Archive of Our Own ^beta

Laura is four when Derek is born. It’s a traumatic experience for them both.

It’s traumatic for Derek because he’s born too early and too small. It’s traumatic for Laura because she can smell the tension and worry of all the adults in the house. This is the first time she’s ever felt unsafe. It’s a primal feeling that has her making a den under the bed and refusing to come out for a week.

Everyone is so worried for Derek that they don’t notice.

***

Derek shifts for the first time when he’s a almost a year old. He hasn’t learned to crawl yet and he almost never cries. The family is worried.

They’re more worried when he doesn’t shift back.

***

Laura doesn’t mind that Derek is a wolf. He’s better that way. With cute furry ears and a wagging tail, he’s the puppy she was never allowed to have.

Laura is the only one who isn’t trying to get Derek to shift. Mom shifts back and forth from her alpha form to her human form in front of Derek. Dad tries to tempt Derek with things he can only do as a human, like opening a box with food inside it or playing peek-a-boo. Uncle Peter stays up in the library, pouring through book after book. They try scaring Derek, even hurting him, but nothing they do works. Mom cries, Dad runs for hours in the woods, and Uncle Peter barely sleeps.

Laura picks Derek up and carries him everywhere she goes. She plays with him in the sandbox or chases him between the trees closest to the house. She dresses him up and puts him in her doll stroller to push around and splashes with him in the bath.

Their parents worry that Laura is treating her brother like a pet, but he refuses to be separated from her, whining and struggling in his mother’s arms when Laura has to go off to playgroup or sneaking out of his pen to climb in her bed at night.

After a year, they buy Derek a collar and a leash so Laura can take him walking in town.

Uncle Peter goes in search of more knowledge with a few older and larger packs in New York and comes back with a wife and even more books.

Laura takes Derek to school for show and tell.

***

Nobody sees Derek’s human face again until he’s four and Laura is eight.

They’re playing in the old ranger’s station by the creek when a wooden step crumbles and Laura falls twenty feet.

If she were human, it might’ve killed her, so even as a Were she isn’t in good shape.

Derek has made it back to the house by the time Laura regains consciousness.

Later, when he tells the story, Peter will laugh. Now, however, he just stares in shock at a dark-haired, green-eyed boy standing on the porch naked.

“Derek?” he says in awe.

“Laura fell. She’s hurt. Hurry.” Those are Derek’s first words.

Laura’s broken leg and her crushed hand and concussion heal by the time night falls.

Derek curls up in her lap in his human form the way he did as a puppy. He still sleeps in her bed while the adults continue to look in on them just to see his human face.

***

Even though Derek speaks full sentences and knows how to count and now uses the toilet, he stays behind when Laura goes to school.

All Were children from packs that socialize with humans are taught not to shift and not to tell the family secrets at a young age. Laura got the rules every day for the whole summer before school. Her mom used her alpha voice, imbuing them with command every time she repeated them: don’t kill a human, don’t hurt a human, don’t shift, don’t push or hit or slash even if someone does it to you first.

Derek gets that training and a lot of other things too.

“They don’t let me rest,” Derek whispers when he and Laura are alone at night. Rest is the word Derek uses for shifting. “They hurt me if I do.”

Laura sneaks Derek into the woods to let him shift, even though she’s supposed to pinch him hard if he does.

Derek has incredible control. Laura still barely remembers her full moon nights, whereas Derek just curls up and sleeps if the adults won’t take him running with them.

Laura doesn’t think they’re keeping him home because they’re afraid he’ll shift in front of a human. They probably just never want him to shift because he might not come back.

***

Ironically, when Derek is finally allowed to go to school when he’s eight, they skip him up a grade.

Uncle Peter and his wife have produced two cousins by then and Mom is pregnant with their future baby brother.

Laura isn’t concerned about the other children. They are too young to be any fun. Things only get interesting when halfway through the school year Uncle Andrew comes to live with them, along with the two human girls he conceived with his human ex-wife.

Anna is seven and Maggie is six. Laura and Derek are not allowed to wrestle with them or take them hiking in the forest or really do anything fun with them at all. Even jump rope and mini-golf and hide and go seek aren’t fun with the humans. So they learn to play board games and they watch more movies than Laura and Derek were ever interested in. They take the humans down to the community pool in the summer or drop them off at friends' houses.

Laura and Derek don’t go over to friends' houses to play. They don’t really have any. Derek is known as the weird kid, according to Anna. He sits alone at lunchtime and spends recess reading by himself. People would bully him, except Derek quickly established his physical dominance early on and now the other kids just give him a wide berth. Laura is well-liked, but she claims to constantly be grounded so she can head home right after school. She never tells her classmates what she did to get punished, but their imagined stories just serve to make her seem more interesting and dangerous.

Laura doesn’t need any friends because she has her brother and her brother is all she needs. Derek has finally succeeded in teaching Laura how to transform into a full wolf, so they spend every spare moment in the woods, playing chase or hide-and-seek or hunting rabbits and deer.

Laura makes leather harnesses with small pouches for both her and Derek. They’re just big enough for a cell phone, some cash and a pair of really sharp tweezers. As wolves they can hunt their food, sleep without blankets, heal most anything, and run away long before humans approach; they don’t need anything else.

Over school breaks they spend every day in the woods, trying to get farther and farther from home. Their father and Uncle Peter don’t approve, but their mother is the alpha and she allows it.

***

Their parents have long tried to keep Derek from sneaking into Laura’s bed at night, but they have mostly given up by the time Derek turns seven.

One night, when Derek is nine and Laura is thirteen, she wakes up to her brother clutching her tightly, giving off heat like a furnace. This isn’t unusual. What is unusual is the rhythmic undulation of his body against her back and the hardness she feels pressed up half between her legs.

Laura panics, knowing what is happening, but not knowing what to do. She doesn’t want to wake Derek and make things awkward between them. Even though it is always Derek that sneaks into her bed and not the other way around, Laura doesn’t think she can bear to spend a night without her brother. This is the first time she’s actually felt fear around him: not fear that he will hurt her, but fear of how things may change.

So she just stays there, letting Derek rut against her until she feels a wetness dampening the back of her sleep-shorts. She waits, tension in every joint, heart beating out of control, until she hears his heartbeat mellow deep into sleep. Then she pulls her shorts off and tosses them at the laundry hamper.

Laura wakes up before Derek the next day and shoves his snoring, drooling body off her shoulder as usual. It’s only when she’s standing in only her underwear that she remembers what happened the night before. She rushes to the hamper and pulls the sheets up to see the damage. There isn’t anything on the sheets, so it’s only Derek’s boxers that are a problem. Laura pulls them off his legs without him waking, but she’s halfway to the washing machine before she realizes that Derek will notice if he wakes up naked. Except he’ll be naked if he shifted.

She starts the laundry and then ascends back up the stairs. “Shift, baby brother,” she whispers in his ear. “You need to rest. The moon is full and you are safe. Shift for me.”

It’s her final plea that does it. Before she knows it, her brother is gone and a big black wolf is left in his place.

She ruffles his ears and kisses his muzzle before stepping into the shower to prepare for school.

***

Laura isn’t sure how much Derek knows about what happened. He should still be able to smell it, but there’s no guarantee that Derek knows what that smell means. The adults in their family are good about showering afterwards, but Derek must have smelled it on humans. Probably some of the boys in Derek’s class reek of it, but with only the smell and no actual liquid, Derek’s unlikely to connect the dots.

Thankfully it doesn’t happen again for another month and a half. This time, when Laura wakes up, she decides to be a little more proactive. She turns around, watching her brother twitch and moan. He still looks like a child in need of her care. She pulls the sheet away to see what’s going on. They’ve talked about this in health class and with her werewolf senses she’s heard the boys in her class go on and on about it. Some of them even think about her when they do it.

When she pulls his boxers down, Laura is surprised to see how much her brother’s penis has grown and how it sticks up like that (not completely perpendicular to the body like she’d thought). She sees Derek naked practically every day, but she’s never seen him like this.

Curiosity gets the better of her and she reaches out to touch his erection. It’s smooth and soft, not wet and slick like she thought it would be. It’s not as solid as it seems, giving against her skin as she squeezes. It twitches too, when she releases it. That almost makes her laugh with the absurdity of it. Laura pulls back the foreskin to poke at the head. Here there is slickness and heat. The strange slide of it against her palm interests her and soon she has made a game out of it, seeing how much of the slippery liquid she can get out.

Laura is completely surprised when Derek gasps and shudders and a flood of white spills into her palm and all over her hand. She panics and shoves Derek off, cleaning her hand with tissues and then flushing them down the toilet to hide the evidence.

When she gets back into bed, Derek immediately plasters himself up against her, making it hard to pull his boxers back up.

“Goodnight, baby brother,” she whispers, kissing his forehead the way she did when he was four and finally human again.

***

It happens two more times. The first time, Derek whispers her name as she strokes him, making her pause in shock for a moment. Is he awake? But when she asks him she receives no reply. Laura likes the way her name sounds on a moan.

After that she sneaks into the puberty alcove in the young adult section of the public library. It’s an alcove hidden in the twisted maze of the shelves, with all the books displayed with their covers out, instead of shoved next to each other with only the spine visible. Laura knows the goal is for people like her to be able to grab one of the books without feeling self-conscious about it. With her quick reflexes she has the thickest one tucked behind Robbie in the baby sling she’s holding like a shield. She ducks into one of the private reading rooms and bounces Robbie in her lap as she reads.

Laura learns two important things. First, that it’s better with lubrication and faster strokes and, second, she learns that what she’s doing is wrong.

She has always known that it’s wrong. Not just because it’s touching down there but because Derek is her brother. What she hadn’t considered is that she has been doing it to him when he’s unconscious and even though he moaned her name, he didn’t give her permission.

The next time it happens, Laura is torn. On one hand, the book said she shouldn’t, but on the other hand, Derek is whining, frantically moving against her and even pricking her a little with his claws. This is why their parents never let them go on overnight trips, she realizes.

Derek needs to calm down before he wolfs out completely, so Laura pets him, strokes the hair that grows on the side of his face and coos that everything is okay, that she’ll take good care of him. It’s a relief when his features are human again, angelic in sleep.

She never intended to stop, Laura realizes when she is pulling a tube of scentless lotion out of her night-table. She wouldn’t have placed it there if she had.

This time, when Derek spills between them, he bites down on the juncture of her neck and shoulder. She feels a jolt go through her, a tightening in her muscles like a wave. She’s growing wet in her panties the way she has only a few times before: sitting on top of the washing machine while she’s waiting for her clothes or watching Jerry Maguire on cable TV while she was babysitting for the Whittemore family and their adorable toddler.

Laura doesn’t know what it means when Derek’s bitemark doesn’t fade immediately. Laura wears a scarf to school the next day. She isn’t cold, but it’s part of the current human fashion so her parents don’t question her.

***

Laura feels as though she’s drowning in guilt after that. She had told herself that she was helping her brother out, keeping him from getting discovered so that they wouldn’t be separated. But she knows it’s more than that. She enjoyed it too.

She loves Derek differently than she loves Robbie or Maggie or Anna, though they are pack and they are family and she has practically grown up with all of them. At first she thought it was because she and Derek are closer in age, but now she knows better.

When the girls in her class huddle together on the bleachers and talk about boys, she has to pick a boy to have a crush on at random because Derek is the only person that makes her heart speed up the way Jessie or Casey or Sara’s do whenever their crush looks at them across the hall.

“Your brother is really cute,” Laura says to Casey, listening close to her heartbeat.

“Ew!” Casey says. “That buggerface? You can’t seriously like him.” She isn’t lying.

Laura shrugs, “He’s not my brother.” Because her own brother is the only brother that Laura likes.

“I guess,” Casey replies, still looking suspicious. “I wouldn’t be mad if you wanted to go out with him, Laura. But I’m not going to help you.”

Laura had hoped that the way she feels is something that a lot of girls go through but don’t talk about, like bacne or masturbation. As it turns out, it’s just another way that Laura is not like the other girls at school.

She’s a werewolf, so what’s one more secret? People are born the way they are and sometimes they’re born dangerous. The important part is to keep it secret, to keep control. She doesn’t think the way she feels about Derek is wrong even though she now knows that everyone else will think it is. It doesn’t feel wrong, just like being a wolf is as natural as breathing.

What does feel wrong is that she has no clue how Derek feels. She knows that he loves her more than anyone else will ever love her, even their parents. She knows that he said her name once as he was spurting all over her hand. She knows that his heartbeat races when he sees her and that he stares at her when he thinks she’s not looking.

She also knows that she must tell him about her feelings, but she’s afraid. What if he rejects her? What if he doesn’t? Will he be disgusted or will their nights turn into a clandestine romance? Laura doesn’t think ahead five years or ten or until they grow old. She’s still a child and those dates seem impossibly far ahead.

Just when Laura thinks she’s going to crack under the strain of her own inner turmoil, Uncle Peter comes up with a solution that will let her delay a little while longer.

One day at dinner Peter announces that Josh and Sofia are interfering with his nocturnal activities and they need a room of their own soon. The house is huge, but with three families living there, they are already occupying all seven bedrooms. Anna and Maggie know that because they are the youngest and of the same gender they will be made to share, but Derek immediately claims that he isn’t using his room anyway and that he’d gladly move in with Laura.

“I figured as much,” Uncle Peter says with a smirk.

At three and four years old, Josh and Sofia are too small for Derek’s full size bed, so they move it into Laura’s room and take out her fuzzy purple couch.

It’s difficult at first, sleeping alone for the first time since she was five, but Laura figures that it is more honorable than the alternative.

Derek does sneak over occasionally, but only as a wolf curled up on top of the covers at the foot of her bed.

***

Now that they are older, Laura and Derek are allowed to stay in the woods by themselves overnight around the time of the new moon, when hunters are most afraid to attack.

Laura is being generous today and she lets Derek lead them back home after a night spent running and howling and curling up together in a den of dried leaves.

At first light, Derek leads them in a deer kill. It’s deer season, so Laura doesn’t feel bad when they eat only part of it. Some other creatures will scavenge the carcass, she supposes.

By the time they finish they’re covered in blood, with twigs and leaves sticking out of their fur. The buck managed to gouge Derek in the side with his antlers, so they need to wait for him to heal before they run back.

Laura follows the sound of water to a nearby stream. A beaver has built a dam at this bend in the river since the last time Laura and Derek visited the area, so there’s a nice swimming hole already prepared for them.

Laura shifts back into her human form and casts off her leather harness. She must look a mess, with blood smeared all over her like tribal paint and mud in her hair.

Derek stands at the edge of the water still in his wolf form.

“Come on,” Laura complains. “Shift back so I can help you wash the blood off.”

Derek sits down with a whimper and Laura wades out of the pond to check him over. She doesn’t remember the gouges being that deep. She probes his thick black fur, trying to sort out still bleeding wounds from ordinary clumps of fur and blood.

“You’re healed already!” She hits him on the tip of his nose and he snaps at her. “Change back.”

When Derek doesn’t budge, Laura stomps back into the water exasperatedly. “You know mom will never let you in the house like that.”

She takes her time to wash herself, luxuriating in the freedom of being out here, so deep in the woods that there won’t be a human around for miles.

Laura swims a lap across the pond, wondering if beaver meat tastes any good. She’s a little worried that Derek hasn’t shifted, but it’s been a touchy subject ever since they were young and she knows better than to bring it up.

When Laura pulls her ears out of the water, the first thing she notices is that Derek’s heart is beating fast and he’s panting. She looks around for the threat, but there’s nothing there and Derek’s tongue is lolling out in a friendly gesture.

Laura rolls her eyes, diving at him and grabbing his paws to drag him towards the water. “Come on, you mongrel. If you don’t shift, you’re going to smell like wet dog.”

Derek snaps at her and Laura’s eyes flash without conscious command. The threat makes him shift, immediately wrenching his hands from hers and using them to cover his manhood.

It takes only the brief glance she has of it for Laura to see that he’s hard. It explains why he didn’t want to shift.

Derek is flushed head to toe, but he can’t look away from his sister’s naked body. Laura feels a similar heat overtake her.

She realizes all of a sudden, how incredibly young he looks. Derek is only ten. He’s not even allowed to use the stove unsupervised. Laura herself is only fourteen and neither of them really knows what to do and what is right. But she does know that she can’t do this to her brother. She might be all twisted up inside, but Derek is still innocent. She has to protect him and keep him that way.

Laura decides to just ignore the situation and let Derek pretend that she didn’t see.

Maybe this will be something that they’ll grow out of, Laura hopes, as she splashes her brother, tackling him down into the muddy substrate. They pretend that she doesn’t feel his hardness rub against her and that the way he bares his neck is submission, not invitation.

***

Derek is oddly sullen as summer begins. They still spend most of their time playing in the woods, but Derek refuses to leave his wolf form now. It’s a regression that makes Laura worry, but she can’t tell her family about it for fear that they’ll discover the cause.

Laura wonders if she has traumatized him somehow or made him feel unwanted. But she has never done anything while he’s awake, so she doesn’t know what she could have possibly done to make him like this. Maybe he’s just finally growing up.

Derek helps Uncle Peter clean out part of the attic and turn it into another bedroom while Laura takes more babysitting jobs. Her mother volunteers her to babysit for Mrs. McCall, because she’s always overworked, even though she doesn’t pay half as much as the Whittemores or the Martins.

As far as Laura understands it, Mrs. McCall is always overworked and in need of a babysitter because Mr. McCall is deployed to Kosovo. Dad and Uncle Andrew follow the conflict closely and even decide to upgrade to satellite TV so they can watch coverage on CNN. Mom and Uncle Peter dismiss it as human problems and retreat to the library whenever they see it on.

Laura doesn’t understand why some people are killing some other people just because they’re a slightly different group of humans.

“Fear and power,” Uncle Peter says. “The same reasons why hunters kill werewolves.” Thus far, hunters have always been just monsters in their father’s stories and scare tactics to keep the children from straying too far in the woods.

Fear and power isn’t an adequate explanation to give Laura’s two-year-old charge when Scott asks where his daddy is. “He’s fighting monsters,” Laura says instead.

Except it turns out that it’s Scott’s daddy that is the monster. One day while Laura is babysitting overnight, he bursts in the door wearing fatigues and stinking of alcohol. The only reason Laura doesn’t slash his throat immediately is because she recognizes his photo from the one next to Scott’s bed.

Laura wants to call Mrs. McCall, but the monster stands between Laura and the phone.

“You’re beautiful,” he tells her. “My dumb cunt of a wife did a good job hiring you. About the only thing she’s ever gotten right.”

“Thank you,” Laura says, moving to put the couch between them. Her heart is racing even though she knows that an army-trained brute of a man with a gun is no match for even a fourteen-year-old werewolf. She smells gunpowder, but she can’t see the gun.

It can’t permanently damage her unless it’s a point-blank headshot, but she suddenly realizes that it can kill a human by accident. Werewolves share pup-rearing duties, so it’s Laura’s instinct to care for Scott. She would protect him with her life.

She moves back around the couch, which is far closer to the man than she wants to be, but she needs to put herself between him and the door to the bedroom where she just put Scott down to sleep.

“Mrs. McCall didn’t say you’d be home today.” There isn’t anything else to say. The tension in the air is too thick for small talk.

Mr. McCall shrugs his huge shoulders. “I got back last Sunday. War’s over. Thought I’d have some fun before getting stuck back with that bitch. But I gotta see my boy.”

“Scott is asleep,” Laura tells him, planting her feet firmly and hoping to god that her eyes stay a mild, unexceptional green. “You shouldn’t wake him up.”

Anger crests in him, peaking in a terrible smirk. “There’s better things out here, anyway.”

Laura doesn’t know why she freezes, but before she knows it, she’s on the floor with his thick, dirty fingers clawing under her skirt and his tequila soaked breath tickling her nose.

If she were a human, she might knee him in the balls. She might scream or try to stick her fingers in his eyes. If she were human, she’d probably be forced to lie there while he violated her.

But she’s not human and before she knows it, he’s made the terrible mistake of exposing his neck. Two nights until the full moon, she sinks her teeth in.

He’s howling, screaming at her to get off, beating at her with those massive arms. Her bruises fade before they can form. All it would take for her to yank out his throat would be for her to jerk her head back just an inch. His blood tastes like alcohol, but it spurs her onwards nonetheless. The instinct is to just destroy him, carve him open like he’s been trying to do to her. He’s a bad man and the world won’t miss him. But more than that, she wants to kill the way she does when she comes upon a rabbit warren or an ailing deer. She’s never been given permission before, but his hand up her skirt seems permission enough.

The only thing that stops her is a small, fearful sound, coming from the bedroom. Scott is here, she remembers. She can’t kill his father. She can’t kill a human or they will kill her. That’s the first rule. She’s never understood until now, why not killing doesn’t go without saying.

Laura shifts her teeth back, retracting them from the sweat-slick skin of the monster’s throat. He’s panting, sobbing, struggling and she’s had enough. She throws him off and into the wall where his slumps unconscious. He might be bleeding out, but she finds she doesn’t care.

She runs into Scott’s room, needing to see him. The incipient wail that he had been building calms when she picks him up. He doesn’t seem to care that her mouth and neck are covered with blood. She doesn’t stop to wipe it off, just grabs Scott and slams out the door.

The next thing she knows, she’s running the woods on three out of four limbs, using one arm to hold Scott against her chest.

She hears the crack of branches just as a black form comes barreling out of bush to her left. Derek shifts between one blink and the next, pulling her into a tight hug as she sobs. “I almost did it,” she whispers. “I wanted to.”

Her mother and Uncle Peter are only a moment behind. Mom pulls Laura into a tight embrace then traces the blood stains running down her chin. Talia Hale is alpha first and mother second because the next words out of her mouth are stern and her fingers suddenly clench, vice-like, on her daughter’s shoulders.

“Whose blood is it?”

“Mr. McCall,” she chokes out, burying her head the familiar scent of her brother and their lingering combined odor from when they shared a bed.

“That abusive alcoholic sonofabitch. Did you kill him?”

She shakes her head.

“Is he still alive?”

She shrugs.

“At the McCall house?”

She nods.

Mom looks pointedly at Uncle Peter until he runs off back towards the McCall house.

“Shhh . . .” her mother soothes, pulling Scott away from Laura’s breast. She grips him so tight that he looks like he might cry. Mom gives an exasperated sigh. “It’s okay, Laura. You did a good job protecting him, but it’s time to let go. We’ll take care of everything. Come on, honey, let’s get you cleaned up.”

Later, while her mother calls Mrs. McCall, Derek runs a bath in Laura’s bathroom. He helps her out of her clothes and then strips himself and gets in the tub with her like they haven’t for years. Derek washes her hair as Laura stares at the white tiles on the wall, mesmerized by the way the water drips into the caulking.

“What did it feel like?” Derek asks in hushed awe. He might never get the chance to bite someone.

“It felt good,” she admits, leaning back into him. “That’s the scary thing.”

“I won’t let him do it again,” Derek promises. “I won’t let them take you away.”

Laura doesn’t think that Derek has any power over that, but she leans into him anyway, feeling safe in his small arms.

The problem with being a werewolf is that she can’t invite police attention by filing a report against McCall and she can’t tell his wife what happened because it wouldn’t explain the bite. Later, Laura will feel guilty because it takes Melissa McCall five more years to leave her abusive lush of a husband and another two to get full custody of Scott.

***

Things are tense at the beginning of Laura’s freshman year of high school. The bite that Laura left on Steve McCall has brought two hunters into town to investigate. That they haven’t settled down yet is a good sign, but they could always decide to permanently set up post here.

The adults in the pack take turns watching the hunters, who appear to be in a hurry. They are young to be hunting alone -- still in their late twenties -- and they smell of children’s shampoo and wet wipes. Their youth is both encouraging (because the problem is obviously not serious enough to warrant an experienced hunter) and discouraging (because young hunters wanting to prove themselves can be trigger-happy).

Mom and Uncle Peter are in charge of the negotiations. They are reluctant to bring Laura along, but she’s the one who did the biting, so they don’t have a choice. Derek puts on a dog collar and tries to follow in his wolf-form, but Uncle Andrew catches him easily.

“Your daughter attacked a human,” the female hunter says. She smells like baby powder.

“That human tried to rape my daughter,” Mom replies. Laura has never used that word to describe what happened. That word surely can’t apply if she was never in any real danger. “And he was drunk, with a gun around the two-year-old boy she was babysitting. You’re anxious to get back to a toddler yourself, you must understand.”

If the hunters are surprised by that knowledge, they don’t show it.

The woman replies, voice deep and commanding, “We saw the police record. He was drunk and the gun they found on him was his. We assume you moved the body into the preserve to cover the wolf bite, but can give me assurances that there was no other tampering?”

Uncle Peter nods.

“There is no doubt that your daughter had the right to defend herself. But for someone with superhuman strength and agility, many ways are available that don’t involve a wolf bite to the throat.”

Before her mom can make excuses, Laura announces, “I’m sorry. I was so scared. He was on top of me, pinning me down. His neck was shoved in my face. I just acted on instinct.”

“The instinct of a beast,” the woman says, sending Laura’s heart stuttering. She knows what hunters do to wolves who break the code. Will they really cut her in half before she even has a chance to graduate high school?

But then the man speaks up for the first time, imploring his wife. “Victoria, she’s only fourteen.”

The wolves watch the couple argue, impassively. It is unusual for hunters to not present a united front in front of their enemy.

“So you’ll be the one to tell Gerard that we let a beta who bit a human go free?” Victoria demands.

The name is an invocation. Uncle Peter flinches and bares a hint of teeth. He’s the friendly adult who makes goofy faces and tells stories about how a brave wolf will look a hunter in the eye and laugh. It sends a shiver down her spine to see him lose control for even a second.

“My father has other urgent business,” the man replies. “He’s leaving us in charge of this sector. We need to find our own stance.”

“Our family has lived peacefully in this town for a hundred years.” Her mom’s voice is the calmest Laura has ever heard it. It’s terrifying. “We have dealt with rogue omegas and protected the land against other supernatural threats. If a wolf kills a human, we will put that wolf down ourselves, but if you go after Laura for what you know was a justified defense, disproportionate in force only because she’s young, you will face the wrath of our entire family and the packs allied with us.”

Victoria nods and Laura feels like her entire body is coiled, ready to spring at this woman’s word. For once she feels like prey, not predator.

“I do not believe that will be necessary,” Victoria says after a moment’s consideration. “However, you daughter has put Beacon Hills back on the map with her recklessness. We will keep an eye on her and your pack to make sure this doesn’t become a recurring problem.”

There is more talk, but Laura just sags with relief. It doesn’t take the fear long to creep back in, however. If she makes another mistake, they’ll kill her. And she’s brought hunters here, maybe permanently. She’s put her entire family at risk.

On the ride back she cries and cries, face buried in her mother’s neck. Even though everyone has assured her over and over that it isn’t her fault, Laura overheard her father and mother arguing about sending her off to another pack to learn better control. If they think she didn’t have enough control, then they must think that it is at least partially her fault.

Derek is waiting for them in his wolf form at the end of the driveway. Laura opens her door and lets him leap into her lap. She tangles her fingers in his thick fur and only while holding him close can she calm her breathing and rein in her sobs.

She can’t tell him what she’s done, how she’s ruined it for everyone. She’ll never be ready to inherit the alpha position, not after this.

It’s Laura that sneaks into Derek’s bed that night. At some point he has become her protector, even if it’s supposed to be the other way around.

***

On the next full moon, nobody is allowed out for a run. They stay in the basement with its shackles just in case. Robbie, Josh, and Sofia don’t have control yet, but they are easily corralled by the adults. Derek paces anxiously in his wolf form, whining and looking more agitated than Laura has ever seen him. Laura doesn’t shift at all, just curls up in the corner and tries to sleep.

The next morning they are all exhausted and on edge. The parents call everyone in sick from school, even Anna and Maggie.

Mom sits them down and says, “We need to be more careful than ever. There may be hunters around and that means both keeping complete control and living ordinary lives. We have isolated ourselves out here to protect the humans. But now we need to protect ourselves. The more integrated we are into the community, the more trouble hunters will have attacking us unnoticed.”

“What does that mean?” Derek asks, looking a little horrified.

“It means that you, my little nephew, will be socializing with your classmates,” Peter says, clapping Derek on the back.

Derek makes a face.

“Well, it’s too much to ask that you suddenly stop snarling at your poor classmates, so we’re signing you up for sports,” Peter continues. “Lacrosse, of course. Maybe soccer and swimming, definitely swimming, just so you have one where you don’t have to cooperate with the team.” Derek hates swimming with a passion and Peter knows it. He loves playing around in streams or in the lake, but he claims to be allergic to chlorine. Laura thinks he just doesn’t like the smell.

“What about her?” Derek points to Laura. “Why do I have to do all that?”

“Oh, I think Laura will be fine,” Peter replies. “She’s a lovely young lady. But don’t worry, Derek, you won’t be the only one suffering. We adults will have to come out of the woods as well.”

The family has plenty of money. Enough to stay cocooned, Laura knows. Uncle Andrew trades stocks on his computer, Aunt Darcy works as an oncology nurse, and Laura’s dad builds custom wood furniture in the converted guesthouse. Uncle Peter and Laura’s mom don’t work, as is traditional for the Alpha and lead Beta.

Uncle Andrew goes back to his previous work as an accountant and ends up working for the largest lumber company in town. He drags them all to company picnics and bowling night. Laura’s dad moves his shop to the back of a little building off main street, where Mom and Laura take care of the storefront showroom. All the profit still comes from custom orders and the store itself actually loses money, but it makes them visible. Aunt Darcy gets involved with the homeschool association and Uncle Peter coaches Derek’s soccer team and his lacrosse club, and somehow gets himself on the board of the Beacon Hills Historical Society.

Laura worries about how she is supposed to integrate into the community, but it turns out that she doesn’t need to.

Laura doesn’t intended to try out for any sports, because Derek is right in his grumbling: they’re boring when you spend all of your effort keeping your skills in check instead of trying to win. Of course, that’s before the cheerleading squad gets to her.

Laura has always known that humans find her attractive. She has wide grey-green eyes, pale skin, dark hair and a lithe but still feminine figure. She doesn’t look her age. To born wolves, appearance is nowhere near as important as smell and pack-rank, so she isn’t expecting the sheer amount of attention she receives from members of the opposite sex and the junior class’s single lesbian.

Laura does a kickflip off Kyle Sander’s chest when he won’t stop harassing her and it attracts the attention of two of the girls on the cheerleading squad. With their crappy football team, Beacon Hills doesn’t really follow the rule of cheerleaders being popular and the team spends more time practicing for competitions than it does actually cheering anybody on, but being a cheerleader doesn’t hurt Laura’s popularity.

So there’s cheer practice and road trips to competitions. She starts spending time after school with friends, accepting rides from juniors and seniors, attending sports games and house parties and school dances. There’s also boys, which aren’t the pleasant kind of distraction.

Laura goes out on dates and even lets a few guys kiss her, but she doesn’t get a boyfriend. There’s still far too much to hide and it doesn’t seem worth the effort. It’s not because she thinks about her brother whenever she tentatively explores her own body in the bath. She tries to think about Michael Martin, who sneaks over from his father’s house whenever Laura is babysitting his stepsister. Or she could think about the way Tyler Smith fills out his swim trunks. But all she can think about is the way Derek smells of pine and moss and something heady that makes her steal his clothes and cuddle up next to him on the couch while Uncle Andrew yells at CNN. Laura stops touching herself.

When her father asks if Laura has her eye on anyone, she tells the truth: “None of the humans smell right.”

He sighs and pats her head. “You got that from your Mom, I’m afraid. Some wolves will instinctively want to keep the bloodline pure so the smell of humans repulses them. I count myself lucky that your Mom is one of those sensitive ones, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

Laura’s parents met at a social event for young wolves hosted by the Fuller pack up in Oregon. Dad and Uncle Andrew are the product of a human-wolf marriage and the only Weres other than their mother in their family. Dad never dated another Were before, but he was attending the University of Oregon and the local pack insisted that he join. “When you meet the right person,” Dad says, “he will smell so wonderful that you’ll never want to leave him just so you can wake up covered in that smell for the rest of your life.”

Dad seems upset when Laura isn’t reassured by that, but she can’t say anything more to him and risk being caught in a lie. Teenaged boys are all horrible anyway. Then they turn into alcoholic assholes who try to feel up the babysitter or stupid jocks who whisper about Laura’s tits during Chemistry or idiots who jump off roofs during house parties because they think that will somehow impress her.

***

Just as Laura has been able to reinvent herself in high school, Derek is making progress at being social, even though he’s grumpy about it. He still whines and complains constantly whenever Uncle Peter takes him out to practice his self-control or drags him to a team night or a game. Even Peter flashing his eyes at Derek isn’t enough to get him to shut up and he ends up with more than a few dominance marks on the back of his neck and his belly. Derek doesn’t seem to care.

Getting nominated to the all-state junior lacrosse team in eighth grade is enough to make Derek a kind of class hero and his complete lack of interest in people somehow makes him mysterious and cool. He takes to dressing in all black and frowning so that everyone will just leave him alone to read, but it’s Derek, so of course it backfires and everyone just thinks he’s some kind of tortured artistic genius.

“All you need is a guitar and the girls will be fawning,” Laura teases him.

Derek just glares. “I don’t care about the girls. They just giggle and whisper lies about me.”

Laura is familiar with that phenomenon. John Black kissed Laura once at a house party and started telling all the boys in the locker room that he’d slept with her. A slap so hard that it knocked him out of his seat in front of the whole cafeteria put that rumor to rest.

“They want me to take them to get ice cream or to hold their hands, because that’s what they think boyfriends and girlfriends do and they want to be able to say they did it. But they don’t know anything.” Derek sounds bitter. “The boys are always bugging me about why I don’t go out with one of those girls. They think a little handholding is worth it if I get to touch a real breast. I think nothing is worth having to listen to the things they whisper about me.”

Laura shrugs. There’s not a lot of advice she can offer him, so instead she teases, “Oh Der-bear, don’t let the tweenies get you down. Someday you’ll be happy they can’t keep their hands off of you.”

“I won’t,” Derek says in the petulant way Derek says everything nowadays. It makes Laura want to shake him, beg this brooding little monster to give her sensitive little brother back. They don’t have time to run in the woods often or really a lot of time for each other at all. The connection that Laura used to feel to her little wolf pup is slipping away and she hates it. She hates all these stupid human affairs getting in the way.

“Laura,” Derek whispers, looking unflinchingly into her eyes and sounding sincere for once. “I won’t.”

She believes him.

***

Laura doesn’t anticipate how much having Derek in high school changes things. Before, they had different schedules and different friends and didn’t have to interact until after school.

Derek is only 13, but werewolves grow up fast. He’s still skinny, but he’s almost as tall as Laura. He’ll grow taller still, and probably end up broad-chested, if he’s anything like Dad. He wins over the lacrosse team in a pickup game when he’s able to basically climb up 6’4, 230 pound senior Matt Greenberg, use his momentum to knock him on his back and score a goal on the way down. Laura went to to spring formal with Matt Greenberg last year. She doesn’t think it’s a coincidence, but Derek only smirks when she confronts him about it. He’s becoming a cocky little shit and she doesn’t like it.

Derek has elected to not do a fall sport so he can focus on lacrosse pre-training, but Laura suspects it is more because Uncle Peter wants him to try out for water polo, which he hates with a passion that’s intense even for Derek.

Derek ends up leading a whole troop of freshmen who want to get on the lacrosse team in the spring and know that he’s already basically guaranteed a spot. Watching Derek teach his classmates would be endearing, except Derek is horrible at it.

Derek learned to play lacrosse from Uncle Peter, who lightens the sting of his grueling practice techniques with jokes and plenty of encouragement. Derek uses the same drills that Uncle Peter, werewolf and high school lacrosse champion, used on a club team, except Derek uses them on freshman, most of whom have never played lacrosse.

Derek is very patient, but he isn’t good at explaining things that come naturally to him (which is pretty much everything). Derek also somehow manages to make every compliment he tries to give sound sarcastic. “Great job, Jenkins, you made three out of ten this time instead of two out of ten” or “Come on, Ford, you only have fifteen more laps to go” or “I think we can actually finish by sunset today.” Some of the juniors and seniors eventually take pity on the frosh and help Derek out occasionally.

Of course, Derek spending time with the lacrosse team, means Derek spending time with Laura’s friends. It means watching him stand awkwardly in the corner of house parties while Laure pretends to be drunk. It means listening to her fellow cheerleaders talk about her baby brother and how cute they think he is only to have Laura snap “he’s thirteen.” But worst of all, it means that Derek is always watching her.

Over two years of high school, Laura has crafted a very specific persona. She’s sweet but bland, popular but reticent, girly but tough and just mysterious and ruthless enough that even the meanest of the mean girls won’t cross her. She takes one look at Derek where he’s sitting in the bleachers waiting for her cheer practice to finish and her broad fake smile falters. Their eyes meet across the cafeteria while Anderson is being an ass and dramatically serenading Laura and suddenly all Laura can see is the vulnerable line of Anderson’s jugular and the ease with which she could force him to submit.

Against protests by her parents, Uncle Andrew gives Laura a black Camaro as a sixteenth birthday present and now that they’re both in high school, Laura is supposed to take over Derek’s transportation. This means that he’s always looking for her after school, intruding into the space she’s carefully cultivated for herself. They fight, which they never did before when they were animals and it felt like all of nature was made just as their playground.

Laura tells Derek he’s too young for certain things, which just makes him more determined to do them. Derek interferes with every one of Laura’s relationships and won’t even admit it. They bicker about waiting for each other to leave for the day and about which brand of cereal to buy when it’s their turn to do the grocery shopping. Laura accuses Derek of being too obvious with his wolf skills and one time he calls Laura a slut. She slices his chest open in the school parking lot and Derek ends up having to break his own nose so they can explain away the blood as a nosebleed.

Their family doesn’t say anything about their sudden fighting. There isn’t really anything to say. Except sometimes Laura can barely sleep at night, her heart pounding with guilt and sorrow that she and Derek can’t be what they once were. But they can’t talk about how sometimes Laura comes home to find the scent of Derek’s spunk lingering in her bed or how she steals his boxer shorts and old t-shirts to use as sleepwear.

Now, when they do find the time to run together, their game of chase has grown violent. Laura is afraid to let Robbie tag along because one of them might hurt him in their whirlwind of gnashing teeth and slashing claws. Laura always wins these dominance battles, but they both end up bloodied and limping.

It always ends up the same way. Derek will slink up to Laura and nuzzle at her neck and start licking the blood from her fur. Laura will return the favor and then they will curl up together until they hear their parents calling them back.

***

Derek spends the summer at lacrosse camp and Laura is sent up to her Dad’s old surrogate pack in Oregon. Dad says it’s just a visit so she can meet other wolves, but they all know that it’s training because it’s becoming increasingly clear that she will be alpha one day.

Laura learns a lot that summer. She learns about the politics of different packs and how territory disputes are usually settled. She learns where to find accurate information about the supernatural and fighting techniques against hunters. Laura will be team captain of the cheer squad next year and she is a natural leader, but she learns the little tweaks that need to be made to accommodate wolf hierarchies and how to select and train bitten wolves.

Oregon is beautiful and isolated and the pack spends whole weeks in the forest, with the members that can’t transform into full wolves running in their beta forms where no one will see them. They make campfires and tell stories about their history and Laura thinks that this is how they are meant to live: not in houses, driving sports cars and working behind a desk, but wild and free.

David is twenty and only bitten last year by a feral alpha whom he came across while backpacking deep in the forest. He has long blond hair and warm brown eyes and refuses to eat meat while in his human form. He brings a full backpack and a tent, much to everyone else’s amusement. He doesn’t mind walking by himself until he catches up with the other wolves wherever they’ve brought down game for dinner.

Laura is so intrigued that she ends up walking beside him, at first as a wolf, showing off by catching a salmon out of the stream with her claws and using her nose to find an old metal compass, lost by some backwoods explorer almost a hundred years ago. He talks to her about the stories his human family had told around the campfire, with ghosts and trolls and werewolves as the bad guys and humans as the good. His human family thinks he’s dead and David suspects that the pack has ensured this, though he doesn’t blame them. It’s easier to keep them safe this way.

At night he reads to her out of a much loved notebook, poems and paragraphs copied from Thoreau and Whitman and Wordsworth. He shows her drawings that he did of the wildlife before he started to smell like a predator to them and points out the constellations by their true names. Laura compares them to the names she and Derek invented as children, but doesn’t tell David. Those names are for the two Hales alone.

Eventually, Laura stops insisting that David shift to run with her and returns to human form herself. He is entranced by her nakedness and she is self-conscious about it for the first time. She ends up walking in his extra shirt, which only just reaches her upper thigh. She tells him about the role she’ll return to when she gets back to Beacon Hills, how she almost killed a man, and how she’s terrified that she’s brought hunters to their doorstep. She doesn’t tell him her darkest secret, though. She doesn’t think even David, who has forgiven even the alpha who ripped him away from the world he knew, can forgive her perversion.

They meet a young black bear by a mountain stream. Laura shifts immediately into wolf form, but David grabs her scruff to stop her. He shrugs off his backpack and walks ever so slowly towards the creature. It is wary at first, but David uses his claws to catch a salmon like she taught him and offers it. It takes a long time, but eventually Laura and David and the bear are splashing around in the stream, wrestling for fun and eating blackberries from a nearby thicket.

“That was amazing,” Laura says as the bear eventually trundles off. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“I would have been too scared as a human,” David admits, “but I’m closer to nature than I ever could be. More than even the transcendentalists were. The bite is a gift. There’s a high price, but it’s a gift.”

She kisses him then, still tasting of blackberries, and he touches her in all of the ways she was afraid to touch herself. David smells like oranges and sun-warmed gravel and a kind of freedom that Laura has never tasted. But her father’s words linger at the back of her mind. David isn’t the one whose smell she’d want to smell for the rest of her life, but she opens her legs and lets him enter her in a meadow by a stream in Oregon, far away from her burdens.

They make love in his stupid tent and against an old redwood tree and in a copse by the shore of a lake. When they return, she sneaks into his bed back in the pack’s house, though judging by the knowing looks, it isn’t exactly sneaking.

When it is time to return to Beacon Hills, she kisses him and promises to come back. He looks skeptical, but she will.

***

When Laura and Dad pull up to the house in his old pickup truck, the whole family is waiting. Her mom holds her tight and asks what she’s learned about being an alpha. Her little cousins demand stories about the other wolves and Uncle Peter gives her a knowing look and a wink as he says that he’s sure she really enjoyed herself.

Laura expects Derek to be happy to see her, hoping that separation has dulled their previous animosity. She missed Derek everyday, even when David was pistoning inside her and making her scream. But Derek takes a single sniff at the air and slams back inside the house, leaving blood on the doorknob from where his own claws must have pierced his palms.

“Derek hasn’t been feeling well recently,” Uncle Andrew explains. “He came back from camp because he’s hit another growth spurt and they weren’t feeding him enough. We told him to come back rather than hunt deer when all the other kids had fallen asleep.”

“I still think he just didn’t like it there,” Uncle Peter argues. “I don’t think Derek is meant to overnight in a dorm with so many humans for weeks on end. He’s always been a little more wolf than man, ever since he was one year old.”

“Well, he missed you very much, honey,” Mom tries to assure Laura. “He’s been pacing all morning, not to mention stinking up the living room with his anticipation. We were going to take the little ones on a short pack run, but maybe you should go inside and get him to talk about whatever new source of teenaged angst he’s found.”

Laura is wary as she enters the house. It seems every floorboard creaks in the silence. And then she hears a low growl, subvocal for humans, coming in waves from the attic. She creeps up the stairs, a chill running down her spine.

“Go away, Laura!” Derek yells. He sounds hurt and Laura can’t stand it. She hates this distance between them, even though the only other option is to cleave too close. She throws open the door, ripping the handle out of the wood where Derek has locked it.

She barely has time to draw breath before he’s on her, tackling her down to the floor and slamming her hard against the soundproof paneling that he hasn’t gotten around to covering with carpet.

“Derek, what the hell?” she demands, poking him in the ribs.

Uncle Andrew is right: Derek has gone through a growth spurt. In the three months she’s been gone, he’s grown several inches and put on at least twenty pounds of muscle. Laura could still throw him off easily: it doesn’t matter how much like a bodybuilder he looks, she’s the dominant wolf and she will be physically stronger.

The thing is: she doesn’t want to push him off. Her muscles automatically relax with him spread out over her, pinning her. His heavy weight is a comfort and his familiar heartbeat a balm. The only incongruity is his breath, sucking in and out in a wheeze like a jet engine and ending in a whimper.

“You smell like him,” Derek accuses. His voice breaks. “You can’t smell like him, Laura.”

Laura does push his shoulders up off hers so they can really look at each other. He’s in his beta form and his eyes are luminescent blue. “Derek,” she warns, but there’s no wolf behind it. She twists one of his nipples the way she did when they played human-form wrestling as children. “Get off me, you giant dork. I’ll shower if it bothers you so much.”

His features smooth. She’s giving him the out. She thinks he’ll take it and they can go back to denial, denial, denial like they have done for years. Laura can go live in Oregon with David and Derek can take on one of his many human admirers.

They pause like this, that moment of freefall at the crest of the wave, before Derek is leaning back, rucking up her shirt and unbuckling his belt, his hand moving frantically in his pants while she looks on, bewildered.

She can’t speak, because saying what this is will make it real.

Derek gasps as he spills all over her stomach, whining more like a wolf than a man. He looks so vulnerable when he comes, like he’s not just in pain, but he’s being tortured. Maybe he is, because these feelings are ripping her apart, too. They’ve been drawn and quartered, flayed open wide, and now it’s too late to stop it.

Derek pants above her and as the wildness fades from his eyes, he’s overcome by a look of pure horror. “Oh my god,” he says. “Oh my god, Laura, I’m so sorry.”

But then Laura is flipping him, rubbing his come in between them as she kisses him, rough and passionate. There’s no turning back now.

***

At first, they’re careful. They limit themselves to once a week on saturday afternoon when they always run together in the woods. They use their hands and mouths and always wash off thoroughly in the stream before returning. Derek lifts Laura up against a tree and eats her out as she holds onto its branches and squeezes her thighs around his ears. She lays down naked on a flat slab of granite warmed by the sun and lets him rub himself all over her until she’s completely drenched in his scent. He learns how she likes him to move his fingers inside of her and she sucks his cock in the hushed darkness of the new moon. She even lets him lick her with his rough wolf’s tongue in huge curling swipes that have her screaming, almost howling, like she never did with David.

It’s Derek that suggests that Laura find herself a boyfriend so that they can have plausible deniability. Laura picks Jeff Snyder, because even though he talks like the world’s most macho asshole in the locker room and makes kissy noises at her during class, she can smell the arousal on him whenever John Black walks by. Even though they both know that Jeff is gay, the relationship still drives Derek crazy with jealousy. Probably because Jeff hasn’t really figured out that he’s gay himself. Laura has given him a handjob a few times, but it only ever works with her behind him where he can imagine what he wants.

As a sophomore, Derek has begun to embrace the perks of being the MVP of last year’s lacrosse team. He got a stern warning from their mother about being “too good to be credible” but he hasn’t toned it down. If anything, he’s even more obvious. He struts around the school like he owns the place, surrounded by his pack of boys - the former freshmen who he’d trained until they were good enough to make the team. They worship him for it. It doesn’t hurt that Derek has grown into his body. He’s fourteen, but he could pass for nineteen or twenty. Laura is sick and tired of every girl she’s ever had a conversation with bugging her about why her brother is still single.

Derek has turned into the same cocky blowhard jock stereotype that Laura has always hated. But then again, she’s head cheerleader and mean girl in chief, so perhaps they’re a pair.

Derek has cleverly told everyone that he has an older girlfriend who he met over the summer. He doesn’t have to pretend to be dating a blockhead like Jeff Snyder. The stories he tells his friends about the sex he’s had are true, however, and it makes Laura’s blood boil thinking about Derek describing her breasts in perfect detail or when he gives pompous lectures on the best way to make a girl come on your face to a locker room full of eager admirers.

Derek is even worse whenever Laura’s around. He ignores her and does even more stupid things to impress his friends. He makes her wait for him while he’s hanging out after school and she hears a rumor that he stuffed a freshman into a trash can. One dominance bite from her and the bullying behavior at least stops. The bragging doesn’t.

Of course, the second they’re alone in the car, he always apologizes, stroking her hand on the gearshift or telling her about all the times he saw her that day and was struck by her beauty. Derek can be a romantic little shit when he wants to be. He swears that all the macho bullshit is just a role and she’s sure he believes that. Laura understands the need to play a part when you’re nothing but a wild animal clothed in human skin, but she thinks that Derek enjoys his role a little too much.

After Laura makes Jeff buy a giant box of condoms (most of which she steals), she and Derek start having real sex. Their first time is, fittingly, out in the preserve in this small little cave that they’d played in since they were children. Laura’s claws gouge into the wall as they tussle violently and vie for dominance as they fuck. Unlike David, Derek takes advantage of his werewolf strength and will let Laura wrap her legs around him while he’s standing and basically lift her up and down on his cock if they can’t find a good place to lie down.

They find that they smell very much like each other all the time now, but if they use a condom, they don’t smell any more like sex than if they had been mastrubating in their separate rooms. With werewolf hearing, this opens up a whole new world of possibilities: the locker room, in the woods by the school at lunch break, changing rooms in Macy’s at the mall, in strangers’ bedrooms after Laura has put the kids to sleep while babysitting.

Not to mention, with a car at their disposal and sports events almost every weekend, they can sneak off at other schools or linger coming back home. Their parents are happy that they’re not fighting anymore and even give Laura permission to take Derek and two of his friends into San Francisco to see a Giants game for Derek’s birthday. Nobody blinks twice at the siblings sharing one room while Derek’s friends share another.

It’s like an addiction - the heady phase where you don’t even think about stopping, because each hit just sends you higher and higher and you actually think you chase perfection and catch it. Laura finds it hard to believe that there isn’t something chemical, something biological that ties them together ever since Derek was just a pup and Laura was already the only one for him.

Laura doesn’t think they could stop even if they wanted to. If they’ve already broken such a strong taboo to get here, she doesn’t know what could be enough, other than getting caught. And even then, she thinks that their parents would have to shackle Derek like it’s the full moon to keep him from getting to her, he’s so wild for it. Sometimes they bruise and bite each other or leave long gouges in skin that almost immediately heals back to perfection. Other times their encounters are so quick and furtive that Laura wonders if they even happened at all.

The opportunity to slowly make love doesn’t come as often as they’d like, with the risk of getting caught, but as he gains experience, Derek learns how to hold on for longer. They’ll run for hours deep into the forest and then Derek will lay his sister down and fuck her so exquisitely slowly that when she finally comes it’s an orgasm with the complexity of a sonnet. Other times, Laura will pull the Camaro over on a deserted mountain road and ride her brother at such a torturous pace that he’s crying and begging her by the end of it, unable to even move his hips against her superhuman strength.

Then they get reckless. Derek’s room is soundproofed and even though their family is big, there’s a schedule board posted in the living room and they use the house’s cordless phones like a baby monitor to hear if someone comes home unexpectedly. They have a few close calls, when Laura has to run straight into her shower naked or once when they end up pretending like they’re wrestling. Uncle Peter doesn’t see that Laura is actually sitting on Derek’s cock under her skirt and they escape only because Derek’s room has smelled like he does nothing but mastrubate ever since he moved into it.

They fuck in the school bathrooms after getting excused from class and they end up having to bribe little Lydia Martin with ice cream and a princess tiara to keep her from telling her parents about the big black dog that Laura was petting on the couch when she woke up thirsty one night. They stop doing anything at the Martin house after Lydia insists it was a canis lupus youngi and not a canis lupus familiaris that she saw. Luckily for Laura and Derek, Lydia’s parents almost never listen to her and even if they had, they wouldn’t have known that she was talking about an extinct subspecies of wolf.

***

Around spring break of her senior year, Laura starts to get sick. It isn’t a serious illness - just a general feeling that something isn’t right. She’s sleeping two hours more than usual and she’s still tired all the time. Her stomach rumbles uncomfortably and it takes significantly more effort to shift. Much to Derek’s disappointment, she stops being able to go on runs with him, so instead they take short walks and cuddle against a favorite tree and even sometimes let Robbie come with them.

Her sex drive plummets and whenever she’s not looking, Derek has a hurt, confused look on his face. “Do you regret this?” he asks her over and over again in many different forms: “Do you want to stop?” , “Do you still love me?” , “Is there something I need to change?” , “You know you can tell me anything.” She always kisses him and tells him that she doesn’t regret it, but their kisses are sweet and chaste, gone is the former fire, along with Laura’s good mood.

She snaps at her siblings and cousins and even finds herself baring teeth at Mom once. That’s when she realizes that something is seriously wrong. It’s also when her Aunt Darcy announces that they’ll soon have another cousin.

It becomes fairly obvious at that point, but Laura still goes through the motions, checking off every cliche box. She drives out of town and buys five separate pregnancy tests and takes them in a rest stop bathroom. Then she just runs into the field beyond and cries. It starts raining, just to underscore the desperation of the moment.

She’s eighteen and pregnant by her brother. If she were human, the answer would be obvious. She’s not a minor so she would get an abortion. Her junior year, she’d even driven one of her cheer teammates up to Oregon to get the procedure done where she wouldn’t have to notify her parents.

But there’s no way she can get something like that done, not when the doctor would immediately see how quickly she heals. She supposes she could do it herself, even just cut her stomach open, because she’d heal. She could ask Derek to do it, but she doesn’t think she can bear to bring him into it. Even if it is half his fault, she can’t force him to open up his sister and kill his own child.

Laura thinks back and realizes when conception must have occurred. Two months ago she and Derek ended up having sex in their wolf forms. It was actually pretty horrible, especially the part when they ended up tied together, but there had been no stopping it, the instinct had been so strong. You give the wolf a long enough leash, she thinks, it’ll eventually break free.

Based on her aunt’s symptoms, Laura knows that at around three months the other wolves will be able to smell the pregnancy on her. By four months, the heartbeat will be obvious, though they’ll be able to hear it in a matter of weeks if they listen for it.

She’s been accepted to the University of Oregon in the fall, following in her father’s footsteps. She’d applied there because that’s where David had gone and it seemed that in the one year he’d attended, he’d learned the kinds of things that she longed to understand. It’s also close enough to David’s pack for emergencies and close enough to home that she’ll be able to come back for a three day weekend.

If she can just make it until summer with nobody finding out, she can claim that she’s going back to spend time with David. His pack will be loyal to her father, but David will help her. She knows he will.

Laura has no idea what she’ll do with the baby once she has it, but she’ll figure something out. There are homosexual or barren werewolves looking to adopt just like there are humans. Or maybe, she and David could raise it. She imagines them building a little house deep in the backcountry, living off the land and off the grid, writing nature poems and teaching the pup to be a real wolf.

She doesn’t dare imagine a future with Derek. There’s no future with her own brother. There never had been, she realizes. How could she have been so naive that she couldn’t see that they were driving into a blind alley? Even if they run away together, they’ll be omegas. If the family doesn’t find them, then hunters will. Laura’s mother has to die or she has to kill an alpha if she wants to start her own pack. That’s too much to stomach, so she’d die packless.

Derek would want to try it, though. Derek is fiercely loyal and he’s always been protective. He wouldn’t want to leave her to suffer this alone and he’s just idealistic and cocky enough to believe they could survive on their own.

She has to save Derek from himself.

“Come on, Laura. You can do this,” she tells herself.

She sits behind the steering wheel of her Camaro until she stops shaking. The drive back home is a fog, but the closer she gets, the more her resolve strengthens.

Derek meets her at the base of the driveway. He’s been listening for her engine. That means he’s been worried.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says when he asks what’s wrong. She’s never told him that before, but it’s such an innocuous thing to say that she doesn’t think he notices it’s the first time.

Her clothes are still damp and her runs a bath for her the way he did after she bit Steve McCall. She’s the bad one. She’s always the instigator and Derek is always the one who pulls her together and comforts her afterwards.

His touch is a cold comfort now.

Laura cuddles in Derek’s bed with him that night, allowing herself that last moment.

Laura deliberately empties the trash with the double-ziplocked used condoms into the kitchen trash can. As predicted, it doesn’t take long for her mother to find.

Mom comes down on Derek hard, demanding to know what girl he’s been sleeping with and chiding him about how dangerous it is to sleep with humans. He could wolf out. He could expose himself to hunters.

Derek won’t reveal who it is. Anything he says will be a lie, so he keeps his mouth shut. He lets mom get him down on his back with her full alpha teeth pressed to his throat. Mom in her alpha form is massive. She doesn’t show it many times, not even on the full moon, and it’s all the more effective used sparingly. Anna and Maggie had been afraid of it for years.

Still, Derek refuses to back down. He gets grounded for the rest of the school year, including lacrosse. He even gets the wolf equivalent of a spanking, which is to have his hands and wrists broken by the alpha. It takes painful hours to heal, but Derek doesn’t say a word.

Laura ignores mom and takes Derek up to her room where she splints his hands so they’ll heal faster. She tucks him into her bed and strokes her fingers through his hair while he tries to be brave and not whimper.

She brings up Derek’s plate from dinner and feeds it to him bite by bite. Their parents don’t stop to wonder why she’s doing this. The fact that their two eldest are fucking is so far beyond what they could ever anticipate that they don’t even question why she doesn’t pause when they threaten take away car privileges for two weeks for interfering with her brother’s punishment.

When his hands have mostly healed, Laura crawls next to Derek under the comforter and presses a sweet kiss to his lips. “We have to stop,” she says.

“I know.”

***

Laura manages to avoid the smell problem by basically following her Aunt Darcy around whenever anybody else is home. Everyone assumes that the pregnancy smell is from her Aunt and not Laura. She’s also lucky that despite feeling a little queasy, she never gets actual morning sickness.

She contacts David and even though she hasn’t been very good about calling, he agrees to meet her outside of Eugene without telling the rest of his pack. Derek stews, lashing out at whoever tries to talk to him and ignoring Laura when she tries to tell him that it’s for the best.

“Why does it have to be with him?” he hisses, but there’s not much he can say when she refuses to leave the living room where Aunt Darcy is busy knitting a pair of booties for their new cousin. Avoiding spending time alone with Derek is hard when she’s normally his ride to school, but she managed to tell him that she needed some space back before she started to stink of baby. Derek runs to school and since he’s banned from all extracurricular activities, Uncle Peter picks him up while Laura has prom committee and cheer practice.

Prom and finals and AP tests and graduation all fly by in a blur. All Laura cares about is not getting discovered. She ends up filling in random bubbles and using pi for all her answers on her Calculus AP.

Even prom passes with dreary inevitability. Laura doesn’t even care that Jeff finally comes out publicly and bombastically by kissing John Black in the middle of the dance floor to the beat of Crazy in Love. She forgets to act like an embarrassed jilted girlfriend and just starts clapping until everyone joins her. She’s mostly just happy that she can still fit into her prom dress.

Derek shows up at the hotel suite she and Jeff rented, even though she didn’t tell him where it is and he’s supposed to be stuck at home. Luckily, Jeff and John have been smoking weed and hotels are always a confusing mess of smells for werewolves, so Derek doesn’t notice the telltale smell of pregnancy.

After her date and his boyfriend have retired to have noisy sex in the bedroom, Laura and Derek sit on the couch holding each other’s hands and just being together.

“I’m doing water polo next year, like Uncle Peter wants,” Derek says, looking down at his lap. “Coach Lahey always rents a house down in San Diego so the team can stay there while they go to some special water polo clinic. I think I’m going to go. I’ll also do soccer in the fall. Keep busy, you know?”

Laura nods. She can’t tell him what she’ll be doing. It won’t be going to college. He’ll hear the lie.

“I think I might . . . I might try to get a girlfriend.”

“You should.” Because at least one of them deserves to be happy.

Derek looks completely wrecked that she’s encouraging him. She supposes she would be too if she didn’t know what’s at stake. “I don’t--” he starts. “It won’t mean anything. It won’t be the same.”

“You don’t know that, Derek,” Laura argues. “You’re fifteen. You have so many opportunities in front of you. You have to let it go.”

“I won’t love anybody the way I love you.”

“Of course you won’t,” Laura says. “I’m your sister. But the next girl, Derek, promise me that you’ll at least try to fall for her. Promise that you’ll honestly attempt to make it work.”

“How can you say that?” he demands. “Do you want me to fall in love with the next girl I meet? I’ll be graduated in two more years and then we won’t be living at home. We’ll be able to do whatever we want.”

Derek’s tear-glazed eyes bring Laura to downright sobbing; they always have.

“And then what?” she demands. This is going to hurt. It has to. “We run away together and never see our parents again? We move to the suburbs and have a nice little house with a picket fence and two pups? We find other people to share our lives with but keep fucking each other when nobody’s looking? Derek, it had to end sometime. It’s better that it end now.”

Every muscle in Laura’s body is tense. Her instincts are screaming at her not to do this. She doesn’t want to hurt Derek, who she loves above all others, and she doesn’t want this feeling of anger and loss festering deep in her chest, but she knows there isn’t another way. It’s like that horrible, vulnerable pull right in the middle of the shift when the ribcage barrels out and the skin stretches to leave the heart feeling wide open.

Laura kisses Derek one last time and then he’s out the door and disappearing into the night.

***

Not a lot of stuff can fit into the Camaro, so Laura is leaving it with Derek to practice for his driver’s test this summer and taking her dad’s pickup truck up north. It seems a little too convenient, considering that her dad can’t haul furniture in a sports car.

Of course, Laura sees why when Uncle Peter shoves a few suitcases aside and hops into the passenger’s seat. “Change of plans, niecey. I have some business with the Fuller pack, so I’ll drive you up there and bring this old hunk of junk back down with me. Derek and I can bring you the Camaro whenever you need it.”

“That makes no sense!” Laura protests. She’s not really sure if that convoluted plan is actually for the best, but she’s scared. The second she’s alone in the car with Peter, he’ll know.

Peter shrugs, giving her a charming smile. “Not the most efficient, I’ll give you that. But your dad can’t go long without his beat up old baby and you can’t take all this stuff in Andrew’s idea of an appropriate car. It is what it is.”

Laura knows her whole family must hear her anxiety, but she can’t make herself calm down. Will Uncle Peter at least give her a chance to explain before he turns them right back around? Can she open the windows or spill some garlic sauce in the back or do something to hide the smell?

She’s numb as she hugs everyone goodbye. This is its own strange kind of gallows walk, with Derek waiting for her at the end. Is he executioner or fellow prisoner? Priest or the one spectator that stands out in the crowd?

She hugs Derek tight, careful to hide the subtle bulge at her middle. If she holds on too long, he doesn’t protest.

“Well, it’s time to let this little canary out of its cage,” Peter remarks, waving to everyone as Laura pulls them out of the driveway. She briefly considers just pushing him out and speeding away as fast as she can.

But Peter doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even take an extra sniff after he makes her roll the windows up once they reach the highway. He’s calm and very, very uncharacteristically silent. The only noise is the way he drums his fingers laxidasically against the glass.

It scares Laura more than her mother in alpha form ever did.

There’s only one explanation: he already knows. That’s probably why he’s on this trip to begin with.

They stop for gas in Medford, right over the border, even though they could probably go another fifty miles before filling up. Laura once again contemplates just running for it, but she can’t shift in the middle of a town and even though she’s slightly stronger, Uncle Peter is fast.

Peter is sitting in the driver’s seat when she gets back from using the bathroom. He still hasn’t said much other than to comment on the weather and ask if it’s okay to change the radio station. He doesn’t reply when Laura offers to keep driving, just pats the seat next to him.

He rolls his eyes at Laura’s hesitation, but that doesn’t put her at ease, just makes her more nervous. As soon as she’s in, he peels off with a screech of tires. Peter has always driven like a man who knows he can’t die in a car accident, so that isn’t unusual. What’s unusual is that he turns off the 5 and onto Route 62, headed into the national forest.

“Uncle Peter, where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” he smirks.

Uncle Peter has always been the nice, cool uncle. Uncle Andrew made a play for it with the Camaro, but Laura barely knew him growing up because he was too busy trying to pretend to be a human. Mom is alpha and dad is a born follower, the perfect alpha mate. Uncle Peter was always the one Laura and Derek went to first when they’d done something naughty, because he would understand and would maybe not tell their parents if it wasn’t a big deal. He was the one to teach Laura how to control herself under the full moon and whenever she was sad, she’d curl up in the library with her head in his lap, while he read his books and stroked her hair, humming some old melody passed down from their long-ago ancestors in France or some catchy pop ballad by Madonna or Britney Spears.

This is the first time Laura has ever felt threatened by her uncle. It’s like all these years she’s been blinded by the illusion of the charming, sassy uncle who overindulges his nieces and nephews and forgotten what it really means to be lead beta. When the Fuller pack had explained it to her, Laura had scoffed and said that her Uncle Peter would never do those things. But Uncle Peter is the one who disappears off to negotiate with other packs, who keeps every variety of wolfsbane and mountain ash in a safe in the floor of the library. Uncle Peter is the one who’s made all the family’s escape plans, who even owns a gun full of wolfsbane bullets to maybe use against another Were one day. She’s never really forgotten that it was Uncle Peter who moved Steve McCall’s body to make it look like an animal attack. He could just as easily do the same to Laura.

The drive seems interminable, but that’s probably just her nerves. They pull off the highway onto progressively smaller and more twisted roads, until they are on a dirt road in a deep valley. Laura has tried to take in the smells on the way here, trying to keep track of scent landmarks and turns in the road like those pamphlets about kidnapping tell people to do.

Peter stops the truck at a small grove of trees where the road turns into a trail.

He hops out and then chivalrously helps Laura down.

“Uncle Peter,” she begs, “what are we doing here?”

“You know why we’re here, Laura. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice you following my wife around for the past month? I listened for the heartbeat. It’s almost deafening if you’re looking for it.”

“I’m so sorry, Uncle Peter. I was stupid. I should have been more careful.”

“Should have been more careful or shouldn’t be having sex at all?”

Laura gulps. She can’t answer that.

“I’m not going to ask you any questions. I’m not sure that I’d like the answers.”

Oh god, does he know? She and Derek hadn’t been as vigilant as they could have been, but why wouldn’t he have said anything if he did know all this time? Or maybe he just suspects and maybe he doesn’t want to have to lie to the alpha anymore than he already has by taking her out here.

Peter reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small vial. Inside is a purple liquid. Laura recognizes the picture on the label. It’s wolfsbane, but there are so many kinds and Laura admits that she hasn’t studied them as well as she probably should have.

He hands the vial to Laura. It’s so light in her hand. Laura thinks that kind of dangerous should feel weighty. It’s a burden that should have its own gravitational pull.

“The way I see it,” Peter says. “You have two choices. You can proceed with whatever scheme you’ve come up with to have this child and either abandon it or disappear in order to raise it. Or you can drink what’s in that vial and come home with me.”

“It’s . . . um, to get rid of the baby?”

“As you know, population control has been a key part of our survival as a species. Too many wolves get discovered by humans. Too many wolves become a threat. We’ve long had ways to prevent that.”

Laura has had two months to get used to the idea that she’ll give birth to this child because she thought she didn’t have a choice. She’s rubbed her belly and whispered to it, imagined what it would look like, stayed up at night worrying that it might have deformities caused by its parentage. The baby has become a life to her and this would kill it. It would damn her as a killer more than the mere presence of the wolf inside.

But if she just drinks this little vial, she can go back home to her family and to Derek. She can go to college and have more children one day, with someone who isn’t her brother. She can forget it ever happened, which is what she’s wanted to do all along.

She looks at her uncle with tears in her eyes. “I don’t know.”

He opens his arms and lets her hug him. Peter’s hugs have always been a little awkward. They’ve always been the one imperfect thing about her favorite uncle, but right now Laura doesn’t care. She grips him like he’s the last anchor at the end of the world, crying into the supple fabric of his leather jacket.

“Shhh. Shhh,” he says. “I can’t make this decision for you. You have to make it for yourself.”

There isn’t a decision, not really. This child never should have existed. She and Derek never should have done what they did. All she’s doing is correcting a mistake. Laura pulls back, ignoring the way Uncle Peter is staring at her so intensely. She can barely see anything through the veil of tears or hear anything over the sound of her own sobs. But on the inside she’s calm. On the inside she knows what has to be done.

She pulls the stopper from the vial and downs the purple liquid in one gulp.

***

Her body is on fire. She’s broken bones and earned scratches in dominance and in play, but she’s lived a sheltered life. She’s never felt the sting of wolfsbane before. She’s never healed herself from the brink of dying.

She’s barely conscious of warm hands scooping her up, carrying her down the trail and into the woods for who knows how long. Time passes in disjointed spurts between blackness and between breaths. She doesn’t know how long they walk, but soon the terrain has changed from woodland to strangely barren valley, a rocky wound in the Earth. She can no longer smell the car or hear the highway in the distance. There is no smell of human life for miles.

Her uncle helps her down so that she’s kneeling. Black veins are spidering across her chest, down her arms. She vomits up a thick sludge like tar. It feels like it’s spilling from her eyes, her sweat glands, down between her legs. She cries at the cramping and grips the hands that hold her until the bones crack.

She’s lifted up again, settled into a cold stream that quells the heat. The water runs around her, washing the death and decay from her skin. Between her legs she bleeds red. Uncle Peter sits behind her, propping her up and letting her grasp at him. He makes soothing sounds, but they’re as insubstantial as clouds. Nothing can anchor her now.

She cries and whimpers and she know she’s saying Derek’s name. She’s begging for her brother in a way that must be incriminating, but she can’t help it.

After there’s no more blood to bleed and she feels the empty ache of a barren womb, she realizes that her jaw is being pried open. The grey liquid tastes of ash, but it dulls the pain until she finally gives in to the blackness.

Laura doesn’t know how much time passes before the fever breaks, but when she comes to, it’s night and she’s lying naked on her side on top of Peter’s leather jacket. He’s naked also, with their clothes laid out to dry on a nearby rock. He has a fire going, heating a single metal mug with what smells like chamomile tea. He lets Laura struggle to a seated position by herself and offers her the first batch.

She drinks it greedily, not caring that the hot metal scalds her hands. But the liquid isn’t enough. She drags herself to standing and uses the mug to drink gulp after gulp from the clear stream. When her thirst is finally quenched, Peter takes the mug back and makes his own batch of tea.

He raises his eyebrows at her across the golden glow of the fire, as though daring her to confess the sins he must suspect. She stays silent until he puts out the fire and helps her to her feet. They howl together once before pulling their damp clothes back on and heading back towards the car. Laura’s howl contains all the pain of the loss and of the terrible love that spawned it. Peter just howls along. He isn’t sad; he has a baby on the way.

Laura’s body has returned to normal as though she wasn’t bleeding out and writhing in pain mere hours ago. Even the exhaustion that previously plagued her is gone. There’s no evidence of this transgression. Herself and Peter are the only witnesses and she knows, deep in her bones, that this will remain their secret. Not even Derek can know and Laura is certain that if she sees him now, he’ll see the truth in the carnage of her heartbreak.

“I still want to spend the summer with David,” Laura says once they’ve changed their clothes and are headed down the darkened road at midnight. They leave the headlights off; they’re wolves and the moon is full.

***

Laura doesn’t come home at all before the start of school. She knows that her exile is self-imposed, but she doesn’t feel as though she has the right to the comfort of her family after what she’s done. Wolves need the touch and connection to their pack, but she can’t accept it. Right now she needs to feel the pain of isolation.

Her relationship with David has changed, though she’s never had the courage to tell him why. They sit around his small little cabin on the edge of the Fuller pack territory, reading and doing a little gardening or working on David’s online business doing backpacking gear repair. They spend a lot of time in the backcountry and Laura finally convinces David that he no longer needs more than some tweezers and a box of waterproof matches (since he still refuses to eat things raw).

She knows she wakes him up with nightmares, but he doesn’t say anything.

They aren’t lovers anymore. Laura still feels too raw for that and even if she did feel up for it, she doesn’t think she can go back to David after what she had with Derek. She tries not to think about her brother, but they’ve been a part of each other ever since the day that Derek was born. It’s impossible to leave that behind entirely.

David has a crush on one of the baristas at the local coffee shop. She has dreadlocks and a nose ring and serious brown eyes. Laura tells her that David is her cousin, because they’re pack now, even though Laura has never actually left hers.

At the end of summer, Uncle Peter drives the Camaro up to her by himself. Her parents wanted to come, but they have suspicions of hunter activity in Beacon Hills and the alpha cannot leave.

Laura registers for two literature and one history class and places out of general bio and into zoology. She joins the cheer squad and actually learns about football for the first time in her life. It turns out that she likes watching it better than lacrosse. Derek was right: it’s best to keep busy.

Laura lets one of the football players take her skiing in Banff for Thanksgiving break so that she doesn’t have to go home to be with her family. They aren’t happy and the phonecalls become more frequent. Even Robbie has begun to call her with increasing desperation when he thinks their parents aren’t watching him. She knows that the separation produces as much anxiety for the pack as it does for Laura.

Laura and Derek don’t talk. Not even after Anna tells Laura that she thinks Derek has a secret girlfriend. Laura can’t bear to have that confirmed, not when she herself has given up so much.

Aunt Darcy gives birth to Laura’s new cousin on the first of December. Laura’s child would have been born in January, had he or she lived. She’s happy that phones aren’t sensitive enough to transmit heartbeats, because then her mother would have known how much the happy news upsets Laura.

She braces herself to see Aunt Darcy and Derek and the new baby, because now there’s no way she can put off coming back home. The baby needs to carry the scent of the whole pack and that includes Laura. She reluctantly plans to come home in time for the winter solstice on the twenty-second, but the there’s a weather advisory for Siskiyou Pass. Even though half of her family would laugh at the idea of being cowed by a little snowstorm, Laura is willing to take any excuse for delay that she can.

Later, she wonders if that little decision was her being saved by fate or doomed by it.

She wakes up in the middle of the night with her heart pounding and her claws ripping into the sheets of her bed. Her roommate has left already, thank god, so she’s free to give an animalistic whimper. She hasn’t lost control like this in years, but she feels like her body might crack apart at the seams from the power that surges through her in a torrent. It tastes like blood on the back of her throat, smells like lightning in the air, but the rage that tears through her is the sweetest, sharpest pain she’s ever known. It’s worse than the first time she laid a twisted touch on her baby brother, worse than the man’s throat between her jaws, worse even than the pain and guilt and pure injustice of killing her own child.

It takes hours to calm her breathing and still the transformation. Her heart is heavy, the pack is calling, and she howls, not caring who will hear.

When she looks out the window, she sees the reflection: her eyes flash red.

***

Laura is only an hour out of town when she gets the call. It doesn’t hurt any less because she was expecting it. There was a fire. It’s not just her mother. Her entire family burned. Uncle Peter and Maggie and Anna are in intensive care at the hospital. Derek hadn’t been home - he’s at the sheriff’s station. Everyone else is dead.

Derek is curled up on a hard wooden bench in the sheriff’s office when Laura walks in three hours later. She can smell his tears and his distress and even though they’ve always been connected, she feels it ten times more intensely as his alpha. She heard the faltering rhythm of his heartbeat the second she entered town.

Laura doesn’t remember the drive. Her feet feel a million miles away from her body, like she can’t relay the instructions to them fast enough. That’s probably a good thing, because the instructions she’d like to send them are to run away. This feels like something out of the horror stories they used to tell in the woods at night. It’s a dream. It’s shocky unreality. But it also feels like the final blow, the inevitable conclusion of all the tragedy of her twisted life. Except she’s still alive and so is Derek so the tragedy hasn’t ended yet. That, she thinks, must be the punishment for all their sins.

Derek must have heard her coming, but he doesn’t look up. He won’t meet her eyes when she wrenches him into her arms. She nuzzles at the juncture of his neck, rubbing their scents together for the first time in seven and a half months. The mix still smells beyond right, even with the smell of ash overlaying all of it. Derek’s arms are tight across her waist and she can feel his claws digging holes in her jacket and into the soft flesh of her sides. She lets him bury his head against her stomach until his wolf has finally subsided. It’s only then that he cries, giant gasping sobs that wreck his entire body. He’s still so young.

There are tears in her eyes, too, but she cries silently. Even that sign of restraint is hard-won with all the inner strength she can muster.

Laura is so caught up in her own grief that she doesn’t notice the boy standing there until he’s been staring for quite some time. He’s very thin and pale, with a buzzcut and huge eyes that are just a little sunken. He looks like a skeleton, or maybe like a ghost. Laura wonders if he’s sick, but even though she can smell antiseptic and vomit on him, there’s not that deathly smell emanating from his pores.

“His eyes were blue,” he says to Laura, looking at Derek’s shaking back.

Laura forces a tight smile. “Green eyes can look blue in a certain light,” she replies. Of course Derek hasn’t been careful. How could she possibly expect him to be in a situation like this? They’re lucky that the only one who seems to have noticed his lapse is this little boy. He can’t be more than six or seven, so nobody will believe him anyway.

“No, they were like glow-in-the-dark!” the boy protests.

Laura knows better than to contradict a kid at that age. She always just goes along with whatever Robbie says and he drops the subject quicker. Oh, god, Robbie. Laura wrings a few more tears out of her eyes.

“It’s okay to cry,” the boy says. “My dad says that crying is how the sadness gets out so it’s not trapped inside you anymore.”

“You know,” Laura forces herself to reply, even though this is the last thing she needs to deal with right now. “It’s not that hard to make your eyes glow in the dark.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You just need to believe really hard and that belief will turn into a spark that will light up in your head and people will be able to see the fire from out of your eyes.”

“Can you show me?” the boy asks, stepping closer to Laura. She tries not to flinch away from his outreached hands.

“Stiles,” a booming voice says from down the hallway. “Leave that girl alone.”

“But dad she said that I could--”

“I don’t care what she said,” the dad snaps. Deputy Stilinski is what it says on his nametag. “Go wait in the breakroom like I told you.”

Stiles gives Laura a pleading look, but obeys his father.

“I’m so sorry about that,” Stilinski says. He looks tired, more world-weary than seems possible from just dealing with Laura and Derek’s tragedy. “My wife . . . . I didn’t have a choice about bringing him in today.”

Laura nods. There’s a story there, but she’s in no condition to hear it.

“Ms. Hale, I know that this is a difficult time and I promise that I’ll be quick, but there are a few questions that I need to ask you and then, if you feel up for it, I can take you and Derek over to the hospital.”

Laura nods, letting Derek unwind from around her. He still hasn’t looked her in the eyes. It hurts to be even a few feet away from what’s left of her pack, but Laura follows the deputy back into a sterile-looking room with only a table and two chairs. It’s for interrogation, but Stilinski leaves the door cracked open to put her more at ease - as though any ease is possible in this situation.

“Laura, do you know anyone who would want to do this to your family?”

There are so many people, Laura can barely count. Not just hunters, but maybe even rival clans of wolves. Uncle Peter would know, but they’ve been keeping the kids from the gory details of pack politics. “No. Not that I know of. Do you think it was arson?”

“It’s too early to tell. We’ll need some specialists to come in to determine that, but if there’s a chance it could be deliberate, we want to start following potential leads as soon as we can.”

Leads lead to hunters and hunters lead to motive and motive leads to secrets being exposed. “I’ve been away at college,” Laura explains. “But my parents didn’t say anything. Did you ask Derek?”

“I did. He’s not really up to talking right now.”

Obviously. His whole family was just killed.

“Is there anything, maybe having to do with work?”

“No. Everyone had boring jobs.”

“I hate to ask this, but what about your parent’s marriage? Your uncle's?”

“Uncle Peter and Aunt Darcy just had a baby. My parents were happy.” It’s only Laura and Derek who are fucked up.

“Your other uncle came to live with you after a divorce, right?”

“Yeah, but the fire doesn’t have anything to do with that. His ex-wife didn’t fight him for full custody of my cousins and he pays her really good alimony. I don’t think they’ve spoken in years.”

Deputy Stilinksi asks her a few more inane questions, but Laura is starting to get antsy. The power of the alpha is too much and she feels if she doesn’t get out and run soon, she might wolf out right here in the middle of the sheriff’s station.

There is something important she needs to ask, however. “What’s going to happen to Derek?”

The man sighs. “The court will appoint a legal guardian for him. Do you know if your parents wrote anything about that in their will?”

“It was supposed to be Uncle Peter. If not Uncle Peter, then Uncle Andy.” Laura has never actually seen the will, but it will follow pack hierarchy, she has no doubt.

“What about any other family?”

Mom was alpha before Laura was born and she and Uncle Peter were the previous alpha’s only children. The alpha’s brothers and sisters had been killed by hunters. Dad and Uncle Andrew have cousins, but they are all human. They would be only a last resort.

“Could I be his legal guardian?” Laura asks.

“You could be, but you are nineteen. The court would have to decide it would be better for Derek than foster care.”

Laura nods. “Can he at least stay with me for now?”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’ll get a hotel room.”

“Are there maybe some friends you could stay with?”

“Please,” Laura says. “Just let me take my brother so we can grieve alone for a while.”

When they walk out of the office, the little boy is back sitting next to Derek and holding his hand as he chatters away about something. Derek seems reluctant to let him go.

***

The hospital is grueling.

Anna had passed away only a few hours after they brought her in and Laura has to make the horrible decision to have her cremated. Maggie is hooked up to a ventilator, but it will be a miracle if she survives. Laura calls her human mother, but she won’t arrive in time. Laura and Derek sit in Maggie’s room and listen to her heartbeat as it finally stutters to a stop. Maggie and Anna’s mother will blame this tragedy on what the family is, just like she blamed werewolves for the dissolution of her marriage. Laura thinks the blame isn’t misplaced. It has always been dangerous for humans to run with wolves.

As alpha, Laura can feel the bright hum of her uncle’s pain. He was the last one that she saw and now he’s in a hospital bed, covered in bandages. Derek distracts the nurses while Laura pulls away his dressings to check the healing beneath. Burns are more difficult for wolves to heal than other wounds, but they should be healing. His face is badly burned, as are his hands and part of his torso, but he should be awake right now. There was no head trauma.

Laura begs and cajoles, but her dearest uncle doesn’t open his laughing eyes.

“He smells like mountain ash,” Derek whispers once they’re alone.

That, of course, would explain it.

They stay there to the end of visiting hours and then Laura checks them into the local Holiday Inn.

The first thing she does once she gets her thoughts together is to call Mr. Whittemore. He’s a family lawyer so he’s able to tell her the odds that she could get legal custody of Derek. He advises that it might be easier for Derek to emancipate himself, which he will be able to do in a month on his sixteenth birthday. Except they can’t stay in Beacon Hills that long, not with whoever did this still on the loose. With everything there is to sort out, Mr. Whittemore doesn’t think they can get any kind of hearing until then, so Derek might have to spend some time as a ward of the state.

Derek is losing control for the first time since they were young. He can’t go to some facility or to a foster family. He’ll need to be chained up for the full moon. He might need to be chained up period.

Derek has curled up on the bed and hasn’t moved for an hour. His eyes have stayed glowing blue the entire time. Laura doesn’t want to leave him here, but she needs to move and he can’t go out in the state he’s in.

“Derek,” she says. “I need you to shift.” He can come with her in wolf form. Nobody will recognize him.

He takes his clothes off mechanically and Laura gasps. He’s covered in red marks. They’re taser burns, she realizes, and strong ones, because it’s been almost half a day since the police picked him up.

“Where did you get those?” she demands, realizing that she’d never stopped to question why Derek hadn’t been in the fire.

“A hunter, I think,” he says. “By the time I woke up, it was too late.”

“Why weren’t you home?”

Derek blushes. His heart is racing, but he isn’t lying. “Visiting someone. They got me before I could get back.”

Ah, the secret girlfriend. That’s some guilt her brother clearly doesn’t need. She can’t make it worse by forcing him to say it out loud. “So a hunter tasered you until you were unconscious? And then what?”

“I woke up and I panicked. I ran to the house, but the firemen were already there and the police. They pulled Uncle Peter off the porch. He almost got out. Anna and Maggie got away, but they were too badly burned. I should have been there.”

“So should I. Now come on, Derek. We have some things we need to do.”

Derek stands there for another minute, a grim frown on his face. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t rest.” He’s crying tears of frustration now. “Laura, I can’t rest!” She lets him try for a few more minutes, but it’s clear he won’t be able to shift. Derek will never be able to shift into his full wolf form again, but now they don’t know that.

Laura doesn’t exactly have time for her brother’s psychological trauma, but she envelops him in a hug anyway. She kisses him sweetly on the lips and kisses away each tear that falls down his puffy cheeks.

“I love you, Derek, but you need to stay here while I go, okay? Go to the hospital tomorrow to check on Uncle Peter. Call Deputy Stilinski for a ride. I’ll meet you there when everything is done.”

She has to shake Derek a few times, repeating the he can’t let anybody in. She stops at McDonalds and buys Derek five big macs and forty chicken mcnuggets. Derek is back to a catatonic ball on the bed when she comes back, but he takes the food when she uses the alpha command to force him to eat.

Uncle Peter had drilled the routine into Laura. She knows what she has to do.

She drives south down the five and then turns off on route 36. Three hours from Beacon Hills, there’s a small dirt road off mile marker 58 that takes her another mile or two into the heart of the National Forest. There’s no one here but loggers and biologists and there aren’t many of either.

Laura takes off her clothes and pulls on her well-worn leather harness before shifting into her full alpha form for the first time. She’s still a wolf, but now her wolf is massive, with thick sinewy muscles and a bite twice the size. This wolf cannot pass for a dog. This wolf is not docile. It is the beast that she’s always felt was clawing at her insides.

She closes her eyes and follows her nose, remembering all the little landmarks Uncle Peter had drilled into her. The smell of water, a lake five miles to the southeast, a grove of redwood trees to the west. A stream that she will follow until she sees the ridge and the big rock shaped like a skull. There, she looks for the smell of rusting metal and digs a banker’s box out from beneath the boulder with a single set of claw marks on it. She palms the key she finds sealed in a waterproof pouch inside. Laura sleeps here. She lets herself howl out her grief, wishing that Derek was here to share it.

The key opens a safety deposit box in a small independent bank in Redding, where she stops the moment it opens the next morning. She empties out the contents: cash, gold, diamonds, antique jewelry, treasury bills and bonds and stock certificates with the name left blank, fake passports and birth certificates for everyone in the family. There are three more of these caches, but she won’t empty the others just yet.

Laura stops by the school and picks through Derek’s locker and at the hotel to gather anything he might have left there. She visits the safety deposit box in town that has family photos and their original birth certificates. Her parent’s will is very clear. She’d asked Mr. Whittemore about that too. Their funeral will be provided for and all remaining assets will be liquidated and put into a trust for Laura and Derek whenever they’re ready to return to claim it.

Laura wants to grab Derek and get out of town, but there’s one thing she still has left to do.

The house looms so ominous, now a scene from a horror movie and not a quaint colonial style country mansion. The fire has burned away a lot of the structure, but more than she expected is still standing. She wants to go in and look for anything that might have survived, but then she walks up to the steps and stops. It’s surrounded by mountain ash.

Laura knows with sudden clarity exactly what happened. Hunters surrounded the house with ash so none of the werewolves could get out. But Anna and Maggie were human. Uncle Peter must have realized that and tried to get them out. But humans are also more fragile than wolves. It was too late. And then the firemen must have come and dragged Uncle Peter across the barrier without ever knowing it was there. That’s why he’s in a coma. That’s why he would probably never wake.

Laura is so enraptured by her own emotion that she doesn’t hear the car pull up until the door is slamming behind her. “So, can you tell me anything?” Deputy Stilinski asks. Why can’t he just leave her alone?

Laura could tell him a lot of things. “I can’t believe they’re gone,” is all that comes out.

“I have to go inside a minute,” he says. “Our arson guy wants me to get another sample or two. I know this is a lot to ask, with you, here, but can you make sure my son doesn’t get out of the car?”

The little boy is banging on the window, yelling at his father.

Laura nods, but the second the elder Stilinski is inside, she opens the door to the police cruiser.

“Where’s Derek?” the boy -- Stiles was his name -- demands. Laura didn’t know he’d even spoken to Derek.

“He’s at the hospital.” She’s too tired to come up with a lie.

“Is someone sick?”

“Our uncle.”

Stiles nods. “My mom’s sick, too. But you don’t have to be afraid of the hospital. It’s where they help people find their way to heaven.”

Oh god, Laura is not prepared for this.

“What’s your name again?” Stiles grants her reprieve by changing the subject.

“I’m Laura. And you’re Stiles, right?”

He nods enthusiastically.

“Remember how I told you that people can make their eyes glow in the dark?”

“Yeah. I tried believing really hard but nothing happened. Are you sure you didn’t lie?”

“It takes a lot of practice,” Laura admits. “But if I show you how I do it, can you do a favor for me?”

He nods, looking far too serious. Laura shakes his hand like it’s a deal, then flashes her alpha eyes at him.

“Oh my god! That’s awesome!” he squeals.

Laura winces at the volume and motions for him to quiet.

“Sorry. But that was amazing. Can you do it again?”

“You have to keep up your end of the deal first,” she says, grabbing his hand and leading him over to where she feels the mountain ash line. It’s buried in the leaf litter, so it must have been a strong mage who did it, to hold the barrier with breaks in the line.

Uncle Peter had said that for magic you need a human with a talent for belief. Who better to believe than a child?

Laura points at the mountain ash line. “Stiles, I want you to clear me a little patch of ground right here, wipe everything off until there’s only brown dirt and when you do it, I want you to imagine that there’s a great glass wall around the house.”

“Like an isolation room?” Holy shit, what kind of trauma has this kid been through exactly, if that’s where his mind goes?

“Like an isolation room,” Laura agrees, because it’s as good a metaphor as any. “The spot where you’re going to clear, that’s the door. So when you clear everything away, I want you to imagine that the door is opening so we can go inside.”

“I’m not allowed in the isolation room. I have too many germs,” Stiles says.

“Well, when you open this door, you’ll be allowed inside, okay?”

Stiles smiles back at her. When he breaks the mountain ash line, his eyes seem to glow just slightly amber. It could be a trick of the afternoon sun, but Laura doesn’t think it is.

Laura shows him her own glowing eyes one more time before Deputy Stilinski comes out again. “I see he tricked you into letting him out of the car.”

Stiles grins, triumphant.

“The house isn’t structurally cleared, Ms. Hale. I wouldn’t advise that you go in there.”

Laura nods. “I know. I have to take care of my brother. I won’t take any unnecessary risks. I just need a little time alone.”

Stilinski pats her on the back soothingly, the way her father always did. Laura feels the tears rising again, but she waves to Stiles as the police cruiser pulls away.

***

First they drive north to Oregon to clear out Laura’s dorm room and warn the Fuller pack. But it’s too close to Laura’s school - hunters could find them. They’ll need to go farther away.

The Fullers offer to call other packs to see if someone will take them in. They vow that they will help Laura track down the hunters who did this and kill them, all she has to do is ask. But Laura just wants to get away from it all and Derek is slowly unraveling.

She switches license plates with one of the Fuller’s old trucks that they no longer drive in town. She’ll switch those license plates again a few states over. She knows she should ditch the car, but it was a gift from Uncle Andrew and she can’t bear the idea of getting rid of it.

They trash their cell phones in Idaho and buy short-wave radios instead. They can buy new phones with their new identities. Laura dyes her hair blond and shaves Derek’s off. They find another of Uncle Peter’s caches in Colorado, but all Laura takes out of it are some disks where Uncle Peter has digitized some of the family archives. She makes copies and puts the originals back. They are passcode encrypted and Laura doesn’t know how to crack them, so she’ll just save them for later. Derek takes out another set of fake documents, but doesn’t explain why.

They cash in some of their monetary instruments in each state they visit. Laura would worry about traveling with so much cash, but they’re not exactly in danger of getting mugged. They can open a bank account when they know where they’ll settle.

They don’t really have a destination so they don’t stop driving until they reach Pennsylvania. Upstate New York would be a great place to start a new pack, but New York City is a better place to disappear. Maybe one day they can start thinking about re-establishment, but Laura doesn’t want to have to think about anything right now. They can just hide until they feel ready to face the world.

Laura spreads their potential fake passports and birth certificates out on a paisley bedspread at a little bed and breakfast in Allentown. Laura will be Lauren Peters. Derek looks into his sister’s eyes as his hands skip over the passport for Darren Peters. He’ll be Eric Mendez instead.

They don’t have to be brother and sister anymore, not when nobody knows them.

***

Laura doesn’t call herself Laura Hale for eight and a half more years. She works as a waitress and eventually gets a job as a patternmaker in the garment district. She’s quiet, but designers have begun to recognize her for her speed. She turns down an offer by her boss to finance fashion school. She doesn’t want to stick out. They’ve kept safe by blending in for so long.

Laura comes home every night to her construction worker husband, who she married the moment he turned eighteen. They’re the Mendezes now, that sweet couple at the end of the hall that will always be willing to feed a neighbor’s cat and don’t cause trouble. They don’t have a lot of friends, and the friends they do have complain that they never take them on their weeklong backpacking trips upstate.

They never talked very much. They’ve never needed too, but they’ve grown quieter over the years. Bringing up the past is too painful and their future isn’t really their own to claim. Laura knows that Derek has a secret that’s eating him up inside, but Laura doesn’t push. She has a secret too, and she doubts that his could be as awful as hers. She isn’t brave enough to save them from their secrets.

They have a contented life, filled with routine and the small joys that are the only moments of happiness available to two people as broken as they are. Neither of them wants to upset the balance by airing past wrongs. They’re not Derek and Laura Hale anymore - those people died with the fire.

Except in all their quaint domesticity, it begins to eat away at Laura: the child they could have had, if only she had been braver. It’s a horrible thought to have, but if she hadn’t taken Peter’s poison, she would have given birth right around the time they arrived in New York. It would have at least have made the death of everyone they loved mean something. It wouldn’t have been a fair price: eleven lives for one, but it would have been something to hold onto, an anchor.

Laura is anchored to Derek and Derek is anchored to his own rage and guilt and self-loathing and as much as Laura wishes they could change that, she knows they won’t.

Maybe that’s why she doesn’t throw away the letter from David, who goes to check on Uncle Peter four times a year. Peter never improves, but this time David met a contact who claimed to have known her mother. He gave David a picture of a deer with a spiral on its side. It’s just a dead deer, but Laura thinks that maybe it’s the sign she needs to impel her to return to Beacon Hills. She begins to dream that she can go back and tie everything up, put ghosts to rest and maybe even kill the person responsible for her current life. Maybe once she does that, she and Derek can move forward out of this half-life they currently lead.

She’s been keeping up their old identities, just in case they need to return to their old lives one day. It’s sad that the driver’s licenses under their real names are the ones that are fake, but there’s a part of Laura that had always been Laura Hale even when she was Lauren Mendez and Laura Hale wouldn’t just give up on her family, not after she’d sacrificed her child so she could stay a part of it.

Laura leaves Derek’s driver’s license for him with the keys to her trusted old Camaro and a note next to the bed. The note says: I love you. It has a spiral drawn at the bottom of it. Derek has buried himself in werewolf symbology in the wake of the fire. It’s really the only part of being a werewolf that he embraces anymore. He’ll know what the spiral means.

She kisses her brother’s sleeping form on the lips one last time. He got home from work late last night, so they didn’t have time to make love. It’s okay, she thinks. She’ll be back soon.

***

Beacon Hills is a smaller town than she remembers. It’s nothing compared to the Big Apple. With her flashy New York style and grown up mannerisms, nobody even recognizes her, except maybe Lydia Martin, but she was only seven years old the last time Laura had read to her from the Encyclopedia before bedtime. They had been on the Ts.

Laura discovers that the arsonist is a woman about Laura’s age. She even finds a witness who draws a necklace that looks suspiciously like the Argent crest. Laura remembers the two that blew into town right after Laura bit Steve McCall. They hadn’t been convinced that Laura needed to be put down, but they kept talking about that man, Gerard, who Uncle Peter was afraid of.

There’s something about the fact that it was a woman and that she was a similar age and build to Laura - she’s perched on the brink of understanding, but she can’t grasp it quite yet.

Laura is so close she can taste it, but before she can drive up to Oregon to see if the Fullers have any more information on the Argent family or if she can find someone to unlock the passcodes for the CDs from the safety deposit box, she hears a howl in the woods.

Laura doesn’t care that she’s ripping her $2,000 Burberry jacket or that she’s going to have to face the skeleton of the house where her family died, because she knows that howl.

“Uncle Peter!” Laura calls. “Uncle Peter!”

She smiles when she sees him walking towards her. She’s wished for his council so many times these past years. His planning had let her and Derek escape and he’d stood by her in her most ugly moment and kept her darkest secret. Seeing him finally awake brings her more happiness than she has felt since before her pregnancy, when she and Derek had thought they were invincible.

“I know your sins,” Peter says as he slashes her throat.