The next week was chaos. Blake lost count of how many hours he spent in the “interview room” with the police, and there was simply no telling how many different cops he saw. It seemed everyone was interested in what he had to say.

However, there soon came to be two versions of the story. That was because some of the cops were shifters and others were not. The police chief was human, though aware of the presence of shapeshifters. She demanded the whole story, unabridged, and Blake gave it to her from the very beginning. He left out no details, including the incriminating vandalism parts which had led the alpha called Zee to attack him in the first place. She made no comment, and he made no excuses.

When it was over, she leaned across the little desk in the interview room. He supposed she was good-looking, in a womanly sort of way. Really, she reminded him of the kind of person who might have sex twice a week on predetermined days.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

Okay,” he said, stirring his cup of coffee. It was a vile witch’s brew of instant crystals which never truly dissolved, powdered clumps of creamer, and enough sugar to turn him into a diabetic if he dared finish the entire thing. They hadn’t asked how he wanted his coffee, so he assumed the cop who made it for him had prepared it how they normally would. Whoever that person was, he pitied them greatly.

The chief, whose name he couldn’t recall—and didn’t care to remember—played idly with a plastic wrapper while speaking. “Because of the nature of these events, you are only going to be interviewed by others like myself who are aware of shapeshifters. We will know the truth. We have a special file for this kind of stuff that only I can access.”

He had expected as much. Releasing something like this into the world was not only a major violation of shapeshifter code, it was also damn stupid. Portsmouth would receive a news story about Bigfoot waterskiing with pretty much the same attitude as they would read about a werewolf murder.

“For everyone else you speak to, you are going to tell them this story. He was a senile old man. He saw you with your boyfriend and didn’t like it. He attacked you. All you could think to do was hit him with your car. The rest is history. Are we clear?”

Blake nodded. “We’re clear.”

It was difficult to keep both his stories intact, but he managed somehow, or at least hoped that he did. A slip-up could lead to everything unraveling.

More information came out about the attack, giving Blake some of the answers he wanted so desperately. Apparently the sight of two skeevy-looking old men dragging another man between them—one who seemed conscious but also very out of it—caused some stir. A few people had indeed called the cops but everyone else didn’t bother with what they assumed to be a group of three drug addicts.

The truth of that made him hate society, but he suspected he might have done the same thing. Sometimes you just had to look after your own interests first before protecting the rest of the world.

And, while he had been embracing Josh in the hallway, the two old wolves had escaped out the open front door. Rather than running away, they circled around the house and climbed in the bedroom windows to begin their ambush.

One thing not answered was why they simply hadn’t attacked him under the cover of trees. No one could figure that out. After much pondering, he made up his own reason: with their feral minds, it simply hadn’t occurred to them.

He was not arrested, and he was not held on bail. After nearly 20 hours of interviewing—which he eventually found out was the new politically correct term for interrogation—he was allowed to return home with Josh to await the announcement of his court date.

Someone pulled some strings—he suspected it might be his parents, who seemed to try to be reentering his life now that he was on the straight and narrow—and the case was expedited. He appeared before a judge within two weeks and was given a mere slap on the wrist. One hundred hours of community service and mandatory counseling sessions. When his counselor announced him stable, he would no longer have to take them.

All in all, he got off very lightly.

He didn’t attend the trial for the two feral elders. He didn’t need to be there, and no one recommended that he go. It would only upset them. Later on, he heard they were both sent to a mental institution, where they were properly diagnosed. Then, they were sent to a state-run old folk’s home where they would be given treatment and care until it came time for them to be moved to a hospice. From there, the grave. They would live out the rest of their lives knowing the peace that ferality had robbed them of. While not exactly a poetic resolution, it was a humane one.

The night after his short trial, Blake lounged on Josh’s couch, restlessly flipping through the TV channels. His mate approached from the kitchen. “I just put on your coffee.”

“Thanks,” Blake said. He felt listless for some reason he couldn’t quite figure out, though it was bothering him immensely. He glanced over at Josh as the omega sat down near him. The cushions dipped beneath his weight, which they hadn’t done a few weeks before. “Are you really pregnant?”

Josh stared at him. They had been avoiding this topic after their argument at the meeting, though they were both very aware of the fact that Josh only grew more and more pregnant by the day. Then he started to laugh and leaned back against the back of the couch with his hands cupped under his stomach for support. Blake watched with bemusement. He didn’t know whether to be happy with this response or afraid of it and could only wait in suspense.

Finally, Josh’s laughter gave way to breathless chuckles. He wiped at his eyes with his knuckles, brushing away moisture. “God, don’t do that. You’ll make me pee.”

It was Blake’s turn to stare, raising an eyebrow. “Do what?”

“Be such a clueless dork.” Josh sat up and looked into his eyes. “Yes, I’m really pregnant. I’m not just super fat. Although I am super fat.”

His baby, inside his mate. Sometimes he thought he could detect the infant soul when he touched minds with Josh, just a pale flash that was there and gone again. He didn’t know how to feel about that still. There was still the part of him that didn’t want to have kids at all, but there was nothing he could do to escape that now, short of leaving Josh. And he would never do that. Wolves mated for life.

Josh leaned back against the couch again, slouching down as if it took too much effort to support himself. “It’s okay if you don’t want a pup.”

“Is this where you leave me?”

“What? No!” Josh smacked his thigh, then stroked it as if to apologize. “I love you, you big brute. Just, if you didn’t want a pup, you should have used a condom.”

“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. He wanted a cigarette very badly, feeling the old craving deep in the back of his throat like thirst. “I just wanted to feel close to you.”

“Well, you’re the closest you could ever be to me, since I’m growing a miniature-Blake inside me.”

He looked curiously at his mate’s rounded stomach. How would it feel to grow a person inside himself? Josh patted his thigh. “Does it hurt?”

“No. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable when she moves around, though.”

“She?”

“It feels like a girl. I’m not sure, though. The doctor said it’s too early to be able to tell on the ultrasound.” Josh grew a little quieter. “Why don’t you come with me to my next appointment? It’d be nice to have someone else to talk to besides my doctor. My very judgmental doctor.”

Blake looked at his hands, considering all this. He didn’t want a pup, even if it was going to be a precious little princess he could dote on. The responsibility was too much to even consider. He had only just begun to care for someone other than himself, and now there would be a third, screwing up the dynamic they’d only just begun to discover with each other. “I don’t know. I think that would make it a little too real.”

“It’s real anyway, Blake.” Josh let out a little annoyed growl. His amber eyes were very serious beneath stray dark curls which lay against his forehead. “You’re thinking like the old Blake. I need to talk to the new Blake here. The one who takes responsibility for his actions. You did this. Now face the facts.”

He looked up again, a little surprised. “You don’t sound so enthusiastic about this either.”

Josh bit his lip. “It’s my pup. It’s part of me. I can feel it. I love it, and I can’t wait to meet it and watch it grow up.”

“But?”

“But at the same time, I’m terrified,” he admitted. “I have no idea what to do. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how to even get started. I wasn’t expecting it and now the future...is kind of hazy?”

Blake understood. The future seemed hazy to him, too. “Do you think it’s normal to be afraid?”

Josh nodded. Blake privately agreed. It seemed very simple to him that most people would rather pretend their lives were absolutely perfect and they had no doubts about anything at all. How many new parents acted excited in public, sharing all their plans for the nursery, already having picked out a preschool, but went home to huddle together to try and chase away the doubt that everything they were doing was wrong? He suspected the number was quite high.

And now he voiced the last question which had been bothering him, one which he wasn’t sure he wanted answered but which needed to be said. “Do you regret looking in that well?”

“No,” Josh said. The response was immediate, but not overly expressed. Blake trusted it. “I don’t regret anything. I just wish I could have done some of it a little different.”

“What would you have done differently?”

Josh’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. Just different. I feel like a whole lot of shit happened that wasn’t supposed to.”

Blake leaned towards his mate, and they pressed their sides together for comfort; however, as close as they were, the thought of the baby still seemed to be between them. “I think we just pulled the short straw. All this stuff could have been avoided, but if it didn’t happen to us, it would’ve happened to someone else. We got through it, didn’t we?”

Josh nodded against him, cuddling closer. “I guess you’re right.”

“Besides, your magical well shows you your true mate. We would have ended up together anyway. Somehow. Eventually.”

“Do you think that because I sped up the process, all this shit happened all at once to compensate?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Blake admitted, “but I think it’s a little bit rude to call our unborn daughter part of ‘all this shit.’” That earned him a whack but he could feel Josh smiling, so it had been worth it. “Can I feel?”

Josh sat up a little. His amber eyes were a little guarded. “Sure, if you want. Do you want to?”

Blake hesitated. Here was another moment where he could change the course of his life. There had been quite a lot of those recently, but he thought Josh might be right in that regard. Instead of finding each other naturally and growing together slowly and properly, they had been forced together. All their progress together was compressed into a relatively short amount of time.

Did he want to feel Josh’s stomach? They hadn’t really had sex recently, so he hadn’t had much of a chance to see what it was like, that firm, rounded flesh. He was curious to know its texture, to see if it was as hard as it seemed. But he knew the question was asking so much more.

His thoughts about not having pups were based on decisions he made in his youth, all the way up to when he first started hanging out with his gang. He didn’t want a family. He didn’t want to be forced to coexist with something he had no choice over. A man could pick his friends, but he’d be hard-pressed to decide the personality of his children.

And there was a good deal of the desire to avoid responsibilities mixed in there, too. He would see some poor woman dragging along what seemed like her entire clan, eight brats with half of them still in diapers, and he would be incapable of comprehending how she was still able to smile. She probably had no free time to herself between potty training, changing diapers, making meals, and carting them all around to wherever they needed to go. To him, that was no way to live. To be tied down? Fucking awful. But even if it was someone with only one child, that was still too much life robbed from a person.

He hadn’t thought about it recently, after meeting Josh. He hadn’t seen if he still thought the same way. It seemed only natural to him that he wouldn’t change his opinion on this, but now he thought that kind of thinking was a little dickish of him. The rest of him had changed. Why not that?

Did he want to have a child now?

His first instinct was still to say no, but why? He loved Josh. They were mates. He figured eventually they might get married, just to have the knot officially tied in the human world. Why not start a family with the man he loved? It didn’t mean giving up on being himself.

“Would I still get to be a punk?” he asked, before he could stop the words from coming.

Josh smiled a little, then looked solemn. “We can have the coolest baby on the block. Leather baby clothes, little boots, and candy cigs.” He smiled again. “You can be the cool dad, and I’ll be the boring mom who stays home and cooks all day.”

What would it be like to go to work, then come home to the smell of dinner cooking? High-pitched yaps as a trusting little life ran to him and hopped into his arms, staining his clothes with the remnants of whatever snack they had last?

Blake reached out and set his hand on Josh’s stomach. His skin felt very warm, warmer even than the rest of him, and it was stretched tight over that mound of flesh. The skin was also oddly rippled in some places, almost elastic, like scar tissue. He stroked one of these patches and then glanced up at Josh.

“That’s where I’ll have stretchmarks,” Josh explained. He grimaced. “Will you still think I’m pretty after I push this thing out of me?”

“Yes,” he said. The answer came automatically—a man learned quickly to never say anything less than “yes” to such questions—but he was surprised to realize he meant it with all his heart. “I loved you before. I love you now. I’ll love you then. That’s a promise.”

Tears sparkled sweetly in Josh’s eyes, and they kissed. As they did, Blake realized he had something else to do before he could truly move on to the next part of his life.

He did it in the middle of the night. Josh was asleep at his side, curled up into a little ball around his stomach as if to protect the child within from the harshness of the outside world. The omega stirred a little as Blake slid out of bed, but he didn’t awaken. That was good. He didn’t really mind if he had to explain what he was doing, but he would rather just get it over with before he overthought it too much.

He slipped into his wolf form as soon as he shut and locked the door behind him. The sky above was incredibly dark, as spring nights often were. No stars broke apart the eternal darkness of the sky, as Portsmouth was too big of a city even for its relatively small size. The ambient glow of city lights blocked out any that might have shone down from above. As a result, the moon was a grey, washed-out thing no brighter than the wing of a dead moth some cat had caught and eaten. Clouds edged the horizon, outlined faintly with silver, but they were filmy and bore no rain.

The smell of green growing things mingled with the fading scents of car exhaust and humans. Soon enough, sometime between midnight and dawn, a layer of dew would form on the grass to render the whole world clean and new until the humans woke again to leave their marks.

Blake liked this in-between time. He didn’t think it was much of a coincidence that these hours were called the time of the wolf.

He padded quietly in the shadows that littered the sidewalk, sheltering within them and dipping further into yards whenever he came across a streetlight. If anyone happened to see him, they would think him only a large stray dog. By morning, they would think they only imagined his massiveness, that the night blurred his true form and tricked their eyes. That is, if they could remember him at all.

He took his time. There was no rush. He knew where they would be, which street corners were their favorites on nights such as this.

And he found them, having smelled their cig smoke long before they came into sight. Little wisps of grey danced up from burning cherry-red tips. Fox’s red hair was a blaze of flame in the reflected light, and his rare blue eyes were turned purple. Pinocchio's gray beard seemed full of shards of silver. Pete was an indistinct blur, having just extinguished his L&M between two moistened fingers.

Li’l Nickie stepped out of the dark from behind an alley wall. Pissing, probably. Or puking. Her eyes had that bloodshot, wasted look. “Hey, Blakey,” she slurred. “You here to celebrate the good news?”

“What news is that?”

“She walked in on her boyfriend shagging some gay,” Pete said. “Can you fucking believe it?”

Blake winced. He could feel Nickie’s pain now, could feel the tremors of hurt sinking claws into her heart. “That’s shitty. I’m sorry.”

“Told you he was a fa...”

“Don’t!”

Pinocchio stared at him. He was not the sort of man who appreciated being interrupted. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t say that word. It’s fucking disgusting.” Blake dug around in his jacket for a moment before realizing he wasn’t even wearing it. And why would he, except for the fact that he always wore it, no matter what?

They must have noticed.

Fox tossed something at him. He caught it instinctively and looked down at it, a little surprised to see a box of Tareytons. He retrieved the lighter he knew he had in his pocket and lit up, dragging deeply and appreciatively before letting out the harsh smoke in a soft stream. The wisp of gray glittered orange in the glow of the streetlamp before dissipating.

“Figured I’d pick those up as a welcome present for whenever you decided to show your sorry ass again,” Fox said. “We’ve missed you.”

“You turn homo on us while you were gone?” Pinocchio said. The words were teasing, almost a challenge, and Blake didn’t appreciate that at all.

He dropped the cigarette on the ground and stomped it out. All four of them stared at him. Even Nickie, in her pathetic state, realized he had never put out a cigarette before it was finished before. Something was amiss. Just to make his point, he dropped the rest of the box on the ground too and kicked it away.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t turn homo. I am homo. Always have been. And I found myself a mate. A damn good man. And I love him.”

Nickie seemed enthralled at this news, stars in her eyes at what she might perceive in her inebriated state to be a brave declaration. Blake didn’t think it was brave, or a declaration. He was only stating a fact.

Fox, on the other hand, looked very contemplative.

Pete and Pinocchio looked as if they didn’t know whether to be disgusted or not.

“I’ve been spending time with him and I’ve decided. No more gang shit for me. I’m through with all that.”

Pete curled his lip, exposing a row of white fangs. “So, go.”

Blake blinked, a little taken aback.

“You think we depend on you or something? Shit, you ain’t our pack leader. We don’t need you. We been getting along just fine without you. So go on. Get out of here.”

“Yeah,” Pinocchio piped up. “You came all this way just to tell us you ain’t coming anymore? Waste of your time, Blake.”

That stung, but he knew, deep down, it was for the best. He thought their friendship ran a little deeper than that, but since it didn’t, he would have no problem leaving here. So, that was what he did. He turned around and walked away without another word. Mission accomplished. He could get on with the rest of his life now, focus on making a family with Josh. He, like the night world, had been renewed.

He was only two blocks away from where he spoke with the gang when he was suddenly aware of a presence at his back. He turned, not sure what he expected to see. No idiot would dare be following a giant stray dog in the middle of the night, would they?

Behind him was Fox, also in wolf form. The other’s wolf body was a little gangly, a little oddly proportioned, but that just made sense when a person considered how weird the rest of Fox was.

He carried something in his mouth. A white box with red stripes. With a whine, he offered it.

Blake studied the weird little omega wolf, not quite sure what to make of this little peace offering. Then he stretched his neck forward and bit gently at the corner of the box of cigarettes. Fox let it go easily, then lifted up his tail and gave a small yap. Then, he turned and scurried back, presumably to catch up with wherever the gang was headed to now.

Blake watched his tail recede into the darkness, a flame snuffed out, and then shook his head. At least he still had one friend, as unlikely as that friendship might have been. He headed home. Josh hadn’t stirred at all, so he climbed back into bed with his mate and curled around him.

Tomorrow was a new beginning.