Page 63 of The Good Boys Club

“It could still be you, Alba,” Rob said, turning to my only unshifted sister, who’d wisely kept herself out of the argument.

Until now. “We all know it’s gonna be Mash. Sorry, Z, but you just aren’t as cool as my baby bro.” Alba’s shit-eating grin told me, without looking at Zach, that her arrow had found its target.

“If Mash is the next alpha, I’m never speaking to him again,” Zach said. “I’ll leave the pack and start my own with Kai. You can’t be the leader of a pack with a name like Mash.”

“Oh, don’t be dick,” Poppy yelled, also standing. “Just because you think—”

I jumped to my feet, pushing a gap between them, careful not to place my hand anywhere near Poppy’s daisies. “It’s fine. Whatever happens, happens. Zach can be alpha, anyway. I don’t want to.”

“That’s not how it works either,” said Rose, as Rob said, “Why not? I reckon it’d be really cool. Bossing everyone around, lording it about, always getting the biggest steak.”

I shrugged. Hadn’t thought too much about it, but I knew I wanted more. To see more of the Eight and a Half Kingdoms, meet the other species I’d read about in books and seen in movies. Couldn’t do that if I had to stay behind and lead the pack. “I wanna travel.”

“You can do that before you’re twenty-five. That’s what most wolves do,” Poppy said.

I sat back down, safe in the knowledge that Poppy and Zach weren’t about to have a dogfight. “I just don’t want to do it, okay?”

But it was pointless trying to deny what I already knew. What Nana, and Mam, and Clem, and Mika, and Alba, and even Zach already knew—though he was in denial. I would shift tonight, or if not tonight, over the next few lunar cycles, and I would become alpha.

I felt it in every fibre of my being. In my guts and the marrow of my bones. In the very atoms that made me Mash Cassidy.

Zach watched me over his shoulder. He said nothing and then turned back to Kai.

“Oh, they’re shifting!” Poppy said, snapping everyone’s attention to the crowds of wolves.

A deep rumble filled the marquee. Resonant growls built louder and louder as a hundred wolves transformed at once. It sounded like thunder rolling overhead.

The once-naked bodies sprouted fur—on chests and backs first, but soon it covered everything. Bones began elongating, bending different ways. Wolves were crying, howling. The noise was skull-splittingly loud. Impossible to even think through.

Mam padded over to the cubs’ area. She was enormous now, with her light-brown shaggy fur and deep amber eyes. “I’m notmeant to be here.” She pushed her cold snout against the skin of my neck, sniffing me, and then she did the same to Alba and Zach. “But I can’t miss one of my babies shifting, so I’ll be just outside the tent if you do, okay?”

“Sure,” I shouted over the top of the noise.

Alba waved her away, and we continued to watch the rest of the wolves shift and then scent each other in very typical dog fashion.

“I’m never gonna sniff someone’s butthole,” Rob said.

“Yeah, you will,” Rose said. “Everyone says they won’t, but it’s just something that cannot be stopped.”

Poppy looked down at her hands. “I really hope I shift tonight. I’m tired of waiting.”

“Try sitting here every month for three years,” Rose said.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

It was Zach who spoke. “Yeah, it fucking kills.”

“How would you know?!” Poppy shouted over the roaring and yipping and barking in the marquee. “I’ve heard it hurts at first, but you get used to it.”

We continued to watch the wolves shifting and filing out of the exit until we were the only people still here. After another thirty minutes, Rose brought out the blankets for those who were getting chilly. I refused mine. Felt like I was burning up. Poppy also turned hers down.

“If it’s gonna happen, how long does it take?” I asked.

Rose shrugged, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and sat on the floor. “Probably would’ve happened by now, but they say it can happen any time before dawn.”

Everyone groaned.

An hour went by, the board games were brought out, and the fizzy drinks and junk food.

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