I hadn’t made it a couple of steps away from Mara’s locker when a townie purposely bumped into me.
“Whoops,” Adam, a tall blond said as he shouldered me. “Didn’t see you there.”
I rolled my eyes and kept moving, alert to the fact he immediately followed.
“Hey,” he said, barely containing his laughter. “Come back. I want to ask you something. How many people do you share a room with anyway, because we’ve counted, and there’s way more of you scruffy refugees than there are rooms.”
My shoulders stiffened. Getting at me was one thing, denigrating my pack was quite another.
“Oh, Adam, just shut up,” a brunette called Chloe said irritably. “You’re so annoying today.”
That drew his attention away from me. Which was for the best. My fists had already clenched. I spent the next forty minutes trying to still the tension in my chest. Victor would have broken Adam’s nose. I could imagine how satisfying that would feel, but it wasn’t best for the pack.
I trudged into my next class alone mid-morning, fervently wishing I could go home and run in the woods when a sudden chill raised goose bumps on my arms. I froze to the spot, causing the girl behind me to bump into me.
“Move, you idiot,” she said before shoving me out of the way.
I wasn’t paying attention anymore. Someone else had caught my eye. There she was again, the blonde I had met a couple of days before, looking so ethereal that I had half-wondered if she was real. She had barely spoken to me, but I hadn’t been able to get her out of my head.
She definitely wasn’t a wolf, but somehow she didn’t seem human either. When she had looked at me with those pale secret-knowing eyes, ghostly hands had run up and down my spine. I had passed it off as a quirk, but there it was again, right in the middle of my classroom. I lost all of the scents, all of the noise, and that was worse. I felt alone when I looked at the girl with hair a shade darker than white, a spine so stiff she could have been a doll, and an aura that protected her like a shield—an ice-cold werewolf repellent shield. Which was just ridiculous. Nathan was right; I had to man up sometime.
I kept my eyes on her as I passed her table and took a seat behind her. She hadn’t even looked at me, never mind recognised me. I breathed through my mouth, a prickling under my skin that usually forewarned a shift into wolf form. I bit down on my tongue until blood flooded my mouth and the wolf relaxed. The girl wasn’t a threat. She hadn’t done a thing to me.
But she had been watching our territory as though sheknew, and that was never good. Maybe, if I found out why, the pack would think I wasn’t as useless as they all suspected.
* * *
At lunch,I sat with the rest of the pack. Mingling was rarely entertained, despite our alpha’s best hopes.
My pack was a garbled mix of different cultures and ethnicities, a result of the last alpha’s efforts to bring werewolves together and away from humans. Like many younger wolves, I had no idea where my ancestors came from. When the Evans family found me, I had understood a number of languages, but spoke proficiently in none.
I wasn’t the only one.
My pack was called anything from gypsy to refugee because we didn’t belong. Being wolves made it harder to find a place to fit in outside the pack. Humans always knew there was something different about us. Some of them were drawn to the difference, but most were repulsed by it, which made it even more difficult to be part of a world we didn’t understand, a world that didn’t understand us.
But even the pack didn’t understand each other half the time.
For a wolf, I was sensitive to more than most, so perhaps that explained my earlier reaction. Maybe that girl in class felt like an outsider, too, so she projected cold steel instead of welcome. Maybe she was more like us than I had imagined. But that didn’t give me an appetite either, and I pushed my food aside, sickened to the stomach.
“What’s up with the pup?” Mara asked without even looking in my direction.Thatparticular blonde was probably the most petite girl in school, and also the most terrifying.
“Yeah, what’s up with you, Dory?” Victor flicked his banana skin my way.
The skin hit my shoulder and plopped to the floor.
He glared at me, more than a little wolf showing in his green eyes. “You better clean that up.”
I couldn’t hold his gaze for longer than two seconds. I broke away and bowed my head in submission, unable to defend myself. My wolf just sort of retreated. I picked up the banana skin then got up to throw it into the nearest bin.
I spotted the new girl walking by, looking awkward and unsure of herself. She seemed too vulnerable to be a threat, and I was filled with the desperate need to take her under my wing, to protect the weak one. My first instinct was to ask her to sit with us, but when I glanced back at the other werewolves, I knew that would just be cruel. She left the room alone, and my wolf whimpered. I would hate that.
When I slipped back into my seat, Victor pointed at me. “Why the hell are you so miserable looking today?”
“I’m not.” I avoided his eyes. “There’s just this girl—”
He burst out laughing. “Just when I think you can’t get any more pathetic. What’s the matter? Can’t work up the courage to talk to her? I bet she isn’t even a wolf.”
The girl to his left, Alison, snorted. “As if he could handle a wolf.”