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Del shook his head, like my words had hurt him. “It’s not like this in the other packs, you know. This ain’t how shifters are supposed to live.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our pack, the Southern pack, is backward. Worse than the other North American packs by a long shot. The way we treat the unranked, the females—hell, even the elderly—is not normal, not lawful.”
“Alpha reads out pack law every full moon, Del.”
“He does no such thing.” Del barely breathed his words. “He reads the parts that make what he’s doing sound acceptable. There used to be more read aloud before the war, before this Alpha.”
Before Callaway? He’d been Southern’s Alpha for over twenty years, longer than I’d been alive. I knew he’d taken over for his uncle, who must not have had kids of his own. The war with the Russians had wiped out most of the older shifters, not only in our pack, but in all of North America. At least, that’s what I’d learned in school.
The packs had established firm borders, and everybody more or less kept to themselves. Though only Callaway had decided to build an actual fence and make everyone live inside. Since Southern only had a few hundred adult shifters anyway, and a handful of kids, he said it was necessary to keep us safe.
Keep us prisoners, more like. I wondered exactly what parts of pack law he’d been skipping on the full moons.
I was about to ask Del for details, when he stopped me with a finger to his lips. Someone was outside, in the dining hall. We both waited, barely breathing. Finally, Del decided they were gone.
“There’s some clothes in a drawer,” he murmured. “Boy clothes. Change. Cut your hair with the knife, short. If anyone sees you walking to the fence, they’ll think you’re a boy.”
I nodded. Maybe some girls would give a shit about their hair—and to be honest, I would miss it, as it was the only attractive feature I had. Long, thick, stick-straight, and a deep red that I covered with soot on full-moon nights in the Hunt, in case it gave me away, my hair was objectively pretty. Other girls had said so, though they’d never complimented me to my face.
My hair was about the only way you could tell I was female at all. I mean, if I’d had more to eat growing up, I might have curves like the other girls. But I was skinny, pale, often weak from lack of protein, and my eyes were constantly bloodshot from lack of sleep. It wasn’t like I’d lose my shot at Miss Shifter America if I cut off my hair.
“Got it.”
“Go as far as you can. Don’t start a fire for cooking unless it’s night, and the wind is blowing away from the compound. If you can, eat raw. Stay there until the Conclave. You’ll see the other packs arrive. Some of them might camp on the hunting grounds, so stay back. But still on packlands.”
I nodded. Leaving the packlands was death, if you ran into the rogue shifters that haunted our borders. But there was an obvious flaw in his plan. “Del, you know they’ll notice I’m gone. They’ll track me, smell me.”
“This is the part you’re not gonna like. You’ve got to get rid of your scent for the first few miles at least. I want you to roll in the pit latrines on the way out, then walk above the sewage lines as far as you can.”
“The leaking ones?” The infrastructure of our pack was as rotten as the shifters who ran it. Our lines had plenty of leaks, so the soil above them was often rank. I’d used the sewage lines to cover my tracks before, during the Hunt hours. Most shifters kept clear of them.
Del nodded. “You know how it works. The marsh out in the woods has pockets of gas. Stay near those once you’re outside the fence, in the hunting grounds. No one should notice a little more stink.”
“Fine.” I knew better than to argue about something as insignificant as smelling bad. I’d roll in a rotting skunk carcass if it meant staying away from the Enforcers. I’d need to bathe in one of the creeks in the forest once I was loose, that was all.
Del’s eyes sparked with what I hoped was pride. “You still want to fight in the Enforcer Games?”
“Hell yes.”
“I’ll get you signed up for the first night then. Keep practicing your bojutsu until then. Use a branch or something.”
“You trained me, Del.” I leaned over and gave him a tight hug. “I’m sure I’ll beat at least one guy and get picked up by another pack.”
He let out a heavy sigh. “Sometimes I wish you were more like the other girls. You could find your true mate at the Conclave, you know. Sneak back into the compound for one of the social events, meet as many of the outsiders as you can. That’s a way out, too.”
“Are you kidding me? You know I promised Mama I’d never mate.” He grumbled for a second, until I whisper-yelled, “Mama’s true mate tortured her, left her covered with scars, then screwed every female he wanted for fifteen years and drove her insane. He broke her!”
Del had told me once that her mate must have been trying to sever the mating bond, but it hadn’t worked. I remembered the countless nights she’d screamed and torn at her own throat, trying to end the pain. Every time he’d fucked another woman, she’d acted as if her blood had turned to acid. It would have made anyone crazy.
“I know all that,” Del growled. “Only good thing he’s ever done was?—”
“—make a sperm donation,” I finished. Mama had gotten pregnant the same night she met my asshole father, and Del had delivered me nine months later, taking over the parenting duties that my mama tried so hard to do. But she never could; she was too broken.
In every way that mattered, Del was my real dad. The only person I loved, who loved me back.
His dark eyes went soft as he gazed into my face, staring like he was trying to memorize my features. “True mates aren’t all evil, Flor. You might end up with a good one, and he’d take you away from all this hillbilly shit. You could finish high school, get a job. Not make yourself into some sort of warrior.”
