Adam’s third morning in Minnesota started with a freezing cold shower to counteract his second straight night filled with dreams of a blue-eyed omega who snarled at him and kissed him and rubbed up against him. Adam resolutely did not allow the dreams to follow him into his day, did not picture a certain face or attach a certain name to the omega in his dreams.

The dreams were just byproducts of neuronal activity, the brain shuffling recent events into long-term memory. They meant nothing, as long as he didn’t allow them to.

He was still telling himself that as he drove back to the Midwives’ House to discuss where else he would be taking his survey. He’d spoken to his supervisor at the Lycanthropic Research Division the day before, explaining the success of the field recruitment approach—and making arrangements to ship the DNA samples back immediately and get a return shipment of fresh test supplies. He had been given permission to continue working remotely for another week at least.

Now all he had to do was extend his thirty-six-hour streak of not completely fucking up everything.

He was on the dirt road that led into the pack’s territory, past the unmarked boundary but well short of reaching the Midwives’ House, when a slim, curly-haired figure stepped into the road fifty yards ahead.

Casey.

Adam hit the brakes, ready to swerve, but he hadn’t been going particularly fast and the car came to a stop safely short of the omega.

He was wearing clothes this time, and not wrapped in a blanket, but Adam still recognized him instantly. He was barefoot again. He had his arms wrapped around his middle, and he was staring down at the ground—until he looked up, meeting Adam’s eyes with a directness that took Adam’s breath away. He couldn’t look anywhere but into Casey’s eyes, and Casey looked back, keeping him pinned, for a long moment. Then he jerked his chin toward the side of the road and walked back the way he’d come, off the road and into the trees.

Adam could not even pretend it was not perfectly clear to him that he was supposed to follow—ordered to follow, not merely invited or expected.

The last time he saw Casey, Adam had assaulted him while he was naked and intoxicated. Neither of those choices on Casey’s part were for Adam to judge; he knew that most werewolves who grew up in packs were much more casual about nudity than he was. He also knew, as well as any alpha could, how much an omega could need to self-medicate, and how easily that need could lead to abuse of whatever substance they chose.

The remembered smell of sweet wolfsbane smoke rose up again, and he remembered sitting in a corner of his dad’s lab or outside the bedroom door, curled up small so he was inconspicuous, while his dad smoked and cried, or smoked and stared vaguely at the ceiling, or smoked and scribbled wildly in notebooks. He hadn’t entirely understood the pain his dad was in at the time—he’d been as selfish as any kid, he just wanted his dad to pay attention to him—but he could see now that his dad hadn’t been able to bear doing anything else. Casey likely couldn’t either.

Adam’s own actions, on the other hand, were plainly inexcusable. Whatever Casey might want to say to him, Adam owed him a hearing. He pulled his car over onto the grass at the edge of the road.

It was only as he was walking into the trees that Adam caught the sound of Casey’s heartbeat and realized he couldn’t hear another within easy eavesdropping distance. The rustling of leaves overhead provided enough white noise to give them as much privacy as werewolves on pack land could hope for.

A few steps farther on, at about the moment he caught sight of Casey standing in a small sunlit clearing, it occurred to him that if they hadn’t been alone, Casey could have called him here to have some physical retribution meted out. His alpha foster sister, for instance, might like to defend Casey’s honor. While Adam had a male alpha’s size and innate strength, he hadn’t grown up tussling with other young alphas. Violence was not his area of specialty, by a long shot.

In fact, he thought—as he stepped into the clearing and Casey looked up, pinning him once again with that vivid blue gaze—if Casey himself wanted to get a few licks in, sheer fury would probably carry him. Adam didn’t even know if he could bear to raise his hands to an omega, not when he was thinking clearly, not even in self-defense. Not when he’d demonstrated to himself only two days before that he was no better than any other alpha when he wasn’t keeping himself under careful control.

Casey showed no immediate intention to get anywhere near him, and Adam stayed where he was, on the edge of the clearing with a solid twelve feet between them. Casey was a little downwind of him, but Adam could easily hear the steady beating of his heart and his slow, even breaths.

After a long moment, Casey looked away, his expression tightening with something Adam couldn’t read—frustration or anger or just distaste. He took a deep breath and then asked, still not looking directly at Adam, “Did they tell you the choice they’re giving me?”

It took a moment for Adam to even parse the words, so far removed from anything he’d expected. “The midwives? What...”

Casey did look at him then, his frown deepening. His gaze moved up and down over Adam’s body, then, not just searching his eyes.

Casey snorted, shaking his head a little as he looked down. “That’s... that’s even better. Great. Fuck.”

He turned his back, and Adam shoved his hands into his pockets, pressed his heels into the earth, and kept his mouth shut. He’d already made the mistake of interfering with Casey twice; whatever was going on now, Adam just had to keep his distance, no matter what primitive alpha instincts reared up in the face of an omega in distress.

Adam would be gone soon, anyway. He would never see Casey again after today, so Casey would be perfectly safe from him. He just had to hear Casey out, and then get to his meeting with the midwives.

Casey faced him again, and his gaze was softer when it met Adam’s, not that diamond-edged stare but something... conversational. “They want to send me with you, to be your omega interpreter.”

Once again it took Adam a few seconds to make any sense of what Casey had said, and when he did the rush of furious adrenaline was instantaneous. “You?”

Of all the ways to sabotage his study, he’d never thought they’d resort to dumping their unstable drug addict on him.

Casey scowled, his hands closing into fists, “Look, I know I haven’t made a good first impression, but—”

“This isn’t about being late to a job interview,” Adam snarled. “I can’t have my study in the hands of somebody who’s on fucking drugs—”

Casey flinched, almost imperceptibly, and maybe it was his body temperature rising as he got angry, maybe the wind shifted, maybe Adam just knew, but he smelled wolfsbane.

He strode across the distance between them, just barely hanging on to enough sense not to touch him. He loomed over him instead, looking down at Casey as he defiantly tipped up his chin. Adam stared at the width of his pupils in their rings of blue.

“Are you high right now?” Adam demanded.

“Fuck you,” Casey snarled, and shoved him back with both hands, which was decidedly not no.

Adam didn’t know what he was going to do if—no. No. He wasn’t doing this, period. He turned on his heel and headed back for the road.

“It’s not like I’m shooting fucking heroin,” Casey yelled, coming after him, his steps louder than someone so small, and barefoot, ought to make. “I’m not smoking crack, okay, I am trying to literally medicate myself in my capacity as a medical fucking professional, Doctor.”

Adam whirled back to stare at him.

Casey stopped short, glaring.

“What the fuck kind of—of medical practice—ethics—” Adam was spluttering. He couldn’t even put words to his argument against what Casey was asserting. “You can’t just—”

“I am a midwife, working under the supervision of more senior midwives, to treat a member of my pack,” Casey gritted out. “That is in fact accepted practice for werewolves, which you might fucking know if you were one.”

“Oh fuck you straight to hell,” Adam snarled back, dimly aware that that wasn’t an argument any more than Casey’s had been.

“Yeah, I am deeply fucking sure that that’s exactly how that would go,” Casey snapped. “Which is why I’m trying to hit the sweet spot where I don’t go for your throat or your dick whenever I’m in your presence, but the formula obviously still needs some work.”

“So, what, you intend to travel with me and assist me on this project while tinkering with—with—”

“The dose of my medication? As necessary, yes. I do have some training in this, a decade or so, and I promise I won’t put my grubby wolfsbane-addict hands on your pipettes or whatever you’re worried about, you can do all that stuff yourself. I’ll talk to people, because even as shitty as I am at that right now I’m still better than you.”

“Oh you will, will you,” Adam snapped. “It’s all decided already? What am I even going to meet the midwives for?”

Casey snorted and looked away, and Adam could see the muscle bunch as he clenched his teeth. “So they can tell you. Ask you, maybe even. You can probably say no, if you’re so scared that an actual omega will fuck up your omega study.”

“The omega part really isn’t—” Adam stopped short, the rest of Casey’s words sinking in a little belatedly. “What do you mean, I can probably say no?”

Casey didn’t look at him. “I mean, it’s your study. If you put your foot down... they might not be able to send anyone else with you, but they can’t force you to take me.”

“You’re a midwife,” Adam said, a different, deeper anger building. “Why can they spare you, and no one else?”

Casey shot him a sideways look, his mouth curling up in something too bitter to be a smile. “You’re not the only one who noticed my performance the other day. I’ve been given an ultimatum. Go with you, or go up north.”

Adam’s hand shot out as something hotter and brighter than rage shot through him in an overwhelming rush, and he was barely aware of the pain in his palm and fingertips as he anchored himself physically against it. He could hear his dad’s pleading voice in his ears, his father’s shouting, the fight raging on and on until his dad shut himself in the lab, or Adam’s bedroom, to get away from it. Adam could still smell his terror.

Adam could smell blood. Adam looked over and had to blink a few times to make sense of the sight: his right hand was clutching at the rough bark of a tree, his fingers digging right into it, splintering the wood. He was bleeding.

Adam closed his eyes and pictured it from the outside: Casey had said something—something about the predicament he was in—and Adam had gotten so instantly angry that he clawed his fingers straight into a tree.

So much for restraining his violent alpha impulses around Casey.

“Adam?” Casey said, his voice gone calm and gentle in a way that Adam almost didn’t recognize, but it wasn’t a cowering plea. He wasn’t afraid. Wasn’t running away to put a locked door between himself and the angry alpha.

Adam opened his eyes. Casey had circled around to stand on the other side of the tree Adam had jammed his hand into. Casey’s hands were raised, palms out, fingers slightly crooked, framing Adam’s hand.

“Can I help you with that?” Casey asked, still gently, and Adam understood, viscerally, all at once.

Adam wasn’t a dangerous alpha now. Adam was bleeding, and that made Adam a patient. This was Casey as a midwife, putting everything else aside when his calling demanded it.

Adam hated being a patient, but he hated being an angry alpha more. He nodded, the motion stiff and awkward. He pressed his other hand to his thigh, bracing himself not to lash out, not to make a sound.

Casey shook his head slightly. “Breathe, Adam, it’s gonna be fine. Listen to my breathing, follow me. Listen to my heart. Nice and slow now, okay? Nice and easy.”

Adam let out a hard little laugh. Nothing was ever nice and easy for him. Nothing ever had been. But he appreciated that Casey had a job to do here and it would be easier if his patient wasn’t tensed up as much as physically possible, so he closed his eyes and tried to get control of his breathing, listening to Casey’s body and trying to make his own match.

“That’s it,” Casey murmured. “I’m gonna put my hand over yours now, I’m gonna be as gentle as I can but I can tell you’re gonna jump a little, here I am...”

Casey’s hand settled over his, small but strong and perfectly steady and warm. Adam felt the touch through his whole body, that warmth reaching into him and easing the live-wire tension. He felt his breathing ease as though Casey’s hand was guiding his lungs, his heart slowing as if Casey’s hand guided every beat. His fingers relaxed their grip on the tree, and he felt his blood flowing like sap.

“Okay, okay, that’s fine, you’re fine.” Casey’s other hand was on Adam’s wrist now, guiding Adam to remove his hand from the tree, turning it palm up.

Adam opened his eyes to see whether the damage was as bad as it felt—a lot of splinters and jagged cuts along the insides of his fingers, scratches over the surface of his palm. But he couldn’t keep his eyes on his own hand; he looked up as far as Casey’s face, intent on the examination.

Casey nodded a little to himself and looked up to meet Adam’s eyes as he said, “We’ll get you—”

“I’m not going to let them do that to you,” Adam said, his voice low and rough. “I won’t let anyone—”

Too intense, he saw from Casey’s reaction, wariness overtaking his professional gentleness. “It’s really not—”

Adam shook his head. He didn’t want Casey to downplay what they were threatening to do to him, how awful it was, just because Adam’s reaction had been violent. “I just—I want you on my study, if you want to be there. I want you to be my—what did you call it? My omega interpreter. I think I’ve made it pretty clear I don’t know how to talk to omegas.”

“Well, we make a great pair, then,” Casey said, dropping his gaze to Adam’s hand again. Adam’s fingers twitched as if the look had been a touch. The bleeding was already stopping.

“That’s, uh,” Casey’s hands squeezed a little on Adam’s and then quickly returned to their careful, practiced grip. “That’s what’s wrong with me. I have a kind of pathological aversion to alphas. So going with you is... exposure therapy, basically.”

That made... a very limited amount of sense, but Adam wasn’t going to leave Casey behind with these people, not if they were going to send him north as soon as Adam was out of sight. So he’d have some time to find out what the real nature of Casey’s difficulty was, and whether there was anything better to be done for him than forcing him to spend time with an alpha who was at least as likely to fly off the handle as he was.

Adam’s life probably would have been easier if he’d had an aversion to omegas—if his dad had put him off omegas for the rest of his life.

He felt a little sick at the thought of it, the idea that some other version of himself had hated omegas because of what his dad suffered, or had become indifferent to them, ignored them and everything they went through. What would that say about his dad, if his son acted like that?

Adam shook off the thought, and it was oddly easy to let it go and return to the present. He looked down at Casey’s hands carefully holding his, breathing in the soft, soothing scent of him, and then said, “I can’t get a contact high from your medication, can I?”

Casey looked up at him, flashing a bright little smile, and his scent was warm and soothing and almost sweet, targeted directly at all the most primitive alpha parts of Adam’s brain, as he said, “Not technically, no. Not as such.”

“Casey,” Adam growled, even though he wanted, a little bit, to laugh. Because he wanted to laugh. Because that wasn’t him; he didn’t want to laugh about this.

“Yeah, okay, you’ve pretty much stopped bleeding, we’ll clean it up back at the house,” Casey said, letting go of Adam’s hand and hastily stepping around him. “Give me a ride?”

Adam looked down at his bloodied hand, flexing it to feel the little jabs of pain from the splinters still embedded in his fingers, and then turned and followed Casey out of the woods.

Granny Tyne and Auntie Mark were waiting for him out on the porch this time, and didn’t remark on him arriving late and mildly injured with Casey in tow. Casey just threw out a cheerful, “Be right back! Don’t wait on me!” and disappeared into the house.

Adam stood uncertainly at the bottom of the porch steps until Granny Tyne gestured to the empty chair beside her. He went and sat, keeping his bloodied hand palm up on his knee. Auntie Mark, on Granny Tyne’s other side, had his feet up, a new-looking laptop resting on his lap, and was typing away intently.

“I take it you and Casey have agreed, then,” Granny Tyne said, flicking only the barest glance at his hand. “You’ll take him with you?”

Adam nodded, dropping his gaze as it struck him that the kindly-looking elderly omegas saving his study were the very same ones who had intended to force Casey to go north if he wouldn’t go with Adam. “We can leave today,” he said. “As soon as we’re done here.”

“Mm, you’ll have another stop to make after this, but then, yes, you’re expected at the Brysons’ for lunch,” Granny Tyne said. “They’re checking around, but they think they can have you see all the omegas who are interested by the end of the week, and you can stay the weekend with them, and then next week the Frasers and Jensens will have you.”

Adam stole a glance over at Granny Tyne, who was watching with something like mild amusement. Before he had time to bristle, the screen door swung open and Casey came through holding a gently steaming bowl, a small stack of linens over his arm. Auntie Mark took his feet off the stool they’d been propped on, kicking it toward Adam’s chair, and Casey snagged it with one foot to settle it in front of Adam’s knee and sat down without looking directly at Adam.

Casey transferred the stack of linens to Adam’s left knee, and took one to dip into the bowl. It seemed to be water, clouded with salt and something herbal-smelling, hot but not scalding.

“I’ll let you try soaking the splinters out before I go digging for any of them,” Casey said. “But we might as well clean the blood off first, okay?”

Adam didn’t know what to say—almost anything he said might well lead to a fight that would make Granny Tyne change her mind about letting Casey leave with him today—so he just nodded and extended his hand to meet Casey’s.

As Casey gently but efficiently cleaned the blood from his fingers, Auntie Mark spoke up. “I think we’ve got a pretty good schedule worked out between everybody’s availability and a sane travel route. Case, what’s your plan for the full?”

“Suppressants,” Casey said, almost before Adam had realized he was listening to two omegas discuss the full moon and heat plans. “Had to send me off in the fall, huh, couldn’t wait another couple of months? I dry up after winter solstice, like clockwork.”

“Everybody spends a heat away from home sooner or later,” Auntie Mark said, still not looking up. “We’re sending you to the Onalaska Brysons once you’re done with the local packs, they say they can keep a heat-house free for you if you need one.”

“By heat-house do you mean hundred-year-old dugout, because I think I’d rather take suppressants and sleep in a ditch,” Casey said, still dabbing gently at Adam’s hand. Adam knew neither of them could possibly have forgotten he was there, but he kept perfectly still and silent anyway.

“Pretty sure they can at least find you a nice level dry spot under a tree, then,” Auntie Mark said. “And, hey, the dugout is a hundred and thirty years old, have some respect for pack history.”

Casey huffed and dropped the bloodied cloth on the boards by Adam’s foot, picking up the bowl of water and easing Adam’s hand into it as if Adam might lose his way without Casey’s guiding touch.

“Eau Claire, Duluth—” Casey twitched at that, and Adam thought that there wasn’t a lot more north you could go from Duluth. He touched Casey’s shoulder with his good hand, resolving not to let Casey out of his sight during that stop. Casey glanced up at him, meeting his eyes for a second with an expression Adam couldn’t read, and then looked down again.

Auntie Mark was still outlining the itinerary, heedless. “Should put you with the Beltrami Niemis for the empty—one of us can come up if you need pack for that. Then Thief River, Devils Lake, Minot, and spend the full at—”

“No,” Adam said abruptly, because he knew even before the name was spoken, he knew, and he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of this. Surely they would have realized it was him and want nothing to do with it? But apparently not, somehow.

“No?” questioned Auntie Mark. “You got something against the Hathaway pack of Clearwater, North Dakota?”

They drove my dad to kill himself when I was ten years old and as far as I know my father is still a pillar of the pack. I swore when I left that I would never set foot on their lands again.

“Yes,” was all Adam said. “They are not being included in the study.” He didn’t bother to add, They know why.

Auntie Mark looked over at him for a moment, his expression still mild, and then nodded. “All right. It’s your study. I’ll figure out where you’re going after Minot, then. Meantime, you’ve got a schedule for the next month or so. I’ll email you the detailed itinerary with estimated numbers of participants.”

That was when it hit Adam that he’d been hoping for another few dozen participants and instead he had more than a month of field visits lined up. Adam flexed his fingers, and watched splinters pop out of his skin into the hot water.

“Thank you,” Adam said, to the faint reflection of Casey’s face in the bowl of water, to Auntie Mark and Granny Tyne and the universe.

“Well, you’re doing us a few favors too,” Granny Tyne said beside him, in a tone of putting an end to the topic. “Casey, he’s a medical professional, I think he can manage his own splinters. If you’re all packed, you can go and say goodbye to Amy—June took her along to see the twins.”

Casey darted a glance up at Adam and nodded, shifting his grip on the bowl of water so Adam could steady it with his own hand. Then Casey stood up, turning away as he did. He walked slowly at first, every step controlled and deliberate, but three steps past the bottom of the porch steps, he took off running, quickly disappearing into a stand of trees.

Adam could still hear his heart beating, though. His own sped up in time with it, and he closed his eyes and focused on flexing his fingers, expelling more splinters into the stinging salt water.

“I haven’t seen him do that for an alpha since... me, actually.”

Adam opened his eyes as Callie Niemi climbed the porch steps. He gritted his teeth and kept still, trying to steady himself against the rising urge to move, to—to run right after Casey and—

“The calming,” Callie added by way of explanation, moving to perch on the rail of the porch right across from Adam. “Minor first aid he can usually do—and any time he cares for a kid or an omega or anyone else who doesn’t strike him as an alpha, the calming goes right along with it. But he hasn’t been able to do it for an alpha since the time I broke my arm falling off a barn roof, and that’s been, what, five years?”

He had asked Casey if it was a contact high, and Casey had said not as such. But if the medication kept Casey calm enough to exert that influence on a patient, then it worked out to nearly the same thing.

“It’s his medication, it’s nothing to do with me,” Adam said, looking down from Callie’s expectant expression to his own hand and the damage he’d done to it when he realized what these people were threatening to do to Casey.

Maybe... maybe it was a little to do with him. Maybe Casey’s sheer relief at having some alternative had helped, and if Adam could be that much use to him, he was glad to do it no matter how much he wanted to yell at Casey about messing with his head. They’d have plenty of time for that, out on the road together for more than a month.

“It’s complicated,” Callie said. “Which is why Alpha wants to talk to you, once you’re done here.”

Adam scowled. “If he means to threaten—”

Callie snorted and shook her head. “No, no. He just means to make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. He’d strongly prefer you and Casey both come home alive.”

Her voice was light, but her posture coiled tight, and what Adam could catch of her scent over the steaming water and the lingering smell of his own blood told him she was very, very serious. There was a very real danger here somewhere.

Adam took his hand from the water and dried it, ignoring the stabs of the last few splinters that hadn’t worked free yet. “Let’s go, then.”

Callie led Adam into some woods oddly interspersed with apple trees, and over a creek, into another apple wood, then through it into what seemed like more ordinary forest. They’d been walking for nearly half an hour when Adam heard another heartbeat, and they headed toward it, and toward a brighter sunlight. Alpha Niemi was awaiting them in a clearing, obviously.

Adam stopped dead at the edge of the trees, wondering if this was some sort of absurd werewolf version of an overprotective father loading a shotgun in front of his child’s suitor. He was deep in the woods, alone with Alpha Niemi and his loyal daughter, and the clearing where Niemi waited was entirely carpeted in flowers of a purple so deep it was almost black: wolfsbane.

“It’s all right,” Niemi said, beckoning from where he stood amidst the flowers. He was a big man, middle-aged but still fit, and with an obvious outdoorsy strength, wearing faded jeans and work boots and a worn flannel shirt. “This variety isn’t actually very toxic. Won’t hurt you unless you start pulling up plants and eating the roots.”

Adam looked over at Callie, but she was leaning against a tree, arms folded across her chest, obviously intending to stay right where she was. Adam gritted his teeth, shoved his hands into his pockets, and strode out through the flowers, trying not to crush any underfoot and coat his shoes with poison.

When he stood at the center of the clearing, he could see that the ground cover wasn’t perfectly uniform; there were stones here and there jutting out above the flowers.

“Have you brought me here to show me where you buried people who offended Casey’s honor?” Adam snapped, raising his gaze to scowl directly at Niemi.

The Alpha raised his eyebrows slightly, then said, “No, we left those where they fell, more or less. These are the graves of his family.”

Adam felt himself freeze. He looked around again, counting.

“Not all of them,” Niemi said. “But we couldn’t be sure who was who, so we brought them all home and buried them here, where they’d be safe from any further desecration. And where Casey could visit them, if he ever chose to.”

Adam looked around again, then met Niemi’s eyes. Carefully level, Adam said, “I don’t understand.”

“No?” Niemi raised his eyebrows, his expression still pointedly mild. “Maybe you better let me tell you what I brought you here to tell you, then, instead of jumping to nasty conclusions and spitting accusations at me.”

Adam ground his teeth and stared at his own toes, waiting. He would say please if Niemi demanded it—for Casey’s sake—but he didn’t have to like being set up for this.

“Casey doesn’t remember what I’m about to tell you,” Niemi said. “It’s not a secret from him, as such; a lot of people know at least some of this, and he knows that a lot of people know. But he was little when it happened, and he forgot a lot—a lot of it we’ve had to guess at because he was already forgetting things when we found him. And some of it we didn’t tell him at the time because it was nothing to go putting on a little kid, and since he’s been old enough, he’s forgotten the rest and doesn’t want to hear it.”

Adam looked up at the sky, still clear and blue overhead, and down at the ground, steady underfoot. Birds were singing in the trees, insects chirping away. It didn’t ease the sense that something deadly was crashing toward him—something much, much bigger than he was.

Niemi was still talking, not perfectly at ease but matter of fact and as steady as the earth. “Casey knows he only has to ask and I’ll tell him, but he’s never wanted to know. Except last night, when he was upset about being sent away, he demanded that I tell him. I didn’t, because he was in no state to hear it, and he was only asking because he thought it might mean he could stay. He hasn’t asked again this morning, which he could’ve. He went to talk to you instead.”

Adam shook his head, denying not the fact but whatever Niemi seemed to be implying by it. He was marginally better than the worst possible thing that could happen to Casey, that was all. He’d do his damnedest not to fail that incredibly low standard, but that didn’t mean he had any right to know Casey’s secrets.

“You could be telling him right now.”

Niemi shook his head. “Only if he asks. And when he does, I’ll tell him a hell of a lot more than I’m about to tell you, because he’s got a hell of a lot more right to know than you do. But Casey’s hardly ever spent a night outside our lands since he was six years old. I can count on one hand the number of times he’s been out of Olmsted County in nineteen years. Whatever happened to him, it happened out there, and that’s where you’re taking him. It’s my belief that no one who hurt him directly is left alive, but that’s worth shit when it comes to protecting him.”

Adam looked Niemi over; there was no hint of threat in him, but he radiated a purely physical power; he was the alpha of an old-fashioned pack, and he’d probably spent his whole life fighting, one way or another. When he said none of the people who hurt Casey were left alive, Adam could hear him politely refraining from confessing to murder while making it crystal clear how that agreeable situation had come about.

“I don’t know how much I’m worth, if it comes to that,” Adam said flatly. They had to know he wasn’t that kind of alpha, and he wasn’t going to pretend to be, even for this. Especially for this.

Niemi shook his head. “You can call us, or the cops if it’s that urgent, as well as anybody. It’s mostly about making sure you know there’s something to watch out for; I can’t tell you exactly what, or who, but I think if they come after Casey after all this time... it’s not gonna be anything you—or anybody—could settle with a knock-down drag-out.”

Adam nodded sharply. Being suspicious was, in fact, an area in which he excelled. Calling for help wasn’t, particularly, but in this case he could probably manage it. “So, inexactly, who or what am I watching for?”

Niemi’s lips twitched, almost a smile before the expression was snuffed out.

“When I found Casey—a couple of miles from here, up in the state forest—he was wolf-shaped, still all puppy-fuzzy. He was scared as hell when I tried to pick him up, but not of me, exactly. He didn’t run from me or snap at me. Whenever I tried to get close to him, he’d back off, whining, and he’d look everywhere but at me.”

Adam remembered Casey’s blue eyes flashing open, sightless in sleep, and Casey whispering urgently, Run.

“He was afraid for you,” Adam said, looking again at the stones scattered around the clearing.

“Yeah,” Niemi said. “We backtracked him, found a hunters’ hideout. And once we’d dealt with the hunters, we found bodies. A lot of bodies. Best guess is they were keeping Casey to lure werewolves. Alphas, mostly lone alphas without packs, judging by what we found—lost little omega, what lonely alpha could resist? We think the hunters had Casey for weeks at least, maybe months. It took three days before he shifted human-shaped again, and it was a month after that before I ever heard him speak a word, although he talked to the midwives sooner.”

Adam had an unwelcome new insight into why Casey needed exposure therapy for close proximity to alphas. The forgotten—repressed—fear of what could happen to an alpha who came too close to him had to be monstrous. Unbearable.

Had they been killed in front of him? Had he made himself forget their last words, and the scent of their blood? Adam felt a horrible sick sympathy, and a sicker envy of Casey’s forgetfulness.

“You said his family is buried here,” Adam said, those implications unfolding hideously.

Niemi nodded, gesturing to a cluster of stones at the eastern edge of the clearing. “In all the bodies, there was only one omega, and three kids, all older than Casey. All boys, we think. We couldn’t be sure if one of the alphas was his dad—most of them we managed to identify, but there were a handful we couldn’t—bitten, maybe, or from farther away than we could trace.” Niemi gestured to another stone, a little removed from the cluster. “We buried our best guess closest.”

“Nineteen years ago,” Adam said, his brain abruptly kicking into gear in the face of a solvable problem. “Did you put them into coffins? Are they protected in any way? There could still be viable DNA in the bones if—”

Niemi shook his head, that almost-smile coming and going again. “No need. We documented everything. Took samples and froze ‘em. But it was before the Revelation, and even after—I’ve heard those ancestry places reject werewolf samples, send ‘em back saying they’re contaminated. Didn’t figure there was any use.”

Adam closed his eyes. “There isn’t anything available to the average consumer, so far. But I could put you in touch with someone who could do the testing.”

And if Casey’s father wasn’t among the bodies, where was he? Would Casey be better off finding him, or was that who Casey needed protecting from? What had left Casey, at least one parent, and his siblings so vulnerable to hunters in the first place?

“Could you compare them to your samples, if we did that? Would you be able to tell what pack they’re from? Or if they’re way different from any of the packs you meet?”

Adam looked over at Niemi with a frown. “Why...”

Niemi looked away this time. “Omegas mostly live with packs. Especially before the Revelation, especially omegas who have kids. They need midwives, need to be safe during heats, need to give birth with people who aren’t gonna be surprised by where the baby comes out.”

Adam gritted his teeth and nodded.

“And packs know each other. Not every pack knows every other, and there’re divisions, feuds—some packs we don’t know much more than where they are and that they want to be left the hell alone, just enough so we don’t trespass by mistake. But even those, we could get in touch with them through somebody. And we sent a picture of Casey to every damn pack we could find in North America, and asked them to send it to anyone we missed. And here he still is with us, nineteen years later.”

There had to be explanations for that, but... “His omega parent? You described them, too?”

Niemi nodded. “And the boys, and that alpha along with all the others. Not a single pack claimed any of them. No one we could get in touch with had anyone unaccounted for that they could possibly be. Four kids born to an omega, and no pack knows any of them? Casey spoke English when he started talking again, and he didn’t have any accent as far as we could tell. He has to have lived the first six years of his life within a thousand miles of here, and somebody has to know where he came from. And once you take him out there, there’s a chance he’s gonna meet them—or a chance they’re gonna get worried about meeting him. Or...”

Niemi shook his head. “I don’t know what could happen, exactly. I just know something could, and at least now I’m not sending you out there blind.”