I knew from the second the door closed behind Dylan that I was about to be assaulted with questions — and sure enough, I only had to turn around before I caught sight of Oscar, arms folded and leaning against his chair. There was a broad shit-eating grin on his face, the likes of which I hadn’t seen for a while now.

“Yeah, good job, Mark.”

I rolled my eyes at him, sinking back down into the stool at reception. “It was Mark’s appointment. That’s all. I just… never corrected him.”

“I guess your hands did most of the talking.”

“I did tattoo him, yes. That is what he came for.”

I knew that wasn’t what he meant, but if he was going to make that kind of insinuation — well, he could go the extra mile and spell it out. He raised his bushy eyebrows at me, trying to flush out more information, but gave up pretty quickly.

“Seems like you wanted to do a little more than tattoo him.”

“Well, you saw him,” I said, keeping my tone casual. “I’m an alpha. He’s an omega.”

“And that’s all it is,” said Oscar, as though there were nothing in the world he believed less.

I sat in silence for a while, choosing not to encourage him — and, kind of proving his point, also choosing to spend a few moments remembering the exact notes of Dylan’s scent. Omega, yes. Broadly speaking. But there were more layers than that. A kind of earthiness. Something very floral. There were so many other wolves’ scents in there too. A big pack, maybe.

I must have smelled like that, once. Today the only other wolves Dylan would have sensed on me were Mark and Oscar.

Kind of lonely, really. Maybe it really had been too long.

“All I’m saying is, I saw your ears perk up when you saw him walk through the door. Don’t think I don’t know that look.”

“Haven’t you given up yet?” I peered over at him, trying to maintain an unamused expression in the face of his self-impressed smile. “Don’t make me pull rank.”

“God, no,” he said, lifting his hands. “You already did that with this shitty faux-leather.”

“I’m not having my clients rub up against dead animals. Anyway, it’s not shitty. That’s high-quality stuff.”

“It never breathed.”

“That’s… a bad thing?”

Oscar waved his hands at me, turning the chair around to straddle it backwards. “Serious question. If you had to tear someone's throat out for the sake of the pack, would you be fine with having flesh in your mouth or would you immediately spit it back out?”

“On second thought, why don’t we talk a little more about this omega?”

“I knew you’d come around.”

“What omega?” We both turned to lay eyes on Mark as he stepped out of the back room for a break, pushing his glasses back up on his nose. He paused for a second, caught the scent, and then nodded slowly. “Ah. That omega.”

“Jack’s new boyfriend,” said Oscar.

“Your client,” I corrected, throwing Oscar a playful look. “With the wedding rings. He just left a few minutes ago.”

“Cool,” said Mark. “Why’s it smell like he rolled all over you?”

“It does not-”

“I told you,” Oscar interrupted. “Boyfriend. You should have seen the way he was looking at Jack. If you’re going to rip anybody’s throat out, man? Honestly, I think he’d let you.”

“He was memorializing his husband,” I said. “We should probably keep that in mind.”

“His dead husband,” said Oscar. “Who, predictably, is dead. So he’s single.”

“You’re evil,” I said, pointing at Oscar. The point may have been slightly undermined by the fact that I couldn’t keep a smirk off my face. “Look — if he comes back, he comes back. But as things stand, he’s already left, and I don’t have his number.”

“The shop has it.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s breaking every personal data code in the book.”

“Oh, I doubt he’d report it,” said Mark evenly, heading for the kitchen. “That scent of his is very satisfied.”

“See? See?”

I shook my head at Oscar, flipping through the reception appointments book just to have something to do with my hands. “I told you. If he comes back, maybe we’ll see.” Then, a beat later — “Do not call and tell him to come back.”

“I’d call you a spoilsport,” said Oscar, “but you’re really only sabotaging yourself. Don’t you think it’s about time you met somebody? I don’t care whether it’s for pups or mindless sex, Jack; I just think you’re too isolated. You don’t have enough fun — or enough protein.”

“I get plenty of protein, thanks.”

“Rest of the points still stand.”

“I’ll think about it, alright?” I looked up at him, shaking my head. “Shit. There are a thousand omegas out there I could go out and find any time, you know. It doesn’t have to be this one, right now.”

“But it could be.”

Mark reappeared from the kitchen with a mug of coffee in his hands, making slow progress towards the back of the room again. “Are you still on his back about my client?”

“Sure am,” said Oscar. “Anything else to contribute?”

“Jack should get laid,” said Mark, frowning down at his coffee and slipping back through the door with a nod. “Yeah… I think that’s all.”

I shook my head, glancing between Oscar and Mark as he disappeared through the door. “You two could focus on your own sex lives too. You are aware of that?”

“That would be in open defiance of the ‘alpha fucks first’ rule.”

“That… is not a rule.”

Oscar shrugged, standing up to begin wiping down his surfaces for the end of the day. With the rain starting to pour down outside, it was unlikely we’d get any more walk-ins now, so I made no attempt to stop him. By the time Mark was finished with his emergency client, who couldn’t stop pouring out gratitude even as we ushered him out of the store and locked the door behind him, it was getting on to 7:30 in the evening.

“Time to call it a night?” I suggested.

“Sounds good, boss.”

“Uh-huh.”

Walking out in the rain to my car, I finally began to lose Dylan’s scent. I could feel the dampness in the atmosphere airing me out and lifting it away, even with my hood pulled up over my hair and my hands shoved deep in my pockets. Once I got behind the wheel, door shut behind me and torrents of water heavy on the roof of the car, I finally allowed myself to feel a little bummed out about it.

Oscar and Mark were right. He had smelled satisfied on me, and it had been a long time since I’d had any omegas in my life, even in a very casual way. Even as I tried to take my own advice and remember why Dylan had visited the store today, I couldn’t help but want to nestle into his hair and pick up a heavier trace of him — grip him tight, and mark him out as mine. Find out where all those flowery notes came from.

Instead, I gripped the wheel. Beneath my hands, the faux-leather around the wheel felt cool and smooth. There were other things to think about. Dinner, for one thing. Maybe I could get ahead on the business accounts tonight. Unless Dylan decided he needed something else, then I was going to have to drop this line of thinking anyway.

Even so, the rain drummed out the rhythm of his name all the way home — two short, sharp syllables, over and over again. Dylandylandylandylan. I pulled my hood down, running a hand through the longer hair on top of my head as I kept one eye on the traffic lights. This was fucking useless. I wasn’t sure whether my packmates had put the idea in my head or if his scent had already sunk too deep, but either way I was going to need a distraction before this evening went to shit.

Unfortunately, I was due the kind of distraction I never wanted.

Trying to find something else to listen to than the incessant tapping of the rain and the shape of the word it sounded like in my head, I turned on the TV as soon as I got home, shaking the excess water out of my hair and dumping my faux leather jacket over a dining chair.

(Yet another advantage to being a vegan? Fake leather didn’t get ruined in the rain.)

The TV started out as background noise, with a half-familiar string of jingles soon fading out into the intro to the news. I was only kind of listening as I started switching on the oven and reheating one of my pre-prepped portions of aloo gobi, and tuned out the serious voice of the newscaster as I focused. Only towards the end of the show, after all the human interest stories had passed, did I catch a word that brought me fully to attention.

“...local wolf news, it is reported that a number of Seattle wolf packs have been coming down with a mysterious illness sometimes known among wolf-kind as ‘lunitis’. Taylor Wells reports.”

I paused, plate in hand, and didn’t dare to look at the screen as the report began. I could only listen.

“Wolf communities across the United States are frequently secretive, and prefer to keep their affairs from the attention of local government services. Some would say that’s understandable, given the well-documented history of discrimination shown across this country, even in left-leaning cities like ours — but recently, experts have been growing worried about the health of several of our local wolf packs. I’ve been speaking to community leaders in several prominent packs across Seattle, and while most are remaining tight-lipped, it’s clear that they’re facing a growing health crisis.”

“There are at least two packs confirmed to have been affected by this strange illness. So far, human doctors have been unable to get close enough to give a specific diagnosis, but symptoms are said to be fast-acting and severe — not unlike canine parvovirus.”

Though I had almost reached my armchair, I couldn’t take another step. The plate in my hand felt like a dead-weight, not an upcoming treat. In fact, the thought of putting any of it in my mouth filled me with revulsion. I headed back to the kitchen in silence, ringing in my ears drowning out the rest of the report, and began to wrap the plate for storage in the refrigerator.

Not again. Please, god, not again.

It took me a minute to remember to shut off the TV. Once the sound had gone, the air around me was still filled with that same nervous static. There was nothing else to do but shift — padding straight into my room, large and black and panting with anxiety. Underneath my bed was a pile of blankets I had been meaning to move into storage, but I was glad of it now. With a bit of tugging and biting, it made for exactly the kind of fort a child would build. The kind of space that might look like unoccupied mess if you happened to miss the glassy dark eyes peering out from inside it.

I dropped my head down, trying to remember the scents of my parents and all their friends. It wasn’t easy to recall now. It wasn’t as easy as looking at a photograph or hearing a recording of somebody’s voice, because there were no prompts to help me call it all back; there was only the power of the memories, and those faded every day.

After all, it was over a decade ago now. I had only been 18 — too young to have ever thought of trying to preserve those memories, or to imagine that everything I had would disappear someday. Now that I was 34, I had lived almost as long without my pack as I had ever lived with them. A depressing thought.

I couldn’t help but think of Dylan’s scent again. This time it wasn’t so much lust as it was jealousy. All those other wolves laced into the very fiber of his being. Did he know how lucky he was to be surrounded by so many others? That even after such a crushing loss, he still had so much love to rely on?

It wasn’t fair to think like that, and I knew it. I curled up on my side, entombed by the soft swathes of soft fabric. This wasn’t very alpha of me. Being vegan wasn’t either — but feeling the nervous weight of my responsibility towards Mark and Oscar, and the strength that lay in my limbs beneath the glossy mass of my fur?

That still felt very alpha indeed.