Kyle groaned. “Then where are they, Xander? Because I sure as hell haven’t met some perfect woman when we’ve gone to any of the pack ceremonies, or full moon parties.”
I grunted and kept eating. Kyle and I had enjoyed more than our share of females over the years. We’d partied through our twenties, but we’d never thought we’d get to thirty and still not have a mate.
I swallowed hard.“She’s out there, Kyle. I know it. One for you, and one for me. We aren’t destined to be alone.”
My father was the lead Beta to our Alpha, and the Alpha had no children. Which meant, more than likely, I would be chosen to step up to be the next Alpha of our pack.
But with no more breeding females, our pack’s days were numbered—unless I broke the curse.
“I want to leave,” I announced suddenly, before taking a swig of my beer and wiping my mouth with my sleeve. “I’ve been thinking about it for years, and I think it’s time.”
Kyle cracked open two more beers, frowning at me. “What do you mean, leave? Like... abandon the pack?”
“Hell no! I’d never abandon the pack.”
These people were my home, my family. Where my heart and soul resided.
“Then whatdoyou mean?”
“There’s something wrong with the pack, right?” I said, verbalizing my thoughts out loud.
“Well... yeah. But no-one knows why.”
“It has to be something,” I said. “The water, food. Magic, or a curse. This pack hasn’t seen a live female birth since the day I was born, and now that Mikaela can’t have any more children, we don’t have any breeding females, either. Our pack will die out. My newest nephew will be the last of our kind.”
Kyle ran a hand through his shaggy, dirty blond mop. “Even if that’s true, what can we do about it?”
He sighed sadly, but I didn’t feel defeated. Quite the opposite. For the first time, speaking out loud like this, I felt like we had hope.
“We need to find out why this has happened to our pack. I don’t know how, but I was thinking maybe one of the elders would know.” They had to remember a shift, or change. Surely? There had to be a clue. Somewhere.
Kyle lifted his gaze to mine, then looked away again.
A chill coursed over my back. I pointed at him. “You know something, don’t you?”
He slumped in his chair. “Yeah... Maybe. I heard something years ago, when we were kids, but it didn’t make sense to me at the time. Now... I don’t know. It’s been playing in my head over the past few years, and recently I can’t seem to let it go.”
I sat up straighter. If Kyle knew something, I had to know. Now. “Tell me.”
Kyle groaned and slid down in the chair, leaning back as though to get comfortable for a long conversation. “My parents were talking about it one day. You know, all the boys being born, and my mom said she’d heard someone say the Alpha had cursed us all.”
“The Alpha!” I gasped. “Seriously? How?”OurAlpha? Why hadn’t anyone said anything?
“Mom said something about a witch, and the Alpha, and that it was all his fault, but that was all I got.”
I stood up, filled with nervous energy. I cleaned my plate, put away the empty beer bottles, and poured myself a glass of water. “So that’s who we need to ask.”
“Who?” Kyle asked. “My mom?”
“No.” I pulled off my shirt, readying for a shower. We had to go straight to the source. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier? “We need to talk to the Alpha.”
The leader of our pack was a lone wolf, which didn’t make it easy to contact him. He only came into the village a few days a week in his human form, and the rest of the month he ran free in wolf form through the forest woodlands that surrounded us.
After I had a shower, and a quick power nap to catch up on the night’s lost sleep, Kyle and I headed to my parents’ house. My father had essentially served as our pack’s leader in our Alpha’s absence for most of the last ten years.
Mom answered the door with a smile on her face. “Hey sweetheart. Are you looking for your dad?”
I nodded. “How’d you know?”