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Cole
If I was honest with myself, I was hoping Curt was going to be all bark and no bite. I’d fought the kid before, and he was far from having any kind of meaningful prowess when it came to a fight. I knew he was scary and menacing; he could talk good game and intimidate; he was fast and fluid. But that was all he really had going for him.
But as I worked with the rest of the pack to collect the thousands of flyers off our property, I had to wonder if he’d been training. I hadn’t seen him do much fighting at the canneries, and even if I had, I’d been so exhausted and stressed while we were working together that I wasn’t sure I’d even remember it.
Luckily, the propaganda they’d showered down on us hadn’t convinced any of our members to leave us. But it was certainly enough to make everyone nervous and on edge. Some of the women in our pack were looking jumpy and on edge; there was the definite sense that they weren’t sure we were capable of keeping them safe and protected. It was enough to make my skin crawl, but Marley reminded me that I could only do so much and it would take time to make them feel at ease.
I just had to keep proving what we were capable of.
It was getting late, and even after filling dozens of trash bags, we still had so much to go. After I cleared the last bit from the front of the building, Travis approached me from inside.
“Hey, there are quite a bit of flyers up on the roof. I'm worried about the structural integrity up there. Wanna help me tackle it?” he asked.
“Do we have safety harnesses to use?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he answered. “Sylvia ran down to the house and brought some back. Just two, though.”
I nodded. Luckily, I’d started working on the roof a couple of days prior, so I still had harnesses we could latch ourselves into. It wasn’t worth the risk of going up there on our own, not when it was close to a fifty-foot drop thanks to the sharp slopes of the Victorian-era building.
“Yeah, let’s go,” I said. “Last thing we need is to have to clean up paper sludge from the shingles because of a snowstorm or something.”
We made our way up to the roof, strapping ourselves into our harnesses and checking each other to make sure we were locked in properly. After getting ourselves locked in, we started working on clearing the papers off the roof, dropping them off the side of the building to be handled by a few pack members who offered to clean up what we threw down so we didn’t just throw away all the work we’d done.
“How you doing?” Travis asked me after a while.
“I’m fine, just tired. Ready to get some sleep,” I said.
“That’s not exactly what I mean, man.”
I looked over at him from where I was getting ready to toss a handful of papers over the edge. I paused for a moment, then tossed them over. “Uh...Marley wants to finally move ahead with the transition,” I said finally.
“No shit?” Travis asked. “When’d she tell you?”
“After the bullshit with Ashton,” I said, chucking another handful of papers over the edge, “I’m being a good boy, but it’s hard not to feel like I fucked things up.”
“Why do you feel like you fucked things up?”
“Because she probably wouldn’t have felt the need to rush the situation if it wasn’t for the fact that the pup almost took her and my son out,” I said grouchily. “Because if I’d nipped the issue with Ashton in the bud from the get-go, she and Noah wouldn’t have been in trouble in the first place.”
“It’s not a failure for your wife to become a shifter with you, bro.”
“It’s a failure if the process kills her.”
“I think that’s way less likely than you think it is,” Travis said. “And if the injections start going poorly, she can always call it quits.”
“She can, but what if she doesn’t?” I asked. “What if she’s so insistent about it that she tries to go through with it even if it kills her?”
“You really think she’d rather die than be partially shifted?” Travis asked. “Come on, man. Marley’s smarter than that.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt her intelligence,” I said. “I doubt her willingness to give up. I always thought I was a stubborn prick, but I’ve never met someone as doggedly determined as she can be.”
“She’s gotten stronger since she met you, huh?” Travis asked thoughtfully as he gathered some more paper. “I remember her being kind of meek before, and lately she’s been really pushing herself to match your intensity. Sometimes, it kinda looks like Noah trying to walk around in your dress shoes, but other times, I’m really fucking glad we have her. Ashton may have looked at you after she gave him an earful today, but I’m pretty sure what she said has started to get through.”
“I’m sorry about that, by the way. If I’d been better about disciplining him, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt,” I said.
Travis shrugged. “Yeah, but I kinda needed to get a little fight out of my system, anyway. He and the other purity bros are getting on my fucking nerves lately. Especially the ones who can’t even shift fully anymore.”
“I keep trying to figure out some way to get people to start changing their mindsets about that whole thing,” I said. “It doesn’t make much sense—the whole half-breed thing. We all have the genes, but only certain people have them activated.” I sighed. “On one hand, I understand the argument about it being a lived experience. About being ostracized and demonized your whole life, only to transition when it’s convenient or safe for you. But if you follow that line of logic to other similar situations, it’s pretty nonsensical.”
