Page 14 of Wolf Duty

The beast had never communicated with him in words. It growled and sent mental images—lately, it also purred—but words were new.

Another sign that he couldn’t deny the truth any longer.

His instant attraction to Sonya. The weird shock when he touched her, skin to skin. Her feeling his wolf’s internal growls.

And now, the beast calling her mate—using the word, not an image.

She was his true mate, and his wolf had already claimed her.

The beast rumbled its agreement.

Bay mentally shook himself. Sonya deserved so much better than him, but he could only manage one problem at a time. Right now, they had to track down a small pup, convince it tochange back into human form, and bring the little dude back to attend his sister’s mating ceremony.

Sonya refused to take vows without her brother’s presence.

He sent his beast an image of Karim’s all-black wolf form.Find pup. It needs help.

His animal brother shook itself, lifted its leg to mark a tree, and then sampled the surrounding air until the faint scent of a small shifter reached its nose.

They followed the trail through the woods. Eventually, the trees thinned out, and a lake nestled in a green meadow appeared. A sad-looking small black wolf lay on the muddy shore with its nose on top of its paws, its eyes closed.

Bay’s beast circled until they were downwind from the boy and then entered the meadow on silent paws. If he were the alpha of Karim’s pack, Bay could communicate with the pup while in fur. But since he wasn’t, he shifted to human shape when they got closer.

The young wolf’s head shot up, eyes open.

“It’s just me,” Bay said.

The pup whined.

“I can’t understand your wolf. Shift and use your words.” He’d never seen a wolf roll its eyes before and had to turn away to hide a grin.

Karim shifted into a mud-covered, naked boy. He shivered in the cold air. “Is Sonya okay?”

“She’s fine,” Bay assured him. “But she’s worried about you.” They needed to talk fast so the little guy could get back to being covered in warm fur.

The cold didn’t seem to bother him, though. The boy dragged his big toe through the snow, tracing some sort of shape on the ground. “I’m fine,” he muttered, but then looked up with eyes shiny from unshed tears. “Why won’t the pack let her be my parent?”

“They will.” Bay inwardly cursed his limited ability with words. How could he explain the intricacies of pack rules to a kid? He settled on, “It’s just complicated.”

“Why? She’s my sister. What’s complicated about that?”

Bay weighed what to say. Did Karim know Sonya was his stepsister? If not, it wasn’t Bay’s business to tell him. “Shifters have a lot of secrets, and they don’t want to share them with people who aren’t pack.”

“Why?”

The kid was stuck on that one word, not that Bay blamed him. The Sunbeam pack’s strict interpretation of shifter laws made little sense to him, either. “Mostly it’s to protect wolves. Regular humans scare easily. And when they’re afraid of something, they hunt and kill that something.”

Karim’s frown covered his entire face. “But wolves are much stronger than regular people.”

Bay didn’t want to scare the little dude, but Karim should be aware of the dangers in the world. “In unarmed combat, the wolf always wins. But regular humans like to hunt with guns.” He watched the boy’s reaction closely.

“That makes sense,” the kid finally said, and Bay exhaled. “But Sonya is great at keeping secrets. She never tells me anything important,” Karim muttered. “Even when I ask.”

“She’d be a great pack member, then.”

The boy nodded. “So, when will Dale let her into the pack?”

Bay rubbed the back of his neck. They were back to complicated things. “Sonya will not join the Sunbeam pack.”

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