me go?
Walking back into the parlor, I spied David’s jacket still on the floor. Leaving it would only give him another reason to scold me later, so I picked it up. After fixing it nicely on a hanger and dusting it off, I meant to return it to David’s walk-in in the bedroom on the second floor before the sound of the porch door sliding open scared me out of my skin.
I jumped and spun around, wide-eyed at the nine hunters from earlier—now human—clustered around the door. Alpha Gavin was at the head of them with the slain elk’s neck on his shoulder.
Blood smeared across his forehead, and sweat glistened on the hard musculature of his bare shoulders, his jeans stained. Dark hair teemed across his broad chest, brown locks slick against his brow, his eyes the colour of an ominous murk—and pinned on me. My heart raced. I begged my feet to move, but they wouldn’t. I couldn’t even look away. Dread welled up worse and worse, panic rising as I watched Gavin’s unpredictable anger come to life before me… and I was directly in the crosshairs.
Chapter 2: Gavin
The hunt had been a disaster. I was already furious about the mayhem I caused, so when I laid eyes on that scrawny wolfless girl in Hexen Manor, it was like she ignited the fuse inside of me. And the longer she looked back at me, the closer I was to detonating.
My shoulders ached from carrying the elk up from the valley. There were no roads down there and too many trees to get a truck through, so we had to haul it all the way up to the house. A couple of the Dalesbloom wolves carried the back legs, but Catrina wasn’t one of them. Of course, she didn’t help. She just trotted along beside me, swooning over my show of dominance during the hunt. It pissed me off even worse that she encouraged my loss of control. I thought once the hunt was over, I could relax and try to forget what happened.
Instead, I walked inside to that Jesper runt gawking at me like she knew every terrible thing I had done. I couldn’t hold back my anger. “What the fuck are you staring at, runt?” I snarled, dropping the elk with a heavy thud.
She flinched and bolted down the corridor.
Catrina squeezed through the door beside me, tittering as she grabbed my arm. “How sad,” she said. “She can’t even greet you properly.”
“Like I care,” I said, pulling my arm away.
The others all clutched the elk and dragged it through the porch door into the dinette. I gripped a handful of its coarse brown hide along its neck and heaved it across the floor, leaving behind a mess of dirt and blood. We had really done a number on the animal, but I didn’t remember most of it. I only remembered seeing red.
In my periphery, I glimpsed David turning the corner out of the corridor and into the parlor.He stuck his hands in his pockets as he looked us over. “I’m pleased to see you’ve had a successful hunt,” he said.
“You should’ve been there,” said Catrina. “Gavin was the star of the show.”
I didn’t want to acknowledge them.
“How about some wine, hm?” She crossed the dinette into the open kitchen overlooking the backyard, disappearing through a door leading down to the wine cellar.
I got ready to help carry the elk down the stairs into the basement where the carcass would be bled out and butchered, when David’s casual clearing of the throat implied he had other plans for me. “Gavin, why don’t you let the hunters take care of that?”
My anger from earlier that evening was still red-hot. I abruptly released the elk and looked up at him, but my eyes were drawn back to Colt, who’d been standing across from me with a deep gash across the bridge of his nose. I had made that.
Colt avoided my eyes and kept tugging the elk. “Lift it by the haunches. Get the antlers,” he instructed the others.
I stepped over the blood trail that dragged across the linoleum and past David, opening up a cupboard in search of a glass. As I filled it with cold water from the fridge, David stood beside me, his neat grey dress shirt and black pants starkly different from my shirtless, filthy appearance.
“Impressive kill,” he commented. “I take it you’re the one who made it.”
“Yeah.”
“My pack will eat well tonight.”
I chugged my glass of water but felt no relief from it.
“You know,” David continued, lowering his voice, “I have a shipment of PMR-30’s coming in tonight that I need to receive, but I’ll be somewhat preoccupied meeting with a client. Alpha to Alpha, you wouldn’t mind taking care of that for me, would you?”
My fingers left an oily residue on the glass as I put it down, still thirsty. “Gotta scrounge up something fresh for my pack tonight.”
“Send them my way. I can spare a quarter of that elk,” said David.
“A quarter’s not enough.”
“It’ll tide them over. There’s only, what, ten of you left now?”
His idle comment punched me in the gut. Whereas Dalesbloom boasted forty-four wolves, Grandbay lost numbers every year and struggled to regain them, and the way he said it felt almost like he was rubbing it in. “I have to head back out,” I grunted.
David’s mouth tightened into a firm line. “I was really hoping I could depend on you for this.”
To what, collect and transport the illegal shipment of handguns he bought under the table to avoid having to register them? I wasn’t interested in doing his dirty work. I was an Alpha in my own right; I had enough to take care of, even if my pack was barely a quarter the size of his. I avoided responding to that by going for another glass of water. Thankfully, the silence didn’t last long before the wine cellar door opened, and Catrina reappeared with a bottle of Merlot.
“Ugh. What a mess,” she said, gesturing at the blood trail left behind by the elk with her nose.