Chapter 11

Ethan had clearly shifted before, but he must have done so deep in the woods or safe within the confines of his locked bedroom. Somewhere that his wolf hadn't felt threatened or challenged.

Now, the beast before me snarled as he stared up at an alpha who he fully expected to hurl him to the ground with righteous indignation. It didn't help that Fen had spun around to take in the unexpected scene, her own lupine form half rampant behind her human eyes as she made a snap decision about the safest place to stash the wolfling in her arms. To a new wolf, her firm intent could easily be construed as menace.

I was fully clothed, but I had a feeling only my own wolf would be able to calm Ethan before he did something we'd both regret. Whether that something would consist of taking to the woods and letting his lupine mind fully surpass his human brain or whether he'd stay and fight remained to be seen. But my wolf and I preferred not to wait for the expected drama to unfold.

Instead, falling to the ground, my lupine half unfurled her claws and ripped through our clothes as we shifted. Shreds of cloth fluttered through the air like confetti, and we couldn't resist howling in awe at our own skill. So that's what my beast busied her brain with planning when she was bored by the extensive time we spent in human form. Good job, wolf.

But now wasn't the time to pat ourselves on the back. Our lupine vision tunneled in on the strange wolf who wasn't really a pack mate, at least not quite yet. We allowed one ear to twitch back, catching the sound as Fen quickly shed clothing and shifted to stand between us and the pup. Then we breathed out a pleased puff of air, knowing Ember would be protected no matter what went down. The reassurance gave us the ability to focus on what needed to be done.

My brother's wolf had yet to choose his course of action. Instead, he stood poised, ears half pinned as if he wanted to submit to our alpha dominance but couldn't quite talk himself into letting down his guard. My human half well remembered how confusing it felt to shift to wolf form after a childhood spent on two feet, how scents and sounds were nearly overwhelming and how the wolf's brain pulled at human emotions. How we'd had to struggle valiantly in order to resist crouching down in instant submission each time an older and larger wolf strode past.

But even at fifteen, Ethan's wolf was already bigger than mine. And for all my alpha dominance, my own lupine half was wholeheartedly female, aggressive only when pushed. So we paused and let my brother raise his nose to scent the air, taking in an aroma that would remind him of his own barely noticeable scent. He would be smelling our pride and excitement at sharing lupine form with a brother who we'd thought would always walk on two feet. Surely even Ethan's newborn wolf would know just by looking that I wasn't the pack leader our father had been.

Like any good predator, my wolf and I understood how to stand stock still and wait out our prey's jitters. Yes, the clock was ticking down on our peacekeeping appointment, but my human brain remembered that we had an hour or so of wiggle room left while my wolf brain was wholeheartedly uninterested in anything except the present. Meanwhile, both of us understood that my brother's first entrance into pack society couldn't be rushed.

He whined. The barest hint of sound, confusion given voice by wolf throat. Then, brave as any Wilder, Ethan padded toward us, his gaze skittering back and forth between our own and the surrounding scenery. The teenager's lupine half wouldn't allow him to lock eyes with a more dominant shifter, but his human half obviously couldn't resist checking our face for clues to future behavior.

We made it as easy for him as we could. Cocking our head to one side and lolling out our tongue, we yipped joyously.

Despite our best intentions, though, Ethan still jumped straight up in the air at the sound. Still, once his pads were on the earth once again, our brother continued his approach until he was so close we could feel his breath sliding across the sensitive skin of our nose.

We raised our muzzle invitingly, and Ethan's wolf knew instinctively what to do. Reaching up, he paused in fear, then cautiously swiped one lick of his tongue beneath our chin. When we made no move to push him away, the younger wolf's eyes immediately squinted shut with relief and rapture and he continued laving our fur with enthusiasm.

Despite the growing sogginess of my fur, I let him lick. After all, I knew exactly how good it felt for someone who'd considered himself a lone wolf to enter a pack for the first time. I knew because my human brain could feel the emotions roiling in our direction from my brother's mixed-up head.

So the four of us wasted another few minutes dancing around the campsite, sidling, nudging, then leaping and bounding with wild abandon. Fen and Ember had joined in the fun, and we all ended up on the grass at last in a jumble of fur and carefully retracted claws, panting from pleasure and relief.

I was the first to surge upward into human form, but Fen soon followed. "We have to go," I told Ethan regretfully, waiting for him to shift.

But he didn't. Instead, our little wolf pup pattered off to the pile of clothes lying by the side of the car, grabbed a full syringe in tiny wolfling teeth, and ambled back in our direction. Clearly Ember had been in on Ethan's experiments from the start and knew he'd have the antidote on hand. Equally clearly, my brother was still unable to shift without the aid of drugs.

Which left one of the big questions still wide open, even though Ethan's brave actions had put a second worry to bed. Yes, it was safe for a shiftless werewolf to use F2F to change forms. But whether the drug would impact Ember's ability to transform at will in the future remained to be seen.

Well, I can't expect my brother to take the entire load of decision-making off my shoulders, I thought wistfully. Even proving the safety factor was a huge stride forward. It would have to be enough.

"Do you want me to inject you?" I asked Ethan, crouching down so I was at his eye level. "Or would you rather see if an alpha command would do the trick?"

My brother had been attempting to wedge the syringe up against a tent stake with his ungainly lupine paws, clearly expecting no aid with his return transformation. But now he looked up and I could see his wolf breathing in my scent once again as he considered his options.

An alpha's compulsion could be painful, as I well knew, especially if the shifter in question was struggling against the required action made mandatory by the pack leader's bark. But the command could also feel nearly orgasmic when an alpha helped an underling achieve a mental state that he had been unable to attain on his own. I'd experienced both sides of the equation firsthand and couldn't help remembering exactly how exhilarating Wolfie's command had been as I struggled with my own wolf just eight months earlier.

And I also couldn't help remembering how angry I'd been to lose control over my own body at the same alpha's bark upon our first meeting.

So I fully expected the sullen teenager who I'd met just a few weeks earlier to refuse my aid. Chances were good Ethan wouldn't even allow me to inject the remedy into his veins since he'd obviously managed the return journey on his own at least once before.

Have a little faith, my wolf chided as I prepared to rise back to my feet.

So I waited. And felt joy nearly as boundless as the emotion Wolfie had given me when my brother lifted his paw in an emulation of Ember's puppy sign language and patted me gently on the chest.

"Shift," my wolf and I said together. And, moments later, our brother stood before us in human form, breathless and rumpled but with the biggest smile I'd ever seen spread across his face.

***

"I hope you know how proud I am of you," I told my brother hours later as he squeezed packet after packet of fast-food ketchup into our wolfling's gaping maw during our last stop before reaching the Tribunal's peacekeeping grounds. It turned out that ketchup slowed the effects of F2F while also lessening the after-headache, proving that Cricket's instincts about Ethan's dining habits had been spot on after all.

Luckily, my own instincts that a brave young man lurked beneath the tattooed body of my little brother were right as well. I could barely imagine how much strength of will it must have taken to inject himself with Dale's drug the first time, not knowing whether he would die, would wind up stuck in wolf form for the rest of his life, or would be entirely unaffected by the cocktail. Words alone seemed like too little recognition of my brother's courage, but I figured I had to at least try to acknowledge his sacrifice.

Ethan smiled up at me in response and I could see the teenager's wolf alert behind his eyes for the first time. Despite their traumatic morning, the beast was calm and centered, so much like my mate's that I felt a prickling of tears behind my own eyes.

I'd called Wolfie one last time that morning, but had once again received no reply. My inner wolf maintained that our mate was merely outside the bounds of cell-phone signals, but I was less sanguine about his silence. Because as much as I hated to doubt our bond, I couldn't help wondering whether my refusal of a claiming moon piling on top of my choice to forcibly shift our adopted daughter had been the last straw that tore our relationship asunder. Would Wolfie still be my mate when I saw him next?

But now wasn't the time to worry about my own woes. Ember's little belly bulged with ketchup, we were a five-minute drive from the peacekeeping grounds, and I knew we had to time our entrance carefully. A forced shift might not count as proof of our wolfling's majority, so we'd keep the impetus of Ember's transformation on the down-low. Instead, Ethan would inject Ember as we pulled into the parking area and the pup would shift as the two of us sat down in front of the Tribunal.

Or so we hoped. Ethan had warned that it was better for Ember not to change form more than once every twenty-four hours, not if we didn't want a vomiting, feverish wolfling on our hands. So we couldn't test the hypothesis that F2F would work on our bloodling, we had no idea if Ember's transformation time line would be similar to what Ethan had experienced, and we couldn't know if dangerous side effects would pop up right in front of our foe.

We've planned as much as we can, my wolf said simply. Let's go.

So we piled back into the car for the last leg of our journey. Fen was silent beside me in the front seat, having refused to talk about my faithless cousin and instead drawing deeper within herself with each mile separating her from her potential mate. And as much as I wanted to help the young woman work through her pain, I knew Fen would be the first one to tell me that her emotions didn't matter. Not right now when I had to remain focused on pulling the wool over the eyes of some of the strongest werewolves in the eastern United States.

The peacekeeping grounds lay in outpack territory, roughly equidistant between all of the territories that the Tribunal oversaw. To the human eye, the area looked like nothing more than a large hay field, infrequently mowed save for several long paths that wound deep into the center. There, hidden within the tall grass, the most powerful alphas from each All-Pack gathering waited to decide whether Ember could stay at Haven or would be forced to return with her father to Clan Young.

I'd set foot on the peacekeeping grounds only once before, during which time I'd watched with childlike wonder as my father helped oversee a peacekeeping session that had gone horribly wrong. Within minutes, the Chief had ripped out the throats of three shifters before my young eyes. Blood spurted across the ground as he shook each body vigorously with a whipping side-to-side motion of his own head and I'd cringed away from the violence.

Only one werewolf had tried to shift and flee, the others too frozen by the Tribunal's dominance to so much as protest their own demise. But the effort hadn't done that one shifter any good. He'd made it all of two steps before the full force of the Tribunal piled upon his back and pushed him down into the dirt. The shifter had been dead before he hit the ground.

And what had all those werewolves done wrong? As best I could recall, one attendee had glanced at the Chief the wrong way, meeting my father's eyes when he should have prostrated himself at the alpha's feet. The Tribunal had a no-tolerance policy for disrespectful behavior, and on that occasion it had been a case of one strike you're out...forever.

Compared with my own plan of tricking the Tribunal, that long-deceased werewolf's mild show of rebellion paled in comparison. And even if I kept my wits about me and pulled the wool over their eyes, there was so much that could go wrong in the minutes to come. Not just in relation to the drug, but also because of our erratic little bloodling.

When it came right down to it, the whole plan hinged on Ember managing to use the human words she'd supposedly been practicing in her mind during the long ride from our campsite. But, with a bloodling, it was hard to tell which parts of our conversation she'd actually been paying attention to and which parts had washed over her like a summer storm. So I had no clue what the pup would say when she got the chance. Or even if she'd be able to speak during her first day in human form.

In the end, though, none of us was willing to give up on Ember without a fight. And this was the fight my wolf and I had chosen together to protect our pack. So as we turned into one of the grassy parking areas at the foot of the hayfield, I shot my brother a look, and I spared him one word: "Now."

Then I pulled the drugged bloodling into my arms and walked through the field to meet our fate.