Charmed Wolf

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

“Alpha, the moon will rise in fifteen minutes.”

“I know,” I told the sentry who’d stopped my car. Digging the ID placard out from under my shirt, I held it out to be scanned.

Ever since Father died, everyone coming in and out of pack central had their ID checked. Now, with Butch’s tale of unbound fae in the area, I was more glad than ever of the security. Even if this particular sentry’s chattiness seemed inclined to make me late.

“And your human friend is here,” he continued rather than raising the gate arm.

I frowned. That was unexpected. “Natalie?”

“Should I have kept her out?” The sentry’s eyes fell to the gravel of the driveway. “Her ID worked. So did the kid’s.” He winced, then admitted: “I didn’t scan the baby.”

An oversight. No wonder his wolf was terrified, almost whimpering despite the human skin that housed his vocal cords.

I rested a hand on his shoulder, calming his inner animal. “You did nothing wrong.”

After all, even fae couldn’t hide themselves in the form of a squalling baby. Glamour only went so far.

On the other hand, Natalie’s presence pointed to another sort of problem. She understood that my nightly round of challenges would begin as soon as the moon rose. She’d only have come at this hour if there was a real emergency.

I leapt out of the car, leaving it for the sentry to park, then broke into a run.

As I sprinted, my brain rewrote my schedule. Looked like I wouldn’t have time to shower. Would fight with dried chocolate caking my fur together. Didn’t matter. Instead, I headed straight for the third living room of the huge Whelan mansion, the one with plush couches that Natalie’s son had liked to hide behind as a small child.

Kale had been Katrina then. A girl rather than the young man he was growing into. Still, a change in gender hadn’t changed his affinity for the animal carvings on the arms and legs of the couches. I knew Natalie would be waiting in his favorite room.

And she was. It was lighter inside than out, so I could see them easily through the sliding glass door panels. Natalie perched on the edge of the eagle-footed couch, long hair loose the way she wore it when not in the lab. Kale was closer to the door, an androgynous silhouette with shoulders rounded.

That was familiar and expected. Two things, however, jarred.

The first was a pile of luggage sufficient to fuel a three-week journey. And the second? The eleven-month-old baby wriggling in Natalie’s lap.

I froze. Natalie usually found a sitter to keep the infant when we got together, so I hadn’t seen it in quite a while. I’d never been a fan of the stickiness of infants, but now the sight of tiny fingers didn’t make me wince. Instead, adrenaline coursed through me, demanding fight or flight.

If I wanted to remain Alpha, I’d have to bear one of those. Soon. An Heir who wouldn’t speak English. Who’d cry for no particular reason. Who’d break if it was dropped.

I’d never been a fan of babies. Having one of my own was a duty I’d hoped to put off for a long, long time.

I might have stood there forever if Kale hadn’t tapped on the glass between us. His eyebrows rose as he met my gaze, proving he’d noticed me even though my attention had been riveted upon his little sister.

At twelve, Kale was shorter than me by a few inches, his pale hair sticking out into chunks that were as much spikes as curls. He cradled a potted plant in his hands, which wasn’t entirely out of character but was odd nonetheless. “Are you coming in?” he mouthed.

I was. Of course I was. The fact my feet had turned away from the glass was irrelevant.

I opened the door. Tousled Kale’s hair to incite a duck and giggle. Tamped down my own issues as I turned to face Natalie.

“What’s wrong?”

Because not only was she here at an entirely inappropriate hour with a baby she knew I wasn’t a fan of, an ocean-like tang of salt had filled the air as soon as the glass barrier no longer separated us. Her eyes were red. She’d been crying gallons of tears.

Forgetting the baby, I slid onto the sofa beside her. “Who,” I added, “should I kill?”

“You always sound like you mean that literally,” Kale observed. He’d returned to leaning against the sliding door, an attempt at nonchalant masculinity. It sat uncomfortably on his skinny frame, nothing like Rune’s panther-like suavity.

I blinked away the memory. “Because I do,” I answered, keeping my attention on my best friend even as I spoke to her son. “Natalie. Talk to me.”

And she did, but not about the reason she’d come. “Bad date?” she asked, reaching up to finger one damp curl.

I shook my head, unsure how to respond to that. I mean, obviously Rune wouldn’t be my Consort. But I couldn’t quite make myself say the date had been bad. It had been...

...irrelevant. “Natalie,” I prodded, reminding her about the elephant in the room.

She took a deep breath. “I need a favor.”

“Anything.” Well, anything except holding the baby. But Natalie and I had come to terms with my disinterest in her younger spawn months ago. In my opinion, children became human at the age of five or ten or, depending on the child, sometimes as late as fifteen.

Kale was human. The baby was not.

Natalie’s response pulled me back to the more important issue. “My mother had a cerebrovascular accident.”

I blinked. I had no idea what that meant, which wasn’t strange. Natalie was a scientist and sometimes she forgot to speak English. “I’m guessing that’s not good?”

“A stroke,” my friend translated, her breath catching in a hiccup.

That I understood. I pulled her in into a sideways hug, the best I could do with the baby between us. Then I released words I couldn’t share with pack mates. Words that would make an Alpha look weak.

“Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry.”

Here with Natalie, I could be myself. I could be myself and hold tight to this human who had no wolf inside her. Since I wasn’t capable of doing what I really wanted to—pushing wild strength through her skin—I settled for rubbing her nonexistent fur.

Meanwhile, I waited for more tears. But none came. Instead, Natalie shook her head and pulled herself together. “I need to see her, but Kale has school....”

And his dad couldn’t dependably get his name right, let alone peer into the dark recesses of a twelve-year-old’s insecurities. The baby had been a last-gasp attempt to repair a broken relationship, but instead a second child had finally pushed Natalie over the edge into filing for divorce.

For that, at least, I owed the infant a debt.

“I can stay with friends,” Kale observed from his perch by the sliding door. He wasn’t even looking at us. Instead, he peered out at the horizon. The moon, he and I could both see, was just barely peeking up between a gap in the trees.

When Kale turned around to face me a second later, wordless understanding passed between us. A memory of our conversation last week when Kale had demanded to know why I no longer let him come for sleepovers. “It’s because I’m a boy,” he’d guessed.

“No,” I growled, wolf leaking through my human skin as I answered. “At the risk of sounding trite, it’s not you, it’s me. There are challenges here every night after the moon rises. Not human appropriate. We’ll do sleepovers again after I’m confirmed as Alpha.”

And...he’d nodded. Accepted that I had a life he couldn’t be part of, even though he’d been my little buddy ever since he’d learned to wash his hands without help.

Now he was remembering our understanding. I could tell by the way his eyes dropped to the plant in his hands, the way he gently fluffed up leaves that didn’t require fluffing. His mother was into chemistry and he was into botany. His nervous motions were akin to hugging a security blanket around his shoulders.

Natalie had overheard the sleepover conversation then, but she forgot in the midst of her pain now. “You have gender clinic Tuesday,” she reminded her son, oblivious to the silent discussion Kale and I had engaged in. “I’ll probably be back by then, but just in case, you should be with someone you’re comfortable with driving you there. If you want to come out to your friends....”

This time, Kale’s gaze fell to his toes. The kids at his old school hadn’t taken well to his change of pronouns. In the new school district mandated by the move out of Natalie’s ex’s house, he’d introduced himself as Kale—he/him—with no complicated backstory.

Like most transgender kids, though, Kale hadn’t biologically transitioned. Not at twelve years old. Instead, he took hormone blockers, a way of putting off the decision until he was older. The fact he trusted me to drive him to his gender clinic warmed my icy Alpha heart.

“Of course, I’ll keep the kids,” I jumped in, accepting the fact that challenges would be a little more complicated for the foreseeable future. I was Alpha, though. I could handle complications.

Of course, as soon as I spoke the baby cooed and waved her hands at me. I swallowed. Shifted my attention to Kale. Please, my eyes said.

And he was a good kid because he strode across the room and put down the plant so he could pick up his little sister. “Who’s a cutie pie?” he asked, crossing his eyes then sticking out his tongue.

The baby slapped him on the face. He laughed. I cringed.

“Are you sure? I don’t know how long I’ll be.” Natalie was standing now, sliding from foot to foot. She either needed to use the bathroom or....

“Your flight leaves soon.”

“Yeah, but if you don’t feel comfortable with Hazel....”

“We’ll be fine,” I told her. And, since she wasn’t a wolf, she couldn’t hear my lie.