TurningWildBlankEditionHTML by Erika Masten

Dustin and Eric
released their grips and took a step back so the men could exchange hard,
questioning looks. “Who is he?” the scout asked.
    “Assuming he’s the same
Ivan, the same black wolf….” Black wolves were too rare for it to have been a
coincidence, and all three men knew it. “He was part of a Fenris-blooded pack
that had set itself up back east, but that was years ago.” Ron snorted and ran
one hand through his thick black hair. Dustin sensed the alpha tensing, saw it
in the sharpening of sinewy muscles beneath his skin. “I was a just a whelp
then, twenty or twenty-two, and barely able to shift on my own. That pack, they
were way beyond anything most of us had ever dreamed. Half of them were at
least fifty years old, with thirty or thirty-five years of shifting behind
them, almost out of their minds with the wilding, all of them.”
    Ron took a step back
from Holly, shuffling, practically stumbling, lost in memory. “All of them but
one. Their youngest member. He was a Russian immigrant they’d picked up working
his way through shit towns and jails in the Appalachians. He’d have been a
little order than I was, so maybe…sixty years old now.”
    Holly shook her head.
“Not him. The were who attacked me was thirty,
thirty-five.”
    “Shifters age more
slowly than humans after they’ve turned,” Dustin told her, which made her
narrow her eyes at him. “I’m thirty, lupa, not a hundred. Stop looking at me
like that.”
    When she focused on
Eric, the blond lieutenant shrugged. “I’m holding up pretty well for forty, I
think.” And it was true, as he looked at least a decade younger than that.
    “I, on the other hand,”
Ron volunteered, “could qualify for my senior’s discount next birthday, were I
still using the name and social I was born with.” A full twenty of those years
didn’t show on the alpha, battle scars notwithstanding.
    Holly’s brows dipped
with worry. “So it could be him. Why did you think he was dead?”
    “The strongest Odin’s
pack in the eastern United States went after them,” Ron responded. “The battle,
the bloodshed, the damage…. They practically demolished a mining town. The
Agency was on high alert for months afterward.”
    “It wasn’t your pack?”
Dustin asked.
    “No, we just took in
the survivors, for a little while. Out of two packs, more than twenty shifters,
there were only three who walked away, all Odin’s Wolves. And they, well, they
were so close to wilding after that kind of prolonged hunt that they were
retired.”
    Dustin perked.
“Retired?”
    “All their needs taken
care of for the rest of their lives. They ultimately settled somewhere remote.
No more shifting, if they could help it, to stave off the progression.”
    “And none of the Fenris
Wolves survived?” Eric asked.
    Ron’s gaze shifted from
Eric to Dustin and back. “We didn’t think so at the time, but…maybe one. Being
as young as he was then, he wasn’t one of the primary targets. He could have
found refuge with others of his kind for a few years here and there, before going
rogue. If he didn’t….” The alpha growled low, raising the hackles on Dustin’s
back and probably Eric’s, too. “If he’s been without that pack bond for more
than twenty years, he’s beyond crazy and more dangerous than any varg we’ve
seen in our lifetimes.”
    The second in command
slid his sunglasses back into place and started toward the cabin door. “Then
the hunt is our first priority.”
    “Second,” Ron corrected
him, and Dustin went still, from breath to heartbeat. “We don’t know where he
is right now. He may well come to us, as we have what he wants.”
    “The girl,” Eric
sighed, coming back across the room.
    “Holly.” Dustin stepped
in front of her again. “Her name is Holly.”
    “Dustin,” the alpha
sighed low and slow, “you know how these things work. The pack brings new
shifters along over time. That’s not just about learning pack law and