by Drew VanDyke
Something clicked in my head. “So are you?”
“Am I what?” He asked, a gleam in his eye.
“Are you gay?” I’d already figured he was an alpha.
Ashlee the Writer’s Note to Self: I’ve found that people will tell you who they are pretty quickly, or at least who they think they are, which is who they want to be. I may have preternatural wolf senses, but for this I just have to listen. Nobody brings up the topic of sexuality unless they feel it’s necessary to let you know where they stand, which comes with a lot of socialized assumptions about how we interact. Me? I go with my gut ninety percent of the time. It may create a little drama and chaos, but at least it feels more honest. As long as I own my own perspective and stay curious, it helps to smooth things out. A girl’s gotta retain a little bit of mystery, right?
“I am, yes. Gay, that is.”
I let out a sigh.
“But my wolf isn’t.”
“Wait…what? You’re gay but your wolf isn’t? You know, Jackson, I’m not even sure that I can process that statement, so I’m going to leave it for later, if you don’t mind.”
“Be my guest.” He leaned back, all confidence and swagger, eyeing me like a rogue – which was adorable.
Damn, I thought. Makes me wish, well…never mind.
I was with Will. This was just the attraction of the bad boy talking. “So, I take it you’re an alpha.”
“I am. And so are you, Ashlee.”
“No, I’m not.” I frowned at him. “I’m total beta.”
“How do you know?” Jackson picked up Spanky again and cuddled him in his arms.
“Interesting. He never lets anyone but family pick him up like that,” I said, giving voice to a stray thought I’d had earlier.
“He recognizes pack…and you’re changing the subject.”
I ignored him and followed my own rabbit trail. “So, how does your mother handle the change while she’s pregnant? I mean, if it’s anything like my shift, that’s gonna be really disgusting.”
“Pregnant women don’t get periods, remember? No period, no change.”
“Really? That’s awesome. I wonder if it would be the same for me? But I didn’t get…” My voice trailed off. Why the hell was I being so familiar with this guy?
He leaned toward me. “Didn’t get what?” I could feel his gaze on my lips.
If you ever find a guy going glassy-eyed on you and you have a sudden self-consciousness about whether or not you have schmutz in your teeth, but the look that he is giving you is pure heat, you can pretty much bet he’s thinking about how good that mouth could taste and where those lips could be. When I have those moments, I usually forget what I was going to say.
I don’t have those moments often, but this was sure one of them.
“I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
Jackson cocked his head. “That’s what I asked you.”
This was all too easy. He was too easy. What was it about this man that moved me on a primal level to want to bond with him, to want to curl up in his arms? What was it about him that made me feel safe? I mean, it wasn’t about him being gay. Half gay? The gay guy friend is a stereotype, based on the idea that the relationship can be deep and still platonic, nonthreatening.
But Will was straight. And we’d done platonic for a while. He made me feel safe and our friendship was deep. But that’s probably because he was more of a beta than I was. Or was I the alpha to his beta? Wait, wasn’t there a supermarket chain called Alpha Beta, or was I hallucinating?
I grabbed myself by the mental scruff and shook my wandering mind back to the present, focusing my attention on my nose and past the conscious layers of reality. The wolf in me went probing. “So, why are you here? And don’t try to tell me it’s just because of the basement renovation.”
The drone of the sounds around us receded into the background and all of a sudden my attention was captured, my senses fully engaged. Somehow, within a moment’s breath, I knew him, even without knowing that much about him. On a fundamental level I tasted him. I inhaled the desire from his pores and could smell both the hope and the anxiety in his perspiration. He felt uneasy, but determined, and I couldn’t smell any strange female lycanthrope in his scent, so the wolf within me pronounced him good.
I sat back and decided I would give him the chance to explain. I could hear his steady heartbeat and he smelled of longstanding forests and integrity.
“I told Adam you’d never buy the basement excuse, though I am a contractor and I intend to do the job.” Jackson sat back and grinned. “Don’t worry; he’s just doing his usual string-pulling.”
“What if I don’t want my strings pulled?”
“Then cut them.” Jackson’s face became sober. “But that has its price too.”
“Some days I think it would be worth it. So, what do you want?”
“Hmm, well, let me see…how can I put this tactfully?”
“Oh for criminy’s sake, just say it,” I growled at him. Sometimes guys can be so annoying! Evidently gay men could beat around the bush as well as any straight guy could. Pardon the wordplay. Hey, gimme a break. I’m a writer! Though I ought to be shot for that one.
“Criminy’s sake, eh?” He laughed. “You ought to have figured it out by now, smart girl like you. I want you to have my puppies.”
I snorted. Seriously, you would think I was a were-pig, not a werewolf. Milk-out-the-nose kind of snorting, plus allergy-attack kind of wheezing. I doubled over.
“Lift your arms.” Jackson commanded. Then he slapped me on the back and if I wasn’t in so much agony I’d be embarrassed about all the hacking.
“You have got to be joking,” I gasped out when I finally got my breath back.
“Actually not.” He rubbed his palm against my back, sending whines for more and rumbles of satisfaction through the wolf inside me.
“But I’m not ready to be a mother,” I tried to wail, but my voice twisted in the process and I turned from him, hiding my embarrassment. I felt like I was thirteen again, suddenly unsure about everything.
“That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you know about wolves, Ashlee?” He turned me toward him.
“Only what I’ve read online,” I hedged, not wanting him to know that I was a bibliophile with a library in my reader.
“And what about lycanthropes?”
“Myths and legends mostly. How do I know what is true and what’s not? Until I met you, I thought I was alone in this world.”
“We’ve had to stay under the radar, so we generally keep to our own. Well, lycanthropes are one thing. But lupine, which is what you are, you are a whole different kind of beast.”
“What do you mean?” I thought I was asking him about his perspective on the term lupine, but he plowed on, as oblivious as any wolf on a rabbit trail.
“I mean crossbreeding between lycanthropes and lupines doesn’t usually happen.”
“What, we’re not good enough for you?”
“Well, there are some of us who are prejudiced, but, besides there not being many of you in the world…no, you’re just…different.”
“Different, how?”
“It’s like we’re similar enough in the parts department that in our human form we can have sex, but nothing viable comes of it.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’ coming along here any second now.”
“But in wolf form…it works.”
“Wait. So, if you want to breed werewolves – I mean, lycanthropes, you guys that is, it takes two to tango in human form. But if you cross a lycanthrope with a lupine and mate them during the shift…”
“Only during the blood moon…” he interrupted. “A full lunar eclipse.”
“Fine. If a lupine and a lycanthrope do the horizontal tango during a blood moon, you get…?”
“Something special, I believe. Wolves with greater intelligence and awareness, perhaps even the abilit
y to speak with lycanthropes or lupines.”
“That sounds cool…”
“Better than cool. Awesome.” He said the word not like a teen who applies it to everything fun, but reverently, as if speaking of the Divine.
“How do the pups survive the change?” I imagined myself bloated and retaining water, trying to shift forms while knocked up. “Or does the mother stay stuck in wolf form for the pregnancy?” How the hell would I explain that to my editor?
“That’s the beauty of it. They don’t.”
“They don’t survive?” I was appalled.
“No, no, no – they only appear during the change. It’s part of the magic. Because the human-human mating is sterile, you’re only pregnant when you’re shifted to wolf form.”
“Wait. What? Back it up.”
“You wouldn’t be having children, Ashlee. You’d be having pups. My pups.”
“Please don’t tell me what I think you’re telling me.”
“Wolves, Ashlee. Real wolves. Not lycanthrope, not lupine, not shifters. A new kind of wolf, or perhaps the return of an old kind, a subspecies that hasn’t been seen for centuries.”
“But…”
He must have sensed an advantage and pressed on. “There is something within the mystical chemistry of lycanthrope and lupine that allows us to mate as wolves but without bringing more werewolves into the world. So, I’m asking you to have my offspring, not my children. Lycanthrope plus lupine equals...”
“Litter.”
Jackson laughed. He sounded so reasonable about it, but I couldn’t get my head around it.
“How do you even know this? You said they would be a new kind of wolf. Has this ever been done before?”
“Our oral traditions speak of it happening, but I believe it’s so rare that the über-wolves eventually breed back into the population, diluting their genes after several generations.”
“Then why do it? What’s it going to accomplish?”
“Don’t you get it? Wolves are being hunted off the face of the Earth, but we can help repopulate the species, Ashlee. Our wild cousins would no longer have to live in fear of extinction. Not with smarter, better alphas to lead the packs and pass on their intelligence.”
“I know the wolf population is being threatened in parts of the U.S., but isn’t this a rather drastic solution?” I couldn’t believe I was actually considering his proposition. “And it would only be temporary.”
“Life is temporary, Ashlee. This would help them for generations, even if we only do it once. Here. Take a look at this.” Jackson grabbed a laptop he’d brought with him from the sideboard and brought up a video.
“How Wolves Change Rivers,” I read over his shoulder.
“It’s about the Sawtooth Pack near Yellowstone and how they acted as a trophic cascade to improve the ecosystem. They helped return the behavior of herd animals such as elk to normal, reducing overgrazing and overpopulation, which in turn allowed smaller animals and plants to thrive again.”
“Trophic cascade…” I mouthed as I read the introductory blurb.
“Hey, boss!”
Jackson turned and I looked up from the display at the sound of his building crew, several men and a woman, yelling from the cab of the truck that they’d just parked next to the back fence.
I was glad to see another female presence in the bunch. There’s something about being the only woman in a group of guys, which I’ve kinda been all my life as most of my friends are male, that if I didn’t enjoy the attention so much could make a girl feel like a piece of meat. But this new addition was a Blue Collar Babe. I bet Amber would think that she’s hot.
Not that I would notice that kind of thing.
Jackson waved to the men, nodded at the woman and then turned to me. “Keep watching that,” he said, referring to the video.
”I will. But you still need to clue me in on this remodel.”
“Sure. Let me get them familiarized with the job, and then we’ll go over these plans. You and I can continue our discussion about the, ah, possibilities, later.”
He smiled as he said it, and though I felt a stirring from the wolf inside me, the feeling I got from him was more security than lust. Considering our prior reactiveness, it seemed that this man had incredible control of what he projected.
“Actually…” He turned back toward me as I sent myself the link via his email. “On second thought, maybe we can really get deep into the subject tonight. We’ve got a lodge on the lake, and it has everything you could want. Oh, and I grill a mean steak. Meat so rare and tender you’d think it was trying to crawl off the plate.
“No. And no, thanks,” I told him. “I’ve got a boyfriend who also grills a mean rare steak, so that’s out of the question.”
“Fine. Bring him along. He really should be a part of the equation as well. Since he is your life mate.”
“Not for sure.” I wondered why I was protesting that. We’d made our declarations of love and intentions to get married, someday anyway. What was that if not being life mates? But I didn’t like how Jackson was stating it like it was set in the proverbial concrete. “He doesn’t even know that I’m a were. A lupine. Whatever.”
“Really?” His eyes lit up with interest. “I’m intrigued by your contradictions.”
“I bet you are,” I muttered as I headed into the kitchen.
“Jackson?” The woman, who wore a hard hat with the word “Beauty” printed on it – which was kind of redundant as she was obviously attractive – looked at him questioningly. With her tan skin, white teeth and daisy dukes that matched her blue eyes, she looked like the centerfold of a “Girls of the Construction Trade” piece in a men’s magazine. The guys in matching “Beast” hard hats stood around like sidepieces, hunks to contrast with the female hardbody in the middle.
The ensemble stopped me in my tracks. Just who were these people? Jackson had called them “pack,” hadn’t he? Were the hard hats a joke? A play on words? Or were they all lycanthropes? My senses went into overdrive and I felt a wave of dizziness wash over me. The white noise in my head drowned out the sounds of the crew and I felt a sudden urge to call my sister, but I wasn’t about to take her into my confidence on this one…at least not until I found out more about what was going on and processed it.
The wolf growled within me and I realized that, unusual while still in human form, my senses were overstimulated. I put an ice pack on my head and lay down on the couch with Spanky, away from the activity and Jackson’s overwhelming pack.
“So, what do you think I should do?” I asked the little grey Schnauzer, but he only looked at me with those quizzical eyes and rested his chin on my stomach with a sigh.
“Yeah, I don’t know either.” I said, and promptly fell asleep from the stress.
I woke up later as the vestiges of a dream slipped away from me to the sound of Jackson availing himself of Amber’s refrigerator. Oh, well. Mi casa, su casa.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of checking out the rest of the house while you slept.”
Now that’s something I’m not telling Amber. Weird how I didn’t sense his presence prowling around. I looked at the clock. Two p.m. and Will would be coming over after finishing his Saturday half-day by the time it got hot.
He went on, “And though I like your sister’s style, I was wondering if we could go a little more rustic than Tuscan when it comes to the pool house? Exposed beams on the ceilings, lots of natural light, maybe some stained glass and no fluorescents.”
“No fluorescents? Not even in the kitchen?” I asked, but internally I was questioning how my pool house had suddenly turned into his project. And it wasn’t just Jackson. Will was doing the same thing. All excited about going to Home Depot and looking at things like crown molding. Hmm. I wondered if I could use this to my advantage?
“Naw, recessed lighting is the way to go with kitchens nowadays. Keep it warm with an amber glow.”
“Amber glow. Funny. You know, you and Wi
ll should talk. He’s got some great ideas about the cabinetry,” I deadpanned.
“I’d be happy to spend some time with him.” Jackson looked at me, eyes communicating humor. “What time is he coming around?”
Now he was just baiting me. But I had to admit, I liked the teasing. How liberating to have a friend with whom I didn’t have to lie…in both senses of the word. And my wolf was sniffingly intrigued.
“So, why me?” I asked, switching subjects and reaching for the glass of iced tea he handed me to put it against my temple. “Can’t you just find another shifter in your own area?”
“Not exactly,” he said, opening the door for Spanky to go outside, who promptly went to relieve himself and I couldn’t help but catch a whiff of the adoration and awe in his pee.
I know, I know. As a shifter, I’m often privy to way too much information.
“Why not exactly?” I countered.
“Well, you know when I said before about how some weres were prejudiced? Well, ‘prejudice’ may be a mild term for what is really going on.”
“I’m listening.”
“The truth is, lycanthropes are a xenophobic lot and many of my clan don’t agree with me about this. Most of them aren’t thrilled with what I’m considering, and some say it’s unnatural, bordering on bestiality.”
I barked out a laugh at that irony.
He shrugged. “I know, right? But I get it. They’re scared. Scared that as wolf populations are becoming extinct, we might just follow them. And some of them are concerned that what we’re doing is unethical, tinkering with their heredity.”
“That doesn’t make sense. It’s not like we’re playing God with genetic engineering. It’s no different from the selective breeding of dogs that produced Spanky here.”
“Isn’t it? According to my research, wolves that come out of a lycanthrope-lupine pairing will have a telepathic – or maybe empathic is a better term – bond with their pack. They’ll be smarter and should have a positive moral sensibility when it comes to humans and other intelligent creatures, rather like dolphins.”