Page 5 of Winter Unleashed

I turned to see Brad watching me with narrowed eyes. “What’s up, Brad?”

He tilted his head. “You mean what you said just now?”

“About taking care of Damian?” He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Good.” He moved closer to me, stopping a few feet in front of me. “I know what everyone thinks about me, but I don’t beat anyone up who doesn’t deserve it. Damian is the leader of the shitheads in this school.”

“There are more boys hurting the girls here?”

He puffed out his chest. “Not anymore.”

I nodded. “One thing I don’t get though is that you used to pick on Simon Davies. Are you telling me he was a part of what Damian does?”

His cheeks flushed as he shook his head. “No. He was just too weak. It was too easy to hurt him. It may not be how other people would do it, but I taught him to stand up for himself.”

“Damian used to hurt him?” I asked, reading between the lines. Even at five years younger than Damian, Simon was bigger, but he was too sweet to fight back.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Damian uses his dad’s position to threaten the other kids. He tells them his dad would tell their parents they picked on him and because his dad is Alpha, their parents would believe him over them. Most of the kids bought it. I didn’t.”

“Good for you.”

“You know I don’t always hurt them. A lot of times I just talk to them. If that doesn’t work, I threaten them, and then if they still act like shitheads, I beat them up.”

I gave him a light punch to the shoulder. “You’ll make a great Beta when the time comes to take your dad’s place. Hell, you’d be a better Alpha than Wallace or Porter. Keep up the good work.”

He puffed up his chest again and, for the first time I’d ever seen, his lips pulled into a genuine smile.

“All right, get back to class,” I said, returning his smile.

After a two-hour classteaching twelve- and thirteen-year-olds how to tap into their inner wolf for their first shift, I was exhausted. Their raging hormones mixing with their emerging wolves made them difficult to control. If the boys weren’t fighting, they were making comments to the girls, which made the girls either giddy or uncomfortable. I felt more tired after working with them than I did after fighting vampires.

When I got home, Liam had led me to the lake where he’d set up a picnic for us. We lounged on a blanket and ate our meal while the sun set, then sipped wine under the stars.

“You look like you could use more wine,” Liam said as he filled my glass.

“I can, thanks.” I leaned back on one elbow as I took a sip of the dark red liquid, swirling it around my mouth to let it linger on my tongue, and savoring its rich flavor.

“Thank you for this. It was a nice surprise, but I thought I was supposed to atone for picking on you earlier,” I said.

“Oh, you are. And you will,” he replied with a grin, “but you had shift duty at the Academy today, and I figured you’d need time to relax first. How’d it go?”

“Eh. Same as usual, just with more of the little fuckers.” I smiled to soften my words. He knew I loved my time at the Academy.

He leaned himself back on his elbow, and we gazed up at the sky as we spoke.

“Our numbers are growing,” he said. “There are more births reported every pack meeting. We did exceptionally well this year, and there are still more coming.”

“That’s great news. How about the other territories?”

“The same. We’re doing so well some people are worried we won’t be able to keep ourselves a secret from the regs much longer.”

A lot of shifters were afraid if non-shifting humans—which were called ‘regs’—found out about us, they’d start killing us. And we had good reason to be scared.

Before religion and superstition drove the humans to think we were demons sent to earth by the devil, shifters and humans had lived together in peace. But after they decided we were evil, and they figured out they could kill us if they gave us enough Wolf’s Bane, the humans had nearly wiped out the entire shifter population. The remaining shifters had let the humans believe we were extinct and had gone into hiding thousands of years ago. Since then, shifters have tried to repopulate, but it’s slow going since it’s harder for us to reproduce.

Only their fated mate can impregnate females, and even then, it may take a while. Once they are pregnant, the female has to make sure she doesn’t shift, or it will terminate the pregnancy.

Over the last few hundred years, we’ve finally started seeing our numbers increase consistently. The progress is partly because life is easier than it was hundreds to thousands of years ago. Females can take time to relax during their pregnancies because too much or sudden stress can bring the shift on without warning.