Flesh wound my ass, little brother.
Comprehension lit his face. Our shared mental capacity as children had always been tenuous at best, blinking on and off like a loose wire. Most of the time it had run unfairly one way—from Tyler to me—and when Tyler had changed at puberty the connection stopped for good.
Now it was back.
Time for a little payback, huh, brother?
“Okay, that’s enough,” my father ordered. “Tyler, I need you to behave. Your sister’s going to need our help; what’s happened here is unprecedented. We’ve managed to dance around the seriousness thus far, but now we need to determine the right course to follow to minimize the fallout. The wolves are restless and we must tread carefully.”
My brother sobered instantly. He took Pack business seriously, he always had. At twenty-six, he held an unusually high Pack status; the only other wolf with more status was my father’s second-in-command, James Graham, who’d been by my father’s side for more than a century. Tyler had fought a lot of bloody battles to move up so rapidly in the Pack ranks. He was a strong wolf and I hoped it ran in the family.
My father stood and paced to the end of the bed. “The wolves know something, but there’s still a good chance they don’t know you’ve turned. Most are unsure of what they heard last night, because I snapped the line quickly. We’re going to use that to our advantage and try to hold off sharing the news of your shift as long as we can—possibly indefinitely if we’re lucky.”
“What do you mean, ‘what they heard’?” I asked. That didn’t sound good.
“A new wolf signals his first shift to the Pack. It’s a built-in safety precaution and your wolf sent out that very same alert.” My father turned to face me. “At first change, your body triggers a beacon, and hundreds of years ago we found wolves all over Scotland and Wales exactly like that—wolves who didn’t know what they were prior to their first shift.”
“The whole Pack heard my shift?” The thought of having a pack of werewolves inside my brain sent a rush of panic racing through me. “Can they hear me right now?” I tried to contain the waver in my voice, but it shot around the edges anyway.
“No, they can’t hear you now,” my father assured me. “The Pack connection is always established by me first, and by me alone. Wolves cannot talk internally on their own. You and Tyler are a rare exception, which is undoubtedly because of your close blood-bond, and not because of Pack. I am the conduit of communication only because I’m Alpha. The alert you sounded was only heard by the Pack for a few brief moments. Once I realized it was you, I shut it down completely. As of right now, they aren’t positive it was you and that runs in our favor.” He ran his hand through his hair again. “I can reasonably deny my knowledge of your change without triggering an untruth, because I never saw you. Nobody actually saw you in your wolf form, therefore no one knows for sure if you’ve changed. If we’re lucky, they’ll think it was a beacon coming from a new wolf in the Southern Territories, which is a possibility. We’ve heard one once before. The distance is a factor, but because it’s happened we can use it.” The U.S. Southern Territories controlled everything south of the Mason-Dixon Line down into Mexico, my father, everything north into Canada.
My brother nodded in agreement.
Making sure my father didn’t have to lie to his Pack was important. Wolves could sense a lie, because the body betrayed itself every time. The heart raced, pupils dilated, and you perspired. My father, being a strong Alpha, could mask a lie, but if his wolves questioned him too deeply, his emotions could betray him.
“It’s a relief they can’t hear me, but they have to be curious why I’m home in the first place? I’m assuming they know I’m here.” Keeping me a secret on the Compound would be too hard. I wasn’t supposed to be here, I was supposed to be in Europe. When I’d finally departed for good several years ago, I’d started a new life under the alias Molly Hannon. The Pack was informed Jessica McClain had headed to Europe for good. I’d actually spent a short time overseas recuperating from injuries I’d sustained fighting just before I’d left the Compound, so it wasn’t untrue, and it’d worked like a charm. I’d come back stateside as Molly, and my new life was two hours south of here, in the Twin Cities, and it had been blissfully uneventful. Nobody knew who I was, and I desperately wanted to keep it that way.
“I told them you were in town for a few nights for a rare visit with your brother, and you’d been staying down in the cities with Danny. You arrived on Compound late last night, which was purely a coincidence.” Danny Walker, my brother’s best friend and another of my few allies. He worked policing the cities’ boundaries for errant wolves, and he was damn good at it.
“And they bought it?”