Page 1 of Wolf Found

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I’m Like a Bird

Graham Allen found Kismet when he searched Google for Asher Martingale.

Graham wouldn’t say he’d had a crush on Ash for most of his childhood.

Yes, he did have a crush; he just didn’t like to say it.

That was why he looked for Ash at all; he’d just never heard of Kismet before. On the other hand, he didn’t know a lot about life outside the enclave.

The oven timer went off, the annoying buzz of it distracting him from thinking about Ash; something he’d been doing all too often. He closed his recipe book—where he’d drawn a crude map of where Kismet was, ancestors only knew why—and scanned the small pack kitchen for where he’d left the oven mitts. It was a good thing the kitchen was barely big enough to cook the pack’s meals. Otherwise, Graham suspected he’d spend a lot of time looking for things he had misplaced.

Asher was seven years older than him. He’d been strong, beautiful, and the alpha heir of the Martingale pack. Frankly, everyone in the enclave who found men attractive had a crush on Ash. Graham doubted Ash would even remember him specifically. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a crowd. Graham liked to think he’d changed at least a little in the last eight years.

Graham was one of a dozen omegas in the Martingale pack, and he’d only been twelve when Ash left. He’d followed him around incessantly when he’d been there, until one of the pack’s beta enforcers noticed Graham’s unhealthy crush and had him reassigned to kitchen duty for... well, basically forever.

Thanks to his unseemly crush on Asher Martingale, Graham had spent the better part of the last eight years in the kitchen.

Thankfully, Graham loved the kitchen. He had loved it more when dish and floor-mopping duty had turned into other kitchen chores, and eventually, the cooking itself, but he loved the kitchen any way he could get it. Doing the dishes was a nice calm activity, and he could let his mind drift to other things while he did it.

But he’d gotten good enough at the cooking that there wasn’t much call for him to do the dishes anymore. He did most of the cooking for the whole pack, more than two hundred strong, and he didn’t have time to do much else.

He pulled the last tray of cookies out of the oven and set them aside to cool. They were a recipe he’d gotten from his mentor, that she’d gotten from hers, and an unusual treat for the pack. But he’d had enough money in the food budget to get some chocolate chips, so he’d splurged. The alpha didn’t mind, so long as he didn’t make a habit of it.

That was how he had found the resources to look Ash up. Since he did the cooking, he was also the one to order the groceries.

The enclave had been quick to embrace grocery delivery services, because it allowed them to keep their members inside the compound more than ever before. They just had to meet the delivery humans on the road outside the compound and take the groceries inside.

The only way that affected Graham was that now he was allowed a few hours a week on the enclave’s single computer, and thus, since he knew the grocery order by heart by the time Sunday morning rolled around every week, he sometimes bent the rules and looked up things that interested him.

The first such thing had been research into what had happened to Asher after he’d left the pack. Graham didn’t know—no one but the alpha and his few loyal enforcers seemed to know—why Ash had left them. He’d been there one day, and the next, he’d been gone.

For almost a week, it had been all anyone could talk about. Ash had been the only possible heir to the alpha, since he’d been the only alpha born to the pack in decades. One evening at dinner, the alpha had announced that Asher was gone, wouldn’t be coming back, and that no one was to speak of him anymore.

They still had. Still did almost ten years later, if only in hushed tones in private rooms. Everyone was still worried. What were they to do when the current alpha left them? He was older than anyone else in the pack, and not in the best of health. Sometimes, Graham thought he would die soon. Graham knew he would die if he ate what he made the alpha for his meals. Plain, lean, unsalted meat and green vegetables. Nothing sweet, nothing fatty, and nothing that tasted decent.

There was eating well, and there was eating so well you ate poorly.

In the decade since Ash had left, no alphas had been born, despite the insistence that all pack women needed to reproduce as often as possible, preferably with strong beta males. Graham thought maybe the alpha himself wasn’t able to produce children anymore at his advanced age.

Fortunately for Graham, his omega status made him completely undesirable for mating. Everyone assumed that an omega male would breed more omegas, and the pack didn’t like the omegas they had very much. They called them a drain on resources, since they couldn’t work on the farms or in the orchards, carrying the loads of fruits and vegetables the pack produced.

Graham sometimes thought that penalizing omegas for not being “able” to do the things the pack disallowed them to do was hypocritical, but Graham wasn’t alpha. He didn’t get a say in how things worked.

He started stacking the cooled cookies into a dish for the dining room. A few would break, but that was okay. He’d made enough for everyone, plus a few extras. And invariably, there would be a pack member or two who bypassed them, opting to eat more like the alpha and calling Graham soft and wasteful for making sweets.

The hugs he’d get from the children would be worth it. Increasingly, they were a pack of children, because of the wild attempt to breed a new alpha. The kids were being taken out to work in the fields younger and younger, because they needed more and more food for their increasing numbers.

It was a bad cycle, and Graham worried about their future.

So sometimes, he wondered where Asher had gone. Wondered if he could be convinced to come home, if only to keep the pack from destroying itself.

It wasn’t at all so he could sigh over the man’s incredible form, to say nothing of his unprecedented kindness. The Martingale pack would be better under his leadership, Graham was sure. He suspected the kids would get all the cookies they wanted with Ash at the helm.

That was how he found the news story with a picture of Ash and three other men standing in front of a coffee shop, a sign declaring “grand opening.”Kismet Provides a “Second Chance” for Returning Vets, the article had declared. It had called Ash and two of the other men brothers, because they had joined the human military together. The third, it had said, was the partner of one of them. Partner. Not in business, since they were all that, but romantic partner.

Graham had to admit that it warmed his chest, the idea that even if Ash had known about his childish feelings and hadn’t returned them, at least he wouldn’t have disdained him for being a man who loved other men.

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