by C. D. Gorri
“Last night,” Colin replied defensively. “I can catch and kill for myself when I I need to.”
“You are a conundrum that’s for sure,” Declan puzzled. “Was your mum wolf or coyote?”
Colin frowned, “She died before she could tell me anything. I was placed into foster care. But, there was a letter from my father amongst the stuff my mum was carrying when she died. It said that he was not willing to risk his place as future leader of the pack. There was no name, only the initial ‘D’. I figured he obviously didn’t care for my mother or he would have found us. I won’t lie, I’d love to dish him up some grief but he isn’t worth it. I would like to find my mums family though. I have no idea if they know about me or that she’s even dead.”
Declan parked out the front of the café, “Come on, let’s get something to eat, and you can tell me more about how we can find your family.”
“Wait! What about court?” Colin panicked.
“I had the pack’s lawyer request an adjournment,” Declan told him, trying not to shiver with the reminder of being indebted to Sue-Ellen, and his mind shifted to thoughts of the curvy female hanging sheets on the line in the next backyard.
Declan tried to prioritize his thoughts so as to help Colin figure things out. They sat over a coffee and soft drink, pancakes, and an all-day breakfast, which managed to feed their ravenous beasts. As the full moon drew closer, their appetites always grew along with the pull of the moon. The night of the full moon, they would hunt as a pack, and they would slate the beast within, leaving their wolves appeased until the following month.
“How many full moons?” Declan asked so softly that only Colin could hear him.
“This one will make it,” he paused, chewing the mouthful he shoved in. “Fourteen or fifteen,” shrugging, he admitted. “I freaked out the first time it happened, and I almost got hit by a car. Since then, I have been on the run. I started out couch-surfing with friends. Always making sure to go into the woods around the full moon. A few times, I was almost caught by illegal trappers. If I’d been a wild animal, I probably would have been.”
They finished their food while the conversation moved easily between both males, and Colin was beginning to feel like he may have found someone who could teach him about himself. That was before the next sentence came out of Declan’s mouth, and everything changed the entire atmosphere inside the café. It went from warm and cozy to subzero in three seconds flat.
“So here’s where we are at,” Declan began cautiously. “You are not fully coyote and not fully wolf. You’re a hybrid created by one parent who was a wolf shifter and one that was a coyote shifter.”
Colin’s top lip curled above the left side, and he bared his teeth, “I am not a bastardized shifter.” He took offense at the implication that he was less than a coyote or less than a wolf. He pushed to his feet and was about to leave when Declan stood and stared at the youngling. Colin reacted quickly to the authority of Declan’s wolf as his eyes shimmered to the ice blue of his wolf’s eyes, and Colin bowed his head.
“Sit,” Declan commanded. When Colin’s lips parted as though he were about to argue, Declan growled, “Don’t say it.”
Colin slowly lowered himself back down to his seat, he didn’t look very happy about it, but he wasn’t about to make a scene. He had no idea how many of the people in the café were humans or shifters. The overpowering smell of ground coffee beans was enough to cover the scent of anything except for coffee and freshly baked muffins in the air.
“Before you say anything, at least hear me out,” Declan raised an eyebrow waiting for a sign that the kid was going to do as he was asked.
Colin gave a sharp nod of his head, and Declan began. “When we were kids there was no segregation between the packs as there were limited resources for education. Our parents made the most of the situation and our numbers were integrated with other shifters as well as the humans who lived in the area. Your parents may have grown up together. They may have even dated in their early teen years. Things would have changed though when they began to shift. It would have been expected that they would find a member of their own packs to mate with. Our parents knew that sometimes we would need to travel to other packs to find a mate as it’s not fair to expect any of us to mate with someone we are not bonded to. Some of the wolf shifters in our pack have imprinted on humans and gone on to mate them. Your parents may have imprinted on one another before they reached adolescence only to have their parents deny them the love match. If either of them were born of a pack leader then it would have been extremely hard for the son or daughter to go against their pack’s leader. If they were together while your mother was on heat then she would have conceived. There would have been no way to avoid it. It is most likely the reason your mother was not with her pack if she was from this area. Regardless of the way you came to be, you are not less because you are a coywolf. If anything you are more. In your fur, you are bigger than a coyote but smaller than a wolf. There aren’t really that many things known as each case is different depending on parentage and the strength of the genetics on both sides.”
“What we can do is get my pack to start looking into it and see if anyone might know who your mother is and then we might be able to identify your father by association. I believe your father was coyote, because my father was pack leader before me and he would never stop myself or my brothers and sisters from taking a true soul mate, no matter who they were.”
“I wish I could have that conviction about my parents. It sounds like it would have been nice growing up knowing that your pack was interspecies friendly. The couple of packs that I encountered on my way here were not so open to me being in their area. I was hunted out by the packs within a day or two of arriving.”
“Although we are open minded we are still strict when it comes to pack rules and regulations. We also respect and abide by human laws. The last thing we need is to draw attention to our existence. The only human’s that know about us are those who have been sworn to silence by their mating.”
Chapter Five
Jennifer pulled the cord to the attic and watched as the stairs slowly lowered to the floor. With the folded coversheets packed in a plastic bag, she tried to throw them up through the opening in the roof. Yeah, that didn’t go so well, she thought as she grunted.
“Screw you Isaac Newton,” she snarled as she pushed herself back up from the floor. She supposed it was probably her own fault for not maintaining her gym membership after the first three visits. She’d managed to figure out pretty quickly that she was not built to run. Hell, she wasn’t even built for a brisk walk unless it was to get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ because she was running late for something important.
Sure she had curves, but at least she was authentic. She didn’t lie about her addiction to all the white things you weren’t supposed to eat. She loved potatoes no matter which way they were cooked. Oh, and those delicious things that came from fresh bakery’s, cakes, muffins, sweets and all other stuff and things, were heaven on a good day. Absolute bliss on a bad day. She supposed that was why she failed at relationships. Most of the men she’d dated were overly picky when they saw how she didn’t care about being a gym bunny. It wasn’t in her nature to be a kale-eating, grass-eating juicer. That stuff in the blitzars looked like sewage. How that fad became a multi-million dollar business for a Shark Tanker baffled her. She liked her carrots cooked and served with honey, a side of beef, and green beans. Throw in some corn on the cob, and that shit’s the bomb diggity.
At thirty, she was resigned to the knowledge that she hadn’t met mister right, and she wasn’t into swiping left on her phone to find a brief encounter with someone looking to get laid without building something together. An Ikea bookcase would be a good start. Getting a man to follow those instructions would definitely bring out his true colors.
All things aside, she was at a point in her life where she was okay about being single. Her mother had taught her that if nothing else. Her mother
never returned to the dating world after her father died. She would say that he was her everything and that when he died, he took an enormous chunk of her heart with him, only leaving enough for Jenn.
Jennifer knew the day her mother called by the tone in her voice that she was done. Her mother had called her a month after Jennifer turned twenty-one to tell her that she’d been to the doctor, and they had diagnosed her with stage four lymphoma. Jennifer had tried to convince her mother to fight, but Carolyn was already defeated. She told Jen that she was tired and ready to spend forever with Jennifer’s father. It had poured the day Carolyn Taylor-North was buried. The only person to attend the funeral other than Jennifer was her grandmother from her father’s side of the family.
Jennifer remembered that her grandmother had eyes the same as her father’s, and she cried even harder for the loss of both of her parents. Sobbing so hard, she failed to notice her grandmother move, and suddenly she was wrapped in the warmth of someone she barely remembered. The last time she’d seen her grandmother had been at her father’s funeral. Jennifer still didn’t understand how her father had died. It was as though nobody wanted to tell her. Maybe it was because she was so young at the time.
Jennifer sighed, then feeling like an intruder, she climbed the ladder into the attic. She sneezed three times as the dust in the air danced around her. Shocked at what was hidden in the attic, she slowly turned in a circle. There must have been somewhere between ten to twenty boxes stacked against the perimeter walls of the attic. Some of them were large and some smaller, there were tags on a few to indicate what was in them, and the others were a mystery. There was a desk scattered with papers on the other side of the space, and Jennifer was drawn to a photo on the wall where her grandmother had utilized the area like an office.
She lifted it down off of the wall to take a closer look at it. There was a group of seven men, all of them wearing no shirts and sporting a distinct wolf tattoo on their left pectoral muscles. They resembled a team of some sort with their camouflage pants, army-issue-looking shit kickers, and top gun sunglasses. The man standing second from the right was her father, and he looked happy with a shit-eating grin on his face. His arm around the shoulder of the guy next to him. Below the photo was a list of names with the heading ‘Alpha Team.’ Jennifer never knew her father was enlisted. He was just her father, and then he was gone. She really didn’t understand how he had died, and perhaps now she never would unless there was information amongst the things in the attic. She made a promise to herself that she would work through at least a couple of boxes a day. In doing so, she hoped to reduce the clutter in the house and maybe even learn a thing or two about her family.
Jennifer started with the desk, and she quickly lost track of time completely until she watched a paperclip disappear into a hole in the bottom of the draw on the left-hand side. She felt for the bottom of the drawer from underneath and placed her hand inside the drawer simultaneously. There she discovered a hidden depth in its construction that would easily go unnoticed if not for the paperclip falling through to find the secret compartment. She followed the edge of the interior compartment to establish a way to remove the false bottom. Inside the hidden section, she found pieces of paper that looked really old. Due to age, some were so old that it was almost impossible to read the writing or print on them. There were a couple of stacks of bonds in mint condition, and Jennifer stared at the information on them. If they were authentic, then they could be worth a small fortune. She carefully sat them to one side and lifted what looked to be a birth certificate. It was her grandmother’s name etched on it. Only the date had to be wrong. There was no way it could be correct because that would make her grandmother two hundred and seventy-nine years old. Elizabeth May North was the name on the birth certificate, but then Jennifer didn’t know what her grandmother’s full name was, and she came from an era where children were named after grandparents and so on. Jennifer felt foolish for even thinking it could belong to her grandmother. She’d obviously been reading way too many paranormal romance books or watching too many seasons of Supernatural.
She did find some other interesting paperwork that was also been hidden in the secret compartment. One of those was an old copy of a family tree, complete with their family members' names and dates of birth. She found her father’s name and traced it to where her mother’s name was listed and then down to where her name was printed. She skimmed her fingers sadly over both their names several times before noticing the smallest of details that could have been scuffed with wear and tear with opening and closing the folded parchment. Her father’s date of birth would make him almost a hundred and twenty-eight years old when he died. Things were just weird, and she remembered hearing a heated discussion between her parents when she was only a small child. It had something to do with raising her with the knowledge of his people because Jennifer was one of them. Her mother had argued that he had no idea whether she would possess enough of her father’s genes to fit into his world.
She remembered thinking, why would she want to wear her father’s jeans? They would be way too big, and besides, he was a boy, and girls didn’t wear boys’ clothes. She’d much rather wear her pretty pink dress with the frills around the hem that billowed outwards when she spun in circles. The fleeting memory of her father made her heart ache. He had been the one to kiss her knee better when she fell over. He’d always placated her mother when she made a mess or broke something, saying it was replaceable. He’d say, “Things can be replaced, but people can’t.” A tear rolled down her cheek, and she could have sworn she heard a wolf howl. The sound was so close she spun on her heels to confirm it wasn’t right behind her inside the attic.
The sense of being watched was enough to draw her attention to the small attic window. Looking out from it she saw the guy from next door, only this time he wasn’t alone. He had a young male with him, and she presumed them to be father and son. She quickly dropped the dusty curtain as he seemed to instinctively look straight up to where she was standing behind the sheer lace. She cursed the creepy handsome guy that lived next door, and she pacified her racing heart with the knowledge that there was probably a Suzie Homemaker attached to a man that looked that good. She returned her attention to the boxes and opened the first one of many to see if there was anything worth salvaging. Inside were a pile of drawings and penciled images of mostly wolves. They had her father’s initials on them, and she instantly knew her father had drawn them. She hugged them as if hugging him. They were a missing piece of him that she knew he’d passed down to her in the way she was drawn to sketching wolves. He’d been the one to show her how to see an image and capture it on paper. He’d explained shading techniques, and she had gone on to use them whenever she had time to sketch. Other than a few random pictures here and there, the bulk of them seemed to of wolves. Resigned to spending time going through the images slowly because she wanted to appreciate her father’s talent. She lifted the box to sit on her hip so she could climb down the ladder. Setting the box down on the kitchen table, she put the jug on to boil for a cup of tea. She was startled when suddenly a loud musical tune came from the front door, and she dropped the teaspoon on the floor.
“Coming!” she called out as she picked up the spoon and set it down in the sink.
She spun the deadbolt and pulled the door open only, feel as though she were about to choke on her tongue.
“Hi,” Declan said. Well, at least that was a good start, he thought.
“Hello,” Jennifer said, mentally patting herself on the back for not stuttering.
“Hi, um.” Declan said nervously, “I live next door. I wanted to introduce myself in case you need anything. You can call me Declan.”
“Jennifer,” she slipped her hand inside his offered one. Instantly she felt an unusual feeling of energy shoot along the back of her hand and up her arm all the way to her chest, where it bloomed into something she couldn’t describe and didn’t want to even try. Her immediate reaction was to quickly pull her
hand back from his hold.
Chapter Six
Declan’s wolf howled at a deafening range as their hands touched and her smaller one settled into his, ‘Mate!’ What’s more was that he knew she felt it too. She’d stared at where their hands were touching, one inside the other, and then as if struck by a bolt of lightning, she’d pulled away quickly. This was not good at all. He wasn’t worried about the people of his pack mating other species, but for him to take a human as a mate could potentially result in a massive clusterfuck.
She was beautiful in the morning light through the kitchen window, hanging a sheet out on the line. But up this close, she was stunning in the light of the setting sun. His fingers itched to tuck a wayward strand of hair out of her eyes.
“Maybe you and your husband would like to have a bar-b-que once you get settled in?” Declan held his breath, waiting to hear whether she was alone.
Jennifer crossed her arms, looked down at her bare toes, thought about painting them, and mentally added the task to her, ‘To Do List.’
“Oh,” Jen bit her lower lip. “Thanks but um, there’s no….”
“Look it’s no trouble, I have a guest staying with me for a few days. I just figured if I was cooking for one extra, I could throw on a couple more steaks and make it worth the effort.” Declan took her reluctance to divulge too much information as being that she wasn’t married.
“That would be nice. I would normally offer to bring something but I haven’t had a chance to do any shopping yet.” Jennifer apologized.
“That’s fine. What do you say, seven?” Declan hoped she would accept.
“Will your wife and son be there?” she smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.