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“Maybe if you tried making friends with them, they wouldn’t,” I said wearily, tired of the same old complaints.
“You mean like you?” Victor asked scornfully. “I saw you crawling after them today, trying tomake friends. They looked at you like you were dirt on the soles of their shoes.”
He looked at me the same way all of the time. Margo hadn’t.
“We should stick to our own,” Mara said firmly. “It does us no good to mix with them.”
“What’s the big deal?” I ventured. “What’s so bad about making friends?”
“We can’t tell them the truth, so what’s the point?” Mara glanced at me askance, and I knew she was worried.
She could be gruff, but when it came down to it, she always looked out for me. I’d had a crush on her in the past, but she’d made it clear such a submissive wolf didn’t stand a chance with her—too long after we first kissed. I’d been heartbroken, but our friendship had grown afterward. Nowadays, I saw her more as a pushy older sister.
“I saw you with that new girl today,” she pressed. “I get the appeal of something new, but she’s not like us. She’ll turn on you as soon as she realises how things work here. Trust me, the townies are probably filling her in already.”
“But Byron says we should integrate.”
“That’sneverbeen our way,” she said softly. “It’s bred into us to keep apart, and it’s going to take longer than a decade to change that.”
“People respect Nathan around here,” I reminded her, “and when the first families came to Byron, they made an effort to fit in.”
“And then they moved on,” she said bitterly. “Because rejects like us had to take their place. We’re not like those first families, Dorian. They were ready to settle down, but we grew up wild. We’re the first generation ofrealwerewolves in maybe hundreds of years. Nobody can expect us to just fit in with boring humans.”
“Yeah, but Byron—”
“Do you always do what the alpha tells you?” Victor scoffed. “Oh, wait. It’s D-D-Dorian. Of course he does.”
“That’s the way he’s made,” Mara said. “Just like you were made to be a loser.”
He tackled her, but she was ready for him and had his arm twisted behind his back within seconds.
“Like I said,” she whispered before releasing him.
Victor took his annoyance out on me the rest of the way home, but I didn’t care. I was too busy thinking about Margo. I’d intended to investigate her secrets, but the chill around her had lessened, just as the tension in the pack had been eased, and I’d been drawn in. Maybe she was sensitive, unwittingly aware of the atmosphere, and that was what I was sensing from her.
I’d tried to remain wary of her, but I liked how she spoke. Words were important to me; I paid attention to how a person used them. Margo was different, alone like me, but she held herself with confidence as though she were her own pack, her own army. People like Chloe and Emma or even Victor and Mara would never keep up with her.
I had intended to figure Margo out to prove to the pack I was useful, but sometimes I just wanted to spend time with someone who wasn’t a werewolf. Dealing with bearing the brunt of everyone’s bad mood was exhausting. As most of the townies avoided us on sight, my choices were limited, but I had a feeling I would have gravitated to Margo regardless.
Back home, I cleaned up and started dinner while I waited for Perdita to return home. By the time she arrived, the food was ready.
“No point waiting for Nathan.” She peeked at the pot I was stirring, sniffing appreciatively. “I’m starving. This looks great. What did we do to deserve you?”
“You taught me how to take care of myself.”
She patted my cheek. “You don’t have to take care of me though.”
I would have doneanythingfor her. When I was brought to the pack, around eleven or twelve and a stuttering fool, she had quickly taken me under her wing after discovering how the others treated me. She had been in college that first year, and I had lived for her visits back home, waited patiently in front of the houses for hours when I knew she was coming, ignoring the taunts of the other kids who couldn’t understand why I would show obedience to someone who wasn’t wolf—or why the true mate of an Evans wolf would ever care for a nobody like me.
Perdita’s father was the pack doctor, and human himself, but he knew our truth, and he had spent a lot of time with me, helping me with my speech problems. Perdita had trusted me with her baby brother, her true family, and I had trusted her with my truth, the fact I could shift too young. She’d kept my secret, taking me to shift alone, watching over me, unafraid, sketching me so I would know how I looked as a wolf, back when even the flash of a camera had the potential to trigger an inner alarm. By the time Nathan uncovered the truth, I was close enough to Perdita to fear losing her, but he had treated me with wonder instead of suspicion. He figured the shift came early for me to help me survive the abuse of my childhood, and he’d sounded proud when he told me I had a special kind of strength that didn’t come from dominance.
Between Perdita and Nathan, I’d been reborn, bathed in kindness for the first time in my life, and I wouldneverforget what I owed them. I hoped that Nathan would one day become alpha instead of his cousin Jeremy, and I prayed nightly that I would still be a part of the pack when that happened. I knew Perdita wanted me to stay, but ultimately, it wasn’t her decision to make, and I had never worked up the courage to ask Nathan about it because I knew it would cause problems between them if he agreed to send me away. Perdita didn’t have to obey the alpha, but Nathan had to follow his lead as much as I did.
Perdita served the food, casting concerned glances my way. “You seem to have a lot on your mind lately, Dorian. Need to share?”
I shook my head and forced myself to smile. My seventeenth birthday last year had been the thing, a countdown to a future that terrified me. I felt time slipping through my fingers, eaten up by days upon days in which I failed to fight for my place in the pack. I’d been worrying since then, but I wasn’t about to burden Perdita with that. She’d be upset enough when the alpha sent me away. For an instant, a spark of jealousy flared as I wondered if I would be replaced by the next weak young wolf who turned up.
Nathan arrived home while we were eating. Looking exhausted, he plonked himself into a seat at the table with his dinner, not bothering to heat it back up. Werewolves were generally full of excess energy, so to avoid constant fights and power plays, we tended to occupy ourselves as much as possible. Nathan did a lot within the community, and people generally liked him. It was the rest of us who didn’t fit in.
