Casey woke up with his eyes already open, and jerked back from the stranger crouched an arm’s length away, staring at him.

Alpha.

Casey scrambled backward, halfway around the tree and up to his feet, which of course immediately landed on all the sharpest roots and twigs for a mile around. “Fuck, ow, fuck—what the fuck are you doing here? Who the fuck are you?”

“I heard you crying,” the alpha said, while Casey was pressing his nose and mouth into his blanket, trying to escape the alpha scent. All he got was the reek of his own fear.

Just his moon-damned luck. Casey had tried sleeping outside to get away from the lingering alpha scent in the Midwives’ House, which he hadn’t been able to get rid of ever since Beau spent a few nights there. Not only had Casey had a nightmare anyway, he’d woken up to some weirdo watching him sleep. Casey wasn’t even a mile from the house; he was still squarely on Niemi pack lands. No stranger should have found him here.

“I wasn’t crying,” Casey snapped, as authoritatively as he could with his mouth and nose jammed into his blanket. He wiped his eyes as he said it, and his hand came away wet. Combined with the smell, that meant he’d definitely had another one of those dreams, which meant this spell of bad nights still wasn’t over.

He focused on the strange alpha, whose smell he also couldn’t seem to get out of his nose, which was only making everything worse. “And that doesn’t answer who the fuck you are and what you’re doing on Niemi territory.”

The alpha took a step back, glancing over his shoulder and looking... actually about as thrilled by this as Casey was. “My name is Adam Vinick. I’m visiting—Rory Lea brought me.”

“Fuck,” Casey muttered, turning to press his forehead to the tree. That meant he couldn’t actually chase the guy out—or sic Callie on him and watch her chase him out. It also meant that Casey had slept through breakfast and was going to catch hell from Auntie June for throwing off morning rounds. “Fuck.”

Casey turned resolutely away from the tree, just in time to catch the guy darting a glance downward to where Casey had been sitting—where he’d dropped Pappa Otso’s lavender pillow on the groundsheet he’d used to keep his ass dry. Casey glared at the guy—Vinick, Alpha Vinick, why did he have to go around smelling so much like an alpha—and snatched them both up, shrugging out of the blanket that he still had draped around him and adding it to the bundle in his arms.

“Come on,” Casey snapped, turning on his heel and heading for home. “We’re going the same way, Alpha. Get a move on.”

Vinick caught up after a stride or two and easily kept pace with Casey, which made sense when he was most of a foot taller. His hair was dark blond, and looked like he’d gotten it cut only a day or two ago. He was wearing dark gray dress pants and a crisp white shirt with a gray-green tie—trying to make a good impression, like a kid on the first day of school. His eyes were...

Casey didn’t give a fuck what Adam Vinick’s eyes looked like, except that they were turned on him, looking a question as loud as a shout. As if Casey couldn’t smell his alpha concern, thick enough to choke on and sending Casey’s heart racing like it needed the fucking help.

“What,” Casey snapped. “You’ve never seen an omega have a bad dream before?”

“No,” Vinick said slowly. “No, I have. You’re just... not much like most of the omegas I’ve met.”

Casey snorted, keeping his eyes forward as the path peeled away from the lake. “If you’re the one Rory was bringing to meet the midwives, you literally can’t pay omegas to sit and talk to you, so I’m guessing you haven’t fucking met that many omegas.”

“Definitely none who have such a way with words,” Vinick agreed.

Casey squeezed his eyes shut and dug his fingers into the stuff he was carrying and did not go for Vinick’s stupidly tall alpha throat. He’d have to get past that tie first, and his mouth already felt cottony enough.

Casey stomped toward home, ignoring the way he was managing to step on every rock on the path, ignoring the stale smell of his own fear on the blankets and the warm smell of alpha coming from the man beside him. Above all, Casey was ignoring Vinick and the scientific research project that brought him here.

When they came to the end of the path and the Midwives’ House was in view, Vinick said, almost diffidently, “I don’t suppose I could pay you—”

“Fuck no,” Casey snapped. “Why the fuck would I help you with this?”

He wheeled on Vinick, suddenly spoiling for a real, actual fight, like he used to have with Callie when they were kids, before she started turning every scuffle into a solemn opportunity to teach Casey to defend himself.

“I know what you’re here for, okay? I know you want to strip out everything we know, everything I’ve spent my life learning, midwives have spent a hundred generations learning, in order to help other omegas and serve my pack, and make it science. Put it in a book, give it away to everyone, so nobody needs a pack, right? Because who needs a pack when you could go see a fucking doctor who’s read a book.”

He could see Vinick gritting his teeth, muscles standing out at the corners of his jaw. “Some people,” Vinick said without opening his jaw, “don’t have packs. Or would rather not.”

“That means they need better packs. Or more packs, or different ones. We gotta reach out more, find new ways to connect. It doesn’t mean we should all just—just be alone, like humans. We’re not humans, we shouldn’t live like them! No matter how hard you try—” Casey couldn’t resist, then, reaching out and grabbing Vinick’s tie, giving the slippery green length a yank. “You’re never going to fucking be one. No matter how many degrees you have, no matter how many fucking double-blind studies—”

“Adam!” Rory shouted from the front door, and Casey jumped back from Vinick, letting go of the tie like it had burned him.

Rory was maybe the only person Casey knew who didn’t think of him as either Casey the Midwife or Casey, That Poor Dear, Don’t Be Too Hard On Him. The last thing Casey’s morning needed was to fuck that up by having Rory see him at his worst.

“Hey, Casey!” Rory continued. “Auntie June says to come in and comb the pine needles out of your hair while she decides what to do with you.”

Casey winced and shouldered past Vinick, stomping across the grass to the house. Rory stayed where he was, leaning in the doorway, as Casey approached.

Casey tried to swallow his urge to lash out. Rory looked concerned, and it felt too much like the way everyone looked at Casey when they remembered where he came from. He mustered up a smile, trying to fit himself into it, to be the version of himself who Rory liked and depended on.

“Do I really have pine needles in my hair?” Casey pitched his voice low, for Rory’s ears alone, as he stepped up onto the porch.

Rory took a step out of the doorway then, reaching for him. Casey bowed his head and accepted Rory’s fingers flicking through his curls, and a few bits of bark and twigs pattered to the porch floor. Casey breathed in Rory’s familiar omega scent, and felt the fear and the fight both receding a little, back into something he could manage. The drumbeat had become background noise in the last several days, an ache in his neck and head that kept his temper frayed.

Still, it was enough. He could control himself. He was home and safe here.

“I, uh,” Casey glanced back toward Vinick, who Rory had called Adam, still standing in the yard. Fixing his fucking tie, but it was almost funny when Casey was standing here on his own ground with Rory’s arm nearly around him, breathing in the reassuring scent of omega and the familiar smell of the house itself. “I think maybe I should stay away from our visitor.”

Vinick looked up, his gaze as sharp as it had been when they were side-by-side on the path, and Casey felt his heart start to speed up again. It didn’t feel entirely like anger, but Casey gritted his teeth anyway.

Rory gave him a sideways look, but his voice was neutral as he said, “He’s not so bad, or at least I think he can be taught. I already chewed him out over my dinner table last night, and I think Granny Tyne’s gearing up to go over his study methodology in a really pointed tone of voice. Go wash up, we’ll handle him.”

Casey nodded and hurried inside, letting his shoulder brush softly against Rory’s as he went, eyes wide open to take in the familiar walls around him and forget the sight of Vinick looking at him like—like—

Like an alpha looking at an omega. Like he looked at Casey and didn’t see a midwife or an orphan.

But Casey didn’t need an alpha looking at him and seeing anything at all. He needed to get the fuck away from that alpha—from any alpha.

Showering was a relief, washing away all the scents that clung to him and the grimy feeling of sleeping outdoors. Even his toes finally felt warm again by the time he was done. Casey scrubbed himself until his skin was pink with it, removing all trace of the fact that he’d had one of those dreams again.

At least he only knew the dream by the signs it left, and not any actual memory of it. This way he could let it disappear down the drain. Once he washed off the fear scent, there was no other way for the dream to follow him.

If he wondered sometimes what he dreamed about that made him scared and made him cry, if he wondered why he got into these spells where he was angry and jumpy and couldn’t sleep through the night... Well, he knew it was better not to know, the same as it was better not to know where those nightmares came from.

He knew in a general way, of course. He knew something terrible had happened when he was a child. His family had died, and he had survived and found his way to the Niemi pack, making his way through the woods in a wolf shape that was still all puppy-fluff, ears and paws too big for him. He knew it had to have been ugly. He knew he’d been in his wolf shape so long that he could barely talk when he was finally coaxed out.

He knew it had something to do with alphas, which was why he was the way he was about alphas, even the ones he did like. Too much contact with an alpha could kick off these spells. Alpha Niemi, who had found him in the woods nineteen years ago, was the closest thing Casey had now to a parent. Casey had never been able to live under his roof, and hadn’t been able to hug him for a couple of years now. Alpha’s daughter Callie, who took stubborn pride in her identity as a female alpha, would point to Casey’s reactions to her as evidence of her aspect.

Casey could usually hug Callie, or at least sit close beside her, but he hadn’t been able to handle being within arm’s reach of her for days now.

Callie and Alpha both knew why, better than Casey did himself. Alpha had known from the beginning, because he’d led the group who backtracked Casey’s trail and determined that there was no one else to rescue and no one to return Casey to. And Callie had been told the story a couple of years ago when Casey still refused to hear it himself.

Callie needed to know; Casey’s past could affect the pack someday, and Callie was going to follow her father as the pack’s alpha, a decade or three from now when he was ready to retire.

Casey, though. Casey had no use for that information. He had forgotten it for a reason. He didn’t need those memories in his head any more than he needed his nightmares lingering through the day. He could manage things, usually; he was just having a particularly bad spell right now. Soon it would run its course, and he would calm down and be able to hug Callie again. Maybe even Alpha, someday.

In the meantime, Casey had other things to focus on. He was a midwife, and part of the Niemi pack. It didn’t matter how he’d arrived or what happened before.

Casey dried off and dressed, listening scrupulously to his own heartbeat and nothing else. He focused on keeping it slow and calm, fighting for that calm every moment, as if the moon were rising toward full instead of three days past empty.

Still, he managed. He went down to the kitchen by the back stairs, so he wouldn’t see or hear anything to distract him from the steady beating of his own heart. He ate, barely noticing what, because he couldn’t spare the focus from controlling his own body; he chewed in the same rhythm as his heart, his jaw moving on every other beat.

He washed the dish he’d used. He looked around, carefully, not raising his head, to see if Auntie June had left a note saying what she wanted him to do today. If he could just get out of the house, if he could be busy doing normal things—visiting omegas and their babies, say, while their mates were out of the house for the day—then he would be fine. The calm he was fighting for would become real. Everything would be fine.

There was no note. If he left again without speaking to Auntie June, she’d be even more annoyed with him. Casey stared at the kitchen table for the space of a hundred carefully regulated heartbeats, taking slow, even breaths, and then he raised his gaze to the hallway that led from the kitchen to the front of the house.

His control shattered, his hearing abruptly refocusing from his heartbeat to the front parlor, and the deep tones of an alpha’s voice. “If we could survey a wide enough population, we could compare not only Lycan DNA but the omega gene cluster on the Y chromosome, assuming we find one. We could use that to determine whether omegas go back as far as werewolves, or if the trait arose later.”

Casey wasn’t aware of deciding to move; he wasn’t aware of anything but that voice, Vinick’s voice, drawing him closer, until Casey was standing in the doorway of the front parlor, looking at the big alpha with the sun shining on the dark gold of his hair. He was sitting in an armchair facing Rory and the aunties, who were arrayed across two couches.

He was the best thing Casey had ever seen and, as his heart raced faster, all Casey wanted was to drive him away, out of this house, off their land. His hands closed into fists, and he was half shouting as soon as he opened his mouth.

“There were three first werewolves, and one was an omega! Everyone knows that story, kids who can barely speak sentences know that story!” Casey was aware that Vinick was on his feet, staring at him again, and that other people were moving nearby, and that he should shut up, but he had started and he couldn’t stop, heading straight for Vinick, who just stood still and watched him. “What the fuck do you and your science need with it? Why do you have to stick your fingers in everything, ruin everything, it’s not yours—”

“Casey.” Hands closed hard on his arms and abruptly Casey couldn’t see Vinick. Auntie Mark, the next-youngest of the midwives at forty-something, was crowding in front of him, shaking him a little, and Auntie June was right beside him.

Auntie Mark kept up the hard grip on Casey’s arms and Auntie June pressed two fingers firmly over Casey’s lips as they backed him through the doorway. “Sweetheart,” she said. “You’re not yourself. Hush.”

Casey wanted to snarl, wanted to bite, but—oh, Moon, why had he been yelling like that? In front of Rory and everyone? About a fairy tale?

“Go find Amy,” Auntie June said firmly, cupping his face in both hands now, her thumbs still pressed to his lips to hush him. “I sent her out to the Honeygolds, you can help her pick the best and carry a bushel back.”

Casey gritted his teeth and nodded. Amy was only twelve, and human, and small for her age; she would need help bringing in apples. He could do that. He could focus on that and calm the fuck down. He wouldn’t scare Amy.

Auntie Mark walked him out of the house and to the back of the fenced yard behind it, where the midwives’ herb gardens grew.

“Okay, Case?” His grip had eased, his hands just curled gently around Casey’s upper arms.

Casey nodded, leaning into Mark to breathe in the scent of him, omega and motherly and safe. “I can—I can do this.”

Mark hugged him a little and then let him go. Casey grabbed a weathered bushel basket from the stack by the gate and started down the path.

The Niemis had never set up proper orchards with the trees all in orderly rows; instead they’d planted apple trees in among the woods on the pack lands, whenever a fallen tree or trees cut for timber made space. They did always make sure that any given area had trees of the same type, with a beehive relocated nearby, to minimize undesirable cross-pollinating.

The Honeygolds were planted north and east of the Midwives’ House, between the northern shore of the little lake and a creek about a quarter-mile north of that. It was Honeycrisps on the other side of the creek, so along the creek you tended to get interestingly weird crosses, most of them good to eat right off the tree, ripening at various times from August to October.

Casey made for the creek. He’d often gone there himself as a kid when he was sent to pick apples—especially when he was sent to pick them more for the sake of getting him out of the house than because someone meant to make a pie out of them. He’d liked exploring for interesting apple hybrids, or just sitting by the creek until someone came to find him and scold him for not picking any.

Sure enough, he caught the sound of Amy’s heartbeat on the south bank of the creek, and focused on the sound with a certain professional interest.

Amy had been sick for a long time with an illness no human doctors—nor Beau, despite his best efforts—had been able to diagnose. Her father’s efforts to force Beau to heal her by making her a werewolf had come to a head recently, and the midwives had stepped in to set things to rights.

Amy had come to live with the midwives while her father stayed in pack guest quarters nearby. Amy was thriving with treatment according to Granny Tyne’s theory of the case—some obscure imbalance of microbes in her digestive system that required ongoing adjustment—and her father was doing his best to make amends. Both of them were settling in as human members of the pack.

See, Casey thought, anger rising up again, even humans need pack. Doctors can’t fix everything.

He stopped where he was and made himself breathe in the scents of the creek and the ripening apples. No alpha here. No one to argue with. Nothing to be angry about.

But his heart was still beating too fast, too hard, and his neck still ached with tension. The bitter taste of panic lingered on the back of his tongue.

Casey dropped his basket and jumped up into the branches of the nearest tree, plucking an apple that was oddly striped, light red and bright yellow. He took a bite that crunched loudly enough to reverberate through the woods, focusing on the sweetness in his mouth and not that lingering bitterness.

Amy came into view, down on the ground, looking up at him without fear. “Casey? I haven’t picked very many yet.”

Casey shook his head. “It’s all right, I don’t think anyone’s in a hurry for us to get done.” He looked around for another apple and picked the largest one he could see, then jumped lightly down to the ground. The ground was soft here; his feet left deep prints, but at least he hadn’t stepped on a rock from twenty feet up.

Amy’s eyes were a little wide, but she grinned when Casey offered her the second apple, and she took a bite without hesitating. That was a pleasing change from her old fear of eating; when she’d been sicker, everything that entered her stomach had hurt her.

“Did you find a good spot to sit?” Casey asked.

Amy nodded and turned to lead the way, bringing him to a place along the bank where a huge tree had fallen across the creek. It let sunshine come in through the break in the canopy the tree had left, and the fallen trunk was broad enough to make a comfortable seat right out over the burbling water.

Casey followed her out near the center of the creek and sat beside her. He thought that he’d climbed this tree when it was still upright, ten or so years ago. He couldn’t remember when it had fallen, but from the looks of it that had happened at least a year or two ago. He hadn’t spent much time here lately.

“Casey?” Amy’s voice sounded smaller. He looked over at her, and then followed her gaze to the apple in his hand. His finger and thumb had punched through the skin of it, letting juice drip out. Casey stared at his own hand, trying to figure out what to do about it, what to say to Amy, what—

“Are you okay?” Amy asked softly. “Did you have bad dreams again last night?”

Casey took a deep breath and nodded, trying to relax his jaw. He was going to stay calm for Amy. He could do that. There was nothing to smell out here that shouldn’t be here, nothing to remind him of—of how much he had wanted to jump on Vinick, bite him, how good he smelled and how wrong that was—

Amy’s hand settled on his wrist, and Casey blew out a breath.

“Sorry,” he said, trying to smile. “I’m... not good company, I guess. The guy who’s visiting—did they tell you there was a visitor?”

Amy nodded. “A doctor like Uncle Beau? Somebody he knows?”

“Ah,” Casey said, and focused on steadying his heart, not thinking of the scent of Beau still lingering in the house, the string of nightmares it had kicked off. “Yeah. He, uh... he just... makes me really angry, and it’s hard for me to calm down. Especially when I’ve been having bad dreams.”

“Do you, um... do you meditate, ever? To calm down? Uncle Beau taught me a little bit, for pain. I could...” Amy’s hand on his wrist moved down to his hand, and Casey turned his left hand to hold hers, the right still clutching that apple. “He always held my hand. It felt better. Would that help?”

Casey closed his eyes and took a deep, careful breath. It might help; it ought to, although emptying his mind tended to make a blank space for things to rush in when he was having a bad spell like this. Still, holding Amy’s hand was good, and being here was good.

“I’m gonna try,” he said. “Real quietly. Do you mind just... sitting with me while I try?”

Amy squeezed his hand. “I don’t mind. This is a nice place to sit.”

“Yeah,” Casey agreed. “Yeah, it is.”

He tried not to empty his mind. He tried to fill it with this place, instead. There was the sound of the water tumbling over rocks and birds singing nearby and bees humming as they went here and there, searching for late flowers on a warm afternoon before they went into the hive for the winter. He could smell the water and mud and moss and sun-warmed leaves and ripe apples, the bright sweet juicy scent of the one in his hand. He didn’t look again, but he could picture the roof of green overhead, the sunlight dappling them, the clear swiftness of the creek below them, the stones and mud at the bottom and the little shadows of fish that darted past once in a while.

It was a good place, a safe and quiet place, and he was in the center of it. He and Amy were both safe. He could be calm here. He could. He—

His thoughts tripped fast, to sleeping in a sunny spot and then to waking with Adam Vinick close enough to touch, looking at him with his hazel eyes that were all the brown-gray-green colors of the creek bed, his warm alpha scent, that little crease of worry marking his forehead as he looked at Casey.

Casey lurched forward, remembering at the last second that Amy was holding his hand and he must not haul her down into the creek with him. Amy still gave a little yelp of surprise, tightening her grip hard on Casey’s hand, and Casey managed to rebalance them, his heart beating fast again. Hers was beating even faster.

“Sorry,” Casey said, eyes wide open, staring down at the creek. “Sorry, sorry, I—that didn’t work.”

“It’s okay,” Amy said, sounding breathless but earnest. “You tried. And you were doing okay until right at the end, huh?”

Casey tried to laugh, and settled for a cough. “Yeah. Until right at the end.”

His phone buzzed in his pocket. Casey tossed his apple into the creek, hastily licked his fingers clean, and pulled it out. He had a text from Rory.

We’re all heading out. I’m going to go with Adam to talk to people unless you want me to come hang out with you and Amy.

Translation: Vinick’s study is going ahead like you knew it was probably going to and I’m helping him, unless looking after a twelve-year-old is too much for you to handle.

Casey gritted his teeth and forced himself to consider whether looking after a twelve-year-old was too much for him to handle. Probably not, right? She could be left to her own devices; she was allowed to walk out here all by herself. It was really looking after himself that was the challenge here, and he could already feel the tension rising in him again, the anger burning in his belly.

He wouldn’t turn that on Amy. He really wouldn’t. But if Rory came back... Casey felt sick at the thought, but he knew he might say something awful to Rory.

We’re fine, Casey texted back. Picking apples!

“Come on,” Casey said, smiling at Amy as he tucked his phone back into his pocket. “Might as well get on with it. Have you ever made a pie?”

Amy shook her head, grinning, and Casey told himself that it was going to be all right.