Chapter 2 – Heel

Dax

The wolf wants to turn around.

He's wanted to turn around since I cleared the fence, and he isn't being quiet about it, because quiet isn't a thing he owns.

He just keeps shoving the same word into the back of my skull like a toddler with a doorbell.

Ours.

Ours, ours, ours.

"He's a hunter," I tell him, out loud, because we're alone in the dark and there's nobody around to decide I've finally cracked.

"He’s literally trying to kill us with silver and wolfsbane. On purpose. He's got a whole little routine about it."

Ours, says the wolf, who could not possibly care less.

He always misses, the wolf says fondly, like that's the best thing about Noah fucking Hunter. Some kind of cute inside joke.

He could stop missing, he adds, after a second. We could let him land one. See what he does after.

"We are not getting shot to find out what he does after."

He'd feel so bad, the wolf says eagerly. He'd have to make it up to us. At length. Thoroughly.

"Jesus. Stop that!"

For hours, says the wolf, and goes back to chanting his one word, deeply pleased with himself.

I shift back at the treeline behind the house, which means for a few seconds I'm a naked twenty-year-old standing in wet grass losing an argument with myself.

And if that isn't the glamour of being the youngest Alpha in recent history, I don't know what is.

The cold doesn't bother me. The hunter does.

He's all over the inside of my nose.

Violence, clean sweat, and that sharp green thing his blood does when he's lying to himself, and the wolf keeps rolling around in it like fresh snow.

He went still when I crowded him into that tree.

Not scared-still.

The other kind.

His heart slammed and his scent split right down the middle, fear on top and underneath it something hot and embarrassed and wanting that he'd have gutted me for saying out loud.

I know that smell. People have aimed it at me before and meant it.

None of them ever made the wolf go growly and excited just by leaking it through a jacket.

He smelled good pinned to that tree.

He also smelled wrong. Like a weapon I should've taken apart while I had it in my hands.

He smelled, the wolf says, like ours, and lies down with his chin on his paws, smug.

I’m out of ways to explain that a goddamn hunter can never be ours. Not to mention the fact that he’s human.

I’ve never been with a male before, but I don’t have a problem with that aspect of it.

The other deterrents are more than enough. My wolf will have to get over this little crush of his.

There's a hoodie and a pair of sweats on the porch rail where I left them, because I was taught from a young age to stash clothes anywhere, I might come back to naked, which is most places.

I'm halfway into it when the door opens and Finn leans in the frame with two beers and a face I already hate.

"Sooo," he says.

"No."

"I didn't say anything yet."

"You've got the face. The whole face is saying it."

He hands me a beer, and his nose does the small twitch, the polite one, the one that means he's being a gentleman about the fact that I reek of somebody.

He’s incapable of not going there though.

"You smell like crossbow guy. Again."

"Noah Hunter, the hunter."

"I know his surname's Hunter. You've told me, like, eleven times, it's the only fun fact you own."

He drops onto the step.

"Third night this week you've come home smelling like him and acting like a deer jumped you. Betas can count."

"Shut up. Nothing happened."

"Sure. Did the nothing have you on top of him, or him on top of you?"

I ignore the taunting, because the real answer is a mess I'm not unpacking on a porch at one in the morning.

The real answer is I had him.

Pinned, disarmed, that smart mouth two inches off mine and his pulse going like a bird in a fist.

The right move there, the Alpha move, the one my father would've made without blinking, was to put enough fear in him that he'd quit the woods for good and stay quit.

Instead, I leaned in and took a breath I'm going to be chewing on all night.

Instead, I told him where to go looking for the missing people he’s trying to protect.

I've decided not to look straight on at why I’m not making a move to get rid of him for good.

It's the wolf. That's the official story.

The wolf's got some bug about him, and it leaks out my pores, and that's the whole thing.

The wolf, who’s not fooled, says nothing. Just wags his tail slowly.

"You went weird," Finn says. "Just now. Your whole face did a thing."

"I'm thinking."

"New experience for you, how does it feel? I probably shouldn’t expect more of it anytime soon."

“Fuck you.”

He bumps my shoulder with his, then, because he's Finn and he can't hold a straight face past a minute, "Is he at least hot, though? He must be smoking if you’re ignoring the whole trying to kill you thing."

"It's not a crush."

It comes out flatter and faster than I mean it to, and Finn's eyebrows climb.

My wolf, the absolute traitor, perks at the word like somebody rang a bell.

"Didn't say crush," Finn says, delighted. "I said hot. You said crush. Fascinating."

"Drop it."

Objectively, I can’t deny that Noah Hunter is hot.

Raven black hair, jade green eyes, long inky lashes, every muscle perfectly defined.

He’s not bad if you’re into that kind of thing.

Pity he’s such a dick.

Finn’s smiling into his beer in a way that makes it clear he’s not dropping the subject for long.

I change the subject before he thinks of more bullshit to torture me with.

"You said you'd ask around about the people going missing out of town. What'd you turn up?"

The grin folds and goes somewhere else immediately.

"Yeah," he says. "About that."

He pulls his phone out, thumbs to something, turns it around to show me.

A photo of a flyer, the homemade kind, printed at the library and taped to a pole.

HAVE YOU SEEN. A girl, nineteen, maybe twenty, gap-toothed, laughing at whoever's behind the camera. Mary Masterson is printed under the picture.

"Five since spring," Finn says, all the laughter drained out of him.

"All about that age. All disappearing from the edges of town, bus stops, trailheads, the gas station on the highway. And here's the part I wasn't gonna drop on you tonight."

He taps the screen.

"She went from the lot behind the gym. Our gym. Tuesday. While you were running the eight o'clock."

The wolf goes still.

All the way still, first time all night. No ours. No wagging.

He’s up on his feet inside me with his ears pinned. He knows what it means when the thing eating the town starts eating it off our doorstep.

Tuesday.

I had a room full of teenagers doing barbell lifts.

There’s a kid named Bex who will not stop rounding her back no matter how many times I cue her, and I was in there fixing her form. Being a fun, normal man with a fun, normal business.

The kind of guy half this town waves at without ever guessing what waves back.

Those kids are mine.

Not pack, but mine to keep safe while they're under my roof.

The gym is the one thing in my life I picked instead of inherited.

And somebody snatched a girl right outside, while I counted reps.

That’s on me.

I sent the hunter out to count the missing.

He's out there right now, alone, human, dead sure the worst thing in these woods is me.

Go, says the wolf. Not a scrap of humor left in him.

For the first time in weeks we want the exact same thing.