Page 25 of Fighting Furry

He looked away, not meeting my eyes. “Just been bored while you slept.”

He was the absolute worst liar. “What's really going on?”

He made eye contact then, his jaw tight, his expression pained. “I don't like to be away from the pack too long. Clarissa's good, but she…I just want to get back.”

I could have pushed for more information, but I wasn't sure I wanted to know. There was nothing wrong with wanting to get my life back, and I didn't need to feel any more guilt about that than I already did. I ate the last two bites of French toast and carried my plate to the kitchen. The sink was piled high with dirty pans, but I'd worry about that later. “Let's go.”

Axel drove this time, swerving in and out of the congested LA traffic like he had a death wish. “I thought you said werewolves weren't indestructible.”

“We aren't,” he said. “We're hard to hurt and we heal quickly, but we can be killed.”

“So if you crashed into that guard rail, we'd die?”

“I'm not going to crash into the guard rail. I'm an excellent driver.”

He wasn't wrong about that. “It's all the other crazy people I'm worried about.”

“I'm keeping an eye on them,” he said. “You haven't reached your full power, yet, but you'll understand when you do.”

“What kind of power?” Super-weird sense of smell, alpha voice, and night vision were cool and all, but I wasn't sure I wanted more weird powers.

“It's hard to describe. It's like you're moving slower than everyone else. When I'm in any sort of adrenaline-pumping situation, everything slows down and my senses become heightened. To you, we're moving insanely fast, but to me this is just a leisurely drive down a busy road.”

That didn't sound like a bad skill to have. It would certainly help me in the cage.

“How did you become alpha? Was it a fight to the death like in the movies?”

“Not quite,” he said with a faint smile. “It became clear pretty soon after puberty that I was going to be an alpha. Esmeralda tried to keep my dominance hidden, but by the time I was sixteen, my alpha knew what I was and he wanted me out of the pack.”

“Harsh.”

He shrugged. “Some alphas are cool with having another dominant male in the pack, but not our alpha. He wasn't very popular and he couldn't take the risk of me becoming more powerful than him and taking him out. Darius took me in for a few years, so I could finish high school and mature before I became alpha.”

“How'd that go over with the wife and kids?” I kept my tone light, but I was feeling pretty bad for Axel. It couldn't have been easy to have been forced out of his pack and away from his adoptive guardian.

He smiled. “The kids were toddlers and Darius hadn't married their mom, yet. He told them I was his nephew, that my parents were out of the country on missionary work. It worked out.”

“So you lived there until, what? You became alpha of the Mule Creek pack?”

“Darius and the council made sure I got a college degree,” he said. “There were…Problems with a lot of the packs that hadn't accepted the world was changing and thought they could live the way they'd been living for the past hundred and fifty years. The council wanted the packs to be more a part of the modern world and they thought making sure all new alphas were college educated would help with that.”

“What did you major in? Werewolf pack management?”

He slipped between two cars and onto the exit ramp. His lips twitched, but he didn't smile. “I majored in psychology and history. Darius wanted me to major in business, but that was never going to be a good fit for me. I figured it was more important for me to learn how to mediate disputes and understand the drives of even the least dominant members of the pack. In history, I wanted to learn about the best leaders and try to do half as good as them. For the most part, I manage people as pack leader, I look out for mental health problems, and try to keep the pack from killing each other or themselves for one idiotic reason or another.”

“So, you finished college and then you went and fought the Mule Creek alpha to the death and took over?”

“I was assigned to the Mule Creek pack. They'd been having trouble for years, getting into fights with other packs and the vampires in Aspens Whiten. Darius wanted me to take over and calm things down before they did something irrevocably stupid.”

“And the alpha just stepped aside and let you take over?”

“The alpha was not as strong or as dominant as me and he'd long since stopped being able to control his pack. It should have been a smooth transition, but not all the pack was in favor of my pacifist philosophy.”

“You fought them to the death?” At this point, I was just trying to get him to smile. He was way too serious, way too somber.

“Nope,” he said. “I let the pack members who were opposed to pacifism leave, and the alpha left with them. They're in Aspens Whiten, now.”

“That town in the valley I had to drive through to get to Mule Creek?”

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