Shifters rarely attacked with the intent to kill. In general, a shifter attack was a test of skill, unless they perceived a direct threat to their den, mate, or pups. In that case, the instinct to kill generally overrode their human sensibilities.

The attack was too calculated to be a blind assault, and so Harper had to assume—had to hope—that it was a test. She fought back accordingly.

Her knees threatened to buckle as the blow to her back came. She resisted the urge, and instead twisted her body and ducked, freeing her head. Her attacker would be able to move faster than her. Shifters tended to move more quickly than humans, not so fast as to bend the limits of nature, but fast enough that a human often couldn't react to their movements before it was too late, not unlike a striking snake. But while it was difficult to block a snake mid-strike, it was possible to recognize every sign that led up to the strike. She couldn't be faster than her opponent, but if she could anticipate his actions, she might be able to block and counter.

At the moment, she actually had an advantage. He didn't know her, or what she was capable of, and he was likely to assume that she was unskilled, simply by virtue of her species and gender. That advantage would quickly wane as they fought.

Harper stumbled away from him, taking in his profile in a millisecond. Not tall, but solid. Heavily muscled—he could easily overpower her. Fighter's stance—he was accustomed to grappling in human form.

Fuck.

He advanced on her and she backed away, their movements dance-like in their synchronicity. He wasn't going as quickly as he could, and that worried her. He wanted to toy with her.

The other wolves looked on, unmoving. They wouldn't interfere. Wolves were pack hunters and would generally rush to defend one of their own, but in this, their human mentalities bled through. You didn't interfere in someone else's fight.

Briefly, she wondered if she was handling this correctly. Instinct had told her to fight back, but there had been another option, one similar to submission, but more elegant. She could have played the part of the weak, ineffectual female, appealing to his better nature, his pride, and his dick. There was still time to do so. All she had to do was flinch when his first blow came, or perhaps take it and begin to cry.

Harper wasn't above such wily tactics, and in fact, they were some of her favorite. In this situation, they would likely serve her far better than proving that she was a trained fighter. But there was something in his eyes, something she couldn't readily identify, at least not in the seconds she had to observe him. It was something in the way he smiled, teeth bared on one side, and something in his eyes, which could have been mistaken for a corpse's. This male would not care if she cried. This male would not care if he hurt her. He might even enjoy it even more.

He swung his fist. It was a test blow, almost playful. The sort of blow he expected to clip her, but not fully incapacitate her. Harper couldn't use such a punch to her best advantage, so she simply dodged it. He swung again, and then again, at first amused, and then visibly annoyed as he began putting genuine effort into his punches. All the while, Harper was sizing him up, getting a sense of his skill.

He was practiced, but not refined. Practice, in and of itself, was unusual, given that most shifters fought exclusively in wolf form. While he knew how to fight, it was clear that he was unaccustomed to sparring with a trained partner, because he left himself open in ways that even a novice could have pointed out, if not taken advantage of.

With how he kept his blocking arm limp at his side, Harper could have easily gotten the knife from her boot and rammed it into his torso. But while something like that may have debilitated a human, the shifter's decreased sensitivity to pain would have meant that she'd only be pissing him off.

Instead, she continued to wait for her opportunity. It finally came as he surged forward, throwing the bulk of his weight into a punch that, had it connected, could have killed her. She dodged the punch and sidestepped him, grabbing his arm. Using his own momentum against him, she was able to get him to the ground. In the span of a second, she was kneeling with her knee on him and her hand keeping his arm twisted back.

The knee to his back was a ploy, making him think he could easily shake her off. If he'd paused for even an instant to consider it, he would have realized what a dumb move that would have been on her part. Clearly, he thought she was in idiot, because he immediately tried leaping up. Harper miscalculated the amount of force he would use, and far from causing himself minor injury, she heard his arm snap.

Double fuck.

Knowing she no longer had leverage, she leapt back and drew her knife. The wolves around them grew agitated and began exchanging grunts and barks.

She managed to get back to the tent as her attacker peeled himself from the ground, pushing up on his uninjured arm.

“You filthy, fucking human,” he seethed in a growling voice. There was pure malice in his black eyes.

As he advanced on her, she performed a quick reassessment of her situation and it had gone from bad to worse. The wolves weren't going to interfere in their fight, unless they thought she would kill their pack mate. Now, her attacker clearly had no intention of letting her live, which meant that she'd have to fight him to the death. Her only chance was to appeal to his pack mates and hope that by the law of averages, they weren't all sadistic assholes as well.

“Please,” she said to the wolves. “I don't want this. I don't want to fight, but I will defend myself.”

She thought she saw one of them begin to shift, but she couldn't wait to see if he would intervene. Her attacker moved in for a reckless assault, reaching for her knife hand. He was expecting to be able to use his superior speed to disarm her, which, if he considered how she'd managed to dodge him at every turn, was exceedingly dumb. But he wasn't thinking clearly anymore. He was angry and in pain. This wasn't exactly an advantage for Harper. It meant that it would be easier for her to attack him, but at the same time, he was likely to just plow through her attacks and assault her regardless.

She turned her knife up in time to slice his hand and then kicked his chest, her aim not at pushing him back, but at giving herself the momentum to jump back farther. Had he use of his other arm, it would have been a bad move, but given the circumstances, it gave her the time she needed.

Her attacker snarled as he retracted his hand, and then she saw it in his eyes. Murder. Her heart was pounding so quickly, her breath coming so fast, that she was barely aware of the other presence that joined them.

“Gareth, that's enough. You will kill her.” A male voice.

“Or she'll kill him,” a female said in a not-so-quiet whisper.

Her attacker turned his snarl on an approaching male. “I will say when it is enough!”

Harper remained in a defensive stance, her knife poised in a hand that wanted badly to tremble. She could hear her friends beginning to rouse from inside the tent.

“I think I heard something,” she heard Jo say.

Ian responded, “Yeah, we're in a forest, surrounded by forest-y things that make forest-y noises. Go back to sleep.”

Harper could have laughed, if she wasn't still so hopped up on adrenaline, her life still hanging in the balance of the next few minutes.

“You can't kill her,” the other male said evenly. He approached them carefully, as though worried her attacker would turn his rage on him. “Gareth. Look at her and think. You enforce the Law. You know the consequences for killing a human female.”

His words did not exactly flip a switch in her attacker's mind, but Harper could see understanding slowly dawn on his face. When he looked at Harper again, he no longer regarded her with murderous rage, but scathing disdain. For her odds of survival, it was a marked improvement.

There was a tense silence that ended with the sound of the tent unzipping. The sound filled the clearing, and every muscle and joint in Harper's body locked as her survival instinct overrode her more altruistic desire to run and protect her friends.

Not taking her eyes off Gareth, she called out to Jo and Ian. “Guys, we have company. Come out of the tent with your hands up where they can see them.”

Her friends hesitated, exchanging confused whispers, and then emerged, wide-eyed and nervous as they looked around the clearing. Their first reaction was not one of fear, but excitement, as they spotted the two shifters that were still in wolf form and sitting not far from the tent.

“Oh my God,” Jo said. “They're really here.”

Ian gave them a jerky wave. “Hi. We come in peace.”

“They're not aliens,” Jo admonished.

Harper cleared her throat to get their attention. Their heads snapped in her direction. At the sight of the angry male looming only a few feet from Harper, Jo let out a squeak and instinctively moved to stand behind Ian. Ian, for his part, looked between the male and Harper with alarm, his eyes urging her to do something.

Coming into this, she'd had no expectations of Ian. She had known full well that if shit hit the fan, it would be her defending he and Jo. The extent of Ian's combat training was being captain of his high school debate team. On principle, she disliked when men tried to defend her, as she felt it was undermining her own extensive capabilities. For that reason, she was surprised when she felt resentment trickling from some atavistic part of her.

“Drop your knife,” said the male that wasn't Gareth.

Harper looked at him for the first time. He was naked, having abruptly shifted from his wolf form. Like Gareth, he was heavily tattooed. He looked to be in his forties and about her height, with pronounced crow's feet, a large nose, and brown hair that fell just past his ears. In isolation, each of his features held its own sort of unattractiveness, but somehow as a whole, he didn't look half-bad. Harper found herself far less wary of him, not just because he seemed to be the voice of reason, but also because he had kind eyes. One of the first lessons her uncle had taught her was how to know a person by their eyes, and it was one of the lessons she'd referred to the most throughout her life.

“If I drop the knife, will you promise not to harm me or my friends?”

Gareth gave her a snarling reply. “You are in no position to negotiate, bitch.”

“Humor me,” she said, dryly. “I get that you could kill us, but I'm not going down easy if you try. And you shouldn't try, because like I've already explained, we're not here to encroach on your territory. We didn't even realize this territory was taken.”

“What is your purpose here?” asked the older male. He stepped forward, until he was standing beside Gareth.

Gareth began a diatribe about how it didn't matter what a lying human had to say. Harper spoke over him.

“We're looking for a pack, one led by an alpha named Shan. Are you familiar with him?”

Behind her, she could hear the confused murmurings of Ian and Jo. Throughout their planning, Harper had failed to mention that she knew the name of the alpha. Already, when they asked where she got her information, and Harper would be forced to equivocate, citing some vague reference, or her interpretation of a piece of academic literature. She had hoped that when the time came, she could continue to tap dance around the subject, but at the moment, she was too harried to be bothered.

“How do you know about Shan?” the older male asked, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.

“I have sources in the shifter community,” Harper said smoothly. “I've heard he's trying to bring agriculture to packs in the region. We're hoping to find out more about his efforts and, in exchange, offer our own information and technology to aid his cause.”

It wasn't a lie. While their primary goal was to study the culture of the pack, they were also interested in the implications of an agricultural revolution among wolf shifters. Both topics were a research goldmine. Few people in the academic community put any weight in the rumors of the agriculture boom within the reservation, and those who wanted to research it were hung up in the maddening bureaucracy of getting funded for an illegal expedition and getting legal permission without being funded. Harper had circumvented the broken cycle by simply breaking the law and maxing her (and Ian's) credit cards.

“You expect us to take you to Shan?” Gareth asked with incredulity. “Bring you back to our pack, so that you can spy on us for the rest of your human scum?”

Man, he really does not like humans.

In his ranting, Gareth had inadvertently told her something. He knew Shan and was quite possibly one of his pack mates. She was careful to hide her excitement.

“I would at least like the opportunity to present our case to him,” she said evenly. “Unless, of course, you're authorized to speak on his behalf.”

He wasn't. She knew that, and so did they. In a wolf shifter pack, the alpha's authority was absolute. While certain things could be delegated, the alpha's judgement was not one of them.

“Drop the knife and we will take you to Shan,” said the older male.

Harper complied at once, not because she fully trusted him, but because she was out of alternatives. There was no way she could fight all of them. If they did attack, the knife would only serve for her to do a little more damage before her inevitable disembowelment.

She didn't resist when the older male bound her hands behind her back. She tried to look reassuringly at Jo and Ian as they were similarly tied up, but neither would be placated. Jo looked to be on the verge of tears, while Ian looked at Harper in stark accusation.

None of this had been part of the plan, or at least, part of the plan Harper had shared with them. Privately, she'd been fully prepared to be captured, perhaps even held captive for a time, until they proved they posed no threat to the pack. No pack could thrive as Shan's had without being cautious of outsiders.

While Jo's hands were being secured behind her back, the other wolves shifted and approached Gareth. They were both females, one of them tattooed nearly as much as the males, most notably with a snake wrapped around her upper arm, ending at her neck. She was tall, pale, and had a masculine face. Harper wouldn't have recognized her as a woman if not for her bare chest. By contrast, the other female was shorter, darkly complected, and pretty. She sported only a handful of tattoos, a small tribal one and a few floral patterns. She watched on anxiously as the larger female attempted to set Gareth's arm back into place.

“I ought to plant that knife into that bitch's back,” Gareth seethed.

He made similar pronouncements each time the female pressed down on his injury to ascertain where the damage was. Under normal circumstances, Harper would have written his words off as bluster. The battle was over and he was licking his wounds. But she couldn't fully let her guard down with this one. She got the impression that his mood could turn on a dime, that in a flash of impulsivity, he might forget whatever rules constrained him from killing her.

After tying them up, the older male and the younger female ransacked the campsite. They went through everything, most likely in search of weapons or supplies that might be useful. Harper was indifferent to it, too busy analyzing the wolves to be bothered with property destruction. That was, until the property in question was her own.

When the small female began rummaging through her bag, Harper was quick to lodge a complaint, unconsciously tugging at her bindings as she did so.

“Be careful with that!” she snapped as she watched the girl shake out the contents of her backpack. Her iPad clattered to the ground.

“I'm serious,” Harper said, starting a march towards the female. “Watch how you're handling my things.”

Suddenly, the tattooed woman was in front of Harper, blocking her path. “Where are you going, darling?”

“That is my bag,” Harper said, enunciating each syllable. She knew full well that she had zero leverage, but she just couldn't help herself.

She had serious issues with possessiveness. She was excellent at sharing things, but that's because sharing was on her terms. One of her earliest memories was of her adopted mother asking her to share a toy with one of her cousins. Harper had declined, and when her mother had insisted, Harper had informed her that being forced to bestow something against her will was not sharing, it was “coercion.”

“Oh,” the woman said with mock surprise. She had a strange accent that Harper thought might be Creole. “That's your bag? Well, we'll be sure to hang on to it for when you're not our prisoner.”

Harper stopped listening to her. She could easily see over the woman's shoulder, and felt her anxiety spike as the younger female extracted the bag of joints from their compartment.

“Put that back right now!” Harper snapped.

“What is this?” the girl asked. She held the bag up to the light, as if it might allow her to glean something.

The tattooed woman whistled. “It's our lucky day, is what it is.”

“No, no, no,” Harper heard herself say. “That's medicinal. I need that to sleep.”

“West, can I gag this one?”

“If you must,” replied the older male.

Harper didn't realize that they were referring to her until a moment later, when the leather strap was secured around her mouth. Jo tried pleading for them not to gag Harper, but only received a threat to gag her as well. Ian just watched, regarding Harper with a sour look.

“Sure, fine, tie my friends up and destroy all of their things,” Ian said, affecting his well-practiced impression of Harper. “But oh no, don't touch my pot.”

Harper wanted to strangle him, and she was grateful when Jo said, “At least Harper tried to protect us. You just stood there and let them tie her up.”

“What the hell was I supposed to do? Sorry I didn't take kung fu lessons before we came. I was too busy dropping out of college for a semester to come help you two. And I didn't see you doing anything either. Go figure, the first thing that the self-proclaimed feminist does is hide behind me.”

Two minutes later, West had gagged Ian as well.

As the morning progressed, Harper continued to seethe over her bag. The smaller female had shifted and carried it in her mouth, along with one of Jo's bags.

Ian did have a point. Harper definitely fixated on her bag at the exclusion of all else, but that was because she wasn't particularly worried about her fate, or that of her friends. She knew that so long as they were being taken to Shan, they would be all right.

Of course, she based this entirely on her gut. She knew very few specifics about the alpha, only second and third-hand accounts. There were a handful of details that could be corroborated by multiple sources and were therefore, in her opinion, credible. Like the fact that he was extremely large by any measure, around twice the size of the average alpha wolf. Or that he wasn't exactly a shifter, not in the conventional sense, but more like the proto-shifters, also known as skinwalkers, that had roamed the land in centuries past. And then, there was the one thing everyone agreed on, that he was highly intelligent.

There were other things, factoids bounced around that were too ridiculous to be true, but nonetheless made Harper both wary and curious. There were those who claimed that Shan was not merely twice the size of an alpha shifter, but vastly larger, as big as a tree and large enough to squash a wolf beneath a single paw. Others claimed that he wasn't simply a genetic throwback, but the second coming of some ancient wolf deity. And then, perhaps most unsettling, was the claim that Shan was not merely intelligent, but could read minds.

In any case, his reputation preceded him. He was not known for being merciful, but he was a just ruler. He would hear her out, and when he did, her aim would be to appeal to his intellect. If that failed, she had one, final card to invoke. It was a move that would spare the lives of her friends, if nothing else. For herself, life as she knew it would be over. It was a bell she would never be able to unring, and so it would be her last resort, to be used only if she was certain that people were going to die.

Throughout the morning, Gareth followed them, bringing up the rear of the procession. Though his arm had been set, he would not be able to shift again until it healed, leaving him both bound in human form and in a wrathful mood. He had stopped ranting, but every time Harper looked his way, she found him staring at her with eyes that promised murder.

Sometime around noon, they stopped to drink at a pond. West and Gareth went off elsewhere on their own, leaving Harper and her friends with the two females, who she had learned were named Viper and Rosa. Jo asked several times, and with increasing urgency, if they could untie her so that she could pee. She was at first dismissed, and then outright ignored.

Though agitated on Jo's behalf, Harper was in no position to advocate for her and instead kept her focus on scanning the area and trying to mark their progress on her mental map of the region. She thought she had a general idea of where they were, still in the foothills of the Virginia swath of the reservation, but she had trouble pinpointing a precise location, as she couldn't calculate their speed of travel. It irked her that her cellphone was still in her back pocket, but might as well have been in her Boston apartment for all she could get to it.

She passed the time working at her bindings and trying to ignore her dry mouth and the clear pool of water. West had done a good job of tying her up, but she thought she could get free of the bindings if she tried. At the moment, there was no incentive to do so, so she simply ran her fingers along the twine, familiarizing herself with the knots.

As soon as the males returned, they were moving again. Gareth had shifted into the form of a rather large gray wolf, perhaps to show the others that he was healed. It was a stupid move, as it was clear to anyone that he couldn't put weight on his right front leg. He'd probably injured it more in the process of shifting, a fact that provided Harper some amusement in her otherwise bleak circumstances.

Harper couldn't get a bead on which of the wolves was dominant, though she leaned towards Gareth. Both he and West were likely beta males, as evidenced by their size. Most standard members of a pack, sometimes called omega wolves, ranged in size from that of an average wolf to about twice the size of an average wolf. The rule of two held across the social hierarchy, with beta wolves being about twice the size of omegas, and alphas being twice the size of betas.

From the few interactions she'd witnessed, Harper had gotten a decent sense of their group dynamic. The females respected West, but they feared Gareth. This was particularly telling, because among shifters, fear was an integral part of leadership. It was not enough for an alpha to be beloved or venerated. His wolves had to also live with the awareness that, should they step out of line, there would be swift and painful consequences.

Not long after they left the pond, Jo peed herself. The event was marked by sobs, during which Gareth snapped his jaws at her, only making her cry harder. Harper's protective instincts flared, but it was West who came to her rescue, shifting and ordering Gareth to leave her alone. After that, Harper and Ian were allowed to pee. Harper was escorted by Viper, her bindings never removed.

Throughout the trek, Ian held up surprisingly well. Before they'd left Boston, if Harper would have had to guess which one of them would handle an abduction better, she probably would have said Jo. Ian had a bad temper and rebelled against anyone who tried to order him around. By contrast, Jo had more mental endurance than Ian, in spite of her anxiety problems.

By the time night fell, Harper and Ian were walking side by side, their shoulders brushing up against one another's. The simple physical contact did more to reassure them than any words or meaningful looks could convey.

Jo would occasionally catch up to them, but would quickly fall behind. Try as she might, Harper couldn't match Jo's shuffling gait, and would naturally pull ahead of her as soon as her mind began to wander. Oddly, the wolf named West had no trouble keeping pace with Jo, and a few times Harper had heard him issuing softly spoken words of comfort and encouragement to her.

As lights began to appear in the distance, Harper grew attentive, coming out of her head to analyze their new surroundings. At first, the lights looked like fireflies, glow bugs, as her brother had called them. They danced and pulsed, dotting the mountainside with their light. As they drew closer, the lights came into focus. They were campfires, dozens of them, their light splashing across the surrounding trees and the people clustered around them.

No less than ten shifters were gathered at each fire, all of them in human form. That in itself was unusual. Wolf shifters were generally in animal form by night, as it was prime time for hunting. It seemed, however, that they were socializing or at least they had been until their procession passed by. One by one, heads turned to regard them with curiosity and speculation. No one approached them, but they left a trail of whispers in their wake.

With each group they passed, Harper was building a picture of their pack demographics. They were mostly males, at about a two to one ratio, which was strange, but not unheard of. The gender composition of a pack tended to speak more of their leader, than of anything else. Most alphas were too dominant and aggressive to abide by male competition, and therefore, most packs were comprised primarily of females, with a handful of males that the alpha was confident wouldn't step on his toes. Only a handful of documented packs were composed primarily of males, and in those packs, the alpha was particularly secure in his position and confident that he wouldn't be overthrown by power-hungry beta males. In almost every instance, he was wrong.

There was very little diversity in age among the groups. She saw only one or two shifters with any gray in their hair, as well as few that appeared younger than their early twenties. If she had to guess at a median age, she would put it between twenty-eight and thirty, nearly ten years younger than the median ages in an average pack.

Everyone was tattooed, though some considerably more than others. She noticed, too, that many shared similar tattoos, particularly thin rings that banded around their forearms, which were bare. Most wore clothes that displayed their arm tattoos, and their clothes were unexpectedly modern-looking. They weren't a sloppy hodgepodge of stitched animal pelts, but instead looked like the sort of quality tailoring that could have been found in a haute-couture shop.

As the fires became clustered into a common area, West strode ahead of them, leaving Jo's side for the first time in hours. Behind her, Harper heard Gareth snarl, and when she turned back she saw with relief that his ire was focused on West.

“Run along and tell him everything, you stupid, old fuck,” he muttered under his breath.

At the center of the common area was a bonfire several feet wide, with flames extending almost as high as Harper was tall. There was no clear path through the mass of congregants, but they were quick to clear the way as Gareth charged ahead, his steps heavy and his lips curled.

As they rounded the bonfire, Harper saw West standing beside a lanky, bald man. His body was inclined as he spoke covertly to the male on his other side, the one who could only be Shan.

Harper came to a full stop as she saw him. He sat on a rock, just large enough that he could comfortably rest his feet on the ground. His long, dark hair was pushed back off his shoulders, one of which was exposed, revealing an arm covered in tattoos, from his shoulders to the tips of his fingers. His other side was covered by a glossy brown pelt that looked as if it were molded to his skin. The picture of detached contemplation, he sat with his elbow on his knee, his head resting on the back of his hand, and his eyes distant, scarcely acknowledging the male talking to him.

Somehow, in all of the gossip she'd heard of Shan, no one had mentioned that he was attractive. In fact, “attractive” seemed an inadequate label, as did “handsome”. She shied away from calling him “sexy,” as that was the first step down a path she couldn't afford to be on. She took him in as objectively as possible, noting that he was well-groomed, impeccably muscled, and every bit as large as she'd been led to believe. In both size and stature, he would have stood out in any human crowd. Even among his own kind, he was quite staggering, though Harper wouldn't venture a guess at how tall he was until she saw him stand.

In an instant, his gaze sharpened, moving swiftly from Viper, Rosa, Gareth, Ian, and then Jo. He favored none of them with more than a cursory glance, and then turned his attention to Harper, who still hadn't moved since stopping by the bonfire. He gave her the same frank appraisal, but unlike the others, Harper appraised him right back. Maybe that was why his eyes lingered on her as they reached her face. His eyes were a light green that appeared to glow in the firelight. As his eyes held hers, she grew still inside and out, unable to even swallow. It was an age-old instinct, one she hadn't felt herself gripped in for a very long time. It passed quickly, and she couldn't help but narrow her eyes at him, as if to compensate for her fear.

Suddenly, Gareth was in front of her, snarling. He grabbed her none-too-gently by the arm and jerked her forward, until she was with the others, standing before Shan. With a swift kick to the back of her legs, Gareth had her on her knees. Harper shot him a filthy look, which he didn't seem to notice.

When she looked up at Shan, he was staring down at her, the barest of creases in his brow. She met his eyes, this time trying to get a read on him so that she could plan her next move. Though her father had once told her that you could know a person by their eyes, he had obviously never met Shan. Harper had never seen a set of eyes that were so inscrutable, and for a moment, she began to grow anxious.

Then, she saw it. The flicker of something she knew all too well, the thing she'd used to her advantage for most of her life.

Attraction.