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Chapter 1
Day 156 of the re-emerged Hat Island pack, Sunday, Nov. 10, I-5 freeway
The day was like theday before —and the day before that —misty, overcast, gray. Benny Garrison was grateful, really, because the alternative would be windy, rainy and gray. Such was winter in the Puget Sound. He realized he hadn’t checked what the weather was like in Penticton —or the Okanogan, for that matter —where they were headed.
He was rusty at this — it had been a while since he rode out on a motorcycle with Ryder. Well, Ryder wouldn’t have forgotten to check. For the first time in a long time, Benny relaxed. He wasn’t in charge. He really was just along for the ride. Ryder was in charge, and the guards looked to him. Oh, if he asked something of them, they’d probably obey —all of them had been chosen because they’d ridden with Benny in the past. But they were Ryder’s men, not his.
Who knew his kid brother would turn out like this? Benny smiled, a bit wistfully. Ryder had been a stubborn handful even as a kid. Growing up Native American in the Okanogan region wasn’t easy. The schools were a mix of rural white kids, migrant Mexican-Americans, and members of the Colville tribe — and a whole lot of kids with mixed heritage like Ryder. Of course he hadn’t been Ryder then, just one more stubborn, belligerent George boy.
Ryder’s mother, Naomi George, had been the high school guidance counselor when Benny showed up in the Okanogan schools. And for all of the diversity in the district, a half-Cambodian teen with PTSD was in a category of his own. Benny credited Naomi for getting him through high school in one piece and off to college at the University of Washington where he found his feet.
She was as close to a mother figure as he had. He called her regularly. She accepted that he didn’t come to visit — after all, she thought he was in his 60s, just a handful of years younger than she was. He shook his head a bit. The truth was, he didn’t visit because he looked 25. It was hard to maintain relationships with humans.
But Benny’s father, Tom Garrison, had fallen in love with his son’s high school guidance counselor. They’d married, and at 26, Naomi had decided she wanted a child. Benny didn’t think his father had been consulted, which he had always found amusing.
Ryder looked like his mother. Warm brown skin, dark, almost black hair, stocky and strong. Benny looked more like his mother, a Cambodian woman who died in childbirth. They were actually about the same height — just under 6 feet tall — but Benny was slimmer, more limber. Part of the differences were genetic, but it was also because Benny practiced Muay Thai, and Ryder lifted weights for the upper body strength needed to manhandle a Harley Davidson motorcycle —and his men. Nurture did matter.
Benny followed Ryder out of Everett to I-5. Jessie Nickerson rode pillion behind Ryder, and she looked more comfortable; she had gotten the hang of riding after a long day yesterday. Ryder had been right to insist that she ride with him on that wild trip from Vancouver to Hat Island if she was going on this mission.
Jessie was a concern. An unknown variable in an already complex equation. Well, they’d just have to see what happened.
Benny suspected Jessie didn’t know herself what she would do. She was just following her promise to find her fiancé after escaping from the Vancouver Alpha’s house. That he might have switched sides and was now a member — perhaps even pack Second — of the Penticton pack didn’t deter her. Benny thought it was about having a goal, as much as anything. Jessie didn’t have to deal with what she was going to do with her life — she had a mission: find her fiancé. It gave her purpose. And right now, Jessie Nickerson needed a purpose.
Benny liked her. She’d worked with him at Margarite’s house for the last week, counseling the once-human women who had been rescued from that same pack house she’d escaped from. She needed counseling herself after all she’d been through, but she was holding it together better than most. Benny grimaced. Jessie was 23, a recent college graduate in psychology, whose grandfather had handed her over to the pack Alpha to be a fourth woman in his household. Who did that kind of thing?
Shifters, unfortunately. During a career as an intelligencer for the Northwest Council of Alphas, Benny had been in and out of more pack houses than most —and concluded there were more ways to abuse women than he’d ever dreamed. He’d quit after finding out that the Council used his intelligence to build power, not help the victims. Eventually, he’d ended up in Berkeley getting a PhD in psychology.
Physician, heal thyself, he mocked. Jessie wasn’t the only one who desperately needed the therapy they were being asked to give others.
Not going to think about that, he reminded himself.
The other guards of Ryder’s motorcycle club followed behind Benny, stringing out in the slow lane. There was no hurry. For them, it was just another day’s ride behind the boss.
No hurry, Benny thought with pleasure. Two hours to Abbottsford, and they’d be in Canada. Get lunch there —shifters, like armies, marched on their stomachs — and then head east. Beautiful rugged country along Highway 3, but the road was good. There might be snow, and that was always tricky on a bike. But that was later. Now? Just the road, and the freedom to think.
Although he found he didn’t want to think either. All the questions that Cujo had posed over breakfast this morning, plus all of his own, swirled in his mind, until finally he shut them all down. Today, he would ride. He could think later.
And if he felt like he was running away? Well, it was with his Alpha’s blessing, wasn’t it?
He carefully avoided thinking about what he was running away from.
His wolf whined a bit. Benny automatically reassured him that they weren’t literally running away from anything. No one was chasing them.
His wolf. One of the long list of things he didn’t want to think about. It felt like he was in a constant dominance fight with his own wolf, and that was a sign of impending disaster for any shifter. You lost that fight, and you went wolf. Supposedly there was no coming back from that. There were stories of insanely large wolves in the Canadian forests, smart, fierce, wolves. Wolves that had once been human —shifters. But they went wolf, for whatever reason. Some deliberately. Some because they stayed in wolf form too long. But there was no coming back, once you’d gone wolf.
Except Benny had.
The shifter world celebrated him for it. It had all the feel of the original Iditarod. Benny ran across Russia in wolf form to deliver the news of what caused all the deaths of young shifter girls when they faced first shift, and to call the shifters of Russia to a gathering that would decide the fate of the world.
Great stuff. Except he’d gotten trapped in wolf form for too long.
So, he and his wolf had bargained. Find pack, find the Alpha, friend-mate. Save the stories he was sent to deliver, save the stories of the Cambodian pack he’d been entrusted with decades before, jettison anything else the wolf needed to throw out, and go on.
His wolf whined again, troubled that he had done something wrong. No, Benny assured him. We’re heroes.You’rea hero.
But the truth was, Benny hated to shift now. He was afraid he couldn’t shift back. Just days ago, they’d been attacked, and Benny had shifted to fight. It had taken a command from Cujo to regain control of his own wolf. And he knew his reluctance to shift was causing his wolf to fear returning control to him — his wolf was afraid Benny would never shift again. And his wolf wanted to run. Wanted —needed — that freedom.
Benny couldn’t blame him. Hell, he wanted to run again like that. That was the lure — the real reason shifters went wolf, he suspected. The freedom to run and not be troubled by the world again? He desired it, like an addict looking for his next fix.
