By the time Mariah’s suitcase slammed to the floor, my headache had grown into a full-out migraine. I sighed and glanced at my grown daughter and wondered how it had all gone so wrong.
“Did you even hear me?” Mariah snapped.
“I heard you.”
“And?”
Resting against the wall in the living room of my house, I shook my head. “And what? You want me to make you second or you’re leaving?”
Mariah tucked her long, dark hair behind her ears and rolled her eyes—just like she did when she was a child. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“The way I see it, that’s the only way of putting it.” I pushed away from the wall and stomped over to her. “You’ve been threatening me for months, Mariah. You are not ready to be ranked—”
“I have your magic!” she cut in.
“And zero control over it!” I immediately regretted saying the words when I saw the pained look on her face. Mariah was ambitious. Just like me and just like her mother. But by the time I was her age, I was already a father of a toddler, a single dad, and alpha of a coyote pack. Mariah had yet to show me that she was mature enough for any of those responsibilities. With a sigh, I suggested, “Look, let’s sit down and talk about this.”
“I’m done talking,” she said, the hitch in her voice telling me she was holding back tears.
“Well, I’m your father and I’m not.” I gestured toward the small, round dining room table. This house was over a hundred years old, and it showed its age. But the crooked wood floors, chipped paint on the window frames, and the persistent breeze coming through the ancient plaster was what made it home. The ground creaked below my shoes as I took a seat. After glaring at me a few more seconds, Mariah finally plopped down in the chair on the other side.
“I don’t understand why you hate me so much,” she started. “Is it because I remind you of Gina?”
I tried not to react. I really did. Mariah’s mother split on her daughter’s first birthday and never looked back. But for some reason, Mariah still adored her absent mom despite the eighteen years of zero contact. “You do remind me of her, but you remind me of me even more.” I gave her a small grin and felt a little better when I saw her return it. “When I was your age—”
“Yes, I know. I know about all of the responsibilities you had.”
“You’re nineteen. You’re free to choose where you want to live. But I wish you wouldn’t make rash decisions.”
“And I wish you would respect me as a valuable member of this pack!”
“Mariah,” I sighed.
“No, dad. You don’t even see me. I’m no better than any of the others.”
“I’m responsible for all of you,” I spat.
Mariah jumped to her feet and stomped to her bags again. “Well, you can now have one less coyote to worry about.”
I didn’t try to stop her, and I wasn’t totally sure why. Maybe it was the migraine. Or maybe it was because Mariah was right. She didn’t fit in here. Just like her mother hadn’t. “Where will you go?”
She loaded her shoulders with straps from three different bags before grabbing the rolling suitcase handle. “I don’t know. Somewhere else.”
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
“I do.” She took a few steps toward the front door. “And don’t send anyone out looking for me.”
I lifted my hands in a shrug. “You’re an adult making an adult decision. Just remember that my door is always open. You’ll always be welcomed in Nenana.”
I thought she was going to say something…something that would let me know our relationship wasn’t totally ruined. But when three men bounded through the front door, they were stopped by her glare.
“Going somewhere, Mariah?” Daniel asked with a smile.
“Fuck off,” she grumbled, pushing past the ranked members of her pack and ignoring the rules of our kind.
“What the hell, Mariah?” Colby whined. “That’s not cool,” he yelled out the door after her.
I caught just enough of her form racing past the window to see her flip him off. And when Colby’s brown eyes widened in surprise, I felt a little bad for him. He’d always liked Mariah and had been hinting about courting her for months. But Mariah would have nothing to do with him, and that was why I’d yet to give him my permission to start dating her.
Kevin sat down at the table in the chair Mariah had just left. “What’s going on with her?” he asked me. Kevin was my second. Older than me by ten years but the most loyal member of our pack, he’d been by my side since I became alpha at age eighteen.
I sighed and squeezed my forehead to try and relieve some of the pressure building behind my eyes. “She’s moving out.”
“What?” Colby almost shouted. When I gave him a glare for being so loud, he hung his head and whispered an apology.
Daniel asked, “For good?”
I nodded. “She’s restless here.”
“Yeah but she’s still a skin-walker and a part of this pack,” Colby said.
“She’ll be back,” Daniel stated.
“She won’t.” They all looked at me in surprise so I offered them an explanation. “She is her mother’s daughter.”
The most trusted members of my pack stared at me for a few moments, trying to figure out how I was taking this new development. Coby and Daniel paced in the living room, unable to sit down with Kevin and me unless I gave them permission. And right now, I didn’t feel like being surrounded by anyone.
“So, I kind of hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Kevin started, “but we have something we need to talk to you about.”
“Can it wait?” I groaned, head starting to pound again.
“Afraid not,” Kevin said with a sympathetic smile.
“Fine.”
“There are rumors flying around the pack right now about a challenge,” Kevin said quickly.
“A challenge?” I asked.
Daniel started to speak, but Kevin held up his hand and stopped him. Daniel slunk back into the wall and let his superior deliver the news. “They are uncomfortable with the fact that you haven’t taken on a mate and given the pack a successor.”
“Who is?” I growled at my oldest friend.
“About half the pack.”
“For how long?” I stared at Kevin and then narrowed my eyes at both Daniel and Colby. In their mid-twenties, they cowered under my glare despite their great strength and fighting abilities.
“For a while now,” Kevin finally answered.
“I had a mate and I have a child,” I pushed through gritted teeth.
“Uh, your child just left the pack,” Colby said a second before Daniel punched him in the shoulder.
“And you haven’t had a mate since Gina left when you were seventeen,” Kevin reminded me.
Gina and I had Mariah when we were sixteen years old. Super young and super stupid, but it was still the best thing that could have happened to me. Despite all the anguish Gina caused when she ran away in the middle of the night, it had made me stronger. Made Mariah stronger. And when my magic came into full bloom on my eighteenth birthday and I took over the pack, I knew it was because I’d been forced to grow up early. I had been the youngest alpha in our pack’s history, and I didn’t plan on going anywhere.
“Why do I need a mate?” I snapped at my friends.
“Because they are concerned you aren’t able to breed anymore.” Kevin sighed and put his feet up on the chair between us. He knocked his long, dark hair back over his shoulder and focused on me. “You need an heir and Mariah isn’t it. You know it, so don’t even try to argue.”
I sucked in a deep breath and counted to ten as I continued to glare at Kevin.
“How many women have you turned down?” he asked. “Ten? Twenty?”
“Twenty-three,” Daniel said. “Twenty-three women from our pack wanted to be your mate over the last eighteen years.”
“And none of them were right for me,” I grumbled.
“Why?” Kevin asked. “Because they were either too old, or too young, or too smart, or too perfect for someone else. Jesus, Marcus. Are you really surprised it’s coming to this right now?”
I hung my head. “I don’t need a mate to be a good alpha.”
“True. Mostly.” Kevin dropped his feet on the ground and leaned forward against the table. “But Lucas is gunning for you and he has way too many of our members convinced that it’s time for you to step down.”
Lucas. The name stuck in my throat like a bad piece of meat. Lucas and I had grown up together but he’d never accepted the fact that my magic was more powerful than his. He hated that I could control his shifts and boss him around. He’d always been gunning for me, but he’d never been able to get any traction. “So, what am I supposed to do?” I asked Kevin.
He glanced over his shoulder to the other two men. “We might have a solution for you—”
“No blind dates,” I cut in.
“It won’t be a blind date.”
The coyote inside of me was tired of this conversation. He wanted to run and kill something. It would make both of us feel better. “I’m not in support of this,” I grumbled.
Kevin stood when I did and gave me a shrug. “Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the greater good.”
I glared at my friend who was now throwing my own words back in my face. I’d told him that once, when we took over the town of Nenana. He hadn’t liked the location or the run-down buildings. But I’d convinced him that we needed to start fresh and all be in one place. “I hate you sometimes,” I said.
Kevin smiled and then patted me on the shoulder. “Hate you, too.”
As I brushed past Colby and Daniel, I tried to give them a slight grin so they knew I wasn’t mad at them. We needed to stay strong in order to keep this pack together. And even though my head was pounding and I was not looking forward to dealing with another potential set-up, I knew these guys had my back. Always.
“Where are you going?” Keven asked from the doorway, after I bounded down the small front porch and started in on the path that had been trampled through the snow banks.
“For a run.”
“When will you be back?”
I hung my head and stopped walking. For once, I would love to be able to go wherever I want, whenever I want, without any questions. Just like Mariah had. God, we were so much alike. “In a bit,” I called out over my shoulder. Kevin said something else, but I ignored him. In fact, I blocked out everyone in my pack and everyone in this town and focused only on me and my animal. We felt trapped right now. We didn’t like to be threatened and we certainly didn’t like to be forced into doing something we didn’t want to. Fuck Lucas for being a douche and thinking that he could challenge me. He didn’t stand a chance. I knew that, my coyote knew that, and I was pretty sure Kevin and the boys knew that.
So why did we feel so uneasy right now?
At first, I thought it was because of Mariah. She and I had butt heads since the day she could speak. We pushed each other’s buttons and would pick at the wounds just to hurt each other. She was so much like her mother, at times I couldn’t even look at her. I’d never forgiven Gina for leaving us. And when I heard that she’d run off to the lower forty-eight with some trucker to start a dancing career, I’d all but written her off. She wasn’t worth the time and energy it took to think about her. But Mariah was the one thing I did right in this world. And even when she fought me every step of the way, I knew that she would do something in her life. Be something better than her mother.
Yet as I stomped further away from my house and down the one-way street that would lead to the surrounded parks system, that feeling of unease grew. Stop thinking, I told myself. I did this a lot—stressed about problems that hadn’t even happened yet. It’s probably what made me a good alpha, but it was also going to put me on my death bed quicker. At thirty-five, I felt like an old man some days. Tired, worn-out, and defeated. I’d lived more in my lifetime than many of my pack members would ever get a chance to. And now that I had to register as a shifter with the ISC, I hated that I constantly felt like I had to look over my shoulder. I’d only picked a few of us to register, not all two hundred and twelve members of our pack. I hoped that would buy us some time to feel out this whole shifters-out-in-the-open thing.
Today was one of those days where I wanted to crawl and a hole and hide out the rest of my life.
“Marcus Stillwater.”
I jumped at the deep, throaty voice that had startled me. Turning to my right, I searched the area, looking for the man.
He whistled and said, “Up here.”
Scanning the surrounding pines, I used my nose to find him. There, sitting on the bottom branch of a pine tree was another shifter. And not just any shifter. It was Donovan Bain, the infamous lion shifter that lived with a bunch of misfits at Eagle Creek. He was an unstable, deadly shifter and I hated that I hadn’t sensed him until now.
“What the hell are you doing in my territory?” I growled. I may be a coyote that pales in comparison to his lion, but I had powerful magic and I could have my pack here and attacking in seconds. I sensed Donovan knew this by the way he chose to stay up in the tree. Watching him watch me with his scarred face and shaggy hair, there was no denying that he was an apex predator. But he also wasn’t being aggressive. Yet.
“I did not come here to fight.”
“Well, good. Now why the fuck are you so far away from home slinking around in my lands?” As an alpha, I should maintain my calmness. But today had sucked and it was getting worse by the minute. And now a dominant lion from three-hundred miles away had dared to cross into my territory without notice.
With a graceful leap, Donovan jumped down from the branch and landed easily on his feet. His boots crunched in the snow as he walked toward me. My instincts were to back up, but I fought against them and encouraged my animal to come to the surface as a warning.
Donovan smiled, a crooked grin due to his scar on his right cheek. Despite my six-foot frame, he towered over me and I hated that. “I like to stalk,” he said.
“And you were stalking me?” I let the coyote have my eyes and glared at him in warning.
Donovan held up his hands and stopped walking toward me. “Relax pup, I wasn’t stalking you.”
“Then what were you stalking so far from Eagle Creek?”
Donovan shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have a human in your territory.”
“A human?” I kicked at the snow around my boots and shook my head. “There are a thousand humans that live around here.”
“But this one is setting up camp just a few miles into the park and she’s putting a bunch of markers in the ground, like she’s planning on building something.”
“What?” The headache started building behind my eyes again, but I certainly didn’t want to show weakness in front of Donovan.
The lion shifter nodded. “Thought you might want to know.”
“What I really want is for you to stop stalking…or whatever…in my territory without permission. Actually, you shouldn’t come back here at all.”
Donovan huffed a laugh and gave me his back. Fucking dominant male not threatened by me at all. “Whatever,” he grumbled. Taking off at a slow sprint, I watched as he disappeared into the pine forest just a few seconds later.
First Mariah. Then Lucas and his mission to overthrow me. And now a human trying to set up camp in coyote territory. Today sucked balls.
Massaging my head one more time, I decided that I’d start with the human first. Stripping out of my clothes and tucking them into the cloth bag I always carried with me, I shifted into my coyote with ease. Being in animal form gave me instant relief from the pressures of being alpha. My head felt better. My mind was clearer. And I could feel the magical nature of being a skin-walker healing me from the inside out.
I loved my magic and I loved my pack. There was no way in hell I would let Lucas take that from me. Even if it meant I needed to breed with a woman to give everyone an heir. I would do that for them. I’d always have Mariah, who was born out of love. Would it really be so bad to raise another pup and teach them the magic?
As I ran through the forest with my bag in my mouth, I let the cool air clear my head. No, it wouldn’t be so bad to raise another baby. I loved being a father. Plus, maybe this time, I could do better.
Maybe this time I could give the pack the heir it really needed.