From what I understood, Robbie hadn’t necessarily belonged to Michelle. He’d been more of a drifter, forming just enough of a bond to keep from becoming an Omega. It still must have pissed her off to find that the man she’d ostensibly sent to spy on what remained of the Bennett pack had ended up joining it. I hoped it burned.
Philip Pappas was another story. Ox called him the gruff man. He was a no-nonsense Beta I’d met only once before the Omegas had started coming to Green Creek. He’d come as one of Osmond’s Betas on a visit to Thomas after Abel had died.
He wore wrinkled suits and skinny ties and looked perpetually exhausted. His hair was thin, and he had black-gray stubble that looked as if it itched. His hands were big and his eyes constantly narrowed. He didn’t take shit from anyone, which is why I thought he was perfect as Michelle’s second.
I didn’t trust him.
I didn’t trust anyone outside of the Bennett pack.
“Where is she?” he asked as he sat in the office across from Ox and Joe. Mark was in one corner, Carter in another. I stood near the window, flicking the lid of my silver lighter over and over, watching the ears of the wolves twitch each time the metal snapped together. Two of Pappas’s wolves remained outside, not invited inside the Bennett house.
“With my mother,” Joe said, lean
ing forward, elbows on the desk.
Pappas nodded. “Like the others?”
“Yes,” Ox said, arms across his chest. “Exactly like the others. It’s strange.”
Pappas arched an eyebrow. “They’re Omegas. Everything about them is strange. It’s… unnatural. A wolf isn’t meant to be an Omega. We’re not supposed to be feral.”
“Then why are there so many of them?” Ox asked.
Pappas kept a blank face. He was good. “I didn’t know a handful was considered many.”
I snorted.
He glanced at me. “Something to say, Livingstone?”
“Richard Collins certainly seemed to have more than a handful.”
“An aberration.”
“Was it?” I asked. “Because it seemed a little more than an aberration.”
He didn’t like me. That much was obvious. I didn’t give a fuck. “What are you trying to say?”
Joe cleared his throat, shooting me a glare before looking back at Pappas. “I think what Gordo means is that there seems to be more Omegas than any of us think.”
Pappas nodded slowly. “Do you know how many wolf packs there are in North America?”
Joe looked at Ox, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the wolf in front of him. “Thirty-six in twenty-nine states. Twenty-one in three spread out over Canada.”
“And on average, how many members are in each pack?”
“Six.”
Pappas looked impressed, though he tried to hide it. “Twenty years ago, there were ninety packs. Thirty years ago, close to two hundred.”
Ox barely blinked. “What changed?”
Mark cleared his throat. I glanced at him. He was looking down at the floor. “Hunters.”
Pappas tapped his fingers in a staccato beat on the desktop. “Clans and clans of hunters whose duty it was, or so they claimed, to take out as many wolves as possible. Humans who came with their guns and their knives in the name of killing the monsters. They cut the wolves down indiscriminately. Men. Women. Children. Those that escaped kept on running. Sometimes they joined together in groups, forming makeshift packs.”
“How is that possible?” Carter asked, frowning. “They wouldn’t have had an Alpha.”
Pappas shrugged. “We don’t know. Bonds were formed, frayed and rotten though they were. It slowed down the descent into becoming feral. And then someone like Richard comes along, an abnormally strong Beta in his own descent who could almost be an Alpha, and they gathered behind him. They needed someone to follow. He was a light in the dark, and they swarmed around him. Michelle wasn’t wrong when she told you that when he became an Alpha, if only for a moment, they all felt it. And then that was taken away. Of course they would be drawn here.”