AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Everything told me to text Sterling. Because on my little private metal flying tube, I could do that. Everything told me to text my packmates and tell them I was thinking of them.
Except they weren’t my packmates anymore. They really and truly were not. I’d seen the paperwork. Sterling and I, even if all this ended in our favor, weren’t SnowFang anymore. Sterling had officially, legally, abdicated.
Me? I was declared dead. It just hadn’t been officially filed yet. There was no legal precedent forreturns from the dead. Once you were declared dead—one way or the other, for better or worse, for real or not—you were out of a pack.
Burian, Jun, and Cye were SnowFang. I was a lone wolf or an AmberHowl, depending which name I happened to be answering to.
Getting Waxed
Fairbanks was chilly, with the sun offering a weak warmth low in the sky. The morning chill still clung to everything, and everything was a slushy, brown-and-gray muddy mess, despite the cheerful blue sky streaked with wispy clouds. Some determined grass reached out through the thinning layer of snow, and the cold wasn’t that eat-your-skin-off bite,
The small jet taxied to a halt. I’d changed into fresh clothes that did not smell of other wolves, and Hamid had changed into jeans, a flannel, boots, all battered and well-worn. My clothes—which I didn’t recognize—also looked well-worn and lived in, including the boots with the scuffed toes and worn treads on the outside that actually matched my gait. Hamid tossed me a knit cap and black coat.
“Let most of your hair down through it,” he said when I went to put my hair up into it. “You look exactly like Winter Mortcombe with your hair hidden. But leave your hair down and the brim lower to break up the lines of your face. Just hide that rotten and obvious dye job.”
“It’s notthatbad.”
He didn’t argue, but that was just Hamid’s way of exiting an argument he realized he was having with an idiot. If he’d wanted to yield the point, he’d have saidyes, ma’am. Hamid suffered a client’s stupidity by letting them have the last word.
He pulled out a wad of debris from one pocket—looked like a few crumpled receipts, a pen, and lip balm. Then he studied his hands. He’d rubbed grease and dirt and run a leather strap between his fingers, then washed, but now a fine layer of casual grime resided in the crevices and around his fingernails. As he completed his inspection of small details, he asked, “Ready?”
I checked the analog watch on my wrist and memorized the start time. “Yes.”
We descended the airstairs to the silver SUV waiting on the tarmac. I kept my face tucked into the collar of my coat. The wind direction would waft my scent towards the treeline, not the terminal, so there was that.
Two more men were in the SUV. Hamid got into the passenger seat. “Go.”
My fingers twitched. Had Jerron’s body even been found, or was he officially missing? The human authorities hadn’t contacted me about it. No one had come to ask questions.
I waited to feel guilty or sad about Jerron being dead.
And I kept waiting.
Not a twinge. Except for the haunting twitch in my fingers and the hot, cutting feeling in the scar.
Wolf sibs that didn’t like each other were bad luck. A bad omen. Everyone had always brushed Jerron and I’s dislike for each other as sibling rivalry. Deep down, I’d known it was more than that. I’d just tried to keep it hidden. Jerron hadn’t even tried, and he’d been able to get away with it.
I was glad he was dead.
I was glad Sterling had ended that swaggering, mouthy, dangerous, selfish piece of shit who fucked human women and risked siring a hybrid while he had the gall to ask me where the fuck breakfast was when he’d gone and drunk the grocery moneyagain.
II couldn’t remember a single time Jerron had actually been nice to me that hadn’t also been some kind of trap or ploy.
Good riddance, brother. You deserved it.
Maybe I was an Abomination. My parents had loved me too much to see it, while Jerron had recognized I was the defective member of the litter and tried to toss me out of the box.
The SUV pulled into the parking lot of a run-down once-had-been-a-bowling-alley structure. Another vehicle waited: an unremarkable brown truck with a sagging front bumper.
Without a word, Hamid nodded to me. I opened my own door and hurried around the side while Hamid tapped on the window and said, loudly, “Thanks for the ride, guys.”
Guys? Hamid had saidguys? This was some Iron Curtain level shit. I liked it. Good to be this paranoid. I resisted the urge to glance around, looking for wolves watching from behind theLAST NIGHT : GOING OUT OF BUSINESSsigns on the bowling alley windows. I was just a ho-hum derp derp human, nothing to see here, just got a ride to this cracked, abandoned parking lot to grab my truck.
The truck had a few dents, a sagging bumper, and a solid year’s worth of debris in the bed. The interior was just as lived in and smelled faintly of... fried chicken?
Made me think, for a split second, of Sterling’s beater truck back in Clare.
I slammed the door shut and focused on the next hour of my life.
