They were in the car on Wednesday evening after dinner, driving from the Frasers’ territory to the Jensens’. Adam had permanently retired his garment bag to the trunk, but the Farm Fleet shopping bag was tucked into the footwell with some of the clothes that no longer fit in Adam’s suitcase, breathing out the smell of him. Casey had retaliated by accepting three jars of jam and a tin of cookies, all carefully towel-wrapped so they wouldn’t clatter, plus a bag of clothes and some empty, washed dishes being sent to someone at the Jensens’.

Casey had his window down and his head tipped out. It gave him a reprieve from the concentration of Adam’s scent in the car, although he wasn’t even sure that was what he needed a break from.

The last three days, as the moon waxed from half to three-quarters, had found Casey constantly itchy and edgy and off-balance. He and Adam had wound up yelling at each other a handful of times, twice because Adam was looking at Casey like he knew something was wrong.

Something was definitely wrong, but Casey was pretty sure this was just how the process was going to go. If he didn’t do this with Adam, burn through this feeling and come out the other side, he’d have to do it some other way. This way at least he got to yell at Adam and, sixty percent of the time so far, the yelling ended in making out and grinding against each other in the first vaguely private spot they could find. Adam’s new clothes all smelled almost as much like Casey as they did like Adam.

It also meant he showered twice a day, scrubbing fiercely at his own skin to remove every trace, real or imagined, of Adam’s scent, but... baby steps.

He had managed not to yell at anyone who wasn’t Adam, which was his private benchmark for holding it together—that and he hadn’t gotten a phone call from Granny Tyne or Alpha Niemi telling him that he was fucking up. Clearly the local inter-pack gossip mills were in full working order; every omega they met with knew all about Adam’s study before he or Casey could say a word, and they also all looked knowingly between Adam and Casey but said nothing.

Casey was under no illusions that those gossip mills didn’t work the other way, too. The Niemis would be getting hourly reports on Casey’s behavior, and honestly Casey would take the silent, smug amusement over the concerned looks he’d be getting if he didn’t have Adam, and their possible relationship, for camouflage.

Still, he was exhausted and twitchy after three days with the Frasers, three days with Adam’s scent almost always in his nose, three days of the moon waxing toward full and his body gearing up toward a heat that wasn’t going to happen. He was clutching his seatbelt with his left hand, and the fingers of his right drummed and knocked against the outside of the car, too restless to even raise his hand to slice through the air. Casey felt even more watched than among his home pack; he’d long since gotten used to the Niemis looking after him, but strangers were harder to ignore.

Adam was nearly impossible to ignore. Even now, with his head out the window so the rush of air could fill his ears and the chill night air could fill his nose, Casey was more conscious of Adam beside him than anything else. He looked up at the gibbous moon and he wanted to lean back inside the car and start another fight, get Adam to pull over and climb into the back seat, get Adam to help him stop thinking about anything at all for a little while.

But he couldn’t arrive at the Jensens’ smelling like he’d just been fucked in the back seat of a car.

He pictured it for a second, and then he couldn’t bear the thought of arriving at the Jensens’ at all. He turned his head toward Adam, who had both hands on the wheel, eyes resolutely facing front. His hair was too short to be ruffled by the wind from Casey’s open window, but the cheek and ear that Casey could see looked reddened from the chill, and his jaw was clenched tight.

He knew Adam could feel his attention, but he was pretty certain that Adam wouldn’t respond unless Casey actually spoke, and possibly not then.

Today’s yelling matches had not ended in making out.

Casey wasn’t actually sure why; he didn’t think the stuff they’d yelled at each other about had been worse than usual, and the moon knew Casey wanted it at least as badly as he had yesterday. They’d just never turned the corner—and if nothing had changed in him, then something had changed in Adam, but Casey couldn’t begin to guess what.

Casey had never been good at tracking an alpha’s moods or any but the most obvious health changes by their scent. He got too overwhelmed by the alpha part, and even when he could tolerate being around alphas he was always tuning out their scents. Even with Adam he never picked up anything more nuanced than sex or angry, and honestly angry might just be Adam smells like himself but not sex.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized how little he knew Adam. He had no idea what it meant that Adam hadn’t hauled him into a kiss today, and that seemed like something he ought to at least be able to make an educated guess about. In another hour they’d be in the middle of another pack, getting all those sly looks, and Casey would still have no idea just how far off the mark they were.

“Hey,” Casey said, tipping his head back inside the car. “Let’s go someplace human.”

Adam frowned at that but kept staring straight ahead for several seconds before he looked over at Casey and then pointedly around at all the nothing they were driving through, on their way from the Fraser lands in the southeast corner of Olmsted County to the Jensen lands in the northeast.

Casey stuck his head out the window again, listening beyond the rush of the wind and looking around at the horizons. They were heading due north on the county road, and he could see the approaching glow of the freeway up ahead, so...

“We’ll be in Dover soon,” Casey said, waving ahead of them as he settled back into his seat. “There’s a bar. Please? I just don’t want to jump into another strange pack right now.”

“And you’d rather hang out in a bar?” Adam was looking straight ahead again. “I thought you were a homebody, anyway, what do you know about bars on the other side of the county?”

Casey rolled his eyes. “I didn’t do an exchange, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get my driver’s license and then do as much driving-around-aimlessly-while-brooding as I could scrape together gas money for, when I was sixteen and seventeen.”

And twenty, and twenty-four, and a couple of weeks ago, Casey did not say. The thing about living in a pack that still saw him as a sad kid was that sometimes he found himself acting like the sad kid they all saw. He was aware of the vicious cycle, but he’d never seen a way out that wasn’t worse than staying in, until he was forced to.

Right at this second, ready to vibrate out of his skin and bargaining with an argumentative alpha over where to stop next, he wasn’t sure that this was actually better.

“Please,” Casey said, to fill the silence while he struggled to think of a more persuasive argument.

Adam jerked like Casey had said something awful, hands tightening harder on the wheel. “Obviously I won’t force you to go anywhere you don’t want to. Just tell me where.”

“Moon, it’s not—” Casey cut himself off before he could actually argue that it wasn’t a big deal and Adam didn’t have to make it sound so dramatic. It had felt like exactly that big a deal until Adam agreed, and Casey didn’t need to ruin the breathing space he was so desperate for by starting a fight before they even got to Dover. Casey turned his face to the open air again, and didn’t say another word until he had to tell Adam where to turn.

Dover’s downtown covered about half a block of Main Street; the bar and the restaurant across the street seemed to be the only places open after dark. Adam parked on the broad, mostly-empty street in front of the bar, and gestured for Casey to roll up the window when he turned off the car. Casey did, although even that seemed like an unnecessary precaution. In a town like this they could leave it running with the doors open and all that was likely to happen was someone shutting it off for them and searching them out to return the keys.

Casey stepped out onto the sidewalk and closed his eyes, pausing for a moment to get the lay of the land. He listened for the locations and numbers of humans around them and took a deep breath through his nose, seeking out the scents of the town.

He nearly choked on that breath, his eyes flashing wide as he looked around—he smelled alpha, and stranger, except that wasn’t right because the scent brought up a vivid memory.

Casey’s hair was pulled tight against his scalp and he was scared, so scared, but someone was holding him. The alpha’s hand was big enough to cover half of Casey’s back and the alpha’s scent filled the entire world as Casey tucked his face into the alpha’s shoulder, hiding and feeling—feeling safer—because his—his—

“Casey?”

Casey jerked his head up to stare at Adam, who was frowning down at him. His hands were on Casey’s shoulders, and for just a second Casey wanted to press closer, to hide his face against Adam’s shoulder and have Adam’s arms around him, Adam’s hand on his back, Adam holding him up. He could almost believe that he would feel it again, that wave of reassurance, and then the memory dissolved, leaving just a vague impression of alpha.

“Are you all right?” Adam asked, squeezing gently on Casey’s shoulders. “You were just standing here—I was halfway to the door before I noticed, and you didn’t hear me calling you.”

Casey shook his head. “I just—thought I smelled something.”

He couldn’t smell anything but Adam now, a big alpha radiating concern and Adam’s usual hot undertone of anger. It must have been Adam he smelled, combined with some odd note in the ambient scents of the town to make him think it was another alpha’s scent. Adam hadn’t noticed anything, after all.

Casey shrugged against Adam’s lingering grip, and Adam immediately dropped his hands, turning toward the bar. He didn’t actually move until Casey started forward, and then fell into step just slightly behind him—guarding his back? Casey gritted his teeth against the annoyance that felt like a prickle on his skin, and ran a hand roughly through his hair as he shouldered through the door into the bar.

There weren’t many people inside, and all of them were human; there was music playing, but not unpleasantly loudly, and the smells of fried food and alcohol were reasonably fresh. Casey glanced back over his shoulder and saw Adam coming to a similar conclusion: this wouldn’t be a bad place to spend an hour or two. Adam, in his new clothes, didn’t even stand out too obviously.

Casey headed toward a booth against the far wall under a Vikings banner, catching the eye of the lone waitress on duty as he went. She waved with the hand not holding a tray of drinks, calling out, “Be right with you, fellas.”

They took opposite sides of the booth. Adam sat perfectly upright facing the table, while Casey slouched sideways, drawing one knee up and leaning against the wall. He looked at the people sitting at the bar, the bartender and the rows of bottles behind him, the TV over his head showing a basketball game, the door. At everything but Adam, who sat carefully still, hands on the table, in his peripheral vision.

“Are you sure you should mix alcohol and—” Adam cut off as the waitress approached, but he’d said enough to make Casey realize that he should definitely mix alcohol with the medications he was on; he had enough wolfsbane in his system that human-strength alcohol was likely to actually get him drunk, and that would uncoil this tension, blot out the edgy itchy feeling.

He ran a hand through his hair again, scratching absently at his scalp, as the waitress came to a stop by their table.

She looked them both over and said, “ID please, boys.” Casey wanted to bristle, but she was auntie-aged for sure, and didn’t look like she was about to take any nonsense. He located his wallet and handed over his ID, and Adam did the same.

He listened for it, but there was no betraying skip in her heartbeat when she glanced at the place where WEREWOLF was printed on each of their IDs. She did say, “We don’t get so many from your pack out here. You know the Jensens?”

Casey forced a smile and did not calculate how long it would take for one of the Jensens to stop by here and get all the gossip about him and Adam drinking in a human bar on a Wednesday night. “Yes ma’am,” he said. “Headed over to their place tonight, in fact. Just taking a little break first.”

“Well, we’re glad to have you,” She said with a smile. “What are you drinking tonight?”

Casey glanced over at the bar again and said decisively, “Jack Daniels. On the rocks.”

She looked to Adam, and he was squinting toward the cooler behind the bartender. “Whatever that dark beer third from the left on the second shelf is, please.”

She glanced over, snorted, and said, “Sure thing.”

Adam looked like he wanted to change his mind, but also like he couldn’t admit that he didn’t know what he’d ordered. When the waitress was gone, Casey braced for Adam to tell him more about how he shouldn’t be combining whiskey and wolfsbane, but instead he said, “I’m surprised she didn’t know you by sight, small town like this.”

“Small town on the other side of the county,” Casey pointed out. “I’ve never actually come in here before, I just knew where it was.”

Adam clenched his jaw and looked away, and before Casey had figured out whether it was worth trying to ask him about himself, the waitress returned and handed Casey his whiskey on the rocks and Adam his...

“Root beer,” he read off the bottle, which was already opened.

He looked up at the waitress, who smiled. “You want anything else with that? Or you want to know what the beers in the cooler are?”

Despite his clothes, she had Adam pretty well figured out.

“No,” Adam said, grimly. “This is fine.”

The waitress beamed at both of them. “Let me know if you need anything else, boys.”

She headed back to the bar, to check on the game with the handful of other people in the place, leaving them alone. Casey stuck his nose over the rim of his glass, breathing in the fire-and-smoke smell of the drink, and then gulped half of it down in one go. He managed to swallow it and not cough afterward, but it was a near thing; he rarely drank even wolf-style alcohol, since he could generally get whatever effect he wanted from wolfsbane without the nasty taste.

Adam took a stoic sip of his root beer. Casey could smell the sugary herbal scent of it from across the table—nothing industrially-produced, it must be a local brew of some kind. He smiled sunnily at Adam and then tipped his head back against the wall to see how long the whiskey would take to make an impression.

With his eyes closed, it was easy to say, “So what’s your deal, anyway?”

He listened while Adam took another sip and set the bottle down carefully on the table. “My deal.”

Casey waved his hand around—the hand still holding his drink, as it happened, but there wasn’t enough in the glass to worry too much about it slopping over. “You’re an alpha, you’re an asshole to everybody definitely including me, but you’re doing this study about omegas. For omegas. I could recite your spiel on all the good this study could do for omegas from memory, and it’s obvious you believe it even if I happen to think it’s kind of bullshit. And you were so weird about not wanting to hurt me or impose on me the first time I came on to you. So what’s that about? What’s your deal? I don’t know anything about you that you don’t tell everybody in the room when we recruit for the study.”

“You know... a few things about me that everyone else doesn’t.”

Casey peeked out through his eyelashes, smiling, and, oh, yeah, that was the whiskey. Hello, whiskey. “Okay, I don’t know anything about you that isn’t about fucking that everybody else doesn’t know.”

Adam was turning the bottle around and around, staring at his hands as he did, looking a weird kind of tense—still angry like always, but like the anger was turned inward.

“My omega parent, my dad—”

“Oh, like Pappa Otso?” Casey interrupted, then realized that that reference wouldn’t make any sense to somebody who’d met him two years after Pappa Otso died and probably never heard his name before.

Adam blinked at him, oddly thrown.

Casey explained, “Pappa Otso—Finnish Pappa, it’s like Grandpa—he was the head of the midwives before Granny Tyne. He was born in 1895, and back then most omegas still had to have a female name at least to use among humans and—” Casey waved vaguely and took a sip of his whiskey, “all that. And even though Granny and Auntie and Mom, for omegas, just mean you’re the one with the womb, not that you’re female, he didn’t want to use them. He said it felt too much like the same thing, having to pretend to be what he wasn’t. So he was Pappa.”

Adam still looked wrong-footed. “I didn’t—I didn’t know other omegas did that. Born wolves, who grew up in packs.”

Casey frowned. “I mean, the other way is traditional? But... we decide what we are, and that includes what words people use about us. I always figured I’d grow up to be Auntie Casey and then Granny Casey someday, but if I wanted to be called something else—people might make a mistake, but they wouldn’t... they wouldn’t make me be called something I didn’t like, any more than they’d make me be a girl when I’m a boy. Man. Guy, whatever.”

Casey ran his hand through his hair, tugging a little at the curls and scratching at his scalp. Adam’s eyes followed the motion, intent, then dropped to his hands again when Casey lowered his hand, feeling weirdly self-conscious about touching his hair.

“As I was saying,” Adam went on finally. “My dad introduced me to science, and to research. He wanted to understand all about what he had become—a werewolf and an omega. He was attempting something similar when I was a kid, I think.”

“You think?” Casey prodded, although he could sense that he was on rotten ice. It wasn’t going to bear much prodding, but he couldn’t resist, feeling warm and loose instead of itchy and tense.

“I think,” Adam said precisely. “He died—he killed himself—when I was ten years old, and my alpha father burned all his research.”

Adam’s voice was so even, so empty of emotion, that it took Casey a few seconds to realize what he’d said. “You—what?”

“My father hurt him,” Adam said, after another sip of root beer. “Changed him into something he was never prepared to be, then got him pregnant. Trapped him in the life of the pack, destroyed any hope he had of a scientific career among humans, or of having the research he did do published. And then drove him to despair, and destroyed all his work after he was dead. And I watched it all happen.”

Casey stared at him, jaw hanging open as his mind staggered from one objection to another. How had the pack let any of that happen, let alone all of it? And what exactly did Adam mean about watching all of it, when by definition a lot of it happened before he was born or old enough to understand? Had it actually happened like that?

But what came out of Casey’s gaping mouth was, “But you—you were a child, you—”

Adam shrugged. “But I’m an alpha. And I’m not going to be that alpha. I’m going to try to make up for what my father destroyed and what my dad never got to complete. That’s my deal.”

Adam punctuated that statement with another sip of his root beer, and Casey exhaled and shoved the last of his whiskey across the table, beckoning for Adam’s bottle. “If you’re going to punish yourself, don’t do it with something sweet, for fuck’s sake. Wash your mouth out, at least.”

Adam gave him an unreadable look, then pushed the root beer over and curled both hands around Casey’s glass, more ice than whiskey now. “I... I apologize. That was... I didn’t have to answer you in the most brutal way possible. I just. I don’t talk about it, so I’ve never learned a better way to say it. I’m sorry.”

Casey took a fortifying sip of root beer—the wolfsbane-alcohol-sugar cocktail was probably more fun than he really ought to be setting himself up for right now, but he couldn’t bear to watch Adam keep drinking it like it was medicine. Not after what he’d said.

“You could have told me it was none of my business,” Casey pointed out.

Adam nodded without looking up, and said nothing.

What would he expect Adam to say? He knew perfectly well how to tell Casey to fuck off, and he hadn’t. He had told Casey something he didn’t tell people. He’d done it badly, and, yeah, not very kindly, but Casey was accustomed to people in pain saying all kinds of nasty things to him while he was trying to help them. It was part of the job description, being a midwife.

This wasn’t even that. This was someone showing him a wound gone septic, not because they thought he could help, but because he’d asked what that awful smell was. And then apologizing for being disgusting—for not presenting it more attractively.

It was... trust, in an awful way. Trust Adam hadn’t wanted to give, but had given. Casey remembered the way Adam had said, happily, wonderingly, that Casey would poison him if he deserved it, as if that was the deciding factor in whether it was all right for him to fuck Casey when invited. It made a sickening kind of sense now.

Given what Adam was most afraid of, Casey promising to kill him if he stepped out of line had been a promise of protection as much as any other alpha’s offer of a mate-bond to an omega.

Casey was jerked out of his thoughts when Adam finally moved, tossing back the last of the whiskey. He met Casey’s eyes as he returned the glass to the table and said, still in that even tone, as if none of this affected him at all, “My turn to ask something that’s none of my business.”

“I’ll tell you to fuck off if I want to,” Casey promised before taking another sip of the root beer, guiltily aware that he ought to keep trying to figure out more about Adam and his dad and painfully relieved for an excuse not to try right now.

Adam dropped his gaze, then met Casey’s eyes again deliberately. Determinedly. “What did you think you smelled?”

Casey frowned. “What? When?”

For a second Adam looked as puzzled as Casey felt. “In the street, when you got out of the car. You stopped dead and you were miles away, and when I got your attention you said you thought you’d smelled something.”

Casey looked toward the door. He wasn’t drunk; it hadn’t been even half an hour since they’d walked in. And he did remember saying that. He remembered Adam’s worried look, Adam’s hands on his shoulders. He remembered... wanting to press himself close to Adam, hide his face in Adam’s shoulder. What the hell had he smelled to make him want that? What had he been thinking of while he stood there?

He’d forgotten. And he knew why he forgot things, didn’t he? Because it was better, safer, not to remember them.

He was trying to think of how to make Adam understand that when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He pulled it out, feeling a sense of hopeful reprieve that evaporated when he saw the text.

Callie: Everything ok?

Casey set the phone down on the table, the better to bury his face in both of his hands. He did not scream into them. Screaming never really helped.

“Casey?”

Casey curled down his fingers and looked at Adam across his own whitened knuckles. “Our deviation from the expected schedule has been noted. Callie’s checking up on me.”

Adam looked faintly impressed.

Casey growled.

He tapped out a reply message—Yes, alpha—and a quick message to the next contact down in his list—Do you ever just want to scream at every single alpha you know—and then turned his phone face down before declaring, “I want another whiskey.”

Adam didn’t quite smile, but it looked like he thought about it. “I can make that happen.”

Later, when they were in the car again and Casey was feeling all liquid and loose in the passenger seat, Adam said, “May I ask you another question? A different kind of question.”

Casey hadn’t actually answered the last one, had he? “Sure.”

“This is silly,” Adam said pre-emptively. “But—the day we met, uh, before you went to pick apples. You said something about a story that everyone knows, about the first werewolves.”

Casey blinked slowly at him. “No one ever told you that story?”

Adam shrugged. “My dad was bitten. He didn’t grow up with it, and anyway he was a scientist, he never liked telling me stuff that wasn’t empirically true. No church, no fairy tales, nothing like that.”

Casey closed one eye, squinting. “Your dad... became an actual werewolf... and still didn’t think there was any value in fairy tales.”

Adam shrugged stiffly. “He was a scientist.”

He was also, of course, dead, and had been since Adam was a kid, too young to be particularly critical of a parent, which was maybe part of how Adam had wound up being Adam, but they weren’t getting into that right now. Adam had just asked about the story, not to be interrogated about why he didn’t already know it and what that said about his dad or his childhood.

“I’m not telling it, like,” Casey waved a hand. “Like properly, like you tell it to kids, okay.”

Adam shook his head. “I just need the Wikipedia summary, so I know what people are talking about.”

“Is it on Wikipedia?” Casey muttered, pulling out his phone. He had a message from Rory: Not lately, but yeah, I’m familiar with the feeling. Casey swiped it away without stopping to figure out what that was about.

“Not the actual Wikipedia summary,” Adam said quickly. “I want to—” he hesitated, then said, softer, “I’d like to hear it from you.”

Casey squinted over at him again, feeling mushy and warm in a way that he was definitely going to blame on the whiskey. “Okay, well, uh, there’s three kids, human kids. And their parents are poor, or maybe they die, or the kids are stolen from them—whatever, they end up alone in the woods, the three kids. Two boys and a girl.”

Adam nodded, frowning intently like he was memorizing this information.

“And they get adopted by wolves, of course,” Casey said. “But they’re not like the wolves, they don’t really fit in. But being human didn’t really work out for them either, so they want to become like wolves, enough to run and hunt with them and whatever.” Casey yawned, dimly remembering Pappa Otso telling this story, Alpha Niemi telling it—he’d heard it a million times, and if he was more awake or less drunk he would be reciting it properly almost by reflex, using familiar phrases from the tellings he’d heard over and over as a kid.

Luckily he was drunk, because Adam probably wasn’t that patient.

“So they—you know, this is the magic part that your dad didn’t approve of—they ask the sun to help them but the sun’s too far away and the sun never changes its course. And they ask the earth to help them and the earth is too vast and solid and just swallows up their blood—”

“Blood?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s... You know, fairy tales. They’re gory sometimes. The kids, when they ask, they offer sacrifices. Blood. The sun dries up their blood and the earth swallows it.”

“And then they ask the moon,” Adam said, like he had worked out the pattern here.

“Good job, yes,” Casey patted Adam’s knee approvingly. “They ask the moon, because the moon changes its face and blah blah, the moon makes them into werewolves. And because they’re a whole new thing, and they might just die out and never be able to build a pack if only one of them can pop out babies who will be like them, one brother becomes an omega. Double the babies, werewolves forever. And that’s why we are the way we are today.”

“That’s interesting,” Adam said thoughtfully. “As a representation of inheritance patterns—and the phenomenon of bitten omegas, actually—the story may encode an understanding...”

Casey kept listening, watching Adam through his eyelashes, but all he got from it was the rise and fall of Adam’s voice and then some confused dreams that were full of blood and childhood sweetness at the same time.