Kitsune tucked tail and ran the moment I shifted. I didn’t like the idea of scaring the pup, but at the same time, his reaction was mildly gratifying. At this point, Kitsune was probably the only member of the Salvatella pack who was intimidated by me in my wolf form.

Overall, my transformation into a scary Halloween monster a week ago hadn’t been as awful as I’d feared. I mean sure, technically I turned into a big hairy dog now—typically several times a day. But all things considered, I think I kinda rocked the whole killer werewolf look. My fur was a light sandy-brown shade in my wolf form, and my eyes were amber-gold.

Raul repeatedly assured me that I was a sexy bitch—both in my human and in my animal form.

He had shared a portion of his werelock powers with me a few days after my initial transition. It was decided beforehand that Mike would be prepared to step in and take over as Alpha should Raul’s powers weaken significantly. But to everyone’s surprise and relief, Raul’s powers didn’t diminish at all after sharing what he had with me.

Rafe attributed the phenomenon to Sloane. I didn’t quite follow how he’d arrived at that correlation, but I was thankful for whatever had caused it.

It seemed that others shared Rafe’s theory, however, because as word spread that Raul was still Alpha of the Salvatella pack even after being mated to a common werewolf, it spawned a bit more fear and suspicion within the werelock world about Sloane—the Rogue werelock and embodiment of a dark curse—who had previously demonstrated the ability to seize and redistribute power at whim when she’d pulled powers from Gabe to give to Avery.

“Okay, that was good,” Raul coached me. “But try doing it a little faster next time.”

He had teleported Sloane, Kitsune, and me to Big Basin. It was early morning, and we’d stopped at a secluded spot along the trail so that I could practice my shifting.

I’d felt a little self-conscious practicing it at the Bariloche compound where so many experienced werelocks and werewolves could see me. So Raul had suggested I might be more comfortable doing it here, on my home turf in NoCal, until I gained more confidence with the process.

Sloane, who herself had never even shifted before, kept dropping quiet, stoic commentary about how I needed to be faster at it, more graceful. She kept mumbling to herself about how she could do it so much better than I could.

But despite her criticism, she seemed to be warming up to me—at least a little bit, I thought. Possibly she was simply resigned to tolerating me, though, since Mike and Rafe had straight-out told her that my death would trigger Raul’s death now. Basically, they’d explained to her that she couldn’t kill me without losing her favorite manny in the process.

I’d just shifted for the tenth time in a row, and Raul was giving me pointers inside my head, when suddenly he stopped talking mid-critique, his words in my mind trailing off with a quiet, “Ah, shit.”

I turned my muzzle in the direction of Raul’s troubled gaze and spied a tall, well-muscled, naked man standing thirty feet away from us up the trail. His hair was brown—although it was tough to say whether that was simply from all the mud that was caked in it. His body was smudged and streaked with mud as well, and he had leaf litter sticking to him in random places.

He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen him before. At first glance, he reminded me of the British male supermodel, David Gandy—if Gandy had been a dirty, feral-looking homeless man flashing people on nature trails. And also a werelock.

The werelock’s eyes, which glowed a cold, killer-blue shade, were pinned squarely on my mate, when suddenly it hit me where I’d seen him before.

“Isn’t that the Reinoso pack doctor? Kai?” I telepathically asked Raul, who was still inside my head.

“Stay with Sloane,” Raul ordered inside my mind, just as the homeless-looking David Gandy doppelganger burst into a giant white wolf.