DESIRE

2

Canis: A Pack

Jace Winters

August 2037

He could still feel the smoke burning the inside of his throat as he approached the meeting house where his parents were discussing the consequences of the fire. Everyone around him was saying it was arson, and he couldn't help but believe them. It couldn't have been a shifter though; no shifter would burn down the hard work that it had taken to build the school in the first place.

Unlike the humans, the pack was fairly self-sufficient, they grew all of their own crops, employed all of their own people, and continued to train in case there was another war. They were happy and hardworking to keep themselves distracted.

"You alright?" Marcus, the Gamma's son, asked him clapping him on the back lightly "You look like you're on another planet."

"Yeah, a little bit," Jace frowned, he inhaled to try and calm his mind when he could scent raspberries and cinnamon. He paused, that wasn't Marcus' scent. "Why do you smell like that?"

"Like what?" Marcus lifted his arm to quickly sniff his underarm worrying that he hadn't put deodorant on that morning.

"Like," he inhaled again "raspberries and cinnamon?"

"No, I smell like my mum's laundry detergent, she done my washing for me last night." Marcus gave him a strange look "why would you be smelling anything differently? Unless..."

"Unless what?"

"When I was running patrols today, I saw this human girl who had gotten caught up in one of the hunter's traps. She passed out but I freed her and left her beside the trap before running back over. She could be your mate Jace," Marcus explained "that'll be why you can scent her more strongly than I can."

"Was she alright?" His chest thumped with anxiety at the thought of his mate being in such a vulnerable position. Whilst he knew the hunters would not harm one of their own, a rogue could have stumbled across her.

"Yeah, she seemed fine when I left her, but I made my way back because that was when the fire was really out of control." Marcus shivered, he remembered running back and seeing the burnt down building of the school. Thankfully it hadn't been open, but if the arsonist had been one day later, the entire student body would have been present.

"How the hell am I going to find her?" Jace sighed rubbing at the bridge of his nose, for most shifters once they find their mates, they immediately are with them and start a relationship. However, he didn't even know anything about his mate, just her scent. And this wasn't some twisted Cinderella situation where he could walk around the human district sniffing every girl he came across.

"There'll be a way," Marcus reassured him, "you'll figure it out. But we better head inside my dad's just mind linked me to tell us to hurry up,"

Silently, Jace nodded following Marcus inside the wooden building which was full of bustling people as they were all running around frantically. They walked into the meeting room which quietened once they came in, Marcus apologised as they sat down next to the future Alpha, Damon.

"Alright, so what is the solution here?" Sophia announced to the room, "I've already established that you will have free rein to interview every known hunter in my district with probable cause and you will be able to punish them accordingly."

"We need to figure out arrangements for home schooling whilst repairing the old building," Alpha Erik decided "that is our first priority, we don't have another building equipped for teaching and to hold all of our students."