Blood Of The Alpha.

Mara Voss had seen a lot of strange things working night shift at the Ashgrove County Wildlife Rescue, but nothing like this.

The call had come in at 11:47 p.m.: a possible injured animal off Route 9, near the old birch stand where the road curved too sharply for headlights to catch anything moving. She almost hadn't gone. The temperature had dropped into the teens, the kind of cold that turned exposed skin the color of candle wax, and she'd already logged ten hours. But nobody else was on call, and something about the dispatcher's voice — it's big, Mara, bigger than anything I've seen — had needled at her all the way out.

She found it in the ditch, half-buried in fresh snow, breathing in ragged pulls that fogged the air in short, panicked bursts.

It was not a deer.

It was not a bear, either, though for one absurd second her brain tried to make it one, because the alternative made no sense at all. The creature sprawled in the snowbank was easily seven feet if you unfolded it — which she was very much not going to do — covered in dark, matted fur going silver at the shoulders, with a jaw built for tearing and hands, actual hands, curled against its chest, tipped in claws longer than her fingers.

Mara's flashlight beam shook. The thing's eyes opened.

They were amber. Impossibly, unnaturally amber, and entirely, achingly human in the way they focused on her — first with the dull confusion of pain, then with a sudden, sharpening alarm, as though it had only just realized what it was and what she must be seeing.

"Okay," Mara whispered, mostly to herself. "Okay, okay, that's a person. That's — you're a person."

The creature's throat worked. What came out was not words. It was somewhere between a growl and a groan, low enough that she felt it more than heard it, vibrating up through her boots into her chest.

There was blood soaking the snow beneath its ribs, dark and spreading, and beneath the fur she could see the edges of a wound that didn't look like an animal had made it. Too clean. Too straight. Like something silver.

She should have run. Every instinct she'd built over ten years of handling frightened, injury-mad animals told her that pain plus fear plus teeth this size equaled a very short conversation with a hospital, if she was lucky, and a very long conversation with nobody at all if she wasn't.

Instead she crouched down at the edge of the ditch, slow, palms open, the way she would with a wolf caught in a trap.

"I'm not going to hurt you," she said. "I need you to believe that, because I really don't have a plan B here."

The amber eyes tracked her hands. The growl in its throat hitched, softened, became something almost like a question.

"I've got a truck about forty feet that way," she went on, keeping her voice low and even, the tone she used on things that bit. "I can't carry you. You're going to have to help me, and I know that's a lot to ask a stranger currently learning I exist."

A huff of air. Not quite a laugh. Close enough that her pulse did something complicated.

It moved — slow, wincing, dragging itself half upright with one clawed hand fisted against the wound in its side — and she got a shoulder under what she told herself was an arm, though it bent in places arms weren't supposed to bend, and together they made it, stumbling, silent, to the truck.

By the time she got the passenger door shut, the shape in her front seat had changed.

She didn't see it happen — didn't want to have seen it happen, some coward part of her thought later — there was just a shift, a compression, bone rearranging itself with sounds she'd spend weeks trying not to remember, and where the creature had been there was a man. Mid-thirties, maybe. Dark hair soaked with sweat and melted snow. A face that would have been striking under literally any other circumstances, sharp-cut and pale, marred now by pain and by the same wound, smaller on a human frame but no less real, no less bleeding through what remained of shredded clothing.

"Drive," he said. His voice was a wreck, but the word came out clear. Human. "Please. Before they find the trail."

"Before who finds the trail?"

He looked at her — really looked, amber bleeding back into his eyes for one disorienting second before settling into ordinary brown — and something in his expression made the hair on her arms rise.

"Drive," he said again. "I'll explain. I swear I'll explain everything. Just not here."

His name, he told her twenty minutes later, in the fluorescent hush of her kitchen while she pressed gauze against a wound that was already, impossibly, starting to knit itself shut at the edges, was Ronan Ashby.

"Ashby," she repeated. "As in Ashby's Mill? As in the name on half the street signs in this county?"

"My family's been here a long time." He hissed as she cleaned the wound, and beneath her hands she felt muscle shift in a way that made her deeply aware this was not, strictly, a human body she was tending, whatever it currently looked like. "Longer than the town, actually."

"Longer than the town."

"There's a lot I need to tell you, and none of it is going to sound sane."

"You turned into a seven-foot wolf-thing in my truck ten minutes ago. I think we're past the sanity checkpoint, Ronan."

That got the ghost of a smile out of him, quick and startled, like he hadn't expected to have one in him tonight. It did something unfair to the line of his jaw.

"There's a pack," he said finally. "Mine. My mother led it until six months ago. Now my brother does — or thinks he does — and he's decided the old rules don't apply to him. Territory rules. What we're allowed to hunt. Who we're allowed to hurt."

"And the wound?"

"Silver. He's been arming the enforcers with it. Anyone who challenges him, anyone who so much as questions him—" He stopped himself, jaw tight, and she watched him decide, visibly, how much a stranger with steady hands and a dead-calm voice deserved to hear. "I questioned him."

"So he tried to kill you."

"He tried to make an example of me. There's a difference, in his head. It ends the same way for me either way."

Mara sat back on her heels, gauze gone red-dark in her fingers, and studied the man bleeding out slower and slower on her kitchen floor — a man who, forty minutes ago, she'd have sworn under oath did not exist, could not exist, was a fever dream brought on by too much cold and too little sleep.

"What happens," she said carefully, "when he realizes you're not dead?"

Ronan's eyes came up to hers, amber threading back through the brown like something waking.

"He already knows I ran," he said. "Which means he already knows I'm not alone anymore. Which means—"

The window over her kitchen sink exploded inward.

Glass sprayed across the tile in a bright, glittering arc, and framed in the broken dark beyond it was another shape, larger even than the one she'd found in the ditch, eyes burning a red that had nothing human left in them at all, a voice rolling out of its chest like a landslide:

"There you are, little brother."

Mara grabbed the cast-iron pan off her stove without entirely deciding to, and Ronan was already moving, already shifting, bones cracking back into that terrible new shape between one breath and the next, putting himself between her and the window with a snarl that shook the dishes in the cabinet —

— and the last thing Mara Voss thought, before the kitchen dissolved into chaos, was that she really should have called in sick tonight.

To be continued.