The trail led back through the park and deep into the city, to an area that could only be described as a ghetto. There were too many people out and about, enjoying the beautiful day, for Blake to stay as a wolf even when he was racing through the alleyways, and he feared his slower human pace just wouldn’t be fast enough to arrive wherever he needed to be in time to save Josh.

The trail was very thin now, obscured by the passage of dozens of other people, hidden beneath oily smoke and car exhaust and the smells of food and perfume and body odor and dogs being walked, but Blake was hyper-focused. He couldn’t have lost the trail for any reason at all unless it rained. He was relentless, unstoppable, shoving his way past the people in front of him who were walking too slow, dashing across busy streets with only inches to spare before he would have been hit by this car or that truck. Ever since the day he met Josh, he had become almost obsessive in his care with crossing the street, making sure he had more than enough time to avoid another near-wreck. All that was thrown out the window now. Self-preservation was nonexistent. Every part of him strained towards his mission and nothing else mattered.

“Blake!” someone cried out. He didn’t know who they were, only that they weren’t Josh. He didn’t have time to care if they were Nickie or Pinocchio. They were insignificant to him, and he blazed past them, running for all he was worth. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t much of a runner, that he wasn’t built for speed. It didn’t matter that he was seeing spots and his chest was on fire, or that his shoulders were beginning to ache from the pumping motion of his arms. His thighs were chafing inside his new fancy pants.

None of it mattered. Only Josh mattered.

Some distant part of him registered this ghetto was quite near where he’d been that day he got in his first fight with that old, scarred alpha wolf. A ghetto was never quite an area on its own. It was always a sub-area, hidden within the larger one and usually only separated by a prosperous street or neighborhood by a few fateful turns. This one was like that, a few streets off the main road where he and his friends had been hanging around and smoking on the sidewalk.

He would have given anything for a smoke, remembering that. Anything to achieve that calm buzz, that sense of superiority over the rest of the world.

And he would have traded that smoke for Josh, because love was more permanent than a cigarette.

He charged through empty streets which hadn’t seen maintenance since the day they were laid down. There were virtually no street signs at all, no stop signs or yield signs or “street lights ahead” signs. They had all been stolen or destroyed. The few that remained had been so vandalized it was hard to imagine them in their original state.

The road itself was covered in gigantic potholes, which he leaped over, and webbed with a complicated system of cracks. What guiding paint lines had been placed on the road were now only mere smudges of white or yellow that could have meant anything.

The homes were in no better shape. They were small, cramped things with yards that were either dead and brown, or overgrown and swampy. Toys littered most of them. One had a firepit surrounded by shitty lawn chairs, while another had a classic ornament sitting out by the curb: a ransacked vehicle, just a shell of its former self.

He absorbed this information and then ignored it all as being unimportant. The trail was easier to follow, and he chased it until, abruptly, it ended.

Letting out a bark of agony, as if he had just had some very important part of himself sliced away, Blake spun back around and tried to reclaim it. As he turned, he caught the scent of the three wolves again and realized he’d only missed his turn. The trail led up the nearby sidewalk and down the driveway of a house that looked even worse than all the others. It was very small and narrow, which made it look somehow taller than its single-story height. There was no telling what color paint it once had, because it had long since worn away to leave everything a uniform shade of dirty brown. The lawn was also brown, as was the roof and the windows. Most of the windows were cracked, and several were boarded-up. The door hung crooked on its hinges, and as Blake walked up to it, he realized it was being held shut from the inside by a very large rubber band. He snarled and grabbed at the band, snapping it in his fist. The sound was sharp, like a gunshot. From somewhere in the house came a startled little yelp.

They were in here.

“...to the door?” a distant voice said.

Someone else muttered an indistinct reply. They both sounded male, which confirmed for him he was in the right place.

He said nothing, though he wanted to trumpet his rage and charge in for the attack. He needed to be able to know what he was up against, and this was unfamiliar territory where they would have the upper hand.

A set of footsteps approached. Two pairs of feet. One pair heavy, and the other light. Was one of them limping? He couldn’t tell.

They were coming from the left. To the right, he saw a tiny kitchenette and a small scratched-up card table in the spot where the dining room should have been. He was a little surprised the house even looked as good as it did. The carpets showed an unusual amount of weathering and the furniture was sun-bleached, which told him the door had been broken for a very long time. Despite that, everything was relatively clean and what wasn’t was forgivable. The counters were cluttered and the card table overflowed with bags of trash, but he had to give them credit for not just throwing the garbage on the floor.

The men were speaking again but he hadn’t paid any attention until their voices abruptly cut out, words bitten in half. Blake turned his head and saw them.

As he had known already, one was an alpha and the other was an omega. However, the alpha seemed of rather small stature for a dominant wolf. It wasn’t merely his age, which was quite advanced. His shoulders were bowed and his chest seemed sunken, making his neck seem too small to hold up his head. There was no telling if he had been handsome in his youth, because he damn sure wasn’t now.

The omega also seemed a little odd. He was very tall, and while that wasn’t exactly rare, it was uncommon enough. He was bald and very liver-spotted, with wrinkles so advanced he seemed to be melting, but he didn’t seem weak or overly thin; Blake guessed the extra skin might have once covered a significant amount of muscle definition.

A submissive alpha and a dominant omega. Wonders would never cease.

“Uh, hello,” the omega said. “Can we help you with anything, sir? It’s not polite to...”

Blake drove his fist as hard as he could into the wall. It really didn’t require that much effort because of how cheaply these houses were made, but he knew it would look damn impressive. His hand went straight through the thin wood and into the layer of insulation beyond that, sending out a backwards spray of fluff and splinters. He wrenched out a handful of the insulation and showed it to them. The alpha looked positively terrified. Even more, he looked guilty as hell.

“That,” Blake growled, “is what I’m going to do to your heart if you don’t give me my fucking mate. Where is he?”

The omega blinked and stammered. Though he was ultimately more composed than the alpha, he also looked guilty as sin and was desperately trying to hide it. “I don’t know what you think we’ve done, but that doesn’t give you the right to barge into people’s houses like this! Who the hell are you?”

But looking at them, he knew that they knew who he was. And he thought he knew who they were, too. “You’re friends with that bastard feral, aren’t you?”

They said nothing, but their eyes said everything.

“It was a fucking accident that I killed him!” he said, trying not to sound guilty. He wasn’t guilty. It had been an accident, really. “He started this whole damn thing, but I bet he didn’t tell you that, did he? He probably only gave you his side of the story.”

Suddenly, the elderly alpha took a menacing step forward. His eyes had a mad, gleaming haze at the back of them, and Blake knew he too was on the verge of becoming feral, though his progression was less than the scarred alpha’s had been. Looking at the omega, he thought he might be able to see the burgeoning madness there, too. And if he tried very hard, he thought he could detect the scarred alpha’s scent, though it was very faint after such a long time.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” the alpha snarled. He curled his lips back from his teeth, exposing pointed yellow rows. The madness in his gaze deepened further, the haze increasing until it was impossible to tell what color his irises were. “Murder is murder! You should have paid for it! But you just walked away and left him there for the crows!”

“Crows?” Blake let out a bark. It wasn’t laughter, just a deep thrum of sound to punctuate his incredulousness. From somewhere deep in the house, he thought he heard something stirring around but he couldn’t be certain. “The fucking police found him, and he was in the morgue before the bugs could even find him. Bodies don’t just lie around in this day and age.”

“His did,” the omega said, and Blake saw he really believed that was true.

They both bared their teeth at him now, but they didn’t press in for the attack, retaining enough of their human logic to be able to realize he could escape through the door right behind him. They didn’t want that. They wanted to hurt him very badly, maybe kill him just like he had killed their friend.

It didn’t seem to occur to them that he was going nowhere without Josh.

“Fine. You can believe whatever you want. But you fucks need to give me back my mate. He had nothing to do with any of this.”

“He had to do with you,” the alpha pointed out. “And that makes him guilty, too. We’ll kill him too, when we’re done with you.”

They used Josh to lure him here, which was obvious enough. The real question was why hadn’t they simply waited in the forest to ambush him? Why bring him all this way? For the fun of it? Or because they simply hadn’t considered that as an option? Or was it more poetic to them, in their shattered minds, to kill him in the place where their friend had lived?

There were a thousand things he could say, a thousand words he could speak, and none of them would ever convince these wolves that he was innocent of the crime they thought he committed. They had no power of logic. Their friend had died and judging by the state they were in, dirty and reeking of filth, it hurt their minds badly.

Maybe all three of them lived together because they were the only ones who understood each other. They were all outcasts. Were they all feral to begin with or did that just...happen?

He would have liked to know, but they weren’t exactly going to invite him to have a chat over a cup of tea, and neither would he have wanted that. There were more stirring sounds from elsewhere in the house, and he simply knew it was Josh.

He tensed his shoulders.

The omega saw it and rushed him in human form, arms outstretched and his fangs bared. Blake’s vision was suddenly covered with swathes of red, rage and instinct combining to guide him. Time seemed to slow. He saw an opening, ten openings, and reached out and simply pushed the omega away with his hand on his chest. The omega went reeling backwards as if he had been thrown and was replaced by the alpha.

The alpha shapeshifted as he came at Blake, ducking in low to bite at his thigh. His fangs slid on the slick material of Blake’s slacks, and all he managed to get was a mouthful of material but he didn’t even seem to notice, tugging and yanking and shaking his head as if killing a small prey animal. The force behind the attack was staggering.

Bracing himself against the wall, Blake kicked out. He didn’t kick the old wolf but the force of the motion sent him away as if he had. The alpha hit the back of the living room couch, crumpling into a heap.

And it was over.

Blake shuddered, pulling in huge gasps of breath. His shoulders heaved. The wolf part of him was begging to finish what it started, to let it come out and bite the throats of these menaces until they quit breathing. It was so, so tempting. He could truly finish them. He could rid the world of these fools who thought the appropriate way to handle a conflict was to kidnap someone. He could put them out of their misery, because there was no way they would be able to rise out of their feral condition. That took a depth of will these old men didn’t have. It took a support system, counseling, and, most importantly, an awareness of what was going on. They wouldn’t be able to fix their problem without knowing what exactly that problem was, without admitting they had one.

He could do it. They were old. They were vulnerable. They weren’t unconscious, but they were both winded, just lying there on the floor as two elderly people who had fallen and couldn’t get up on their own. He pitied them. He hated them. He hated to think this could happen to anyone. Best to get rid of it so he wouldn’t have to face that reality anymore, that they were no different than he was.

But he couldn’t.

He stood there shuddering, battling with himself, warring with what humans would call darkness but which wolves would call simply nature.

I can’t be like them. I won’t be like them. This isn’t how things should be.

He opened his eyes as the last of the red haze started to fade away. His anger drained. Adrenaline went with it, leaving him feeling abruptly hollow.

“Josh?” he called out. His voice croaked. It hadn’t even done that when he was going through puberty, not that he’d had a very rough puberty. Growing up was a breeze for alphas.

From somewhere to his left, he heard a very faint gasp, followed by a sob. “Blake?” a thin voice cried.

His soul practically wept with relief. He turned in the direction of the sound and bounded down the hall. “Josh! Joshua! I’m here! I love you!”

He heard shuffling, soft footsteps like fabric against something smooth. Then, a door opened and he caught a flash of white bathroom behind the wood like a sliver of moon emerging from behind dark storm clouds. A pale face appeared in the darkness, half-covered with a mop of curls damp with sweaty exertion.

“Josh!” he said, and threw himself at his mate. He grabbed the omega around his waist and lifted him up high into the air, spinning him around and then bracing him against the wall to hold him. He pressed his lips to Josh, kissing him fiercely over and over. He kissed every part of his mate he could reach, dancing over his face and down to his shoulders. Tears streaked his face, burning hot as he expelled all the fear he’d been hiding up until right now. And Josh was laughing and returning his kisses, their tears mingling on their skin.

Josh wrapped his legs around Blake, but Blake noted he wasn’t using his hands. And he could feel something hard between them, as if tied around Josh’s stomach.

Backing away from the wall, Blake set Josh down on his feet, then held onto him with his hands on his shoulders while examining him up and down. Except for a few small specks of dried blood along the other wolf’s side, where he had landed on the thorns after being attacked, he seemed unharmed.

But there was an orange extension cord wrapped around his stomach and wrists. More cord surrounded his legs but most of that had been loosened and no longer impeded his movement.

Josh held a disposable razor gripped in his hands. Strips of orange plastic were caught between the three blades, and now Blake saw the cord around his stomach had been shredded to reveal the inner workings. Sprays of silver wire poked out randomly from where the razor had bit at them.

“They fucking tied you up?” Blake said, feeling rage try to ignite inside him again. He grabbed at the cords and tugged at them a little. Josh gasped. “Did they hurt you?”

“No! Just...I’m chafed. And it’s painful.” That wasn’t quite the truth, and they both knew it, but now wasn’t the time for such confrontations. He just nodded and went at the cords more gently, tracing their tangled path around until he could find the ends and work them apart. After that, the cord unwound easily and Blake tossed it aside. He freed Josh’s wrists, and then got rid of the cord from around his legs while the omega grimaced and rubbed his wrists. They were indeed chafed, rubbed red and raw, but Blake had seen worse damage, and he knew this would heal rather quickly in the grand scheme of things.

He embraced Josh again and this time Josh was able to hug him back. Their cheeks rubbed together and Josh whispered into his ear, “I love you, too.”

Blake pulled Josh deeper against him, stroking down his back, mussing up his hair. He thought he had never been happier than he was in this moment, cradling his beloved against him and feeling his solid, soft warmth. Josh’s cheek rested against his shoulder, and Blake savored the feel of his breath on his neck. Relief made him tighten his grip, and he stroked the other wolf much more deeply, not just caressing but massaging now, feeling his mate’s curves.

“Did you beat them up?” Josh whispered.

He snorted. “It wasn’t much of a fight. I didn’t even have to go wolf.”

“I think we need to call the police this time.”

Blake sighed, feeling his old reluctance to get authority involved in a place where they had no real right to be. Josh was right, though. He couldn’t take this matter into his own hands, and neither could he just leave these old men to go about their business because they would make more attempts like this. The police needed to be called, to hear the full story.

The full story.

“Josh,” Blake whispered. He trembled and couldn’t help it. Very suddenly it seemed to him as if he was about to go over the edge of a waterfall, and he didn’t know what awaited him at the bottom. He was terrified, almost more afraid than he’d been throughout the whole desperate chase. “Josh, I have to tell the police.”

Josh’s fingers were in his hair, soothing the tension from the back of his neck. “Of course,” he said. “I just said that, didn’t I? The police need to know about this.”

“No,” Blake said. His heart felt constricted, overly tense. “I mean, I need to tell them the truth about that old alpha. About what happened.”

He didn’t expect protestation, and neither did he expect Josh to try to talk him out of this decision, and that was exactly what happened. After a long moment of silence, Josh just nodded and then sighed. “I guess you’re right. I...I’m scared. Very scared.”

“Me, too.” Blake held the omega closer to him, trying to get no space at all between their bodies. He smelled Josh’s scent, clean and sweet beneath the sweat and grime, burying his face in his mate’s hair. He could feel their hearts beating as one, their bodies united. “But the least they can do is give me a slap on the wrist, right? The story won’t change. It was a freak accident. Just, now they’ll have a perp.”

Josh tensed against him. Their thoughts brushed together without images, sharing only their fears and their wishes for everything to be okay in the end. There were so many other things left to say and neither of them knew exactly how to say it.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

And that would have to suffice for now.

Blake had quite a lot of questions still; the main one being how two disheveled men managed to walk with an unconscious one between them without anyone in this godforsaken city finding anything wrong with that. That, at least, would be a question the police could answer in their investigation.

“I guess we should look for their phone.”

It was pretty unlikely these men would have cell phones, mostly because they were old and poor and couldn’t afford the cost of having to keep replacing the phones when their shapeshifting abilities ruined them. A landline was the best option, then.

“It might be in the kitchen,” Josh suggested. Blake nodded and held his hand tightly. They turned down the hallway together, and that was when they saw that neither wolf was there.

Blake’s eyes widened.

Had they escaped?

The answer came a few seconds later, when a heavy pair of paws slammed into him from behind. He felt startling strength behind those paws and knew the elderly omega was attacking him. He twisted as he fell, letting the momentum of the full-frontal attack carry them down to the floor.

Shifting as he fell, he tried to loosen the attacking wolf in the same manner as he’d done with their deceased friend but the omega was wise to such trickery. Claws dug into his skin, piercing flesh. “This is for Zee!” the omega snarled, then bit his neck.

Zee must have been the scarred alpha, Blake thought dimly somewhere in the back of his mind where he was still capable of logic. The nickname seemed rather uncouth, given the nature of Zee’s scars, but it also didn’t surprise him. He was a man himself, and he knew his gender could be rather unkind and blunt when it came down to it.

Staggering to his paws, Blake shook out his entire body as if he was trying to shake away droplets of rain. The omega on his back flailed around, body whipping with ragdoll looseness as he let himself move with the frenzy beneath him. He held on even tighter and sank his fangs into the back of Blake’s neck. Pain shot down his spine. He snarled and bucked, but still couldn’t get rid of his attacker.

Another snarl ripped through the air. Blake staggered against the wall as more weight descended on him, this time clinging to his flank. It was the near-feral alpha, furry sides heaving with effort as he bit at Blake’s tail and ripped at his soft stomach with blunt, chipped nails.

Blake staggered down the hallway, trying his damnedest to shake loose these parasites, but they clung to him, making him sluggish. His thoughts burned. Red flickered over his vision like the reflection from a distant campfire. These wolves were more experienced than he’d given them credit for. Blood spattered the floor, splashing his paws.

“Fuckers!” someone howled. A third weight crashed onto Blake, directly on his shoulders. Confusion pulsed through him, and he struggled to remember whether or not there had been a third attacker, before realizing the voice belonged to Josh. His sweet, loving little mate sounded like a hellhound, a creature scorned from the natural world who had risen once again with hate in its blood.

He didn’t know what to do. To resume his struggles might injure his mate. The weight on his back was unbearable, stressing his spine. He couldn’t think, couldn’t act. All he could do was drop down to his stomach and hope something happened in his favor.

One of the attackers yelped out with pain as he landed hard on their legs. “Good,” he snarled. “Serves you right!”

The scuffling around on his back resumed. He tried to turn his head, but ended up getting his cheek bitten as a result. Blood dripped hotly into his neck fur. There was no telling what was going on, or what fur belonged to whom. The three wolves had become a writhing mass of gray and brown and lighter brown fur, which shifted and twisted and snarled. Eyes blazed black with fury. Blood flew. The air was filled with growls, all of this over the course of only a few seconds.

Then, agonized yelping. The high-pitched, pained cries of an omega. Josh staggered onto the floor off the hallway, seething with rage, his pelt bushed out to make himself seem twice as large. He had a scruff of gray fur clenched in his fangs, attached to the neck of the other omega. Amber eyes blazing like liquid suns, Josh dragged the other wolf onto the floor, away from Blake.

The other omega started to rise, a challenge written on its face, but Josh slapped one paw down on its head and it went still with its eyes rolling up in the back of its head.

That left the alpha. He was no match at all for Josh’s fury, succumbing to a few blows to his face.

Josh fights dirty, Blake thought. Beneath his pain, he felt rather proud of his vicious little mate.

Then the fighting was over once more, and it seemed this time as if it would be over for good. The omega was stirring from its unconsciousness already but it seemed unobliged to move. The alpha had given up entirely and was curled into a ball, licking its wounds. Ears flat and tail tucked between his legs, his posture was clearly submissive.

Josh, on the other hand, stood in the middle of the hallway with his ears and tail up, his stance dominant. He looked like the embodiment of fury, like a man who set out with something to prove and had done exactly that.

Blake lovingly licked his face and chin, whining to him. Josh had never looked more beautiful than he had in that moment, as wild and free as a true wolf.

Real freedom, it seemed, came from loyalty.

“I saved your life again,” Josh said, in his rasping wolf voice. “You owe me.”

I owe you everything, Blake agreed. Josh must have either heard him or seen the sentiment on his face, because he whined with agreement.

The phone was indeed in the kitchen on the counter, hidden behind a few bags of takeout Chinese that were now filled with trash. Josh looked at him before dialing the number, as if confirming again he wanted to do this. No, he didn’t want to but he needed to. This whole situation had come about because he hadn’t come clean earlier, and he was going to correct that. He had seen what his negligence could do, and he wanted no part of it.

Hell, he didn’t want any part of his former life now. He wanted the life he had started living with Josh, and this was the only way he could have it while fully leaving the past in the past.

This needed resolution.

He nodded, and Josh dialed the police.

When they arrived, Blake politely answered the door. The street outside was filled with cop cars, red-and-blue lights flashing. More arrived as he watched, forming blockades around the house.

Standing on the tiny porch were two cops, one black and one white. They were both human, which wasn’t exactly what he’d been hoping for, but would just have to do.

“There was an altercation at this house,” the black man said. “Were you involved, sir?” A heartbeat passed as he waited for the answer, which was obvious given the amount of blood Blake wore. Concern battled with wariness. He had his gun out but pointed it towards the ground. It wasn’t a threat but a precaution. For now.

“I was very involved,” Blake replied. “I was the cause of all this”

Both of the cops stared at him. Clearly, they thought he’d gone off the deep end. They didn’t deal with many calm people in their line of work.

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” the other cop said now. While he didn’t have his gun out, he was gripping the butt of a baton for all he was worth. Behind him, out on the street, more and more police officers were emerging from their cars like clowns at a circus, scurrying around to secure the perimeter.

Blake pulled in a deep breath. “The homeless man who was killed.”

“We get a lot of dead homeless guys in parks. You need to let us inside the house, sir.”

There was that bluntness. It was almost refreshing in the face of such a confusing mess of a situation.

“He had a big Z-shaped scar on his face,” Blake suggested.

“Oh,” the cop with the baton said. “Yeah. Nearly eviscerated. What about him? Move aside, sir.”

“I will,” he said. His heart pounded. This was the moment where everything could change. “But first what you need to understand is that I killed that man. Accidentally.” And he stepped aside, quite politely, so the men could pass him if they wanted to. Both of them stared at him as if they couldn’t comprehend what he was saying.

A minute later, he was in handcuffs. Again.

So be it.