Claimed by the Pack

“I think I just met up with my contacts,” I told her.

I heard her cough off camera, dry and raspy. “You were supposed to wait,” Xiomara said groggily. “You were supposed to stay in the fucking hotel, remember?”

“I got antsy.”

Xiomara did next what she always did: she leaned in and jammed her face way too close to the screen. For several moments all I could see was a single bloodshot eye, and a good part of a nose. Everything else was distorted.

“You got… what?”

“Antsy,” I repeated. “Stir crazy. Bonkers.” There was no reason to lie.

“You had a giant hotel room in which to stretch those legs, Ms. Weston! You couldn’t open a goddamn window?”

“No. Fuck that.”

I saw her jerk back a little in surprise, but I think it was mostly for show. Xiomara knew me. I wasn’t some wide-eyed acolyte, content to sit on her hands. I was a seasoned fucking veteran. Shit, at one point I was the golden child.

“You had me squatting alone in that hotel room for four days,” I barked. “I was tired of waiting. Tired of Europe…” At that we both grew silent for a moment. Neither one of us wanted to go there again. “I couldn’t stay anymore,” I finished. “I just had to get the hell out for a few minutes.”

“All that was for your own protection,” she growled.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I found that out.”

Before she said another word I launched into the whole story of what happened. Well, most of the story anyway. I detailed the entire encounter in the alley, skipped over the part about the bar, and neglected to mention how one of my contacts and I had screwed each other stupid until the wee hours of the morning.

Xiomara went with the stern angle at first, acting inconsolably furious that I’d disobeyed her direct orders. Halfway through however, she sensed that I was even more pissed than she was. While it didn’t back her up a single inch, it did calm her down some.

“You could’ve warned me,” I seethed.

“Warned you about what?”

“My contacts,” I sighed. “They think they’re werewolves.”

“Shifters, yes.”

I ground my teeth together. She knew this part too! The whole thing was just getting weirder and weirder.

“This is all stuff you could’ve told me ahead of t

ime.”

Xiomara pulled back from the phone’s camera a bit. “Would you have believed me?”

“What, that they’re crazy? Yes.”

“No, that they’re shifters.”

I scowled at her. “Of course not!”

“But they are.”

She said it so calmly, so nonchalant. Like it was a well-known fact.

“Please don’t tell me you’ve been buying into their bullshit,” I sneered.

Xiomara huddled up in her bed, pulling the blankets over her shoulders. She was cold but awake now. I could see her cataracts glowing eerily as she stared back at me.

“Damien was made six years ago,” she said. “Zuma beach, west Malibu. He spent a year or two on his own, struggling with what he was. It was two members of the Order who found him. We took him in. Helped him find more of his kind.”