The vast vault of Colorado night stretched around our wolf pack as we raced through the woods surrounding Enchanted Rock. Out here in the crisp fall air the sound of the wild seemed to carry for miles and miles, farther than any other time of the year. The smells of fall, of the pine, spruce, pinon, and leaves already falling from the flat-leafed trees, filled the air as our paws seemed to find every sure-footed spot on their own, our muscles launching us forward through the darkness as we searched for some kind of game.

We were wolves, loup garou, werewolves, shifters. Me, though? I’m just plain old Frank O’Dwyer. Ex-US Army, former private bodyguard, and someone who’s seen more carnage than any man ever should.

And that’s speaking as a shifter who gets his dinner sometimes by tearing its throat out.

I paused as we ran through the forest, just taking it all in for a moment. I still couldn’t get over all these damn trees, how they seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. I’d been born and raised outside Amarillo, up in the panhandle of Texas, and practically the only trees I saw growing up were the ones my friends’ families would drag inside and decorate during Christmas. There, at the foot of the great plains, it was all grass, dust, wind, and sky. After that? Baghdad, where the only trees you ever saw were palms.

Here, though?

Damn, it was beautiful. The land was all the greens and soft blues of forest and heaven, instead of the yellows and blasted, faded blue of the panhandle panorama or the Iraqi desert.

At a break in the trees, I paused and lifted my shaggy head to the moon, letting a howl of excitement rip clear of my lungs.

Peter Frost, my pack leader and boss, stopped and turned his head back to me and growled at me to shut the hell up. We were hunting after all. We were here for a purpose, not just to have a good run. Besides, that rumbling in his chest reminded me that the pack was close to Enchanted Rock, our base of operations, and as far as people knew, wolves weren’t back in the High Country of Colorado yet.

I growled back playfully, letting him know it was all in good fun, and I didn’t mean anything by my outburst. Besides, people would probably just think it was a coyote.

The rest of the guys, Richard, Matt, and Jake, all whipped their heads back to me and gave me big wolf grins and little tail wags. They knew the joy of it all, even if our stodgy old boss seemed to have forgotten for the time being.

We took off at a run again, our bodies slipping through the wide spaces between the trees, barely making a sound, the soil and stray rocks pressing into the pads of my paws as I brought up the rear of the pack. Nope, there was no way I’d trade this, not for the whole damn world. Hell, not even for the whole state of Texas.

A scent hit my nose just then. Yellow in texture, a worried smell. I knew that fragrance. Fear. Pure, primal fear.

But there was something different about it, a certain tinge I recognized and didn’t like, not out here in the wild of the forest. Domestication. Not human, though. More like a dog or cat, I figured.

Up ahead, Matt caught the scent as well, stopping in his tracks right in front of Richard’s chocolate form so they both went down in a spinning, snapping ball of brown and gingered confusion. Many yips and a whine of apology later, my two pack mates came back up to all fours and, along with the others, glanced back at me. I gave a little whine as the second set of smells hit me.

Coyotes. With a domestic dog? That wasn’t good. Not good at all.

Dammit. I growled again, asking Peter’s permission to go check it out.

He bared his teeth, his ears stretched back from his head, as he tilted his snout to the sky and gave a good sniff. He smelled it, too, and gave me the go-ahead. But only if Matt went along with me.

I yawned, my tongue lolling a little from the side of my mouth like a sleepy, good-natured puppy. Made no difference to me, man. The more’s the merrier, I always say. Not that I couldn’t handle a pack of coyotes. I’d been dealing with them since I was knee-high to a steer.

Matt and I broke off from the back, sprinting through the sparse underbrush, the low-hanging needles from the spruce and firs brushing over our thick fur as we shot off like lupine darts to find our target, our noses feeding us information like the guidance system of a heat-seeking missile. We were downwind from the pack of coyotes and their prey. They wouldn’t even smell us coming.

Coyotes do this thing where they’ll find stray dogs or family pets that had gotten left out overnight. They’ll yip and bark, pretending they want to play, like they just want to run and hunt with the poor dog they found. What they’re really doing, though, is getting the poor bastard out into the woods and away from a protected area, delivering him to the rest of the pack.

To my mind, it always just seemed so damned unfair. It was like picking on the kid at school who always showed up with second-hand clothes, or the one who stuttered.

What we did just somehow seemed more honest, I guess. We hunted, of course. We were wolves, after all. But we didn’t hunt like those bastards. We tracked our prey, wild prey that hadn’t been domesticated by humans, then ran them down and went for their throats. Especially when you considered what an elk’s antlers could do to even a shifter. Catch one of those in the side, and they hurt about as bad as I imagined a silver bullet would. Even a shifter didn’t recover from a natural wound that fast.

I trailed after Matt’s auburn form, leaping over deadfall trees, slipping beneath toppled logs, our claws clattering over rocky outcropping. A mile later, we were close enough that we could see them down in a hollow surrounded on all sides by trees and tumbled moss-covered boulders.

We spotted a poor, fluffy Labradoodle with a curly, sandy coat. He was so inbred he barely had any sense in his head as he trembled in fear at the center of a circle of growling, teasing coyotes that had decided to play with their food. He looked at them with his wide, frightened eyes, just like a cattle being led to slaughter.

Just a half-dozen bullies, that was all.

But damn, I hated bullies. Always had. Always would. It was probably why I got into my line of work, private security. Something about protecting smaller people from the big nasties always seemed right to me.

I turned to Matt, trying to see if he had a plan. He gave me a low, whining growl. He wanted to go right on in and cause a ruckus. Plan? Who needed a plan?

My lips pulled back from my white-fanged jaws in a grin. Right on. Before he could give me the say-so, I bolted down into the clearing, leaping from boulder to stone to boulder, without a warning bark or growl, my eyes dead set on the biggest of the bunch.

They heard my claws scrape on one of the boulders, spun to face me with a growl, their tails low as they tried to back out of my way and circle for defense.

I slammed into the largest, probably weighing in at damn near fifty pounds, with all two-hundred plus of mine in a crazed broadside.

He went spinning away, tail over snout, and collided with a far rock as I realized Matt hadn’t come down to join me yet. Despite my being alone, the smaller animals scattered like a flock of grackle.

I went for the closest, my white teeth flashing as I bit into a furry haunch, and ripped a chunk of furry, bleeding meat clean, tossing it to the side.

Two of the of them tried to circle behind me while another came right in, his teeth bared.

My hackles raised as I danced away to the side that would have made Ali himself proud. I lunged forward from my opponent’s slight flank, my jaws set right for her throat. It was too damn late to worry about covering my rear now. That’s what Matt was for, if his mangy ass ever got down here.

The coyote tried to twist out, behind me, the two that had circled around let out growls of surprise.

My teeth latched onto her throat and I applied deadly pressure and tore with a twist of my head. Blood sprayed my fur coat, trickling down my throat as I flung the dying animal away. I swung around and looked for my next target.

Matthew tussled with the two that had gotten behind me, his growls and yaps intermingling with their own like an Arkansas native’s family tree growing back on itself. His teeth flashed, his paws blurred, blood sprayed, and fur flew.

I lunged right in there with him, my taste for blood barely sated. I grabbed one by the scruff of its neck, caught the hard bone of its spine beneath the flesh, pulled it away from Matt, and snapped.

It dropped in a heap at my forepaws as I spun to find another.

There, another one. Its curly golden fur shining in the moonlight made it look just good enough to eat. Like a lamb or a woolly sheep, perfect for the taking.

I shook my head and cleared my thoughts, which sent some sense flooding back into my fuzzy brain. I couldn’t eat this poor guy, I realized. I wasn’t here fighting the coyotes just so I could have a shot at their prey. I looked around, saw the corpses littering the rock-encircled clearing, and smelled the blood already soaking the ground. We’d pretty much cleared the small pack, and left only a couple behind to run off with their tails tucked firmly between their legs like the beaten bullies they were.

The Labradoodle whimpered in fear, cowering as Matt came up beside me panting as warmly as a wolf the size of a pony could. The terror came off the poor dog as the tags on his collar glinted in the bone-pale moonlight. He wanted to know, would he be our next meal? Were we friends, like the coyote who’d tricked him had pretended to be? He cowered from us, unsure of what do, whining again as he backed away until his backside pressed into one the surrounding boulders.

I glanced at Matt and he gave me a little nod. We needed to take the poor guy home. There was no way he’d be able to do it safely on his own. But he wouldn’t trust us as wolves, either. Not with all the adrenaline pumping through his veins.

I whined low and slicked my ears back. I’d do it. I’d smelled the poor pup, he was my responsibility.

Matt gave me a wolf-grin and darted away from the clearing, eager to find his way back to the pack. He’d be able to track our scent back to where he’d left, and, from there, surely Peter and the rest had left a trail of fragrant liquid hints and body brushings against tree trunks for him to follow.

As my pack mate disappeared, I began my change.

My fur shrank within my skin, my ears became human, my bones and spine straightened and curved to a more a upright position as my muscles re-knit themselves into the shape of my normal human body. How it worked? I had no freaking clue.

A shifter lives as both man or woman, and wolf. I don’t know if it’s magic or if it’s just nature’s weird idea of evolution, but whatever we are, we’re neither human nor lupine. And we’ve been around for a long while, in almost all cultures. One way or another, as people spread out from the fertile crescent, we followed along and migrated right alongside them, dipping our toes into their genetic, primordial soup wherever we went, hiding our nature from all except our packs and the others like us who could simply smell the difference.

I groaned in lingering pain as the last of the transformation took place. If I went slow, it almost didn’t even hurt. Fast, though? That was a different story. Finally, though, I stood there on the clearing floor, pine needles and dirt crushed beneath my knees and palms, naked as the day I was born.

The lost dog whimpered in confusion, its fluffy tail wagging tentatively as he stepped towards me.

“Hey, boy,” I whispered, staying low as I stretched out a welcoming hand to him, shivering a little as the cool air drifted over my nude skin. “You wanna go home? Come here, boy.”

He panted and came forward within arm’s reach, unsure of himself at first until all I did was scratch his muzzle a little and reach up to get behind his ears and give him a good petting. As he stepped closer, I reached down and tilted his tag up. “Roscoe, huh? Pictured you more as a Benji.”

He licked my hand happily at the sound of his name, his tail wagging back and forth like a flag as I checked the address on his dog tag.

“Well, how about it, Rosco? You ready to go home to see your parents? Come on, then, let’s get you on home you little doggie.”

I stayed in my human form, padding through the forest naked with Roscoe by my side. As traumatized as the little guy might be, I didn’t want to make matters somehow worse by shifting and letting my wolf nature come back out. Besides, it was only a mile or so back to the address listed.

As we walked, I tested out commands on him.

“Sit, Roscoe.”

He sat.

“Who’s a good boy? You and I are. Aren’t we, Roscoe?”

Finally, we made it to his home, a nice, big four-bedroom cabin about half a mile from The Rock. I stepped up to the edge of the trees and peered through the limbs of pine and spruce. The place looked nice, cozy, and comfortable. The kind of place Roscoe could run during the day and curl up by a nice fire in the evening. I almost envied him a little when I saw the place.

Not because I wanted to kept like a dog by somebody. That would’ve just been weird.

But, instead, because I could tell from his coat and teeth, from his trimmed nails, that he was loved by his family, and he had a nice home to share with them. Yeah, I had a pack and all, but as I looked down at Roscoe’s happy face and wagging tail, I knew he had something I didn’t.

A pack, we’re like brothers and sisters. It’s not the same as fathers, mothers, and children. That’s what Roscoe had. Me? I had uncles.

I shivered against a gust of cool wind, the word resonating inside my head for a moment. Uncles.

“Come on, Roscoe,” I whispered. “Let’s wake your owners up, huh?”

Barefoot and naked, I tiptoed up to the front door of the house and ordered Roscoe to sit and stay. Then I pounded on the door. “Speak, Roscoe. Can you do that? Speak.”

Roscoe obeyed, his bark surprisingly deep and resonant.

“Speak, Roscoe!” I ordered again, backing away as the lights came on in the cabin and I stepped into the grass. “Speak!”

Roscoe barked again, his tail wagging uncontrollably.

“Good boy!” I hissed, laughing a little as I broke through the trees, the pine needles scratching and abrading my skin. “Stay!”

A middle-aged woman wearing a flannel robe and carrying a shotgun opened the front door as I disappeared from view of the cabin, and began to quickly shift back to my larger, furrier form. “Roscoe? Oh my God, is that you?”

The rapid change hurt like hell, but I knew I’d at least be able to sneak away in the darkness more effectively than I would if I was human.

“How did you—who was that knocking, boy? That couldn’t have been you, could it?”

Roscoe barked happily in response.

“Whoever you are,” called the woman. “Thank you for bringing my boy back home!”

Hidden further back in the trees now, my tongue lolled from my mouth again as I panted happily. Poor guy was back with his family. Even though I didn’t have one like his, with someone waiting up for me to get back from being lost, I was still glad for him.

No one needed to be without a family. Certainly not Roscoe, even if he was a labradoodle.

I turned back into the woods and headed off into the forest, loping through the bushes and brambles and over the mountainside to find the rest of my pack. Maybe they’d have picked up the trail of some prey, maybe not. But, whichever it was, they were the closest thing to family I had. Which was more than a lot of people can say.