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And then, she needed to go. She’d had far more adventure in a single day than she’d bargained for, and the sun hadn’t even gone down yet.
___
“Are you sure about this?” Mary said into her phone, clamping the device between her ear and her shoulder as she slowly moved a couple of crates out of the way.
“Positive,” the Norseton Wolfpack alpha, Adam Carbone, said confidently. “I’m a born wolf, just like the others here, and I happen to have a special priority code to the wolf goddess’s hotline.”
“Your goddess.”
“Well, yep, but you shouldn’t assume they don’t all communicate, or that there isn’t some overlapping in the pantheons. Whoever was responsible for making Mr. Toft what he is may very well be the same person who fried the DNA of my ancestors, too.”
“Logical.”
He chuckled. “Aw, I’m not just a pretty face, you know. I try to keep learning stuff. Stagnating is how packs get themselves in trouble.”
Stagnating was likely why the Viking clan in Fallon was so disordered, but Mary didn’t mention that to Adam.
“I’ve already got a couple of my guys heading that way to scoop him up,” Adam said.
“What? I don’t think—”
“Trust me on this,” Adam said, all mirth gone from his formerly jocular tone. “If the wolf magic is reasserting, he’s more or less going through werewolf puberty right now, and he’s not gonna be fun to be around for a few months, probably.”
“Months?”
She’d perhaps stated the word a bit too loudly. Andreas, who’d been up on the ledge by the window, hopped down then, and started heading toward her.
Shit.
She put her crates back in place and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“The process sucks, especially for a guy his age. What is he, like, thirty?”
“Somewhere around there, I’d guess. We haven’t exactly done very much getting-to-know-you yet.”
They hadn’t had time, but she planned to make some as soon as Andreas was back on two legs again. She liked that he was strange. He was a breath of fresh air.
“We’ll watch out for him until all the tough stuff passes,” Adam said, “and if he wants to go back to Fallon after that, we’re not gonna stop him.”
“I feel like that’s not my decision to make.”
“No, the decision should be his, but he might not be in the right state to be able to make that choice, either. If his family isn’t around, you’ll have to be the one on the hook to look out for his best interests.”
“I don’t feel comfortable being that person.” Yet.
“Just give it some thought.”
She didn’t want to, but she was used to doing things she didn’t really want to. She was a suck-it-up kind of girl. Living in Fallon around so many people who could read feelings but lacked empathy had made her that way. She couldn’t afford to be seen as the weak link. The mocking would have been unendurable. “Adam?” she whispered.
“Yep?”
“What triggers the changes?”
“If I had to guess, will does.”
“I’m sorry? Will? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“Bear with me, here. Every wolfpack with a gene pool of a certain age is a little different, of course, but I can tell you that Eurasian wolves don’t have to shift for the full moon. We shift at will. When we’re kids and trying to figure things out, temper is enough to trigger a shift. Other kinds of wolves are forced by the full moon to shift, although they can choose to shift at other times, too. Doing so is not as easy for them. I can’t speak in certainties, but I suspect Mr. Toft is one of the former. He’s more like us than like moon shifters.”
