2

Auntie Letitia was in charge of the cakes, and my two nieces, Melodie and Saoirse, were helping her. She had been in charge of it for at least fifteen years, ever since Great-Auntie Beverly and her husband Jeb had handed the responsibility over to her after they’d handled it for fifty years. She’d taken on Melodie when the girl was five and showed an interest in baking, always demanding to help whoever was making desserts—even when her head didn’t quite reach the counter. Melodie was fifteen now and would be going off to college in two years, so the slightly younger Saoirse had been recruited when she started hanging around the kitchen.

It was one of the many things I loved about our pack. Despite everything we’d been through—especially with Alpha Barris gambling away so much of our land—we kept our tradition of passing down knowledge from generation to generation without compelling anyone to do anything they didn’t want to do. We were lucky to have enough young ones that some could focus on hunting, some on farming, some on being warriors, and some on more traditional skills. Then there were those who went off to pursue more schooling or even just traveled the world. I’d never really gotten a chance to do that, what with being alpha and all, so I cherished it deeply for all those coming up after me. While we weren’t the wealthiest by far, it certainly made me feel so very rich.

“I told you, I had it first!”

“Yeah, and I called cap!”

The angry shouts drifted over the field to Chris and me, interrupting our first calm moment of the day. Chris was my beta and right-hand man, which meant he cleaned up all the messes I was too busy to get to. He was my consultant and my confidant. Unlike me, he was a father, which gave me a vital perspective that I didn’t naturally have. Sure, I loved all the kids in our pack, but it didn’t beat Chris’s lived experience.

“I’ll go handle that.” I sighed. While our pack generally got along, there were bound to be little spats here and there due to the general coexistence amongst shifters. I did my best to resolve them without much drama. “You go check in with Bethany to see if she needs anything.”

“Ach, you’re crazy if you don’t think Bethany’s not already setting up all the tables, the tent, and the play areas for the kids,” Chris said with a wide smile. “She’s been counting down the days to this since the last frost of the year.”

I couldn’t help but grin. Unlike my relationship with my high-school girlfriend, Chris and Bethany had gone the distance. They got married a year after graduating, then had my niece Arietty. At thirteen, she was a precocious kid, and in a couple of years when she went through her first shift, she was guaranteed to be even more of a handful. I adored her, naturally, and was looking forward to taking her on her first run in her wolf form.

“Dude, you’re in your twenties! Don’t use words like cap! It’s cringe!” “Yeah, well, you saying ‘cringe’ is hella cringe!”

I sighed again and shot Chris a knowing look before trotting off. I could tell the voices were male, and I couldn’t say I was surprised when I came across a cluster of young men ranging from seventeen to thirty-three all gathered around the grills that were spaced throughout our cooking area.

No wonder there was already an argument.

Some old-fashioned shifters liked to excuse poor behavior and say that male shifters were naturally more volatile, but that was complete bullshit. However, what was true was that male shifters did tend to have to work through more aggression in their first few years of shifting due to the increased levels of testosterone in their systems.

That was the interesting thing about being a wolf. As far as I knew, we were the latest of all the shifters, with our children ostensibly being born “human” and only gaining their animal form a few years after the start of puberty, meaning most girls went through their first shift around fourteen or fifteen, while the boys were sixteen to seventeen. Bear shifters could shift within months after birth, and wild cats sometime after their first steps. I couldn’t imagine trying to keep track of a toddler who could randomly turn into an animal, so I much preferred our late transformations—even if it did technically mean Puberty Part Two: Electric Boogaloo.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, trying to keep my tone genial. I had no issue using my alpha voice when I needed to, but only when I needed to. Alpha Barris had been known to abuse the skill and compel the pack to give him money or things he could sell to fairies. He was a prime example of a great leader succumbing to a horrible disease that our accelerated healing couldn’t handle. His addiction had consumed him so much that he’d abandoned his responsibility to his people and turned into their abuser instead. I’d cut off my right hand before stumbling down that path.

“Cas!” one of the young men cried—Seamus, a recently graduated young one who was taking a gap year. While I didn’t know everything about every pack member, I tried to be generally informed about their lives. “Glad you’re here. I reserved this grill with Uncle Lazar so I could make this pork butt. It needs six hours, so I made sure I signed up for it last week.”

“I checked that same list, and this grill was free,” the other man, Archie, objected. He had a mechanic apprenticeship in the city with a human shop. That in particular had taken a great deal of effort to arrange, considering the auto shop was in the Ramirez pack’s territory, but after some fierce negotiations with the fairies who monitored the city to make sure we shifters didn’t go to war with each other, our packs had managed to get permission for all our members under twenty-five to be able to travel freely between territories for educational purposes.

“Looks like there might have been a clerical error here, folks. What did you wanna cook, Archie? If you have similar temps, perhaps you could share the grill? It’s got two racks in there.”

Before either of them could answer, a terrible crashing sound filled the air, followed by an alarmed howl. There was a beat of silence, then pure pandemonium broke out. Uh-oh.

I knew the sounds of a new wolf panicking like the back of my hand. Somewhere in our cluster of houses, a young one had

just shifted for the first time. And in the middle of the day, too! Rare, but not entirely unheard of.

“We’ll settle this later,” I said before taking off at full speed. Technically, I could run faster if I shifted into my wolf form, but then I would run into trouble if my destination involved doorknobs or anything else that required thumbs. And while I could shift into a wolf, then back into a human again, such rapid shuttling back and forth was pretty hard on the body, and I wanted to enjoy my day.

Halfway across the field, I managed to pinpoint the location of the commotion, which was growing louder by the second. It was coming from the western chunk of houses on our land.

Our houses were arranged in a bit of a complicated manner. They weren’t quite arranged in blocks, but also not scattered as far as they usually would be in the country. We had the main house, where my mother and a few of the other elders lived, and those of us who were single lived in small cabins that were scattered about. The couples and those with families had houses bunched together in threes and fours so all the immediate relatives were close together. It was a ramshackle community, but everything was in good repair, and it allowed us all to work wherever we were needed. While some of our pack had personal gardens or buildings that were their special pet projects, we pretty much shared everything within reason. “Calm down, Arietty!” Arietty?

That cry allowed me to home-in on Auntie Letitia’s house. I raced there, my long legs quickly crossing the distance. While my inner wolf was always jubilant at being able to run freely, most of his concentration and mine was focused on getting to whatever young pack member needed help.

The thing about first shifts was that, no matter how much we tried to prepare the young ones, it was still terrifying and confusing. Suddenly, their entire body was racked with agony as they were forced out of their human shape into an entirely new one. As if that weren’t enough, their senses were dialed up to a hundred-and-eleven, often overwhelming them with too much information way too fast.

Usually, there were signs that a kid was nearing their first shift—fevers, growing pains, a huge increase in appetite, as well as light and sound sensitivity. Once those symptoms started, we pulled them out of school for a week or so and made sure they were always with several other shifters. As the alpha of our pack, I ensured I knew when anyone was approaching the milestone so I could go on a run with the new shifter once they were ready.

To my knowledge, though, no one was scheduled to shift.

Finally, I made it to Letitia’s back door. I threw it open and came across quite the scene.

“Arietty! Stop! You’re gonna ruin the sau—No!”

The kitchen was just beyond the small mudroom. It was usually a warm, cozy place, but at that very moment, it looked more like a war zone.

The big wooden cabinet next to the fridge had toppled over, scattering flour, sugar, and various other ingredients across the floor. The door to the refrigerator was hanging at an angle that told me it would need repairing. For one horrifying moment, I thought there was blood everywhere, until I saw an upended stockpot of tomato sauce and two crockpots of chili now shattered on the floor.

Aw man, I had been looking forward to that chili!

What was more important than the mess or the ruined food was the brand new, very petite wolf currently horking down the spilled food and clearly having the time of her life.

She was beautiful. She had her mother’s roan fur, but the same tawny dappling that her father had, and her big tail wagged without a hint of aggression. That was certainly a good thing considering how dangerous new wolves could be. Even the loveliest young people sometimes turned violent because their wolf instincts were far more powerful than their human ones.

Instead of violence, however, Arietty was more focused on filling her belly. I supposed there were worse things in life.

“Hey there, Arietty,” I murmured, putting as many soothing tones as I could into the subharmonics that shifters could somewhat communicate in. It wasn’t anything like shifter-speak—the way we communicated in our wolf forms—but more like a subconscious way to share feelings, kind of like humans and body language. “Why don’t we go outside and get you some fresh air?”

I took a step forward, hands raised non-threateningly, but Arietty took it entirely differently, because she whirled toward me and started growling, as if to tell me that the cornbread on the floor was hers and she wasn’t going to share.

Fair. I often wished I could hoard all the delicious cornbread too.

“None of that now, Arietty. I need you to calm down and come with me, all right?”

I was doing my best not to escalate things, and I wasn’t really worried about my safety. Sure, maybe she would nick me or give me a bruise or two, but I would heal within minutes. Maybe she would bite me if things escalated really far, but I didn’t see Arietty reacting that strongly. As far as I knew, she’d only just started puberty.

“Your daddy and mama are gonna be real thrilled to see you! You take after both of them, ya know? You can’t see yourself yet, but I can.”

Apparently, my comforting needed a little improvement, because instead of settling, Arietty lunged forward as if she was going to snap at me.