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  She gave Lycell a warm closed smile and walked around to hug Damon. Damon had a look that he needed a hug and she gave it to him. Although Damon a yearling and ready for a family of his own, she knew he was needy.

  Adrienne knew enough about the fathers of her children to know that Lycell had been needy and the most jealous of them all, and so were his sons. And that’s why she held Damon for the longest. She pulled away and pushed back his long hair and said, “You need a haircut.”

  “I know, mother. I’ll get one today.” Adrienne seemed satisfied with the answer. She walked to the warmer oven opened it and pulled out her lunch. As she walked passed Lycell with bread in her mouth, she leaned in to give him an air kiss.

  He wanted more. He caught her hand as she passed, trying to stop her, if but for a conversation, but she pulled her hand out of his and kept walking.

  Damon saw the expression on his father’s face as he turned to follow Adrienne. Damon caught Lycell’s arm. “Don’t father. You will make it worse for her and you. You know that she’s pregnant with Wilder’s pups, and during this time she doesn’t want to be bothered with anyone but him. You knew this. You said she acted the same way when she was pregnant with us.”

  Lycell smiled remembering his time with Adrienne and hoping Wilder would stop gloating about getting her pregnant. He had Drayton to thank for that. Drayton appeared to be perfectly satisfied with his one pup especially since he thought he was sterile.

  But Lycell was just the opposite of Drayton. He wanted as many sons as possible and he got them all at one time. Six male pups. He thought that would be the end to Adrienne getting pregnant after the birth of his sons. He smirked and bragged to Wilder and Drayton.

  And now this. Now she’s pregnant, and Lycell can’t have her the way he wants. After the door to the kitchen closed, he turned back and Damon had disappeared. Lycell sat alone. Alone with his thoughts of how it used to be with Adrienne and his sons.

  Damon trod out into the cold night air, leaving the warmth of his home, and the protection of the Samsa pack to sleep in the woods.

  Chapter 3

  He woke to the smell of fresh air and the cold frost of winter morning covering his body. He lay alone in the woods not far from the family cave remembering how he fell on that spot and decided to stay there not choosing warmth. He needed to feel like a werewolf. One that wasn’t privileged to live in a house. He didn’t want the pretense of sleeping in a cave either where it was as comfortable as his family’s ranch.

  It had been cold that night but now the sun with its orange and yellow flurry of color in the sky fell on Damon. His eyes opened and his mind stopped thinking about his quarrel with Tracker and his father’s harsh words. He needed to hunt to feed himself. He needed to cut wood to warm himself in the cave.

  Everyone had been busy. Wilder and Adrienne making more pups for the pack. Lycell worries about Adrienne loving him, and whether or not Tracker was the father to Thorn’s pups. Hunter with an eerie feeling that he had another son somewhere.

  No one took the time to attend to the cave.

  Damon didn’t mind sleeping out in the open but now the weather had changed and the cold of winter had crept up on him like a lion after a gazelle. He stood up and breathe in the fresh chill of the air.

  Where would he begin? Hunt for food. Fresh meat. Water, he had all he needed in the stream and the bottled water in the cave. There he would get fresh fish and smoke the meat and fish for the winter months.

  Fresh meat. A werewolf couldn’t maintain his strength without fresh red meat. That’s where he would start.

  He set out like a lone wolf without a pack. Entering the thick of the forest, among the trees, no clearing for him. His hunt would be with the large animals of the forest. A buck or elk heaven forbid a moose. His father warned him against a moose, but there at his feet down below were the tracks of a large moose. He bent to get a better look. He raised his head to get a whiff of the animal’s scent. There was nothing wrong with his nose. It was a moose alright.

  Following the scent, for hours near a half frozen lake with a bank of snow within a clearing, stood the largest moose he had seen as an adult werewolf. The antlers of this beautiful creature span, horizontal almost six feet.

  Damon stood gazing at the magnificence of the animal when the moose caught hold of his scent, but it wasn’t Damon’s scent that alarmed him. In the moose’s direction trotted another moose of equal dimensions, and before Damon could shift, the black moose lowered his head and rammed into the brown moose Damon had hunted for his lunch.

  The black moose quickly turned and rushed wild, and with driven aim, tore into the upper body of the brown elk, toppling him over. But the brown moose managed to get to his feet, turn and entangle his large antlers with the black moose taking him to the ground. They rolled over and over with their antlers locked together falling into the river and because of the freezing cold or the river, both animals scurried back on shore shivering with unlocked antlers, angry, and ready to begin their fight to the death. Eventually rising and falling into the freezing river again and again and this time only one animal emerged. The strongest and ruthless of the two.

  When Damon glanced across the river he saw a cow waiting patiently. The two bulls were fighting over her.

  It was a fierce fight and Damon couldn’t tear himself away from the spectacle of two large male animals fighting during mating season. Yes it was mating season and then it dawned on him what had occurred between he and Tracker.

  If his father hadn’t intervened, he and Tracker would have come to blows to mate with Saadia, and it would be an ugly scene like the one he had witnessed.

  Now he completely understood what his father and uncles had tried to get across. That there is a nature within them that is carnal and vicious because they are both human and werewolf and the human part had to dominate the animal part for them to survive and not tear the family apart.

  Damon watched as the dominate bull moose gored the smaller moose to death all because he needed to mate. “It is the law of animals to mate with the most desirable and fertile of females,” Lycell had said to all his sons. “Make sure you choose the right one and not the one your brother or brothers have chosen to mate with. There are more females than males in this world. You will find another one. One that will love you and want you.”

  Tracker took it to heart. He understood he could find many females to be his mate as he desired. Damon cursed himself for being attracted to that one. It had happened to Hunter but Hunter got over his first love and found another.

  Would Damon be so lucky?

  After the dominant moose pulled himself from the cold water to saunter away feeling superior, Damon didn’t have the inclination to kill it. It had proven itself as the most dominant and would breed with the most desirable female, and one day Damon would meet the offspring of this wonderful creature, Damon thought.

  However, after seeing a long battle for superiority, the moose had been shaken and weakened. Damon could have easily overtaken him, but out of respect for another animal, he let him go and took the smaller moose’s body and fresh killed meat for his own.

  On his way back through the forest he realized he had never been that far north before. He didn’t realize how far he had traveled to find the bull, and how long the fight had taken. His mind had been on Saadia and why he had broken his father’s rules.

  His keen eyes spotted a rundown cabin in the middle of a forest. It didn’t look like anyone lived in it for some time.

  The cabin door swung to and fro on one hinge as the wind sent it back and forward making a noise that echoed through the valley it sat in. Most of the paint had dried and peeled off the house. The house could have been painted white but it was hard to tell. The wind, rain, and snow had worn down the house like a skinned animal, leaving only the frame. Which could collapse at any time.

  Stepping on the rotted porch with Damon angling through the door, into the house, he glanced around and there were pict
ures of a man and a woman and a baby. Much like some of his pictures he had seen of him and his five brothers.

  But this was a picture of a man with a beard and a woman smiling broadly holding a small girl. The girl with dark ringlets like her father’s curly thick hair. And both with dark eyes. The mother with pale blond hair and light eyes. But they all looked happy. He wondered what had become of them.

  They seemed so happy in the pictures like he once felt with his family and pack.

  He moved on through the house and found a bedroom and a separate small room. In the room the remnants of a bassinet and all the things a girl child would cling to including a doll, but the doll had been left behind.

  Turning to walk out, his sharp eyes spotted something behind the door. The skeletal bones of two people. The man lying on top of the woman as if trying to shield her from the bullet that entered his back. It had to be them. The family in the picture, but where were the remains of the little girl?

  As he examined further, it appeared that the skeletal remains of the man resembled that of a werewolf. They had a distinct skeleton, the bones larger in the hip and thigh and pelvis. He had seen it before when he was young and when the humans raided towns that were once inhabited by werewolf families. Most of these towns the men were werewolves and the females were human.

  Lycell had told them of this, and to be weary or humans, because they didn’t like that their women were marrying werewolves and their excuse to raid towns and kill everyone was because the werewolves stole the young women out of their beds at night. And once the women were taken, the werewolves bit them, and turned them into werewolves too, and that’s why the entire family had to be destroyed.

  The humans convinced others that this had to be done for the good of mankind. So men went around searching places they thought werewolves sought refuge, like the middle of forests, where they slaughtered many families.

  Many folk lore of werewolves were passed among humans.

  Some of the old men knew the truth. Werewolves were no more harmful than some of the humans who lived in the forest. Everyone once lived in harmony, but some of the younger humans refused to acknowledge it. They would prefer to pass a false rumor that there were werewolves who stole women in the night.

  It was then bands of vigilantes would take it on their own to go around killing werewolves.

  The humans resented the werewolves because of their obvious sexual abilities and their wealth. In the isolated areas of the northwest where there were few people and fewer women when women went missing, it was to go with the werewolves where they lived happily and comfortable.

  Damon remembered Lycell discussing his father Harper and his mother Emily.

  There were no werefemales within a thousand miles and because Harper was raised by a human mother, this was what he knew, and this is what he desired. And when he put an advertisement in the San Francisco papers, Emily answered his ad. And so began the town of Samsaville.

  Together Harper and his wife created a haven for werewolves and humans who wanted to live under the werewolves’ laws. By writing laws and getting humans to enforce them, Harper prevented some of the werewolves from declaring war on the humans to which the werewolves couldn’t win.

  To survive, werewolves had to blend in with the humans. The humans were never to know or suspect that there were werewolves among them until they could bring all the werewolves together and build their packs. That was a dream of Lycell’s father which would never come to fruition because of a plague that swept through the werewolves’ towns making the werefemales barren—unable to reproduce.

  It was then Harper built the town of Samsaville for their sons and their children. He amassed a fortune to see that they would survive.

  And survive they did and now they are the largest and most powerful werewolf family in all of the Americas, and Damon has threatened the strength of the pack by raising his hand against his brother, causing a division that may take years to mend.

  Chapter 4

  She lived hidden in the forest alone and with no one to tend to her. She didn’t remember her parents dying or the wolves who found her wandering around in the dense forest. All she remembered was she had been left inside a deep hollow cave with a little food and water, and when the food ran out, and the she wolf didn’t return, she headed out to look for more food.

  The first thing she came across was a small wild rabbit who had been lost and deserted like her. She ran after the rabbit and caught it. But when she held it in her hands by the scruff of its neck and ready to sink her incisors into it, it glanced up at her looking sad and lonely like she had been. Immediately she felt sorry for it because it reminded her of herself. All alone and ready to die, but she didn’t die.

  She lived through years of hunger, and years of cold and more hunger, and then spring where she could hunt and find fish and larger game. But now it was cold again. However she wasn’t a helpless child left to die in the wilderness by wolves who had abandoned her in the gorge in the ground that served as a nest.

  She was now a young werefemale who could hunt large game.

  Staring down at the rabbit she had once wanted to eat, but instead, brought the small gray rabbit back to her small cave, and fed it with her last bit of food. Now instead of hunting for herself she had added another mouth to feed because now the rabbit was pregnant.

  When it was only her to feed she hunted freely and ate plentiful from the forest.

  Slowly she noticed a change in her body. She began to lose the hair that once covered her arms and legs, which gave her the warmth from the cold. Now she had no new growth of hair and she felt cold all the time. She didn’t understand what was happening to her because she didn’t have anyone to tell her nor anything to compare it to.

  One minute she’s walking on all fours like a pup, and the next she had transformed to walking upright and she was naked with breasts.

  With the skins from long eaten animals lying around the cave, she managed to fashion them into a poncho and use shredded pieces like string to tie it around her waist. Still it wasn’t enough to keep her warm and the rabbit had grown up with her and it was ready to have babies.

  She glanced around and noticed that the rabbit wasn’t there. She didn’t want to put it in a cage because she didn’t think an animal should be in a cage, so she let it run free.

  “Where are you,” she said looking around and under the fur serving as a rug. Pulling up a piece of heavy fur from a bear cub she found that had died of natural causes, she skinned the animal with a piece of sharp rock and let it dry out in the sun. When it had lost its odor, she used it in the winter to cover her and sometimes sleep on.

  The rabbit wasn’t hiding under the rug.

  Walking out into the sunlight she ran following the smell of the rabbit. It had traveled far south. Farther than she or the rabbit had ever been.

  “Now you have me out in this snow looking for you. When I find you, I putting you in a cage or out. Too many mouths to feed,” she shouted with empty threats into the freezing air.

  The girl had stayed in the same area because the food and water were plentiful. But she knew sooner or later she would have to look for a better place to live. She had outgrown the small cave. Walking and searching around for her rabbit took her far from home. But she never looked back, she walked and walked in hopes of finding the rabbit or new shelter.

  She had never seen this part of the forest before and it amazed her, so she kept walking until the sun set behind the mountains. Standing and looking back at where she had come, she didn’t realize how far it had been and that she hadn’t seen any animals. She thought she would see some small animals. A fox or squirrel or even her rabbit.

  Wandering far from home, it wasn’t wise to travel at night in an area she wasn’t familiar with.

  Stopping at the edge of a river she heard the sound of a waterfall. She would catch fish and sleep in the cave near the waterfall. There were caves all around because she knew instinctively that the
water cut through mountains and created these caves. That’s all she knew, and she knew this because of her observation, and her will to survive.

  Fear gripped her because inside a cave she might find bears. So she crept slowly to the entrance behind the water fall. She stopped in her tracks when she smelled food. She hadn’t smelled that scent since she was a child. It was the smell of wood and fresh meat.

  It was the pangs of hunger that made her want to enter the cave. She knew it couldn’t be a bear. It had to be a human like herself.

  Walking slow looking around she picked up a fallen tree branch. What could she do with that? she thought. Entering the mouth of the cave, she watched around and then looked up at the opening and up at the stars overhead. She had never seen a cave this large and filled with animal rugs and skin. Some chairs made with large branches of trees. Smiling she walked slow but cautious.

  In her hurry to find her rabbit she forgot her bow and arrow at her cave. But she knew how to make a new one. The heavy stick would do for now. It could help if the animal wasn’t too large. As she entered the middle of the cave and turned to her right where the scent of the meat was its strongest, she saw a man standing with nothing but a piece of cloth wrapped around his waist.

  She watched at the strange markings over his strong well developed body.

  This stranger was a lot like her or as she had become. He stood with his back to her not realizing that someone was behind him. Then she saw the fur from a rabbit. And she screamed.

  He turned and she broke into a run. Before she could get out of the cave he had grabbed her in his arms with her scream, biting, and kicked at him.

  “You bit my arm, you little she wolf,” Damon said with a small laugh.