Page 16 of Pack Kasen: Part 1

I could never tell him what I was, but he seemed to understand the reason I occasionally snuck out at night wasn’t to cause trouble. My wolf needed to be free as much as I sometimes did, and for all Robert’s quiet ways, he recognized I came back less tense.

Then he went out one night to pick up milk for me to have with my cereal for breakfast. When he didn’t come back, I followed him to the nearby bodega and found out two robbers had shot him when he intervened and saved the owner’s son’s life.

He died alone in the milk aisle.

Crouched behind a car in the parking lot, I cried for the first time that I could remember. Then my wolf picked up the robber’s scents, and we hunted them a few streets over, ripping out their throats as they were shooting up the drugs they’d bought with the stolen bodega money. They never saw me coming.

I was 16 then, and I’d been with Robert for nearly an entire year, the longest anyone had wanted to keep me.

That same night, my wolf and I came to an agreement about the way the world worked. Predators died. If I ever saw someone suffering, I would do something about it. And if someone hurt the people I cared about… well, they’d better hope I never caught up to them.

The next morning, Iwan found me eating toast with peanut butter and jelly at Robert’s breakfast table. He told me I wouldn’t be going to school that day. That it was time to go to another foster, and so I packed up my bag and moved on.

There was never another Robert, but I knew I was lucky to meet someone like him, and I’m glad I could do something about the people who took him from me.

It’s not smart to be running around campus as a wolf, especially with so many cops around, but there’s a predator on the loose and no one seems capable of stopping them.

My turn.

6

KAT

Ilinger on campus until it’s dark.

I’m on edge. My wolf is on edge, and I can’t stop thinking of Doug.

He took me home for Thanksgiving. Surrounded by his perfectly ordinary, lovely family, I’d known we couldn’t be together. There would always be a part of me I could never share with him and he would always feel I was holding something back.

I broke up with him the week after we got back to school, and I went home, crawled under my sheets and spent the rest of the night crying my eyes out.

I loved him.

Letting him go was the right thing to do, but that hadn’t meant it didn’t hurt knowing I couldn’t have a future with the first guy who actually seemed to care about me.

When the back of my eyelids prickle, I choke down my tears, and I straighten from the tree I spent the last fifteen minutes leaning against, just out of sight of two talking cops.

Tonight, someone is going to die.

I’m in all black to hide any blood if I have to be human to end Doug’s killer. Thankfully, none of my friends were around to seeme when I slipped into my room to change before I started my hunt.

Guilt burned in my gut as I’d dressed.

I could have done something about this killer before they got Doug. I’d told myself it had nothing to do with me, and it does. It has to.

Low-level security lights illuminate the buildings I pass. I keep my head down as I stick to the shadows, my long brown hair braided and out of my face as I skirt the open spaces to reach the parking lot near the stadium.

The site of the last murder.

Doug’s.

Whoever killed Doug had to have known he liked to train late. They had to have waited, maybe set up an ambush as he made his way to his car. And he’d have been alert. He knew someone was picking off my exes. Yet it hadn’t been enough to save him.

He used to walk to his dorm, same as most other football players, but I overheard students whispering that since the murders started, their coach told them to drive to the stadium or walk in pairs or groups.

Doug had been alone. Why?

My Nikes ensure each step I take is silent as I duck under the bleachers so I can find a nice dark place to strip, hide my clothes, and change into a wolf.

---