He brought the dog into the snow and played with it, keeping an eye on the sun as it dropped below the trees, and while he told himself he was just trying to wear the puppy out, he was a little disappointed when it did finally collapse, exhausted. He scooped it up and took it into the fort, where he’d made a nest with his hoodie, and the puppy fell into snoring slumber.
“I’ll bring you food later,” he whispered as he filled an old Frisbee with snow and mashed it for drinking water.
Bringing food would mean sneaking out at night, and he hated that, but if the alternative was letting a puppy starve, it really was no question at all. The rules had to be broken. Just this once.
Next, he had a much less pleasant task: burying the dead puppy. He did that quickly, burying both the bag and the puppy deep in the snow across the road. The sun had almost set. He started jogging back to the house, deep in thought, until the smell of deer made him pause, instinctively lifting his face to inhale the scent.
Scent.
Oh, no.
He stank of dog.
He looked up. Pine needles? Would that smell be strong enough? Maybe if he rubbed them on his clothes and then made a beeline for the shower. But how would he explain to Mom and Dad that he really needed to wash his clothing? By himself?
Well, I have to learn sometime, right?
Dad might let it pass, but Mom had a keenly tuned sense for when something wasn’t quite right with her kids, and she’d sniff out answers like a hound on a trail.
What he needed was a dead animal. Gross, yes, but it would cover up the dog scent. When he sniffed the air, though, he picked up a smell that would do that job even better. Except …
He ran to the source of the scent, looked down, and shuddered.
Kate had really better appreciate this Christmas gift.
“Oh my God,” Kate said as Logan walked in the door. Her hand flew over her nose. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Kate!” Mom called. “Language.”
“You said there’s a time for cursing,” Kate yelled back. “I think this is it. Logan’s covered in deer poop.”
Mom sighed, probably just relieved Kate had said “poop.” Then she rounded the corner and stopped short, her hand flying up to her nose in a matching pose. “Oh my God, Logan.”
“Language, Mom,” Kate said.
Logan lifted his hand. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Don’t worry,” Kate said. “We’re not. What happened?”
“Ice.”
Kate’s lips twitched. Then she burst out laughing. Mom tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to stifle hers, snorting half-choked laughs.
“Thanks, Mom,” Logan said.
“Sorry, baby. It’s just …” She struggled to swallow more laughter. Dad’s footsteps thudded down the stairs. He poked his head into the mudroom. “What’s …” His nostrils flared, and then he drawled, “Well, that’s unfortunate. Ice?”
Logan nodded. He turned and pulled off his boots.
“On your back, too?” Mom said. “How’d you manage that?”
“Ice. It’s slippery. Very slippery if it’s covered in snow.”
“So you fell on your face in deer poop,” Kate said, “got up, and fell in backward?”
“My face is fine.”
“Uh, no, actually there’s a little … Eww. Sorry, Lo. You really stink. I’ll go watch Jeremy make dinner.”
“You could help Jeremy,” Mom called after her as she left.
Kate laughed and kept going. Dad followed. Mom turned to Logan.
“Okay, baby, strip down and I’ll get your clothes into the laundry.”
“I can handle it. It’s my mess, so it’s my cleanup.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’ve got it.” He gave her a wan smile. “It’s not something you want to do before dinner.”
“Just toss your clothes in the washer, and I’ll run it after we eat.” Dad reappeared with a wet washcloth.
“Please tell me Kate was kidding about my face,” Logan said.
Dad shook his head and walked toward him, as if to wipe it off, but Logan took the cloth and backed up. “Got it. I’ve got the laundry, too, Mom. I want to learn. I’ve been thinking I need to take on more responsibilities.”
“All right,” Mom said. “I’ll show you how to run it. I am sorry about laughing.”
“But it was funny,” Dad said. “And it’ll get funnier each time your sister retells it.”
Logan sighed.
Mom gingerly reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “You just need to find something to hold over her so she doesn’t tell everyone at Christmas. Not that I’d recommend blackmailing your sister …”
“Yeah, we absolutely recommend it,” Dad said. “It’s the only defense.”
Logan smiled, and they left him to strip down and run upstairs to the shower.
Kate spent the meal regaling Logan and Jeremy with stories of the “strange behavior of humans”—all the weird things she’d witnessed while out Christmas shopping. Mom’s eye rolls said Kate was exaggerating. Dad’s smirks said she wasn’t exaggerating very much.
That was part of growing up in a werewolf Pack. Humans sometimes seemed a foreign species to Logan and Kate, the way they did to Dad, who’d been bitten when he was a kid. Mom had grown up human, so she didn’t pay any attention when humans did things like let their kids wander off in a mall, or yell at them in public, or cuff them upside the head. Logan got the feeling none of that was weird—or foreign—to his mother. He wondered what her childhood had been like, but she never talked about it, and if he or Kate asked, she’d just tell them a funny story from her school days.
With Kate entertaining at dinner, no one noticed he was quiet. Quiet and deep in thought, his brain racing to come up with all the necessary facets of “the puppy plan.”
He had to get his parents onside. Jeremy didn’t count. No, that sounded wrong. Jeremy definitely counted—it was his house, and he was Dad’s foster father and also the former Alpha. He always counted. When it came to raising Logan and Kate, though, Jeremy kept out. He was like …
Logan wasn’t really sure what Jeremy was like, because he had no frame of reference other than what he could glean from other families. Jeremy seemed more involved than a grandparent. He wasn’t like a parent, either, because he left all the decisions to their mom and dad. One of Logan and Kate’s school friends had a stepdad, who did everything a dad did except when it came to discipline and decisions about raising him. That’s what Jeremy was like. As close as you could get to a parent without actually being one.
When it came to having a dog, Jeremy’s position was simply “whatever your parents say,” as it was on everything else. He wouldn’t even be here for Christmas. He was leaving tomorrow to spend a few days with his girlfriend, Jaime, and then they’d both come back for the big Pack holiday Meet on the twenty-sixth.
The two people Logan had to convince, then, were his parents. He’d considered going straight for Dad. His father might be the most feared werewolf in the country, but his kids saw a very different side of him. Last summer was the first time he’d really raised his voice to them—getting into a shouting match with Kate long after their mother had lost all patience with her acting out. But Kate had had a reason for her bad behavior—signaling her first Change—and they’d sorted it out, and Dad went back to being his usual self, which meant if Logan had to pick who he could more easily woo to his side, it was definitely Dad.
That was a problem. The rest of the werewolf world might think Dad was the scary one, but he wasn’t Alpha. Mom was. That meant that Logan shouldn’t go around her to his father to ask for something. Yes, Mom wouldn’t want him saying that. She wanted to be his mom, not his Alpha. But she was his Alpha, and he felt that.