“But they’ll cut off our heads.” Brandi, the oldest female in my pack wrung her hands together. “They call one of them the Wolf Killer. Deacon, I think was his name. Those Werewolves I met who aligned themselves with the scientists. They told me about it.”

I digested that information, keeping my face and my scent passive.

“I know Deacon Evans.” Somehow I couldn’t be surprised that he earned that title. If ever there was a person that I couldn’t stand it was Deacon. “But if he killed Werewolves like that, it was because they were threatening him. He has made no moves to become aggressive with me and he won’t with you. Remember we’re trying to be like the old days. We want to live in harmony, nearby the humans, and not fight with them unless we have to. They are not interested in causing us issue.” At least right now. “And they’re going to teach us some skills that frankly if we don’t get we’re going to die. That’s all there is to it. I’ll help them with this serious Vampire threat. It’ll all be okay. I promise. You wanted me to lead. This is how I do that.”

Brandi nodded and soon the others did, too.

I had to finish. “Gather up your things. We’re going to go, now.”

Forty souls who counted on me to know what the fuck I was doing. Not one of them had ever been able to tell me why. I’d been a teenager when last they’d known me and not a great one at that. Why had they wanted me back?

“Brandi.” I caught her attention and almost asked her. I’d wanted to know for so long and yet I could never bring myself to ask. What if the answer was we needed an Alpha and you were the only one with your DNA on file in the cloning machine? How would I deal with the randomness of that?

She was waiting for me to finish speaking so I quickly did. “Thanks for the question.”

She nodded, clearly pleased I’d singled her out. Internally, I sighed. I was glad she felt good from the attention, but boy was I bad at this if I was getting all worked up from even thinking about asking them a very basic question.

I shook my head. It didn’t matter. There were things to do. We needed to do them. Every day there was some right thing to do. If I kept walking the path I’d eventually get wherever I was going even if I didn’t know exactly what I would find there.

Our arrival at Genesis was done in the middle of the day just as everyone took a break for lunch. Or at least it felt that way. The council had said this would be fine, but the death glares we were getting from the group as we arrived told another story. The people didn’t want us here.

I stiffened my spine. That was fine. They could all kiss my ass. Who needed this shit anyway? They’d come to me and…

Margot’s scent wafted toward me, and I turned to regard her. She rushed to my side. “I was hoping you’d be here around now. I was going to worry something happened to you. How would I ever know if it did?” Her eyes widened, and she cleared her throat. “Sorry, that must sound… off.”

“I’d worry about you too if I couldn’t find you. How did they take the news about the nature of the daywalking Vamps?”

She scrunched up her face. “About as well as can be expected. Have they shown you where to settle in?”

A guard had pointed us in a general direction. “Sort of.”

Margot laughed. “No one pays that much attention to logistics around here. It took me almost twenty-four hours when I first got here to figure out where my tent was supposed to be. Follow me. I’ll show you. Your pack looks tired.”

“Yeah, well, we’re all actually really old. Hundreds of years when you stop to think about it. That virus halted our aging but maybe didn’t stop us from getting worn down.”

She nodded. “You look pretty young and fit to me, Jason. Body and soul.”

It was sort of amazing to be with Margot. She legitimately seemed to like being with me. The feeling was mutual. If I lost her friendship, even though I’d only had it such a short time, it really would be a hole in my life. I swallowed. Maybe I should start preparing for that hole because the universe really liked to fuck with me.

She took me to an area of tents where I guessed we were supposed to stay. They were sturdy looking structures, for being made to be temporary, and I remembered them from the last time I’d been in Genesis. I stepped inside the one designated for me. It wasn’t fancy, but for the first time in forever, I knew I wouldn’t get wet while I slept at night.

Margot followed me in and scrunched up her nose. “They gave you guys the old ones. I’m sorry. I’ll see if I can find better ones for you.”

I shook my head. “This is great. Seriously. That’s an actual bed.” It was really more of a cot, but I’d slept on the ground forever. “Thank you.”

She laid her hand on my arm. “Jason. I feel like you… like you don’t think you’re going to get to stay here long.”

“I’m not. The deal is I get the Vamp and you guys teach us to make houses. I can’t live here. I’m not human.”

Margot sat on the edge of my bed. It had a sheet someone had thrown on it, but it wasn’t made. “What is human anymore?”

“What do you mean?”

She leaned back, and I was given a good look for a second of her cleavage peaking out of her shirt. I swallowed, my cock suddenly coming to life for the first time since I was cloned. What in the hell? I had a mate. Granted, she rejected me, but Wolves didn’t react to anyone other than their mates after they met them. Margot was gorgeous, there was no doubt, but she wasn’t Rachel. I shouldn’t be noticing her sexually. Except I really, really was.

Margot was saying important things, and I really needed to listen. I nodded, like I was, even as I dragged my gaze away from her breasts to focus on her face. Her lips were moving. They were beautiful, puffy lips that I bet would look really hot if she pouted. I’d never seen her do that. She was more like a get busy doing lifesaving things kind of a woman. I would bet it was a rare day when she pulled a pout. But it would be sexy. Really, really hugely…

No, I had to stop this. It wasn’t helping. She was my friend. The first one I’d had in I didn’t know how long and I wasn’t going to fuck this up just because my libido had decided to break Wolf tradition and turn back on. I rubbed the back of my neck.

“We’ve altered the human genome. I mean, that’s really all it comes down to. Humans being born right now are quite altered from the version that were present when you were growing up.”

That sounded important. Damn it. I really had to get my head out of how lovely she was. She smelled good, too. Like roses. I loved it.

“I need to shift.” I blurted out so abruptly she lifted her eyebrows.

Margot sat up on the bed. “Are you okay?”

“Sure.” The biggest problem was that I was in a close radius to forty Wolves that would be able to scent exactly what was wrong with me. They’d be like a group of gossips chatting away if I let them really get a hold of the fact that their Alpha was suddenly turned on.

I stepped outside. The best thing to do was to shift and run the heck out of here for a while but that wasn’t convenient in the middle of Genesis. The last thing I wanted to do was scare the general population and get us thrown out of here before we had a chance to learn what we needed. Margot was so brilliant. She and the others would figure out something in relation to the original Vamps without me. They only thought they needed my help, they didn’t really.

I bent over and gripped onto my knees. I had to just breathe. When I’d been younger I’d have shifted without control just because I was worked up. There were benefits to getting older.

“Jason?” Margot was right behind. “Are you okay? Did I do something?”

I shook my head. “You did nothing.” Except have really beautiful breasts. Shit. “Sorry. Just having a moment.”

“Anything I can do?”

I lifted my head to look at her. “No. Thanks for just being you, Margot.”

Color crossed her cheeks. “No one has ever said that to me before.”

I wished I could make her some kind of promise or at least tell her what had just happened to me. I’d love to just say Margot, I think you’re beautiful. But I didn’t understand any of this. It really wasn’t possible. Maybe I was officially losing my mind.

“Hey,” a voice called out, Deacon Evans catching both of our attention. If I hadn’t half lost my marbles I’d have smelled him before he arrived.

“Hey yourself.” Surliness dripped through my tone, and I didn’t care to fix it in the least. This wasn’t a great moment for me. The last thing I needed was Deacon. My hearing dinged as my pack whispered their discomfort. There was nothing like a bunch of intimidated beta Wolves to make the Alpha twitchy. Usually, it wasn’t the majority of the pack.

Deacon raised his brows. “Something wrong? Thought we could go over what should happen tonight.”

Margot placed a steadying hand on my arm. It cooled my blood just a little bit, which was interesting since the rest of me was on high alert thanks to her presence. I was such a mess. Did most people have this shit under control by their early twenties?

“I hear they call you the Wolf Killer.”

He looked down at the ground, a waft of shame hitting me before he closed off his emotions. Interesting. Deacon Evans wasn’t so proud of what he’d done. “That day got out of control. To be fair, they attacked us. We were going to die. I did what I had to do. Granted I did it with fanfare that was likely not needed. I didn’t want a reputation, and I’m not trying to live up to it.”

“Are we going to have a problem? Because if we are, I’ll take my people and go. I think we can be mutually beneficial to each other, but I won’t put them at risk if you suddenly find yourself out of control.”

Deacon’s eyes flared with heat. “I’ve grown up. It seems that you have, too. We’re not the same people we were back then. I mean, I don’t know if you’re still obsessed with Rachel but I’m married to a great woman. I think we should all move forward here.” The slightest smirk touched his mouth. Whatever else he was saying he was still Deacon Evans, just an older version. “And if you’re not a total ass, I won’t cut off your head.”

“As if you could.” My temper flared to life. Margot was standing right next to me. How dare he insinuate the utter untruth that he could in anyway cut off my head in front of her? “If you’re not a total dick, I won’t eat your spleen.”

“Okay.” Margot stepped between us, her back to me. “That’s enough. I’m sure you’re both capable of harming the other one. The key here is that you won’t. That’s really the most pressing point you’re both making. And it’s a good one. Because we have daywalking original Vampires to deal with and I’d rather handle before one of you kills the other. Got it?”

I clenched my jaw so tightly it ached. Still, I nodded. “Sure.”

Deacon nodded. “Fine.”

I hated this day.

I hadn’t really given any thought to when I would see Rachel Clancy again. I knew it would happen, and I’d braced myself for the idea that it would be a special kind of hell before I’d put the thought away and refused to deal with it again.

The truth was I scented her in the conference room before I walked into it. Her scent, familiar in the same way a smell would be if I suddenly encountered my mother cooking oatmeal raisin cookies, hit me hard. Childhood and a time long gone were visceral memories that still lived in the forefront of my mind, even in as much as I tried to deny their constant importance.

I stepped into the room behind Margot and met the gazes of everyone inside, including the redhead I used to be in love with. I expected to be overwhelmed, to have my mating urges surge back to life but both of those things had happened earlier—with Margot.

Rachel looked much as I imagined she would. She was a little bit older and loaded with the scent of breeding that came with being pregnant. Her hair was longer, her cheeks rounder, and her emotions hidden behind a skeptical, hooded, intense glower she sent me from her place seated between Chad and a guy who I thought was named Glen. He and I hadn’t had much to do with one another. I thought he was with Chad’s sister Tia but maybe that was long over. I couldn’t keep track of who was with who. Or if I could, I really didn’t have any interest in doing so.

The Genesis drama could stay just that, Genesis drama. I had my own pack issues to handle. Like how we were going to make it more easily through the next winter.

But the truth was that I was fine. I wasn’t suddenly filled with rage. I didn’t want to drag her out of there and demand that she was mine. I had no strong feelings toward her at all. No more than I would anyone else who clearly disliked me and didn’t want me in the room with her.

I turned slightly to stare at the twenty so people who waited for me to say something or, I suspected, to do something weird in relation to Rachel. Well, maybe nineteen of them did. Chad Lyons was once again giving me no reading at all. He didn’t seem the least bit concerned. Why was that?

I guessed it didn’t matter.

“I don’t suppose any of you thought you’d see me again. Sorry, the Wolf couldn’t stay dead. Then again, I think I have Micah to thank for that so I guess maybe I should be thanking you.”

Micah pointed at a chair at the edge of the long table. “Sit.”

I pretended to pant. “I don’t take directions like a lap dog.”

Chad cleared his throat. “What my brother meant was would you please take a seat, Jason?”

Margot slipped into a seat, and I took the one next to her. After a minute of uncomfortable silence, Tiffani spoke. “We’re all here because basically we’re fucked. All of us. I’ve been sitting with this since Margot delivered the news, and I think that these guys, these things that give my nightmares’ nightmares have been sent out now because we made too much headway. These are the monsters that took down civilization. There’s no way we beat them back.”

Margot spoke quickly. “I’m going to have to disagree on some of it. Your main points are valid, of course. But I think it’s not true that we have no chance against them. We have one huge advantage that they didn’t have back then. Or that you all didn’t have back then. Sorry, sometimes I get confused about the fact that some of you were there then.”

Jason waved his hand. “That’s okay, Margot. The timelines of all the people in this room are so screwed up even I can hardly keep track of them. What advantage do we sitting here in this relatively primitive society have over the way the world was the first time these guys were unleashed?”

She didn’t hesitate. “We know about them.”

I leaned forward. “Go on.”

“I wasn’t there. I wish I had been. It would have been so interesting to have seen some of the things you guys have seen and done some of the things you have, but I can’t time travel so I just have to go with what I’ve read. You weren’t living in a time that gave a lot of credence to monsters. Oh sure, you saw them on television and in the movies. Maybe books. Scary stories. Cartoons. Those kinds of things.”

She wasn’t wrong, and I loved listening to her vocalize the thoughts in her mind. Had anyone ever been more interesting than Margot?

“Your monsters were people, sort of. The Dr. Icahn and Doubledays of the world.”

I placed my hand on her knee before I could overthink it. Every time she had to speak of Doubleday her scent let off the briefest hint of pain. I hated it. I’d do anything for her not to have to feel that way.

“They did unspeakable things. No one expected there to be an uprising of Vampires. No one was looking for daywalking bloodsucking virus bringing scary things to be roaming around Trenton, New Jersey making most people turn into an altered version of them.”

She’d just told me something I never knew. “Trenton? Is that where it started?”

Margot chewed on her bottom lip. “Yes, that’s readily thought ground zero for the mess. Now we know why. Those things. We know about them. We know to expect them. Whatever else they can do—daylight or whatever—they’re still Vampires, right? They’re not omnipresent deities from another galaxy bent on world domination. They have to be fed, they have to be controlled. We know who does that and her name is Doubleday. We need to capture one to study it. That hasn’t changed. Other than that, what we need to do is stalk them until we find out where they are meeting Doubleday for the injections that keep them in line. That’s how we’ll decide what to do next.”

Jason looked at Rachel whose eyes were wide. It was she who answered. “I’m not in charge nor would I want to be but that sounds like a great idea, Margot. The first person with any sense of anything to do. Thank you.”

She nodded. “It’s nothing, really. Just a thought. I’m sure others have ideas, too.”

Rachel shook her head. “Sounds like they don’t.”

Margot took my hand, still on her knee, and squeezed it.

Chad rose. “Then we get about capturing the Vampire.”

I stood. “That’s me.”

“What do you need?” Rachel’s husband was obviously the leader here.

“Space.” I’d get this done. One way or another. They wanted an original. They’d get one.

I shifted into my Wolf body and stood waiting on Micah’s perch, the spot on the wall where he observed the darkness, keeping Genesis safe. He stood next to me, staring down. Having the good sense not to try to speak, he wasn’t a bother. Everyone else stayed a distance back in the main part of Genesis. This was Micah’s domain. I knew better than to ask him to leave it.

Even though, I preferred to be alone.

I wished there was someone I could ask where my Wolf thoughts had fled. I thought too clearly like this now. I couldn’t get lost in myself, and I was going to miss that sensation. It had been nice to be able to go away from this world for a while and just exist when needed.

Now I had to think like myself even in my fur. Oh well, I could still fight like a Wolf and for this I would take it. My nose picked up the scent of others in the distance. I rose from my sitting position to stare down.

Micah shifted, his hand on his stake. He’d have to be a lot closer than he was going to get to use that thing on an original, if they would work at all, but I supposed old habits died hard. There was a Vampire out there. He’d fight it, even if it killed him.

He looked over his shoulder behind him and nodded. His wife was somewhere around. She smelled human to me, mostly. There was something other about her, too, but not enough that she set off any internal alarms. If it wouldn’t have been horribly rude I’ve had sniffed at her a bit to figure out her scent. I wasn’t going to get to do that.

And it didn’t matter now because those original fangs were getting closer and there was more than one. If my nose was right, and it almost always was, then there were two of them. One had done damage to me the last time I’d encountered them. Two could be deadly, except I planned on being more prepared.

They came out of the tree line, gliding more like snakes than men. Their red eyes stared up at us in the dark of the night. They knew we were there, and we knew they knew. They didn’t have to care about nighttime or the moon or anything else that might affect an undead. They were here before dawn because that was when they had come. They could have been here at noon. It didn’t matter.

Now was the time of our fight so now was when it would happen. I didn’t determine these things. I just lived through them, if I was lucky.

My mind wandered for half a second to Margot. I hoped she was safe, staying where she was supposed to for now, and that if this turned ugly she’d remember our brief acquaintance well. I hoped she didn’t mind I’d stuck my hand on her knee…

I leapt forward, off the perch and down onto the Vamp on the left. I only needed one alive. The other had to be destroyed. It made a hissing noise as we struggled for survival. I ripped out its throat and still it hung onto me, biting into my flesh before it finally died. The son-of-a-bitch had gotten a lot of good tears at me and sunk its fangs into my neck.

I growled. I was going to get sick again like the last time and that fucking sucked. Genesis better teach my people how to make some damned good houses. I leapt on number two. I couldn’t kill it. That was going to be trickier.

That was where Micah would come in handy. He jumped down, a net in the hand where he’d wrongly taken out the stake earlier. That was okay. He’d remembered the plan. I knocked Fang Boy to the ground, and he threw the net around it, managing to avoid being swiped at while he tied the end of the net together. I grabbed onto the knot, barely giving Micah enough time to get out of the way.

“Shit, Jason. I’m moving. Not all of us have super human speed.”

For the briefest of seconds I could see myself as some kind of superhero. That was funny. I’d be Wolf Boy or something ridiculous. Nah, that image didn’t work. I’d only ever be me. I dragged the spitting Vampire through the door in Micah’s wall.

Margot needed this Vamp. She’d get him.