Secret Worlds (141 page)

“So, right, not about the birds and the bees,” I continued. “I guess I should start out by telling you that your grandfather isn’t a very nice guy, which is why your mother ran away from home so young. I did too.” That had finally gotten Keith’s attention and he watched me as I paced nervously in front of him. After another bout of extended silence (and pacing), I figured I might as well just spit it all out. “I guess I said that wrong,” I corrected myself. “Your grandfather isn’t a very nice
werewolf
.”

It was only after Keith started laughing that I realized the kid didn’t believe a word I was saying. Okay, sure, he probably believed his grandfather was an asshole, but tossing out the term “werewolf” with no lead-in had made my nephew think I was making a joke. And as much as I tried to bring him back down to reality, Keith had determined we were kidding around.

“That’s a good one, Aunt Terra,” he gasped finally, when his belly laughs were all played out. “But what did you really drag me up here to say?”

“I …”I began, but Wolfie had decided to take matters into his own hands. Or, paws, rather. The werewolf stood and walked a couple of feet away from Keith, then shifted into human form.

***

“Whoa!” Keith exclaimed. “You weren’t kidding!”

“And
you’re
not helping!” I shot at Wolfie. Sure, the alpha
had
made my point abundantly clear, but I didn’t think my nephew was ready to see shifters in action when he probably thought they existed only in comic books. Figuring that I’d better get ready to deal with symptoms of shock, I squelched my anger at the alpha and reached out a hand toward my nephew.

Keith didn’t seem as traumatized as I’d expected him to be, though. “You need some clothes, dude,” was his first statement to the wolf who had suddenly turned into a man. Clearly, Keith’s teenage world view expected to see ten impossible things before breakfast, and Wolfie smirked at me as if to say,
I told you so
. Okay, maybe the alpha had a better feel for the situation than I did after all.

“You’ll get used to the nudity,” I told Keith, even though I clearly wasn’t. My wolf was fully alert now and begging to come out to play, but I didn’t want to make Keith shift immediately after taking in the notion of werewolves being real. It was tough tearing my eyes away from Wolfie, though, especially since he seemed to be giving off an even more enticing aroma than previously. Okay, yes, the alpha’s nakedness was a factor in my intense gaze too.

“My clothes are down there,” Wolfie answered Keith, pointing over the other side of the mountain, where we could just make out a colony of mobile homes through the trees. “I thought we might go down and meet the pack.” The alpha looked at me challengingly, and I shrugged, turning the question over to my nephew with a tilt of my head.

“Are there girls in your pack?” Keith asked, and I rolled my eyes again. Just what I needed—a teenage werewolf more interested in the concept of seeing naked female bodies than in his own shift.

***

“Humans in the house!” came the call from the kitchen as we entered the first trailer. “Put on some clothes.”

The werewolf compound consisted of six mobile homes lined up in a rectangle with a huge greenhouse atrium filling the center. As we’d walked up from the outside, I saw doors scattered along each wall’s length, giving the inhabitants easy access to the outdoors. Inside, walls had been ripped out to join the trailers into one structure, and large windows had been inserted into the atrium-side walls, turning the compound into an intriguing example of modern redneck architecture.

The contents of the first trailer were even more interesting than the architecture, though. Four young werewolves were scattered around what seemed to be a communal living room, and I was surprised that no one stopped what they were doing when Wolfie entered the room. I was used to an alpha’s presence having an instant dampening effect on his male underlings, who would have immediately stood to attention in my old pack. Women in Haven were expected to avert their eyes and to make themselves scarce. But no one here seemed particularly interested in Wolfie. Until, that is, the alpha called out an answer to the still-unseen speaker, “There are no humans here, Tia.”

That
silenced the crowd and trained every eye on me and Keith. Before anyone else could speak, a middle-aged woman walked out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel and looking us over. “You’re right,” she said, and a wide smile of welcome sprang out onto her face. “You must be Keith and Terra. Chase has told me a lot about you.”

The woman appeared to be the pack mother of the clan, and I guessed from her words that she was Chase’s parent. I liked Tia right away, but hated the way my heart sank at her words. Despite myself, I wished that Wolfie had been the one telling this mother figure a lot about me, clear proof that I’d spent too much time lately talking to my wolf.

So I was glad when Keith drew my attention back to the task at hand. “Everyone here is a werewolf?” the teenager asked. In his shoes, I would have been daunted by the prospect, but my nephew just appeared intrigued.

“Well, we’re all werewolf kin,” a young woman a few years older than Keith answered him. “Some of us are halfies like me, or are technically humans. But, yeah, most of us can shift.”

As the girl continued talking, their alpha slipped away down the hall, and I gave my wolf a little slap to remind her to pay less attention to the naked man and more attention to the nephew we were supposed to be protecting. Not that Keith seemed to need any help. I was overwhelmed to be in the middle of a pack again after so long, but the kid was eagerly lapping up the attention as each werewolf introduced himself. Keith was clearly in his element, glad-handing the lot of them like he was a politician on the campaign trail—my nephew’s alpha blood coming out at last. But even though I was glad he was happy, I was feeling more overwhelmed by the minute. Loud voices and strong wolf odors were making the walls appear to close in around me, and as I strained to make out Keith’s words to ensure he was okay, I realized that even sound seemed to be receding into the distance.

My panic attack was so engrossing that I didn’t notice at first when Wolfie ended up back by my side, this time clad in jeans and a button-down flannel shirt. I could feel his wolf, though, and my own darker side rose up to meet it, which had the fortunate side effect of squashing my panic. My inner wolf saw no reason to be concerned about these obviously friendly pack mates, and she saw every reason to be interested in the scents wafting off the alpha beside us. So I let her have her head … or rather
our
head … for a few seconds as I caught my breath.

“Do you want us to help him shift?” that alpha asked by way of greeting, cutting right to the chase. His brown eyes were piercing as he trained them on my face and ignored everyone else in the room. I, on the other hand, couldn’t resist casting one more glance around the common area, noticing that no one had batted an eyelash when Wolfie walked back in. This really did appear to be a very different kind of pack than the one I’d grown up in.

Wolfie’s words were also unusual for an alpha, since most pack leaders would have just taken over and decided when a young male was ready to shift. It was traditional for a group of older males to help a younger male through his initial change, and given how hard it had been to pin down my own wolf lately, I figured Wolfie’s suggestion was probably a safer move than having me walk Keith through his first change of form alone. On the other hand, I was the one who would have to deal with the aftermath over the next few days and weeks, so I was leery of initiating Keith’s shift until I had my own wolf under better control. I muddled my way through the explanation, expecting Wolfie to laugh at my inability to shift, but instead, he just seemed puzzled.

“I saw you as a wolf,” the alpha said, confused. Of course he wouldn’t understand how much I struggled with keeping my wolf down and letting her rise at will since he’d met me once in human form in the city and once in wolf form in the woods—perfectly appropriate werewolf behavior.

“And she was beautiful. I remember,” I answered wryly, recalling Wolfie’s words to me on the mountaintop.

“
You
are beautiful,” Wolfie corrected me again, just as he had when we first spoke in human form. “There is no
you
and
she
,” he elaborated. “There’s just us, the wolf.”

“Maybe for a bloodling,” I countered. “But it’s not that easy. Female werewolves change uncontrollably, you know that. When I left Haven, I had to take control of my shifts to protect all of the humans around me. Unfortunately, I seem to have done
too good
of a job of taking control.”

He tilted his head to the side, considering, and then understanding slowly dawned in the alpha’s eyes. “You’re the opposite of a bloodling,” Wolfie suggested. “You’ve let the human take over. You don’t even realize the wolf is no more animal than the rest of you is.” He paused, then added playfully, “It’s not like you’re going to eat small children.”

I flushed, thinking of Wolfie walking through the city on a tiny leash that wouldn’t have held him back if he’d taken a notion to bite the hand off that kindergartner … and of my own wolf’s reaction to an earlier child. “But
your
wolf is different,” I countered. Never mind that bloodling wolves were supposed to be
less
able to handle life around humans, not
more
able
.

“How so?” the alpha asked, cocking his head to the side again in honest question.

Which is precisely when I realized that I’d been having this entire conversation with the wolf, not the man. To my chagrin, I couldn’t quite figure out whether that underlined my point, or belied it.

***

Before I could answer, my attention was drawn back to Keith, and to the trio of males who were stripping in the middle of the living room. There was only one reason Keith’s newfound friends would be getting naked in tandem, and despite my confusion about other issues, I was 100% sure I didn’t want my nephew to change for the first time right now.

“They’re not going to shift?” I asked frantically. “I don’t think Keith’s ready to experience his wolf yet … .” Whether or not Keith was ready, I sure wasn’t, but it appeared that my nephew’s first shift was only seconds away.

Taking deep calming breaths, I struggled to pull up my own wolf in preparation. Ever since Wolfie had met us on the mountaintop, my wolf had been hovering in the background, but now she appeared to be sound asleep and refused to answer my call.
This
was precisely why we needed to wait on Keith’s first shift, but I obviously didn’t have any say in the matter. I could see the gleam in my nephew’s eye as he reached up to unbutton his shirt, putting a hand on one werewolf’s shoulder as he kicked off a shoe. We were fast approaching liftoff, no matter how not ready I was.

“
Stop
,” Wolfie said, barely raising his voice. But despite its quietness, the single word cut through the crowd and froze everyone in their tracks. I realized I’d been holding my breath, and let it out in a sudden gust of air. “Ten steps away,” the alpha continued in a more normal tone of voice, and the young werewolf males rolled their eyes, but backed up.

“He’s ready, Wolfie,” one complained, but Wolfie just watched silently before turning back to me.

“They’ll give him an example today,” the alpha told me, his words loud enough to carry across the room. “Then we’ll work on you and let Keith shift another day.”

I felt like an over-protective mother when the guys shifted in tandem and my nephew’s only response was a crowing “Wicked cool!” But I didn’t have much time to obsess over the issue, because Wolfie was already changing gears.

“So, about that date …” he began. Then, before I could argue, Wolfie continued. “Keith will be just fine here for a few hours.” And despite my mother-hen instincts, I knew the alpha was right.

I had assumed a date would mean dinner and perhaps a movie, but I should have realized that nothing was conventional around Wolfie. Instead, he herded me out into the atrium, where bushy fig trees and ceiling-high tomato vines were thriving despite the autumnal chill.

“Hey, boss,” called a tanned beauty about my age from the other side of a garden bed, and I was embarrassed to feel my wolf wake up and growl nearly audibly. I thought I had smothered the sound, but Wolfie’s cheek quirked up into a lop-sided smile.

“Galena,” he called back. “This is Terra from across the mountain.” The woman waved a welcome, and then another female werewolf popped up in front of us, surprising a gasp out of me. Just as beautiful as Galena, but with a buzz haircut that showed off her slender neck, this second werewolf swooped in to give Wolfie a deep kiss on the mouth, and this time I wasn’t able to stifle my wolf’s complaint.

“I’d be jealous if I had the slightest notion you swung that way, Quetzalli” Galena called across the garden beds, and it took me a minute to realize she was talking to the swooping kisser.

“I’m Galena’s partner,” the second woman explained to me with a smirk, breaking the kiss but continuing to tease me by trailing a finger over Wolfie’s chest. The alpha leaned into the woman’s touch, and to my chagrin my wolf growled more loudly, prompting Wolfie and Quetzalli both to laugh at my reaction.

Again, it was Galena who pointed out that I was being played. Walking around the garden bed to join us at last, she slapped the alpha lightly on the chest, right where her partner’s fingers had been just moments before. “Play nice, Wolfie,” she admonished, her voice light and with no hint of the jealousy my wolf was feeling. She didn’t bother to chastise her partner, merely taking the other woman’s hand and dimpling as she offered up her own mouth to be kissed.

“Just seeing if Terra likes me,” the alpha rumbled in reply, but he lowered his head in submission to the tiny werewolf. Despite my wolf’s reaction to Quetzalli’s game, I couldn’t help smiling to see such a massive alpha letting the minuscule woman boss him around, and my mood mellowed further at the real show of affection between Quetzalli and Galena.