ETHAN
Three hours. I spent the past three hours with Blacktree's pack doctor.
It was damn near impossible to keep my mouth shut during the entire meeting because every few words truly showed his incompetence.
Pack doctors were tasked with ensuring their pack remained healthy and physically taken care of.
They needed a certain level of intelligence, and he sure as fuck failed to hit the mark. I was not sure how he became the pack doctor at all. I was fairly certain that I could do his job better than him even though I had no formal medical training. Shifters did not often get sick, but pack doctors still needed to be knowledgeable enough to handle that as well as care for the injured.
Our own, Dr. Goldman, attended an ivy league school among the humans while also keeping up-to-date with shifter combat medicine. Our physiology was close enough to humans that knowledge of both worlds was crucial to ensure we were properly taken care of.
I had to meet with Blacktree's doctor, Dr. Fineman or something like that, because rogues had been circling both their pack and ours over the past three months.
The Blood Moon pack was more than capable of protecting ourselves, but there were some unusual circumstances. Thus, Xander sent me to consult with Blacktree.
Rogues were not an uncommon occurrence in our world, but the sheer number of them had been the more concerning matter. There was also an unknown substance found on many of them. We did not take threats lightly after our pack had been attacked five years ago. Part of our pack had been decimated during the attack.
That was why I was here in this dingy small town instead of tossing back a few at a bar in my own territory.
Personally, I thought Xander should have been forced to be the consultant. Alpha, my ass. Sometimes he just used that as an excuse to get out of doing something he did not want to do. It was a good alibi for adding additional work to others' caseloads. Hell, if I was the Alpha instead of the Beta, I would use it to my own advantage sometimes too. Guess I could not fault him too much for it. It still sucked though. I hated idiots.
Dr. Finefuck had not been able to produce one single piece of usable information regarding the dead rogues or the black substance that was found on them. Either he truly was completely incompetent or hiding something. Either one was a possibility.
I exited the building and took a deep breath. That was singlehandedly the worst consultation I had ever been part of.
My phone beeped, pulling my attention away from my internal grumbling.
Callie – "Want me to come over later?"
Callie was the current she-wolf that I had been spending some personal time with. She was a flexible slender brunette who was up for damn near anything. She knew how to keep things interesting, but she was getting a bit presumptuous. We were supposed to be causal, but the fact that she asked to come over to the packhouse was a no go.
Xander and I never brought girls back to the packhouse since it was our own personal space. It is just him and me that lived there, and we liked it that way. It was our personal bachelor pad and the only place that we could just be ourselves instead of the leaders of our pack.
Things easily got suffocating being around people who wanted to be around us just because it made them seem more important than they actually were.
Neither of us understood, before we took on our roles, how hard it would become to differentiate between who wanted to be around us because of us or because of our titles. We quickly learned it was actually very difficult. That was why we only did casual.
I had yet to offer any of them anything more than a great fuck, and I did mean great fuck. Plus, if I was being honest, the submissiveness was a bit annoying. I craved a challenge, but none of them ever rose to that occasion. It was easy to excite the body, but exciting the mind was a different beast entirely.
I shot Callie a quick text, telling her that I was busy. I still needed to grab food for Xander and me on my way back to our territory and debrief with him. Luckily our land was only about a thirty-minute drive from here.
Unfortunately, this meeting had been a complete bust, and we were no closer to figuring out the rogue situation. We were at a standstill with it until we figured out more shit. There were still other packs to consult with. Oddly, no other southern packs had reported similar rogue attacks.
Another beep pulled my attention downwards.
Xander – "Where the fuck is the food?"
I began to respond to tell him off because of his impatience. He was the one who forced me to come and consult with Dr. Dipshit. He should have come himself if he wanted it to occur faster.
Turning the corner, I hit something and landed straight on my ass. I looked around to see what I bumped into.
"Sorry," came a soft voice.
So, it turned out to be a who instead of a what. I was surprised that someone so petite had thrown me on my ass like that. A rosy tint blossomed across her cheeks which stood in stark contrast to her fair skin. Her wavy blonde hair hung well over halfway down her back and covered part of her face. I looked at her carefully because she seemed familiar, but I could not place her.
She was trying to quickly stack the books that littered the ground and looked up at me when she realized that I had not moved or said anything. I was struck with how unique her eyes looked. They were a light blue with silver rings around her irises. The rings were a tell-tale sign that our wolves are pressing forward or in control. However, it looked like she was in control, yet the color remained the same and never wavered in or out.
Interesting.
Her blonde brows knitted together when she caught me staring. The eyes that had just struck me narrowed as her body tensed up some, as if readying itself for a fight.
"I get that I knocked into you, but staring is still fucking rude," she quipped.
She held my gaze, refusing to back down. Well, that was certainly new. I could not help the smirk that formed on my lips from her words.
"Perhaps it is. It's just a rare day in hell when someone manages to knock me on my ass."
My response simply made her roll her eyes. "Maybe next time you should pay more attention to where you are walking and less time scrolling through social media."
She then turned her attention to the files I had been carrying. This she-wolf was certainly snarky. I would give her that.
A true chuckle burst from my lips. "It wasn't social media actually," I defended. "Are you okay?" I asked, reaching for the rest of her books.
Why the hell did one person need so many books anyways? I was all for gaining knowledge, but this was pushing it.
She nodded and finished stacking the files I was carrying. "Here, these must be yours."
"Thanks," I said, taking the files. The moment that her hand brushed against mine, a wave of static warmth spread across my hand. I had never felt anything like that before.
I looked at her to see if she felt it as well. Her lack of response led me to believe that she had not. Curious.
"Sorry for my rudeness. I'm Ethan." I offered her my hand to shake, wondering if I would feel the same thing again.
She hesitated for a moment, looking at my hand as if considering the pros and cons of shaking my hand.
"Emma," she replied, shaking my hand. I supposed the pros outweighed the cons in my favor.
Again, I felt it once her hand touched mine. It was unusual, so I stored the information away for another time.
"Very nice to meet you, Emma."
It was amusing to watch her trying to balance her oversized stack of books. She could not be more than 5'4, a bit on the short side for a she-wolf. So far, she did not seem like the type to cower to someone bigger than her. Hell, she called me out for staring without an ounce of reservation.
Shifters had specific auras. You could not tell if someone was a ranked member, such as Alpha or Beta. Although their auras were stronger because of their strength of their wolves. Also, the strength of an aura was based on how strong the shifter was overall. It served as an early warning signal to other shifters.
Our pack prided itself on being one of the, if not the, strongest and most dangerous packs in the south. Perhaps even the entire country. We were not cruel to our pack, but we did not extend that courtesy to our enemies. There was a reason why we were feared by others.
However, this she-wolf did not seem fazed by my aura at all. Add another point in the interesting fact category.
I took in her appearance and mentally nodded in approval. Her chest and ass were a bit more curvier than most of the she-wolves in our pack. Her body was very much all woman. Her chest strained against the black long-sleeved shirt that she was wearing. The jeans highly her thighs and ass in the most delectable way.
There was no doubt about it that she was unbelievably gorgeous.
She noticed my gaze and looked at me incredulously. "Again, with the staring."
Turning away from me, she carried the precariously tall stack of books. Women never turned away from me, so I was instantly drawn towards her. My body propelled me forward until I stood in front of her.
She looked up at me through narrowed eyes, obviously irritated. I knew I was probably coming off as an insistent ass, but I could not help myself. Something was drawing me to her, and I would be an idiot not to figure out what it was.
Since I was a pup, I dealt with getting feelings about things. Intuition if you would. The draw to her was like one of those feelings but far much stronger. I needed to know why.
"My apologies, Emma. You just look familiar, so I was trying to figure out how I knew you," I explained smoothly, trying to add a little bit of charm that always made the she-wolves swoon.
"Is that so?" she challenged, obviously not believing a word I said.