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“My brother’s in one. He ate shit for like, eight months just to fucking put on a cut that I think looks dumb, personally.”
“You got a brother?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah—he’s like ten years older, though. He’s my mom and dad’s actual blood-relation kid, but yeah.” I shrugged my shoulders.“So that’s what I know about pack mentality, which is nothing.” I raised an eyebrow. “Care to elaborate?”
“Look, there are lots of packs in the States and Canada, Central America, and South America. We’re one of fifty,” he divulged as if wearied by my stupidity. That was fine; I didn’t even know Lycans existed two days ago, whereas he grew up as one.
“And this one… is good?”
“This one is not a popular one,” he admitted. “We’re sort of defectors.” He looked at the car ceiling for a second and then restructured his description. “Okay, so that word is too cool for what we are. We’re like LycanRevenge of the Nerds. Almost none of our families approve. Most packs live off the grid as much as possible and are… outdoorsy, to say the least. When you grow up in the culture, and you tell your parents you want to go to college, they basically act like you just said you wanted to grow up and be a cat. It’s not accepted. We’re supposed to live in little Lycan communes, find a mate in another pack, bring her home, and fuck some pups into her. That’s pretty much it. Other packs think we’re human wannabes just because we like to learn shit and we like human culture.”
“Seems short-sighted,” I commiserated.
“Yeah, but when everybody’s short-sighted, nobody seems to realize that there’s more to see.” He waved his hand at the windshield. “So anyway, Caelum started it with Ry, and then they sort of went around recruiting a bit over a decade ago.”
I rolled my eyes in his direction and hedged, “Ry doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of you…”
He was getting conversational now. They always do… Men love being posed talking points. “Yeah, Ry’s more traditional Lycan,but he fell in love with human culture like the rest of us did. Wanted to be a drummer in a band when he was a teen or something. Obviously, it didn’t work out. He went back to his pack, but his pack didn’t take him back, and then Caelum came around and grabbed him up as his beta and helped him to get a degree to fit in with this new pack he had in mind to make. They’ve been thick since.”
“And Caelum?” I asked, fluttering my eyelashes at him. It was almost too easy.
“From what I heard, his dad was a pack leader, but you know, didn’t like that his kid was smarter than him and so was an asshole. Caelum’s brother was older and bigger, tagged to be the next alpha, and also treated him like shit. So Caelum learned harder and faster and more stubbornly than probably anyone you’ve run into. He got footing in this university, and viola. We have our pack, and he is our?—”
“Alpha, right?” I finished for him. “Like wolves.”
“Yes. Gold star,” he told me with a grin.
I did like gold stars, but there was an elephant in the room here. I would have been gratified if he would just bring it up, but as the miles ticked on, he didn’t seem to take the hint and mention it.
“So how can two guys be thinking I’m their mate? That I don’t get. Wolves don’t mate with one female, do they?”
“We’re not normal wolves, remember, we’re Lycan males. Look, I don’t know why, but it just so happens that betas and alphas commonly mate with the same woman. It’s actually helpful in our pack dynamics. Makes it very unlikely to be a coup because they’re linked through their mate.Butwhen their female dies, they die, and the next generation normally steps in.”
Wow. He said that like it was common knowledge. Not so common, buddy. “What? What about my death?”
He shrugged. “As I said, female mates are a liability.”
After that, we fell into a very thoughtful silence until we hit my town.
“Okay, turn here,” I said, pointing to a street sign. I pointed out my family’s house, and he rolled the car up to it. I checked my watch. “I’m gonna go into the house and talk to my sister and grab?—”
Beau left the car, not listening to my plans, probably because I unfortunately wasn’t alpha and he was still holding a grudge against me for making his life “difficult.” I wasn’t going to feel bad about it, though, because it was really myimprisonmentthat I was making difficult, and I wasn’t about to call it anything else.
I followed him up to my front door rather than the other way around, so I had to scramble a bit to take the lead. I knew my parents weren’t home, but my sister was since her car was out front. She only had one class in the morning, and she was probably playing League of Legends right now, if I had to guess.
I opened the door, and Beau suddenly tensed. I figured maybe he had a back spasm or something because his eyes popped wide.
Well, fuck him. I didn’t want him to go inside anyway.
“Hello?” my sister called, having heard the door open.
“Hey, Mace!” I called.
She immediately skittered into the foyer and met me, jumping on me with an affectionate hug.
It didn’t look like she had gone to her class, after all. She was wearing her pajamas with a couple of bunny slippers. Her hair was a blond, curly mess sitting on top of her head, and she was wearing an old pair of glasses that ate up half of her face.
“Why are you here?” she asked, and then she suddenly locked eyes with Beau.
