It was him, Li’l Nickie, and Pete fucking around in an alley. Pete and Nickie had knives, good old-fashioned switchblades which were way less likely to snap than these modern assisted-opening pieces of shit. Blake had a bat. A wooden baseball bat. Some fucks used metal or wrapped theirs with wire, but he was a purist and besides, he wasn’t going to some mob hit. He was smashing up garbage cans, bicycles, plant pots...anything that got in his way.

Rage glowed heavy in his vision, as red as it had been the night before last. Hell, it was even worse now because he’d had some time to stew in his own juices, to circle around in his own mind, getting more and more wound up until he’d seen nothing to do for it but to call up Nickie and Pete from a gas station phone to ask if they were up for a bit of breaking shit.

Maybe it was his tone of voice. Maybe it was the look in his eyes once they saw him, but the only one who’d been breaking shit was him. They stood guard, cracking bad jokes, and smoking enough for a forest fire.

God, he was frustrated. Neither of them had bothered to ask what was wrong. Not like they should have. They weren’t best friends. They knew it was none of their damn business, and they knew you just didn’t talk about these kinds of things anyway. You went out there into the world and you broke shit until you felt better. That was just how it worked.

Blake lifted the baseball bat over his head and brought it down with a grunt. Force reverberated up his arms, making his ears ring and his teeth rattle around in his head. The baseball bat cracked against the trash can that was his current prey, leaving an enormous crumpled dent along the side like it was nothing more than a soda can someone had stepped on and kicked aside. He raised the bat again and struck down once more but this time the huge thump of contact was shattered in half by a pierce cracking. Splinters of wood flew back into his face, and he was left holding onto half a bat, the end now nothing more than a few jagged shards. The head of the bat rolled away through the alley, splintered through with a huge crack down the middle.

“Ah, fuck,” he swore.

“Well, that sucks,” Nickie commented. “How much did it cost?”

He shrugged. “Like three bucks at the dollar store.”

“No big deal, then. Let’s go get another one.”

“Fuck that,” Pete said. “Let’s steal that shit.”

Nickie let out a shrill burst of laughter. “Yeah, okay. How you gonna smuggle out a bat? Shove it down the front of your pants and pretend it’s a dick?”

Blake was about to comment how that actually wasn’t a half-bad idea when suddenly there was the sound of a car approaching, followed by a short blip of police sirens.

“Fuck,” Pete said. He quickly pocketed his switchblade. “It’s the pigs!”

Blake growled, looked at the ruined splinters on the end of his half-bat, then tossed it aside. For a moment, only a moment, he’d imagined facing down a cop and driving one of those long, jagged splinters into their throat. God, it’d feel so good to get out all that aggression, but he wasn’t the kind of person who could murder in cold blood. He did have some standards, and they did cover the topic of killing, which horrified him to even consider.

“Scatter!” he commanded just as there was the sound of the cop car’s door opening. All three of them shapeshifted, hitting the ground running as soon as they had their paws. Blake took the lead, while Pete fell in behind him. Nickie brought up the rear, her higher-pitched panting echoing loudly throughout the alley.

At the end of the alley, Blake kept heading straight. He heard Nickie bark out laughter as she dashed off in another direction, while Pete went somewhere else. The cops were far behind them now, bumbling through the alley, trying to figure out what was recent damage and what was there because it had always been there.

They regrouped a block away outside a Starbucks, humans once more. All three of them were sweating and red-faced and incredibly alive. The other people on the street gave them a wide berth. In these parts, you didn’t want anything to do with someone who had been running because there was only one thing people in a city ran from.

Nickie looked positively vibrant, with red in her cheeks, like a blushing high school cheerleader. “Whew!” she said. “Been a long time since we had a close call like that, huh, Pete?”

Pete stroked his beard, which was even grayer than the last time Blake had seen it. The other man had a playfully nasty gleam in his eyes, one which Blake didn’t really like to see right about now. “Not for Blake. He’s been in a fuckton of trouble lately.”

Nickie looked a bit sympathetic now, but her body swayed and she paced on the spot, the animal within protesting being caged and still. She wanted to run again. They all did. “I heard from my pack that another one had some trouble lately. I kind of guessed it was you, Blakey.”

He hated being called that, but instead of rising to the bait, he dug around in his pocket and pulled out his Tareytons. Lighting up, he turned away from the others so they wouldn’t have to breathe in the smoke.

The fuck am I doing? They can breathe it in. If they didn’t want to be around my shitty cigs, they’d leave.

“But that’s not all,” Pete said, still speaking to Nickie. “You’ll never guess what Fox told me.”

Nickie raised one eyebrow. “The twink actually had something worthwhile to say?”

“Shit, yeah. He said this weird omega came around to him at the theater, asking for him by his real name.”

Blake looked up sharply. He’d heard this story from the mole-man. He knew exactly what Pete was talking about and damn sure he didn’t want it being spread around. “Hey, Pete,” he said, pinching out the light on the end of his cig so it wouldn’t burn down while he spoke. “Maybe a little discretion, huh?”

“Discretion?” Nickie looked at him, planting her hands on her hips. “What, are you a cop now?”

He looked at her, at the self-righteous look on her face, and he hated her. He bared his fangs in her direction, not knowing whether to be pleased or ashamed when she backed up.

Pete wasn’t so easily swayed. As the oldest of them all, he had seen far more than this. His age was one of the reasons Blake liked having him around. Pete knew shit. Pete knew how to set all sorts of fires and how to make bombs from junk, and the names of clerks who’d give you packs of beer right off the shelf in exchange for a dirty favor or two. Pete was cool.

“What the hell is up with you today, Blake?” he said. His hackles were up, bristling. Feeling the other’s aggression only served to rile Blake up even more, too. “You call us out here and then you just spend all day hitting shit. Sure, great, fine. I fucking love hearing the sounds of stuff breaking, yeah, but then you get all touchy about this? You been weird lately. Real weird. I don’t like it.”

“If you don’t like it, then leave!”

Pete looked at Nickie, shrugged, and walked away.

Blake felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. It was just a threat. He hadn’t expected Pete to actually go. He turned to Nickie. “You think I’m being weird, too?”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, hedging. “You are right now. I think I should go, you know? Maybe next time you call, I wouldn’t say no to a beer. Okay?”

He relaxed a little, some of the pain dissipating as he realized he hadn’t entirely lost her support. “Yeah, sure. See you around.”

“Sure,” she said, and walked off.

He watched her go, groaning inwardly. How had things escalated so quickly that he’d managed to alienate two of his companions in the span of a minute? He didn’t even do anything wrong!

The Starbucks door opened with a jingling of bells. A rather large human wearing a manager’s uniform came up to him with a smile which didn’t quite touch his eyes. “Sir? Yes, you, sir. Hi, sir.”

Three sirs in rapid succession. This was going to be good.

“Like, we totally value our customers and all, but you’re kind of loitering right now, so if you could maybe either come in and buy something or else just leave, it’d be super.”

That voice might as well have belonged to a woman instead of a man, it was so stuffy and condescending. Blake ignored the “manager” and re-lit his pinched cigarette. Then he blew a heavy stream into the man’s face, leaving him gasping for breath while he walked away from the coffee shop.

He smoked too fast and walked too quickly, an unwieldy combination which left him light-headed near the entrance to a park. Remembering what happened last time he was in a park, he went off down the street and just walked.

The wind suddenly picked up for a moment, bringing with it a strange warmth. Blake stopped and turned to face in the direction of the source of the breeze, but it was already gone, leaving nothing but a lingering scent of plant life until that, too, was obliterated beneath an onslaught of car exhaust.

Change is coming. Spring is on its way.

Blake continued onward, lighting up another cigarette though he took it a bit easy this time. One thing he didn’t dare admit to his friends, especially not to Josh, and hardly even to himself, was that he was superstitious in his own right. He was no gypsy, didn’t believe in fortune-telling or magic crystals with healing powers, but he had seen enough of this world to know things tended to come in patterns and a person could pick up on what was coming next if they paid attention. Some would call it seeing omens. Others would describe it as foreshadowing.

He called it just not being stupid.

If what he smelled on the wind was any indicator at all of an early spring, the world around him was going to change rather fast. It always did change fast and he never cared much one way or another what season it was, but this time he felt the omen of change had more to do with him than it did the weather.

He was changing, too.

He was like the spring, not yet arrived but not quite in a state of slumber any longer. Something was happening to him and it was all tied in with Josh.

Why did Josh bother him so much?

No, Josh didn’t bother him. That was a lie and if he was going to figure anything out, he had to be truthful with himself. He was attracted to the golden-eyed omega in a very physical way, no denying that, but that on its own wouldn’t unsettle him. It was the feelings which Josh inspired in him that he had a hard time with.

And yes, there were feelings.

He couldn’t deny there were feelings. Just what exactly they were or what to do with them...That was still a mystery to him.

His chest ached when he thought of that world-weary look on Josh’s face.

He wanted to smile when he thought of how eagerly the omega had sex with him and how thoroughly he’d enjoy it.

He remembered how weird and tight and yet soft he felt on the inside when he woke up and realized that somehow, they were cuddling on the couch.

And when he had seen Josh surrounded by his childhood things, in a place that hadn’t changed in years...

So thin, lying on the bed, with no sweater to hide his ribs or the jut of his collarbone from beneath his skin...

He wanted to see those things again. More than that, he wanted to do something so he didn’t have to see that sorrowful face ever again. How could a person have so much and still be so sad? He wanted to get to the bottom of that mystery.

“Ah, screw it,” he whispered softly to himself. His cigarette was burning his fingertips so he dropped it to the ground and stomped on it. A woman passing by gave him a sidelong glance, then herded her children off the sidewalk and into the gutter when they passed by. He hardly noticed and forgot all about her because his revelation would allow him no reprieve. “I miss the little brat.”

But that didn’t mean anything had to change, did it? No, it didn’t. He could still do exactly what he’d been planning to do, which was use Josh until he got tired of him. That would fix everything.

Wouldn’t it?