Page 14 of His Runaway Mate

Someone starts making rainbow cocktails too. Midori for green, Berry Liquor for red, and something else for the other colors, I don’t really know. I start with green and just one puts me on my ass. It’s not often I drink.

“No shifting!” I call out to the others. “We need our wits about us tonight. We just crossed Regent… ah, who am I kidding.”

They’re not listening.

They’re too busy playing beer pong and videoing each other doing stunts and they don’t need to be reminded not to shift when there are cameras around. Fortunately these days, even if they did, nobody would believe that it was real. We’re in a post reality digital space. If it’s on a screen, it’s probably a lie.

I freaked out the first time one of our more reckless shifters filmed himself turning from man to animal. Everyone in the comments was arguing over whether it was CGI or straight up AI. Nobody considered for a second that they’d just seen one of the dark wonders of the world.

“Maybe we should rein this in,” I say. “If he comes and we’re all messy drunk…”

“Nobody else is worried, and you shouldn’t be worried either,” Laura says. “He came over, he… did what he did to you, and he left. I don’t think anybody is scared of anything from him.”

Her sentence barely makes sense, and her logic doesn’t track. But that’s what the particular cocktail of recreational substances she’s taken will do to you.

“We should be worried,” I insist. “Maybe it was a mistake to get everyone gathered here. Maybe I should have told them all to spread out…”

“Too late now,” she says cheerfully. “We’re here and we’re having a good time. So you might as well have a good one anyway.”

She’s right. That last bit of logic is impeccable. I can’t change what’s going to happen. We’ve done what we’ve done. Someone is putting an orange drink in my hand that has chocolate powder on the rim. It’s delicious. I have two. After that, I just stop worrying.

CHAPTER 4

Rex

I find myself standing in the moonlight, charged with intense mating energy. I’ve been horny before, but not like this. This arousal feels like an order being handed down from the dawn of time. It’s a primal need that verges on essential. If I do not breathe, I cannot survive. And I cannot survive if I do not claim my mate.

I know precisely where she is, of course. As if I would ever let her out of my oversight again. As if a day of her life will go past in which I do not know where she is and what she is doing, in which my eyes, or the eyes of those who act as mine are not on her.

I walked away in the middle of the day, left when the sun still shone, allowed her to have a small sense of victory, perhaps. But I suspect that sense of winning will not have lasted long. A mate bond is more powerful than either of the people involved. We are being drawn together inexorably across space and time and the matter of our joining is an inevitability.

The sun has set. The moon has risen. Darkness has covered us, and now I will do what must be done.

The Runaway wolves have taken refuge in a loft apartment. Amusingly enough, the building also belongs to me, albeit through a shell company. They ran from one place I own to another. An easy mistake to make, I suppose. Most of this city belongs to me, one way or another.

If they were actually capable of mounting a real challenge to the Regent pack, they would be sophisticated enough to know these things, but they keep making these amateurish mistakes.

I enter the building and take the elevator to the penultimate floor. From there, I go up to the roof. The building has fallen into silence as the night turns long. On top of the roof, I remove the sweater that Fescue would mourn as if it were one of his own children, and I take my wolf form. I lift my face to the moon, letting her energy flow through me as my body takes on another form, a truer one. My teeth lengthen, my mouth becomes a fierce maw. My muscles grow, my bones bend and extend. I grow a thick, dark pelt and I see through eyes designed to hunt and hold.

It is rare for me to do this in the city, but there are advantages to being in wolf form when you are dealing with shifters in any state. I walked into the Runaway warehouse building as a man, and though they may have felt my energy, they did not understand what it meant to be in the presence of an alpha.

These whelps have not been handled well. From observations, I know that many of them have been so outcast from their packs that even the males don’t know how to shift. The females who are still unmated have never shifted, but that is normal. When I was around the rest of them, even for that brief time, I got the sense that most of the males are not properly conditioned and would be maimed if they tried.

Being a shifter is one thing. Many are born with the capacity. Being able to take the full wolf form is something different. Historical documents that show a werewolf, a figure upright with a snout like a wolf, claws and feet like a wolf, and a furred body, are showing a partial and incomplete transformation. An embarrassment by modern standards. To shift well and properly, a wolf needs to be taught. Usually this happens naturally when young males are taken out with the pack, and again, after a female shifter’s first mating, she will likewise be transformed. It is supposed to be a guided process.

At some point, we are going to have to take the lot of them under our wing, as it were. They’re going to have to be taught how to behave. But I’m going to start with my mate.

I pad down the fire escape. They’ve left the windows open, and the scent of revelry is floating in the still night air. I pad down through the window and stand among them.

I was prepared to encounter them in their wakeful states, but there is almost no motion on this room at all. The whole pack of Runaway wolves are asleep after what must have been a raucous evening. They are all wearing matching footsie pajamas, a fact I note with some amusement and fondness.

They have made a mess of everything, including themselves. The place smells of sweet liquor and vape smoke. Empty glasses litter every surface, and passed-out whelps do the same.

It is a mess. Fescue would be traumatized with despair if he were to set eyes on this scene. No order to speak of, litter left to lie where it was dropped, pajamas soaked in spilled liqueurs. It feels as though I am padding through a frat house.

I want to think they should know better, but should they? I can smell the negligence on them. I doubt even one of them has known the shelter of a true pack. They have obviously not experienced the discipline or the education. These shifters act like humans, but they are not humans. It will end badly for all of them if they do not submit to our pack and assimilate into it.

They think they’re doing something new. They think they can break away from pack dynamics and establish themselves as individuals in a world full of humans who are fundamentally different creatures from them. I already know that Nicky doesn’t consider herself an alpha. Instead, she acts like a kind of older sister at best, and bad example at worst. She thinks the others don’t need strong leadership, but I know that sooner or later, these cute little alcohol-addled whelps are going to turn into full blown monsters.