Unhappily Ever After

Chapter 53 - Gate Crashing

I took all of my raiders to the valley. I didn't need them all, of course, but no one wanted to be left out. It was tricky enough convincing the raiding teams that I didn't play favourites without excluding some of them from the outing of the summer.

I also took my mate. She had decided to stay the night at Lle o Dristwch, so she had filched my mattress and sleeping bag and I had slept in wolf form for a second night running. This time, I had slept beside her, close enough that she could rest a hand on the scruff of my neck. Come the morning, she had been determined to tag along, and I didn't see any reason why not.

And I took Dafydd, against my better judgement. He was very ill by then — scarcely able to walk, but he insisted. Tom was driving him, but the rest of us were walking. It was late evening, the light beginning to fade, and we were all being led by some fourteen-year-old scout who swore up and down she knew where the Alpha King was buried.

So far, the direction we were walking was identical to the route I would take to the valley. It was getting harder to deny that our destination might be Jess's reading spot. I was just finding it hard to believe that I had been sitting on my great-grandfather's bones all this time.

"You're American, aren't you?" I asked Makayla suddenly. She didn't have a strong accent, but there were occasional words that came out pitched wrong.

"Yeah," she told me, shrugging. "Jaz too."

"How did you end up here, then?"

She gave me a wonky grin. "We were wanted for all sorts of shit in California, so we moved to the east coast. Got into trouble there, too, so it was off to Canada. When they got sick of us, we tried the Dales and the Lake District. There's a bunch of packs over there, and they weren't friendly, so we came here. And I reckon we'll move on again before long, but this place has been my favourite since Yosemite."

"The English packs are shitheads," I agreed. We had spent most of the last millennium at war with them, but these days they were too busy fighting amongst themselves to trouble us. "But I don't know jack about the States. What's it like over there?"

"Different," Makayla assured me. "There are bear shifters — black bears, the little ones, mind. And a few mountain lions, jaguars, etcetera. The cats keep their distance, but the bears are always picking fights."

I could have guessed about the bears and the mountain lions. Any country with a predator roughly human-sized seemed to have shifters. I had no idea where the Shadowcats had come from, because their species was extinct everywhere except Anglesey, but the middle east would be a good bet, because most of them had dark hair and olive complexions.

"Wolves have run of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mount Ranier, Glacier and Denali," she went on, "but half of that land is overrun with lupes."

"What the hell are lupes?" I asked.

She frowned. "Lupes. Lupines, you know?"

I only shook my head. Unless she meant actual wolves, I didn't have a clue.

"Well, we were born and raised human," she said slowly. "Our human side learns to control the shift — we are primarily human. We're lycans. But there's another type of werewolf. Their wolves are in charge, so they live like wolves. And that's the lupes."

"And they're just born that way?" Eira asked.

"No. Some lycans can become lupes and some lupes can become lycans. It just depends who gets the hang of shifting first. The socialisation in the first ten years or so makes a huge difference, so you guys don't get many lupes here, but—"

"There are exceptions," Jaz finished. "Dafydd has a few stories about wolves in human bodies trying to live amongst us. And failing, usually."

"Lupes are peaceful enough when they're left alone," Makayla agreed, "but things go hella wrong if they spend too long in human form. Same way we get unpredictable when we spend too long as wolves."