Casey did not feel inspired to punch Adam—he wasn’t exactly being surly—but his protective alpha side was definitely out on display as Casey got some soothing salve for his hand. It didn’t let up the whole time they ate lunch with the Hathaway midwives, plus Greg and Ray.

Casey considered pointing it out to him, but immediately realized that it would only make everything worse. Adam would feel bad about being steered by his alpha instincts and get angry with the Hathaways for it, or decide all over again that Casey must stay away from him for his own good.

Probably both.

As it was, Casey was focusing very intently on not touching his belly, for a dozen reasons. They were in the place where Adam had grown up; whatever happened today was bound to color how Adam felt about the little spark of possibility tucked away inside Casey. And Casey had, without thinking about it beyond a normal caution, touched a strange varietal of wolfsbane—one that was obviously extraordinarily toxic to him, even if no one in the Hathaway pack had such a strong reaction to it.

The burn was superficial. It wouldn’t have reached his bloodstream, and the little maybe-or-maybe-not in his belly hadn’t even been there long enough to implant, so nothing in his bloodstream could reach it yet anyway. If he didn’t turn out to be pregnant, a week or two from now when it would be possible to actually tell for sure, this little brush with wolfsbane would be no more responsible than all the—entirely necessary—medication he’d actually ingested over the last couple of months and the last twenty years.

Still. It took a lot of concentration not to cup his hand to his belly, like shielding a candle flame in a wintry wind. He ate lunch, and kept up a polite and friendly conversation that he had almost no memory of even while it was happening, let alone afterward. They talked about wolfsbane, he thought, and his compounding work, and Adam’s survey.

Adam said something offhand—Casey had heard him say it any number of times before, so it might not even have been aimed in particular at this audience—about continuing his dad’s work. He stopped short after the words were out of his mouth, and Greg gave him an odd look, but said, “He’d be proud of you, Adam.”

Adam dropped his gaze and didn’t speak much after that; Casey turned up his own conversational autopilot from friendly among strangers to hold attention at all costs.

They got through lunch without anything happening to disturb the careful peace, but promptly afterward, Adam turned to his father and said, “You mentioned going over to the house?”

Greg glanced at Casey, looking very much like he meant to ask what Casey would be doing while he and Adam went and had whatever excruciating and possibly violent long-overdue talk they were about to have. Adam shifted his weight toward Casey, and Casey took the cue, sliding his arm through Adam’s and smiling sunnily.

Greg nodded faintly, obviously giving up, and said, “Yeah, of course. We can go now, I turned the heat up this morning. Should be all right now.”

Adam nodded stiffly and steered Casey toward their coats and the door; Casey exchanged an apologetic look with the midwives they were so abruptly departing from. Their return looks were sympathetic.

Once they were in the car and on the road, and thus had slightly more actual auditory privacy than they’d get anywhere else, Casey said, “You want me with you for this.”

It wasn’t a question; Adam’s intention there was perfectly clear.

“He wants to tell me why he burned my dad’s work,” Adam said, looking straight ahead with more concentration than the straight, clear gravel road really required. “He says it wasn’t all of it, that there’s still stuff left, but he had to destroy some of it.”

Casey winced, considering what that might mean, either about Adam’s dad or about his father.

“Also,” Adam said, “I don’t think I’ve been back in my dad’s lab since my father dragged me away from his body, and I have a feeling that’s—”

“Wait,” Casey said. “Adam, were you—did you see?”

Adam glanced over sharply at him, then focused on the road again. “He tried to make me leave. I wasn’t even supposed to be there, he’d sent me out of the house for some reason, but I came back. It wasn’t even that I knew something was wrong, I was just trying to be quick about whatever errand he sent me on, and I fell. Skinned my knees, ripped my pants.”

Adam’s jaw worked for a moment, and Casey had absolutely no idea what was going to come out of his mouth next. He barely breathed, waiting for it.

“Dad wasn’t the type to hug me and fuss over stuff like that, but he was usually good for cleaning it out and making detailed observations of the healing process, so I wanted to show him. I had a data point to offer him. I remember... when he was telling me to get out and leave him alone, I kept telling him that. It’s a data point, we need to make observations right now.”

Adam fell silent for a moment, then said, “I didn’t know I remembered that. I hadn’t thought about that part in a long time. The—right before.”

Casey struggled to control his own breathing and heartbeat; Adam’s were too steady, his calm too much like shock.

“He used a scalpel,” Adam said evenly. “Silver-plated, dipped in some kind of wolfsbane solution. So it couldn’t heal. Although the throat is pretty reliable even for werewolves.”

“Adam,” Casey said, his voice coming out harsh. “Stop.”

Adam’s mouth snapped shut and he looked over at Casey; whatever he saw made him understand what Casey had actually meant, and he pulled over, pressing Casey’s side of the car almost into the banked snow beside the road.

So much for leaning out to puke, Casey thought a little wildly, and went for the other option: he grabbed Adam and hauled him into a fierce hug, pressing his face against Adam’s throat and panting against his skin with the effort of not screaming or being sick.

“Hey,” Adam said softly, his arms going tentatively around Casey. “Hey, it’s—I’m sorry, Case, I shouldn’t—”

“No,” Casey snarled. “No. Don’t you apologize, just fucking let me hug you.”

Adam drew a breath in like he was going to say something, and then let it back out and tightened his arms around Casey.

It took a while, but the first tide of reaction passed, and Casey managed to calm himself down without just forcing his body quiet. He let himself melt a little against Adam. Adam’s grip eased in instant reaction, but he didn’t let go.

“Okay,” Casey said. “Okay. I want you to undergo a therapeutic course of minimum one hour of hugging per day for the rest of your life plus talking this out at some point in the future, but... okay.”

Adam laughed a little. “That’s your professional evaluation?”

“Feel free to get a second opinion,” Casey said, pulling back and settling in his own seat again, wiping his face with the heels of his hands and drying them against his jeans. “But yeah.”

“I love you.”

Casey wasn’t even looking when Adam said it; his head whipped around, his heart doing something painful and sweet at the same time.

Adam looked a little less lost in his own worst memories, but no less raw and vulnerable, his lips still parted like the words had left a crack.

Casey became aware, after some time, of his pulse beating in his ears in the silence. He hadn’t said anything. He had stopped breathing again.

“Yeah,” he said blankly, and then closed his eyes and covered them with one hand. “Fuck. That’s not what I meant to say. I love you too, you just—someday you gotta learn about spacing this shit out, Adam, this is too much.”

“Well, you can tell me about it while you’re hugging me for an hour tonight,” Adam said wryly. “I... shouldn’t apologize, should I?”

“Only if you didn’t mean it,” Casey said, lowering his hand so he could glare properly. “You’re fucking bad at this, okay, but obviously so am I, so it’s just as well we’re stuck with each other.”

Adam’s lips twitched toward a smile but didn’t quite make it. “Harm reduction for the rest of the population, huh?”

Casey nodded and rubbed his eyes again. “Okay. We should probably go, because the sooner you get re-traumatized the sooner I can stuff you in the car and take you away from all this.”

“Well,” Adam said, glancing around and pulling back out onto the narrow road. “When you say it like that, it sounds like a bad idea.”

Casey glared at his profile. “I realize that it was my idea, but to be fair I didn’t know exactly what it meant for you to go back to your childhood home. Also, I have tons of bad ideas.”

“Oh, well, you—”

Adam cut off as the car came around a curve and a single house became visible, with its porch light shining and smoke rising from the chimney. It looked ordinary, and, in a way Casey couldn’t quite put his finger on, human. It had neatly painted white wooden siding and green shutters, and looked like it belonged anywhere along the county roads they’d been driving more than it belonged with the houses clustered together on the pack lands. He was reminded of the street David lived on, the omega who’d made a point of moving fifty miles away from the pack he was born to.

They pulled up into the space obviously cleared for a car, and Greg stepped out onto the porch.

Casey squeezed Adam’s hand and led the way again, getting out without hesitating. Adam’s protective instincts were apparently still in action, because Casey didn’t even get to the first porch step before Adam was at his side, curling an arm around him.

Greg didn’t say anything, just stepped back to let Adam steer Casey inside. Only when the door was shut behind him did he say,

“Adam, I... I’m not going to second-guess you if you want Casey here, but there’s a reason I wanted to talk about this away from everyone else.”

“I already told him,” Adam said shortly. “Dad’s work, that you had to destroy. Why don’t we go in the lab, really get the whole experience?”

Greg’s lips parted and his hands twitched, and Casey realized that even if Adam’s dad hadn’t been the type to hug and fuss over an upset child, Adam’s father was. Casey recognized the frustrated urge to Fix It, preferably while scent-marking, from seeing it so often on Alpha Niemi.

It also occurred to Casey that he was alone with two alphas, one he’d never met before just now, and not reacting to either of their scents other than his profound urge to wrap Adam in blankets and take him away from here. Did that mean that he could finally hug Alpha, when he went home? He craved it suddenly, as fiercely as Greg could possibly want to hug his son.

“Hey,” Casey said softly, twisting in the curve of Adam’s arm. He threw his arms around Adam, tugging him close, and pressed his cheek to Adam’s shoulder while making an apologetic face at Greg.

Greg smiled sadly, nodding, and gestured toward a doorway before he walked away in that direction.

Adam submitted to being hugged for all of forty-five seconds, but that was forty-five seconds he spent not starting a huge fight with his father or having a breakdown about his dad.

“Does it smell like you remember?” Casey asked when Adam pulled back, before Adam could say anything.

Adam frowned, looking around as he sniffed the air, but he shook his head without hesitation. “No, it’s... Dad’s scent is gone. And it’s been redecorated. It just smells like... new things.”

The front room had a couch and easy chairs in bright colors that hardly looked as if they’d ever been sat on, little pillows aligned neatly at each corner. There was a coffee table without so much as a candy dish on it, let alone a normal accumulation of dishes, books, and small projects set down and forgotten.

“Well,” Casey said. “That makes sense, if no one really lives here now.”

Adam looked around then, set his jaw, and headed in the direction his father had gone. Casey was on his heels, and wound up plastered against his back when Adam stopped short in a doorway.

Casey peeked past him and found he was looking into a sunny room, built as a projection from the back of the house so that it had windows on three sides. The floor was honey-colored wood, softened here and there with rugs, and low bookcases, every inch filled, ran under all the windows. On the interior wall there was a woodstove to one side, and on the other side was something like a kitchenette, a counter over cupboards with a deep sink in the middle.

The walls above the counter were covered in framed photos. For a dizzy instant Casey saw Adam-but-with-black-hair beaming and holding a newborn, and then reality took hold. That was Greg, holding Adam probably less than an hour after he was born; next to that was Greg with a big blond omega who had to be Adam’s dad, maybe the next day. Adam had turned pink instead of red and was slightly unfurled.

There was a picture of the mates together, standing with arms around each other’s waists and grinning at the camera. Daryl was close to Greg’s height, with a sturdy build. There would have been no hint of his omega destiny—his omega genetics, Casey supposed—in his human appearance.

Casey dragged his eyes from that photo to one of Adam as a toddler, beaming from where he was tucked in between his parents, his face smeared with chocolate; a fluffy wolf pup with a perfectly unharmed Dr. Seuss book in his teeth, tail in mid-wave; Adam at five or six, his sandy blond hair a riot of curls to rival Casey’s own, sitting across a chess board from his dad and frowning in thought.

“You took out the tile,” Adam said, and Casey looked down and saw that Adam hadn’t put a toe down on the shiny wood floor.

“Yeah,” Greg said. “Couldn’t stop scrubbing it, I always thought the scent was still there. The old benches, too. This used to be,” he gestured at the open middle of the room, meeting Casey’s eyes. “A couple of big lab benches. Burners, fume hoods, the whole thing. It was half the reason we built our own house way out here—partly Dare didn’t like knowing everybody could hear us all the time, but also he needed space for a real lab for his job, and we didn’t want the smell bothering everybody else. Or the possibility of him blowing the place up.”

Adam tensed, finally taking a step inside to press the argument. “His job? What job?”

Greg frowned. “What, you think the pack would’ve looked at an ABD in biochemistry and left it lying fallow? You think he and I could afford to put that lab together and keep it equipped for fun? He did a lot of soil chemistry work, crop analysis, maximizing yields and identifying the best stuff to grow—for a lot of other packs, too. Earned the pack a lot of credit. And he had paying work with the county extension from time to time.”

“ABD,” Adam repeated. “You—you said you hoped I’d like grad school better than he did.”

Greg nodded, grimacing. “He hated all the politics of it. And he couldn’t tell anyone he was gay, or that we were dating, and he hated the idea of another thirty years of that. He jumped at the chance for practical work. We burned the last draft of his dissertation—”

Greg seemed to remember what Adam had wanted to know about in the first place, and stopped short, fond recollection fading to grief again.

Casey hugged Adam from behind, leaning heavily against his back, his face tucked between Adam’s shoulder blades. He could feel the thump of Adam’s heart against his lips, and Adam’s deep, deliberate breath pushed against Casey’s arms.

Adam tugged on his wrist, and Casey allowed himself to be moved, stepping up to Adam’s side.

“So?” Adam said, hardening his voice with an effort that was obvious to Casey. “What was it that you had to tell me, that no one else could hear? What else did you burn?”

Greg looked at Casey again, hesitating, and then sighed. “There’s not that much to tell, really, and I probably shouldn’t tell you at all, but I want you to understand. He had all these papers, notebook after notebook about this secret project of his—he had samples. He was trying to cure himself.”

Casey frowned. “His depression? That’s—”

Greg looked down, shaking his head. “Of lycanthropy.”

Casey blinked, looking from Greg, whose face was almost entirely hidden, to Adam’s, utterly still.

“He was bitten,” Casey said, because someone had to break the silence and he didn’t think it was going to be either of them. “And he, what, he got fixated on that as the cause of his unhappiness, maybe because he became an omega and that’s a big change, and...”

Adam looked up at the ceiling. “Casey, did you know I work for the federal government?”

Casey blinked at the non sequitur. “Uh. I mean, I know you work for the National Institutes of Health, you say so on all the forms. It’s not exactly the CIA.”

“It’s called the Lycanthropic Research Division,” Adam said, still not looking down. “We still get protesters, now and then. People who think that the government wants to wipe werewolves out, that all research on werewolves must be ultimately a weapon humans are going to use against werewolves.”

“Oh,” Casey said. “Shit.”

Because how better to wipe out werewolves than to turn them human? Call it a cure; stick everyone not cured in camps and call it quarantine.

It was the kind of thing Casey had heard people whisper about during the years of the Revelation. The borders of the pack territory had been actively patrolled back then, and the Midwives’ House had doubled as a kindergarten so kids who might otherwise have started going to public school wouldn’t have to until things were settled. Casey had been homeschooled anyway, so it hadn’t made much difference to him except that the house was noisier, and he spent an hour or two each day helping with art projects or reading stories.

But that was a long time ago; there were laws now. There were known werewolves in the military, in police forces. In Congress. And nothing like that had ever happened—individual hunters had harassed and killed werewolves, but not the government. Sheer boredom had made most people give up those theories if nothing else would.

But if there was a way to do it, to turn a werewolf human...

“It’s exactly the kind of thing I’m constantly reassuring people I’m not doing—except on this project the Niemi pack did the reassuring for me. You do it, just by standing next to me.” Adam said, lowering his gaze, and his expression turned a little pleading, his voice smaller. “But, Pa, he had to—he had to only mean it for himself, didn’t he?”

“Of course,” Greg said, while Casey filed away that Pa. He didn’t think Adam was aware he’d said it, but he doubted Greg had missed it.

“You were in his lab every day and never got sick. If he thought it was better for everyone to be human rather than a werewolf, he would have tried to—” Greg’s voice failed for a moment, and he pressed one hand to his eyes. “To save you. And if he thought of it as a way to hurt werewolves, as angry and scared as he got with me sometimes, especially at the end... he would have tried it on me. But he only ever tested it on himself.”

Greg lowered his hand and looked up, meeting Adam’s gaze, squaring his shoulders. “He realized it couldn’t work, about three weeks before he—before he died. And that was—I didn’t know why, but he got bad then. Couldn’t get out of bed. And I should’ve—I should’ve just scooped him up right then and taken him up to Manitoba, just stuck him and you in the car and gone, but I thought there was time—I had no idea he hated it so much, being—”

Greg’s voice cracked and he turned away, staring out the windows.

He was the one who had bitten his mate, turned him, so that they could be together. They had built this house, this room, so Adam’s dad could be happy, a scientist and a werewolf and a parent all at the same time. And he’d used this space to try to destroy that, and in the end he had.

Casey squeezed Adam’s hand. Adam was just staring at his father, and didn’t seem to notice at all.

“But you,” Adam said, sounding lost. “If it didn’t work...”

Greg’s shoulders jerked, and he turned back to face them. “It didn’t work,” he agreed. “On him. The way he did it. But he always used to say, you know. A negative result is still a result. A failed experiment still teaches you something. If anybody could look at his research and figure out where he went wrong, if his work led to more...”

He shook his head, looking haunted. He had to have been considering those awful possibilities for the last sixteen years.

“I didn’t want you to see that your dad was working on that,” Greg said quietly. “And I couldn’t risk the possibility of anyone else seeing it. They would have believed the worst. And if anyone outside the pack saw it, if they even knew it existed, there’s no way I could be sure that it wouldn’t be misused.”

Casey looked over at Adam, but he was staring out the window, laser-focused on one spot in the backyard like he was trying to set it on fire with his mind. After a few seconds he jerked his gaze to Greg and said, “You said... some of his stuff is here?”

The rigid, desperate control was as loud as a shout in his voice, his scent, his posture. He stood there, stiff as ice, like he would break at a touch—but he still held on to Casey’s hand.

“Yeah,” Greg took a key from his pocket and gestured to the cupboards in the corner. “I packed it up before I went up north, and the stuff that—that I thought you might want, it’s all there.”

Adam didn’t immediately reach for the key, his gaze settling on the row of cupboards. “I came and looked, when—when you were gone. There was nothing here, and I thought you must have...” Adam closed his eyes, his shoulders sagging. “That’s why I... that’s what I wanted from the greenhouse. I knew he worked with wolfsbane—not the stuff he smoked, the stuff he had in the lab—and I wanted to find some that smelled like what I remembered. His scent was fading out of the clothes of his that I’d kept, and...”

Casey looked at Greg with an effort, and didn’t let himself look away from the expression on his face. Casey had coached plenty of people through the worst pain of their lives, but when he did it there was usually something they were working toward. He didn’t know where this could end, or how this could ever be healed.

Greg turned his stricken gaze to Casey after a few seconds, and held out the key. Casey kept his grip on Adam’s hand firm and stepped forward to take it.

“The house is yours, Adam,” Greg said quietly. “I never moved back here after you left. People stayed, once in a while when there was a need, but it’s always been yours. If you want to burn the place down or sell it back to the pack, that’s your decision, but... I hoped someday you’d like to have a place to stay here, once in a while.”

The muscle of Adam’s jaw tensed and relaxed and Adam said, “I can’t decide anything now.”

Greg nodded. “Whatever you want to take, however long you need.” He hesitated another excruciating few seconds and then said, “I love you, Ad. I’m so happy you came.”

Adam closed his eyes, and Greg didn’t wait for a reply, just stepped around Casey and walked out. Casey listened to him walk through a kitchen Casey hadn’t seen and out a back door; a moment later a snowmobile engine started up. They both stood still, listening to it pull away.

“We used to get snowed in here,” Adam said, barely above a whisper. “For days, sometimes. We didn’t mind. We were a little pack of three, and Papa kept the pantry and the woodpile stocked up. If the electricity went out, they let me sleep between them, in their bed.”

Casey squeezed his hand gently to show he was listening, and waited for Adam to talk himself out.

“The road that comes out here, it doesn’t really go anywhere else. It was always the last priority for getting cleared. It takes hours, even with a plow.”

Casey thought of the high snowbanks to either side of the narrow road. Cleared just for them—for Adam—when no one could even have been sure they were coming, let alone coming out to this house.

Adam cleared his throat, a rough sound that managed to be more of a cough than a sob. “It was easier just—hating him. He was bad and Dad was good and everything was his fault and none of it was Dad’s, and...”

Adam’s shoulders jerked, and Casey took a cautious half step closer. That was enough; Adam grabbed him like a lifeline, like Adam was lost in a blizzard and Casey could lead him home. Casey closed his fist tightly around the key and put his arms around Adam, leaning into him and waiting for the storm to pass.

He didn’t cry properly; for all Adam detested alphas, he certainly was one. He probably couldn’t cry, unless he was drugged to the gills or otherwise pushed cruelly past his endurance, but his breathing went ragged and harsh, and he breathed his dry sobs against Casey’s hair.

It didn’t last long; he stilled after a minute, taking careful breaths, regulating himself again. He didn’t let go of Casey, kept his face down against Casey’s hair.

“I can’t,” Adam said quietly. “I can’t look in there, Case. It’s—I thought there was nothing, I thought—and now...”

Casey squeezed him tighter. “If you could have one thing of your dad’s, what would you want? Nothing too big, we’re running out of room in the car. Although—never mind, anything you want. We’ll make room.”

Adam swallowed, a shiver wracking him that traveled through him and into Casey. “Just... a notebook. He had these lab notebooks, graph paper on the inside, with hard cloth covers. P—my father gave him a stack every year in a different color, for Solstice. Dad wrote all kinds of stuff in them, doodled... any of those. I don’t care which one. Just one. Just... his writing, his scent on the page.”

“Okay,” Casey said, and pulled back with an effort. He didn’t look directly at Adam’s face, which was still crumpled and half-averted. “You go out to the car. I’ll come join you in a minute, okay?”

Adam closed his eyes and nodded, and after a few seconds he turned on his heel and walked out, nearly running.

When the front door slammed behind him, Casey turned to the cupboards. He unlocked the first door, hoping Greg had been at least a little methodical about the packing, and breathed a sigh of relief. Inside were two heavy waxed-cardboard packing boxes, one labeled CLOTHES + ADAM BABY STUFF and the other labeled GLASSWARE.

Casey relocked that cupboard and tried the next; the bottom box was labeled BOOKS, but the top one was labeled NOTEBOOKS. Casey pulled it out and opened it up to reveal stacks of slim hardbound books with LABORATORY NOTES and DJV embossed on the cover, each sealed in its own plastic bag. He took the top one and set it on the counter before he sealed the box up and put it back, locking the cupboard and pocketing the key.

Then he pulled his phone out and took a picture of each photo displayed on the walls. He couldn’t physically take them with him right now, but there was no way he was leaving them behind entirely.

When Casey stepped out the front door, the car was running, warming up.

Adam was sitting in the passenger seat.

Casey took a breath—he wasn’t going to cry if Adam wasn’t—and hurried down to the driver’s side. Adam had his eyes closed and his head tipped back, but his heart was still thundering, his hands in fists on his knees, which were bent up at an uncomfortable-looking angle. The passenger seat couldn’t be moved back without extensively restructuring the contents of the back seat.

“Here,” Casey said, tapping the notebook against Adam’s stomach.

He jerked, closing his body around it like a bear trap, and Casey turned his attention to adjusting the seat and mirrors while Adam got past that particular adrenaline spike.

“Medium blue,” Adam said. “I was... five or six, I think.”

Casey made a noncommittal noise that hopefully didn’t reveal how desperately relieved he was that he hadn’t grabbed something from the year Adam’s dad killed himself—although maybe all of those had been burned. He backed out of the parking spot and pulled back on to the gravel road. “Where to?”

“Do we have to...”

Casey pictured attempting to carry out the formal politeness of a stop to say goodbye. Even if Adam stayed in the car, Casey didn’t think he would be able to carry it off any better himself.

“Right,” Casey said, and passed his phone to Adam. “Next stop, Grays Inn, Bismarck. You can navigate.”

“Thanks,” Adam said dryly, after a few seconds’ pause, but he took Casey’s phone and put in their destination.

Grays Inn was a chain hotel, catering to werewolves and to humans who realized that a hotel that could satisfy a werewolf’s needs for cleanliness and quiet was worth having werewolves in the next room. It wasn’t as if you could hear or smell them, after all.

Casey had lost his virginity—to another omega—in a Grays Inn in Rochester. He had fond associations with the name, and the understated sign, and the utterly blank smell of the thoroughly soundproofed rooms.

The smell didn’t stay blank; it almost instantly started filling up with the smells of Adam and himself, both of which were washed out and exhausted. It had started snowing on their way down, stretching out the drive. The weary silence of the first hour had turned into the much more pointed silence of Adam constantly refraining from offering to take over driving and Casey gritting his teeth to keep from telling him to go to hell or asking him to take the wheel, depending on how bad the snow was at any given moment.

Casey thought they both knew that Casey needed to concentrate, and that of the two of them he actually was more fit to drive through a snowstorm right now, which had helped keep the peace, or at least the silence. The near-fight melted away once they were out of the car and in the hotel, leaving a heavy tiredness that was at odds with the fact that the sun was barely down.

They needed to eat, but that was a manageable problem—Grays Inns supplied a suitable array of snacks and supplies in the little convenience store at the end of the building. It wasn’t in the same space as check-in, to avoid crowding, and all rooms opened to the outside to help with smell and sound control, but it wasn’t snowing that hard. Casey could handle it.

He just didn’t know if that was the most urgent problem right now. Adam had sat down on the nearest corner of the bed to the door. He was still wearing his boots and coat, his bag dumped on the floor beside his feet. In his hands he held the notebook Casey had picked out for him, still sealed in plastic.

“Do you want me to be here when you open it?” Casey prompted gently. “Or not be here?”

Adam raised his head and looked at Casey like Casey had just spoken to him in Finnish, his incomprehension too complete to even be annoyed.

“Okay,” Casey said. Clearly Adam wasn’t ready for that step, or even talking about that step. There was no rush; the notebook was his forever now. “I’m going to go get food. Any requests?”

Adam opened his mouth to say something and then shook his head slightly. “Not food. Do you have anything in your kit that will put me to sleep? I—Dad used to—that’s why I yelled at you that time, with Amy—and I’ve never, but—”

Casey sighed, because there weren’t words, and he stepped into Adam’s space to kiss the top of his head. His hair was getting long, for Adam; he hadn’t had it cut since Casey met him. It was starting to curl. “Take your coat and your shoes off, okay? I’ll bring you something to eat, and when you’ve got some food in you, I’ll fix you something to quiet your head down.”

Adam nodded into Casey’s coat, and Casey stepped back and headed outside. One more thing to handle—two, if he counted mixing up something to help Adam sleep, although he was pretty sure that eating dinner and sitting still in a quiet room would do the job better than wolfsbane could.

Still, for the look of the thing, Casey went out to the parking lot to retrieve his compounding kit. It was dark out there among the cars. Werewolves didn’t need much light, and fewer big bright lights made it easier to make the rooms properly and comfortably dark at night. Casey didn’t mind the shadows and the snow-dampened quiet; it felt like being at home, where they parked their cars in a clearing in the woods.

He felt a strange pang of homesickness, sharp and noticeable because he’d been feeling it so rarely for weeks now. He should call after Adam fell asleep, catch up with whoever was around tonight at the Midwives’ House. He tried to think of what the rotation schedules would be, digging in his coat pocket for the keys as the trusty dull blue Nissan came into view.

Someone grabbed his arm in a hard grip as they stepped up behind him and said urgently, “Katie.”

The spike of adrenaline shattered Casey’s barely-held control over everything he’d been feeling all day. Every bit of it was channeled into the action of twisting into the grip on his arm to jam the point of his elbow into his attacker’s solar plexus as he snarled, “No.”

The grip on his arm released, and the dark-haired man stumbled back against a car, eyes wide. It was too dark for Casey to truly see their color, but he didn’t have to. He knew that shade of blue, that jutting chin, those curls catching snow. He saw them all in the mirror often enough.

Casey didn’t let up. He wasn’t having this. Not now.

He stepped up close enough to position his knee between the alpha’s spraddled thighs, ready to jam into his balls if he tried grabbing Casey again.

“No,” Casey repeated, low and furious. “My name is Casey Niemi, and I don’t wear my hair in braids anymore. And whatever the fuck you’re following me around for, why under the Moon do you have to pull this now?”

The alpha blinked and then said, his voice colored with a faint, soft accent that made something in Casey’s brain go sideways, “You’re never alone, Ka—” He cut himself off and then said with careful deliberation, “Casey. But I—”

“No,” Casey snapped again. “I do not have time for this right now. We are not doing this. I have to meet the Schulte pack tomorrow, and I have had a very long fucking day. If you want to talk to me, come back here in three days and knock on my fucking door, and we can talk. But don’t you say one fucking word to me right now, not in a dark parking lot in the fucking snow, not after nineteen fucking years. Not tonight.”

“I’m your—”

Casey slapped his hand over the alpha’s mouth. “You shut your mouth or you will fucking regret it, alpha-hole. When I say I do not have time for this I mean I do not have time for this.”

He dug his fingertips in, meanly, until the alpha nodded under his grip, his mouth firmly closing against Casey’s palm.

“Where are you spending the night?” Casey demanded. “Here? You got a room?”

The alpha shook his head, and raised one hand to gesture vaguely away.

“Go, then,” Casey said. “I’m gonna take a step away and if you come one inch nearer to me I will spill your blood all over this fucking snow. You believe me?”

The alpha nodded again, and there was something warm in his eyes now; the shock was fading into something treacherously like fondness. He knew Casey—or had known him, when he was Katie—and he wasn’t displeased by who Casey had grown up into. His scent wasn’t quite the one Casey had been remembering, but it was close. He smelled, if not exactly like home, still like someplace that had been home once.

Casey pulled his hand back, curling it into a sharp-knuckled fist as he did, and took a step back.

The alpha scooted away from him, along the car he’d stumbled against when Casey turned on him. He never took his eyes off Casey, walking backward between the cars. Casey never took his eyes off the alpha either—he could have sworn he didn’t, but before he was lost entirely to the shadows and snow, he somehow vanished from sight.

Casey looked around. There were his footprints in the snow, the mark of his body against the car.

It had happened. Hadn’t it? He was sure it had happened. He raised a hand to touch the spot where his arm had been grabbed, but he already knew there wouldn’t be a mark there, and even the little soreness of the grab was already fading. Only the homesickness remained sharp; it felt almost like grief.

“Fuck,” Casey breathed, running a hand through his hair. The keys were still in his other hand, and he hit the button to unlock the doors. He needed his kit, he needed to get food, and he needed not to let Adam know this had happened tonight.

Because even more than he wanted not to deal with it himself, he really, really did not want to deal with Adam and every other werewolf from Wyoming to Wisconsin freaking out about it in his direction.

“Three days,” Casey said aloud, to the snow and the parking lot and maybe... maybe someone he had felt at home with, a long time ago. Someone he had looked back at, while an alpha carried him away. “We’ll be back, and you can knock on the door.”