For all Gordo’s warnings about how big and scary the world could be, for all Thomas’s notions of a territory protected, nothing had ever happened. No one came. Nothing attacked. I never asked questions about other packs or what else existed if werewolves were real. I lived in a bubble in a small town in the middle of the mountains and I thought that’s where I’d always be.
Everything was good. Everything was fine.
Carter had just graduated and moved back to work with his father.
Kelly was taking online courses so he didn’t have to leave the pack.
Joe was sixteen and still waited for me on the dirt road almost every day.
Gordo was thinking of opening another shop in the next town over.
Mom smiled when she ran with the wolves at night.
Jessie moved back to Green Creek and was a teacher at the school.
Tanner, Rico, and Chris took me out for beers, and we ate our weight in buffalo wings.
Mark was close to telling me about him and Gordo.
Elizabeth was painting in pinks and yellows.
Thomas smiled out to the trees, a king content with his domain.
I should have asked more questions. About what was out there. About what they could want. But I was naïve, and dangerously so.
I was walking toward the diner for lunch. I rubbed the grease from my fingernails. My hands were callused, signs of hard work. I marveled at how I had a place here. In Green Creek. My father had said I was gonna get shit, but he was dead and I had a place. Friends. Family. I had people. I was something. I was somebody.
It was a bright June day and I was alive and happy.
And then a woman said, “Well. Hello.”
I stopped. Looked up.
She was wrong. Off. Dark. Beautiful with red hair and pale skin and a shark’s smile on her face, all bite and teeth. She wore a pretty summer dress, blues and greens. She was barefoot, and I wondered if her feet burned on the cement from the sun.
“Hello,” I said. There didn’t seem to be anyone else on the sidewalk.
She took a step toward me. She cocked her head to the side and I thought, Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. “My name is Marie,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“Ox.”
“Ox,” she breathed. “I do like that name.” She was close enough to touch and I didn’t know how that had happened.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s very nice of you.”
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “You smell like….”
“Like?”
She opened her eyes. They flashed violet, like an Omega. “Human. Tell me, human. You play with wolves?” She took another step toward me.
I took an answering step back. In my head, Thomas was telling me to remember my training. To remember what he’d taught me. I didn’t think it was really him, but I couldn’t be sure. I knew Gordo had wards up all over town, so surely he would have known if another wolf had breached them.
“You should leave,” I told her. “Before.”
“Before?”
“You know why.”
“Ox? What’s going on?”
“Shit,” I muttered. I looked over Marie’s shoulder. Mom was hanging out the diner’s door, watching me with concern on her face.
“Go back inside,” I told her as Marie looked back at her and wiggled her fingers in an obscene wave. Her fingernails were painted blue.
“She smells like you,” Marie said to me. “Did you know that? Like you and wood smoke and autumn leaves. And I know what she smells like now. Scent memory, Ox. It never leaves.”
“Ox,” Mom said.
“Inside,” I snapped at her.
She went inside. I knew she’d be reaching for the phone.
Marie laughed. “Little human has some bite to him. Did the wolves teach you that?”
“This is the territory of the Bennett pack,” I told her. “You don’t belong here.”
“Bennett,” she said. “Bennett. Like that name means anything anymore. Let me tell you about the Bennetts.”
“The fuck is this?”
Gordo was at my side. His face was twisted in anger. His arms were covered by his work shirt, but I knew the tattoos on his skin were starting to shift.
Marie hissed. “Witch.”
“Wolf,” he snarled back. “You got balls, lady, showing your face here. Thomas Bennett is on his way. What do you think he’ll do when he sees you?”
A flicker of fear crossed her face before it disappeared. She smiled again, more fangs than not. “The fallen king? Coming out of hiding? Oh glory be!”
“It’s not hiding when you’re in your own territory,” I said.
“With humans in his pack,” she said. “Low, even for him. Belly dragging across the dirt.”
My hands curled into fists.
Marie grinned at me. “Aren’t you just precious? I could gut you, you know. Right here. Before you could move. Your Alpha has been hidden away long enough. He’s weaker now. Even I can feel it. I could take you and he could do nothing.”
“Try,” I said, and Gordo tensed.
But she didn’t. She took a step back. Looked over her shoulder before turning back. She smiled a little and said, “Say hi to your mom for me, Ox,” and then she was off, down the street until she disappeared.
THEY CAME two nights later.
They were feral. Four of them. Not a pack, as they had no Alpha, but somehow still working together.
They’d made a mistake, though. By showing themselves. Or, at least by Marie showing herself.
Thomas made Mom and me stay at the Bennett house in those days that followed Marie cornering me. I told him Gordo needed to be there too. Thomas didn’t argue. Gordo did. I told him to shut the fuck up. I might have sounded slightly hysterical.
Mom went to work during the day. Carter and Kelly went with her.
Gordo and I went to work. He didn’t let me out of his sight, even when we had to take a longer than normal lunch break so he could strengthen his wards.
Joe stayed home from school. I brought his homework, and he took it from me with steady hands.
Thomas and Mark holed themselves up in Thomas’s office, whispering angrily into a phone, speaking to people I’d never heard of.
Elizabeth kept us calm, hands casually in our hair as she walked by.
On the second night, we sat down to dinner. Conversation was quiet. Silverware scraped against clay plates. Then Gordo took in a sharp breath and sighed. “They’re coming,” he said.
Alpha and Beta eyes shone around us.
We knew the plan. We’d trained for this.
I thought my hands would shake as I picked up a crowbar infused with silver, a gift from Gordo. They did not shake.
Thomas and Mark. Carter and Gordo. Out on the porch.
The rest of us stayed inside. Elizabeth and I in front. Kelly with Joe and my mother.
I saw them approach in the dark. Their violet eyes shone amongst the trees.
Thomas said, “This is Bennett territory. I will give you a chance to leave. I suggest you take it.”
They laughed.
A man said, “Thomas Bennett. As I live and breathe.”
Another man said, “And a witch no less. Smells like… Livingstone? Was that your father?”
Gordo Livingstone. His father, who’d lost his tether and hurt a great many people.