A werewolf's life is dangerous enough for an adult with a pack, but Sammy's family was murdered when he was only ten years old. Terrified, he ran away from foster care and spent several years homeless, only for his worst fear to become reality: he...
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(Art by Heathenfang)
A dark brown shadow in the white-gray environment lurched from tree to tree. One thing was for certain, Sammy wasn't going to make it back to the House. The snowfall had escalated into a full-fledged blizzard, and he cursed himself for not heading home earlier. His back was throbbing now, a dull ache that was seeping through the rest of the body. He could almost feel his vertebrae grinding with every motion. The only way he would survive this night was to get to one of the shelters and stay the night there.
Not long after settling here, his Argo forerunners had constructed emergency shelters scattered and hidden throughout the property, and they had been maintained since. They ranged in size from cubby holes equipped with a lantern, a sleeping bag, and snacks, to a full-blown fallout bunker built in the 50s when those were all the craze. A werewolf never knew when they might need to hide or grab a clean set of clothing. Sammy knew he was close to one of the smaller dens, and he had to get to it before the snow became an impenetrable haze.
Still, as he tripped over a large root that he could swear hadn't been there before, Sammy couldn't help pondering if this was how he would die: freezing to death on his birthday because he had to fulfill some childish fantasy. After everything he had survived, everything he had been through, this death would just be humiliating. But... but Night Sky had lost enough people already; her daughter Sarah, her niece Elizabeth. He couldn't allow her to lose a foster son too. He picked himself up, snarled at the root, and pushed on. The shelter was somewhere around here. Any minute now...
He stopped in his tracks. He had found it, all right, but so had someone else. It was cleverly hidden amongst a rock outcropping, so he couldn't see the light from the lantern, but he could smell the burning kerosene. And, more disconcertingly, he could smell Reilly. Of all the members of the pack, Reilly had to be in there.
He sat down and shuddered, definitely from the cold. Probably from the cold. Reilly tolerated him these days. She even went out of her way to be nice to him, probably to appease her aunt and uncle, or maybe even overcompensating to hide her revulsion of him. But how would she react to being in a confined space overnight? They had shared a bed in a hotel room once, sure, but that room had been a wide open space compared to the den. And he understood better than most that childhood trauma was not so easy to overcome. She might feel trapped, and no amount of forced niceness could balance out a scared werewolf's rage. And it didn't matter that she had once kissed him. She had just been using him to ward off another man, and he had always imagined she had rinsed her mouth out with Listerine at the soonest opportunity afterward. Although, he took some comfort knowing that there were some men she found even more offputting than him.
But the next nearest shelter would be even harder to find than the House, and he had already decided he had no chance of making it there. The wind whipped up, smacking him in the face with his own braid and pelting him with snow, as if he needed reminding of his stakes. He faced two options: getting his scrotum frozen off, or ripped off.
