We walked together through the woods. For all the talking she’d done earlier, she was silent now. It wasn’t uncomfortable and I wasn’t sensing that she was hiding any strong discomfort. Usually I could smell that.

“How did the Vampire walk through the day?”

She shook her head. “That’s why I wanted to collect DNA. We’ve been seeing touches of them. Not a huge group of them but individual Vampires appearing with the ability. Could be evolution. Could be something that Doubleday and her cronies are doing. I don’t know. I’m not sure if I still worked for them that I’d know then. I was kept on the outside and the reasons for that have become increasingly apparent to me lately.”

“The whole clone thing?” That made little sense to me. Chad Lyons was a clone, if I recalled correctly, and I’d be shocked if anyone ever mistrusted him.

She shook her head. “The whole cloned thing only in as far as Doubleday is who I’m cloned from and she is evil. I think it’s more the whole used to work for Icahn’s people thing. Not that I had any choice.”

It was especially nice to see someone else had similar problems. Having just been cloned in the last year, I’d had no opportunity to speak to anyone else about their experiences. Not to mention I sort of just liked talking to her. She was human. I didn’t get to speak to just regular humans anymore.

“So you’re taking huge risks trying to prove yourself?” I actually understood that completely, unfortunately. “What do you remember about being cloned?”

She scrunched up her face. “They cloned me as a baby. I was raised and grew up to now so not anything. What do you remember? This was actually part of what I studied when I worked for the Icahn crew. The cloning issues, things that did and did not happen.”

The wind picked up through the trees. I wasn’t cold, but then again I was almost never cold. It was a Werewolf thing. The girl next to me might be though. I pulled off my coat and handed it to her. She shook her head and tried not to take it.

“No, please. It’ll make me feel better. Discomfort eats at my senses. I won’t be cold. Take it.” Her face fell, and for a second I could almost hear the internal battle she had going on. To take the coat or not take the coat. Would it be rude to take it, would it be ruder not to take it? Was it weird to take a coat from a Werewolf you didn’t know…?

“Margot.” I held out the coat again. “Take the coat. You’re still in clothes you got soaked in. Use your doctor brain. Good idea to get chilled?”

She took the coat from me and slipped it on. I tried to ignore the satisfaction coursing through my veins or to even analyze why it had been so damned important to me that she accepted the coat in the first place. I’d go with the reason I gave her and leave it at that. I didn’t understand women, evidenced by the fact that I hadn’t even been able to seal the deal with my fated mate. At least I could get one woman lost in the woods to take a coat.

She rubbed the back of her neck. Nearby a tree branch cracked, followed by the sound of wings flapping. “You never told me what you remember about cloning.”

I hadn’t, had I? “I’ve clearly lost some of my conversational skills. I remember waking up in the table. That Doubleday person was there. I guess maybe you look like her.” She didn’t smell like her for sure. “Then there was a lot of scampering around as I was ousted out of that hellhole and shoved outside. I saw Micah Lyons for two seconds and then my pack found me. Before that? I remember dying. That I remember doing.” The bullet piercing my skin. I didn’t really remember what that felt like, per se. Just that it happened. “But it technically didn’t happen to me. I mean, that was someone else. I have his memories, I feel like him, but this body was never shot. I guess they aged me three years in the time I was gone. That’s all I know.”

“Are we our bodies or are we our souls? Eternal questions we have to wrestle with since the advent of cloning.” She shook her head. Talking to her was a little bit like being back in school. I’d been a pretty mediocre student, but I’d always admired the smart ones. Rachel had been on her way to a really good college. She made straight As. I would have convinced her to let me follow along, which my father would have hated.

I pushed away those thoughts. They were from an entirely different existence. Who cared who would have done what when now?

“I don’t know. That’s well above my IQ. I…” I quit talking as I smelled them. There were Vampires around. The regular kind. A growl sounded in my throat. “We’re about to have company.”

She sucked in a breath. “Vampires.”

“Yep.” We were close to Genesis. I’d avoided this part of the area like it was my job, but I knew just where it was. I’d always remember the time I’d spent here as the best and worst of life. Nothing was getting to Margot tonight. “Run.”

She gasped. “I can’t leave you to deal with this alone.”

“That’s the best thing you can do. Run, Margot. There is time for you to do that. Trust me. Okay? I know I’m a monster, but I hate the Vamps and so far I like you. I won’t let anything get through me before you have enough time to go.”

A million emotions passed over her scent, and I wished it was a warm summer day where there was nothing to do but analyze every nuance. It had been too long since I did that, and being near a human who didn’t shield her emotions from my nose as my fellow Werewolves often did meant I was practically drowning in sensory overload. But we had no time.

This was nighttime in hell, and she needed to run. Now.

Margot finally turned and ran. I’d never been more relieved in my life. If she really had no fighting skills than I couldn’t be taking care of her and dealing with the undead at the same time. I called my shift onto myself. Maybe I should have just stayed like this permanently. It really was so much easier than trying to exist like a man right now.

Or ever.

The first of the Vamps appeared, and I lunged at them. The daywalker was hard but these would be no problem. I tore at the group, and prevented them from getting past me. No problem at all. Sheer numbers could overwhelm but so far I had this well under control.

Noise sounded behind me and the scent of human males flooded my nostrils a split second before they joined the fight. There were at least three of them. Internally, I groaned. I was going to end up having to save one of them before I was done.

I always did.

The fight went on for a while, but it wasn’t particularly interesting. The Vamps were of normal strength and didn’t have any interesting fighting skills to make it all difficult. I knew the guys I was fighting with, too, which made it all the more irritating. If I could have gone my entire life without seeing another Lyons, or Deacon Evans, it wouldn’t have been too soon.

Yet, there they were. The four of us together like some sort of sick take on the Three Musketeers. I’d always preferred d'Artagnan. I had to get my head out of the past and back to this world.

I took down another Vampire, ripping his head from his body. He didn’t die right away. Kind of twitched for a second. It was sort of gross. There it went again. My human thoughts interfered with my Wolf body. What was happening?

It was almost over. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe these guys wouldn’t need my help at all. They’d get through a battle without…

“Deacon,” Micah called out, and I groaned.

One final Vampire was about to take off Evans’ head. I didn’t even have to work that hard to get there. I jumped, knocking the undead down before it got onto Deacon. I shook my head as the rain resumed.

If we had to be living in this fucked up world, couldn’t we have done it in Arizona?

The three fighters stopped to stare at me. Chad Lyons who had married Rachel, Deacon Evans who had loved Rachel, or at least claimed he did, too, and Micah Lyons Rachel’s best friend. And here I was, the guy who had tried to destroy things by simply having had a claim on her first and not letting it go.

I’d even waited until she was sixteen to insert myself back in her life.

I was the bad guy in their eyes—hell most of the time in my own eyes—and I didn’t need this shit anymore.

Micah nodded at me. “Nice job with getting that last Vamp.”

If I had to face the music of seeing them again, I wasn’t going to do it on four legs. I called the shift onto myself and met the stare of three guys who hated me as much as I hated them. Funnily enough, Chad wasn’t sending me any negative scents at all. He seemed pretty neutrally fine. Well, he’d gotten the girl. Why bother being worked up anymore?

“Gentlemen, bet you didn’t expect to see me again.”

Micah looked at Deacon. “Are you going to thank him? He just saved your life.”

Deacon shot Micah a look that matched the hostility waving off of him before he turned to me. “Thanks, Jason.”

“Sure.” I nodded. “Too much blood spilled, right?”

This moment defined awkward, but it was Micah who filled the silence instead of me. “I knew we’d see you again.”

“I’m not here to cause issues. I walked one of your members back.”

Chad nodded. “Margot. She said you saved her, too. You seem to be on a roll with that.”

“Well, we all have our strengths. I need to speak to someone at Genesis anyway. My pack, we need to start building some homes for ourselves. I’m not interested in roaming around the countryside. I want a home to protect. Help cut down some of the local Vamp population. We don’t want to bother you. So I need to know what you consider the outlier of your boundaries to be. So we don’t accidently build on them.”

Chad made eye contact with Micah. “We have a plan to continue to push outward.”

Of course they did. I steeled my shoulders. There were more of them, but we were monsters, and they hadn’t managed to kill us yet. “To what edge?”

No one answered me, which meant they either didn’t want to tell me or they didn’t have a ready response. That was fine. I had one. “Then we’ll just pick our spot and you can watch out for us on your own expanse.”

“Is everyone okay?” A breathless Margot rushed to join us, accompanied by two women I didn’t know. One of them was blond, the other dark haired. Deacon threw his arm around the blondish one. “Get back inside. It’s a mess out here tonight.”

The dark haired one pressed against Micah. Interesting. It looked like they’d found people, too. That was not at all surprising. Everyone got to do that except me.

I was stuck. Eternally the idiot who didn’t get the girl.

“We’re all alive. Thanks for the help, Margot.” Back in the day I would have winked at her. My heart was devoted to Rachel, but I’d liked how it felt when women tittered around me. Yeah, I was that asshole. My winking days were over.

I turned to leave but stopped myself. “Maybe this goes without saying but Werewolves are big on territory. I just gave you the chance to tell me where yours was. You didn’t. I’m going to pick mine, and I’m going to give you a wide berth. If you get in my territory after that is established we’re going to have problems. Otherwise we never will.”

“The same old Jason making threats?” Chad asked me. I still didn’t get any emotional signal from him. Maybe he had the feelings the equivalent of a brick wall. It didn’t matter.

I waved my hand in the air. “Say hi to your wife.”

I took off running. I’d had enough hello again to last a long while.

A long night making my way back to the makeshift area where we lived in tattered tents told me that it was as good as anywhere to plant ourselves down and make a home. At least half a day’s walk to Genesis meant there was plenty of room for them to grow and not get anywhere near us.

Not that I never wanted to see humans again, ever. Margot had been a nice distraction. She’d had a way about her. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what that was. But it was there and…

“Jason,” Trevor, one of my pack mates limped over to me. He had a leg injury that wouldn’t heal even with shifting, which was very unusual for us. “We were worried.”

They were always worried. The rest of them could disappear as they felt inclined, but if I wasn’t standing right here like some kind of statue when they returned from anywhere, I had to pet their heads and make them feel better about life.

I’d never had children, probably never would, but I still got to be everyone’s daddy.

It was entirely possible I wasn’t cut out to be an Alpha despite my genetics. I just hated dealing with folks’ issues. I sighed. Maybe I was just tired. I hadn’t been to bed yet. Passing out didn’t count, not really.

“Tell you what. I think we’re all ready to make some plans. I have some ideas on this subject.” My father would have left it there. But I wasn’t him. I never would be. “I’d like to get some input from all of you. I mean, I know we have a problem that not one of us can build a house.” All of those Wolves with those skills were dead and we didn’t have a cloning machine available to us to bring them back. I also couldn’t quite reconcile doing so. Sometimes people had to stay dead. I supposed that was easy for me to say considering I was still walking around. Okay, enough of this. I had to sleep.

I finished. “I’m going to take a nap. Consider things. And then we’ll go from there. If anyone has any thoughts they want to share with me at that time I am amenable to listening to them.”

With a nod to the group, all of them staring at me like I was the second coming of something, I walked to my old, ratty tent. My father had supplied us with army-grade sturdy habitats to live in, but I had no idea what had happened to them in the time I’d been gone.

I really didn’t know what had happened to my father. My impression was he’d died in a fight that involved Rachel, Deacon, and some others. I supposed I should be angry and seeking revenge for my father, but he’d long since antagonized Genesis. It was hard to be surprised he’d gotten himself killed when I wasn’t around to keep him from getting in their faces. My sisters? That was another type of problem. Autumn and Luna should still be here.

Hell. I lay down on the ground and covered my eyes with my arm. I was lonely. That was all there was to it.

Sleep came fast as it always did for me when I was exhausted, even on the ground in the worst tent imaginable. If it started raining again I was going to get soaked. I didn’t even care.

The scent of distress woke me a second before the shout of human filled the air from my pack mate Josiah. Well, that couldn’t be good. I leapt to my feet, orienting myself and trying to wake up at the same time. Sleep still hung around me. I couldn’t have been out very long. I charged out of my tent, almost tangling myself up in the enclosure in the process, but I managed to right myself before I fell on my face. Graceful Werewolf I was not.

Her scent hit me the second I was outside and would have come faster if I hadn’t been so out of it. Margot. What was she doing here? And alone again?

“Stop.” I called out to my pack.

They’d surrounded her, and to her credit, she wasn’t whimpering, crying, or acting at all frightened. I smelled the bitter taste of annoyance and that was it.

She was both right and wrong to not be afraid. They weren’t dominant Werewolves but even a submissive Wolf could be dangerous to a human. They’d all learned the hard way to be afraid of any non-Werewolves around. They could hurt her and then they’d come over to me, shift, give me their belly, and hope I didn’t kill them for doing so.

Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

But at least I’d caught it in time. Everyone stopped moving and Margot’s dark eyes lit up as she saw me. “Jason.”

“You know our Alpha?” Josiah snarled. He was really finding some balls lately. Maybe I should be pushing at that, helping him along in his development. If I had any idea how to do that.

“I’ve been trying to tell you that I do. Josiah Robert Klein. See? I know you, too. I used to watch all of you from my vantage point in Icahn’s inner circle back before I found my spine and got out of there. I’m also the clone of a crazy person. You probably want to back off. Weren’t you some kind English teacher in the last life? Go spit out Shakespeare.”

I held out my hand. Margot had certainly found a backbone and then some. Maybe I should talk to her about being cautious when there were wild animals nearby. She put her hands on her hips and my lips twitched. I wanted to smile, and I had to hold off the instinct. She was hysterical.

“Let her go. I know her. She’s not a threat to you, any of you.” I walked forward, pushing through the crowd. My stomach grumbled. It had to be lunchtime or maybe just past. Yep, I’d not slept long enough. Nothing to do about that now. Margot was going to come with me to find some food. That would put some space between us and the pack who wasn’t at all happy I knew this human.

I took her hand in mine. Putting my scent on her would go a long way to chill out the rising tempers, and sure enough, the others finally disassembled. I pulled her along with me, but she caught up quickly, and walked by my side. It was a nice sensation and not one I’d noted in the woods the night before although I should have. That was the first time I hadn’t been in the front of a group since I woke up on that table.

She didn’t know she was supposed to walk behind me. Yet, I missed this feeling. That must be why I wasn’t dropping her hand. Not that it was small and I sort of liked how mine dwarfed hers when we linked our fingers.

If it bothered her she could let go. Margot made no move to do so.

We got to the small bank of the river. This was one of the few places I could touch the Hudson itself without looking down on it from a cliff above. It was also a great place to fish and I’d taken to doing so. Sometimes I got sick of game hunting. Well, not the hunting part. I liked that in my Wolf form. But the eating the same thing over and over? Blegh.

I’d set up lines and sometimes there were fish on them when I checked. With all the rain, they’d probably dislodged, but it was worth it to check. Margot made no moves to leave or ask me any questions. I dropped her hand to fiddle with the one line still intact and was pleasantly surprised to see that not only one, but two fish had hooked themselves on it. I grinned at her.

“Looks like today I’m a fisherman.” I shrugged. I was going to have to build a fire, something else I knew how to do now that I’d never imagined doing in my old life, to cook it. “Do you want some?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes. Thanks.”

I liked talking to her like this. She spoke again. “You’re welcome. What is that line? You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime.”

I nodded. “You know your Chinese proverbs. Impressive, considering you can’t have had the same schooling I did. Surprised they would bother to teach you that.”

“Actually who said that line is widely contested.” Her eyes seemed to sparkle. “It may or may not have been a Chinese Proverb, and I like to learn. No one taught me that. I read all the time. Everything I can get my hands on.”

She was helpful building a fire, too. Although finding kindling that wasn’t soaked proved a challenge, we did end up making a very smoky fire, together. It was after the fish was cooking that I finally had to ask her what I’d been waiting for her to volunteer. “What brings you here, and how did you know where to find me?”

Margot nodded. “Sorry. I should have led with that. I liked the quiet of today. This simple thing we just did together. I never get to just do this. Not once in my life.”

Guilt settled in my stomach. I could have waited a little bit longer before I asked. “I…”

She waved her hand. “Sorry again. Not your problem. Okay. I found you because I’m me and I know all sorts of things I shouldn’t know like the migratory habits your father had and where you used to hang out when you were in this area. I decided to give it a check. Familiarity can breed routine.”

I could listen to her talk all day. “Smart.”

“And I’m here because none of the rest of them would come and we really need your help. The council seems to feel you might be more responsive to me since you don’t already hate me and we have no negative feelings about each other.” She scrunched up her face. “Actually, they’re fifty-fifty whether or not you’ll take me prisoner.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “They need help but they think I might abduct you? All right. How can this Werewolf help you, oh captive one?”

Her smile was slow. “You’re funnier than I would have imagined.”

“You’re braver than you should be and foolish when it comes to dealing with Wolves.”

Margot cleared her throat. “You’re right. I am. I… I have no sense of self-preservation. You killed that daywalking Vampire. We can’t. Anyone who has tried has died. Please come and help us get one so we can study it. I have a bad feeling. I think there are more, and I think they are coming.”

Well, that was very bad news.