Chapter 1

      Boom!

      The shotgun blast decimated the midnight calm of the Walker’s Run wolf sanctuary. Rafe Wyatt’s sure-footed paws faltered. Heart frozen midpound, he dove to the ground, nose filling with the earthy scents of damp dirt and decayed leaves.

      A flash-flood of dread and fear rolled tremors through his wolfan body but he didn’t feel any pain from penetrating shrapnel.

      Then again, three years ago he hadn’t felt the bullet that had ripped through him and killed his pregnant mate trotting beside him, either.

      Goddamn poacher.

      If Rafe had been in his human form, he would’ve spit on the ground and stomped his foot in it as if it were the dead man’s grave.

      The hunter hadn’t lived long enough to collect his trophy. Rafe, still in his wolf form, had torn him to shreds. A justified killing under wolfan law.

      He’d suffered no recriminations from the Woelfesenat, the governing wolf council. Any penance was his own.

      Avenging Lexi’s death had brought him no peace. His only solace from the loss and longing had come from a bottle of bourbon.

      How many times had he drunk himself into oblivion, only to find the sharp talons of reality waiting to shred his heart and soul again the moment he awoke, cold, naked, and alone?

      Too many to count.

      And it had damn near killed him when he’d blacked out behind the wheel and missed the curve at Wiggins’s Pass. Drove right off the mountain. The guardrail, a thick canopy of trees below, and rescue workers had kept his Jeep from plunging to the bottom.

      Still, the accident wasn’t what convinced him to stop drinking. It had been waking up in the hospital and seeing his father’s drawn, pale face, the frenzied panic in his eyes, his ghostly-white lips and the salt-and-pepper hair that suddenly had twice as much salt as pepper. Rafe never wanted to make his father look like that again.

      Now, instead of drinking when unbearable loneliness ate him alive, Rafe ran the pack’s protected expanse of woods. Only, wolfans didn’t use guns to safeguard their territory and the boom ricocheting through the trees was definitely from a shotgun, which meant poachers.

      A chill frosted his skin. Senses heightening, he focused his acute hearing to pinpoint the direction of the gun discharge. From the echo, the shooter was northwest of him, in the vicinity of Mary-Jane McAllister’s farm at the edge the sanctuary.

      The wolflings!

      Releasing Mary-Jane’s potbellied pig, Cybil, and herding her back into her pen without using their human forms had become an unofficial wolfling rite of passage ever since Rafe and his best friend, Brice Walker, had successfully wrangled the ornery sow as teenagers. Their victory had resulted in cracked ribs and massive bruises, but the adventure had been one of the best of their lives.

      Rafe suppressed a snarl at the arrogance of youth. Once he’d been cocky and proud. In a time when it felt good to be alive and unstoppable in the face of a nova-bright future and carefree oblivion.

      At fourteen, Rafe had believed he was invincible. At twenty-eight, the reality of how wrong he’d been lived coiled inside him like a copperhead, its fangs embedded deep in his conscience, spewing venom into his soul.

      The cries of frightened wolflings penetrated his mind. Rafe leaped to his feet in an all-or-nothing run. The nearest sentinels would converge to investigate. Some in wolf form, others in human form dressed as Walker’s Run Cooperative security guards. But none were as fast as Rafe.

      Paws thundering against the damp and familiar ground, he zigzagged through a dark maze of tall pines. The crisp, cool spring air ruffled his fur as he ran. He covered the four-mile distance in just under two minutes.

      Three frightened wolflings darted haphazardly across the farmyard in a confused search for the right direction to run.

      “Go on, you damn wolf pups. Get!” Stomping on her front porch, Mary-Jane McAllister—a sturdy woman dressed in a flowered housecoat and tattered slippers with curlers in her gray-streaked hair, waved a shotgun in the air without making any action to fire it again. Although her tongue had delivered a fair share of sharp lashings, she’d never harmed a wolfan and Rafe didn’t think she intended to do so now.

      “Cybil!” Mary-Jane hollered at the huge pig plowing into the woods. “Be back by morning. I got no time to look for you.