Shadows of the Past

Eight

More peaks of the roof could be seen over and behind the front of the house, telling me the building was actually a lot bigger inside than it looked from here. Big enough to actually accommodate a pack's size. Though from what I recalled in my readings, the Rising Moon Pack did have smaller numbers than ours.

I finally opened the car door and stepped out onto the pebbly road. I slung my backpack over my shoulder but a slim girl I didn't recognize appeared out of nowhere. She cast her thin eyes down at the floor, but held a hand out, offering to take my bag. I glanced at Mom, and she was watching me. She just nodded once, telling me to give the girl my bag.

"Thank. . . You?" I said, unsure what to do.

It was obvious this girl was an omega, sent by the alpha to come collect our things for the guest rooms we would be using tonight. I spotted several others scurrying around the building and taking the enforcers' things. This was new for me; we didn't have omegas. Dad didn't believe in them, and if there ever arose a situation where a pack member would become demoted to omega, they were given the option to leave the pack. The few I had seen that happen to always chose to be exiled rather than serve the rest of their life at the bottom.

It shouldn't be a surprise that other packs didn't do that, and actually had omegas living in their ranks, but I was fascinated by the way they scurried around with their heads down and eyes lowered, hauling away our stuff for us. None of them uttered a word, except for one or two that needed to verbally offer to take a bag from a confused enforcer—they all looked as baffled as I was.

Dad was not baffled. And surprisingly, neither was Mom. Maybe they both had visited enough packs that this wasn't a strange occurrence.

Then the French doors opened—the ones on the left side of the porch's middle section—and a man with striking black hair strolled through them. To his right, followed a short woman whose toned, but feminine, muscles were evident through her zipped up jacket and skinny jeans. Even from here, I could see how perfectly round her eyes were, and that manifested her entire appearance, the first thing you would notice besides how fit she was.

They stopped at the top of the steps, and we kept our distance, standing on the gravel at the grass line. This was werewolf civility, drilled into pups' minds as children: when entering another pack's territory, we were to wait until the alpha gave the okay to step forward. It was a respect thing.

"Welcome, Alpha Anderson." The black-haired man said. Now that he was closer, I noticed how blue his eyes were, standing out against the darkness of his hair.

Dad respectfully bowed his head. "Alpha Black."

I choked back my snort, but didn't stop myself from the thought. Like his hair? It was probably a good thing I didn't say that out loud.

"Come in, come in!" Alpha Black gestured is forward with a wave of his hand. That was our cue to be allowed entrance to his territory. Even though, technically, the gravel driveway was also his territory. He continued, "I wasn't expecting so many to join you." There wasn't a hint of suspicion or aggression in the sentence, just casual conversation.

Cole breathed a quiet sigh of relief beside me. I hadn't really thought about how this might look: bringing along a unit of enforcers when it was supposed to just be a friendly ally check-in.

The round-eyed woman next to the alpha smiled at us, her eyes finding me, and that helped me relax. They seemed friendly. I followed my parents up the stone steps and into the house. And then I was gobsmacked again.

Inside the doors, the main hall seemed to be cabin-themed as well. The walls that were the house's exterior curved in large bumps like real-life Lincoln Logs stacked on each other, and the banister to the stairs off to the left was textured and carved with designs. It made me want to run my fingers against the grooves, just to feel the wood.