Page 5

CHAPTER

THREE

Avery

The food is just as disgusting as it was the first day he arrived, and the store sandwich he had to abandon would have tasted miles better, but he’s too desperate to even taste the slimy green beans as they go down.

The only good thing about meals here is that they give large portions and additional helpings—not out of charity, but because werecreatures can’t work without enough calories to fuel them.

Avery, fittingly, eats like a bear ripping apart a minivan to get to a box of fruit snacks.

He takes a second plate and is eyeballing a third when the cooks begin to clean up the long table, and shifters move to hover in an intimidating fashion.

From that moment on, the drudgery of farm work takes over his higher brain functions.

The only time Avery feels somewhat aware is when he’s interacting with the animals, but ‘giving cows nose scritches’ isn’t a task he’s been assigned, so he spends hours numb, mechanically weeding in the vegetable gardens.

At least this time, others were there to educate him on unwanted plants, so he didn’t ignorantly rip out any important sprouts.

Avery takes the eight PM meal with much less enthusiasm than lunch. Now that he’s not starving, the food is back to tasting like cardboard and mush, and he has trouble swallowing some of it.

He snags two water bottles on the way out, shoving one in the pocket of his baggy shorts.

Curfew is technically at midnight but isn’t enforced until two AM because time can be difficult to keep track of when you’re shifted.

After that, you risk a write-up. The only reason Avery didn’t get caught by a door monitor today is because he was gone overnight—otherwise, he would have been targeted when he tried to return to his bunk.

Escaping punishment other than Atwood’s power trip was pure luck, and Avery isn’t keen to risk it again.

But he’s frustrated. All the emotions he suppressed during repetitive assignations are coming out to hiss at him.

If it hadn’t been for that ill-timed hook-up, he’d still be in his cozy condo, within walking distance from his parents.

They were free-spirited pagans who’d accepted their only child coming out as a transgender man, but turning into a werecreature was too much.

Their new-age spiritual practices led them to believe Avery had surrendered himself to dark magic, and they kicked his ass to the curb.

Nothing would convince them that he hadn’t gotten infected due to individual fault.

It was deeply cruel, considering Avery didn’t choose to get fucked by parahuman magic.

Then again… maybe he had. He’d known Melissa was a werecreature from the start, but trusted her safety precautions.

She was a good fuckbuddy. Cute, only a little bit taller than him, skilled with her mouth.

They used barriers to avoid contact between skin and saliva, and didn’t kiss.

Except that night when she propositioned him, Avery didn’t know Melissa wasn’t herself.

She was under the influence of some delirium caused by the werevirus, compelling its host to spread it to more victims. Maybe if Avery hadn’t had his eyes closed he would have noticed the fangs she was about to sink into his neck, but again. Good with her mouth.

Melissa had been beside herself. She’d taken care of him while he turned and promised over and over again that her were-pack would accept and protect him—and, at first, they did.

The pack alpha, a were-vulpine, had even let Avery stay in their pack house while he recovered from the initial infection.

Then, the night of his first full moon arrived.

Avery screamed through his first shift, bones breaking as they lengthened, his face extending into a fanged snout, dark hair bursting from his follicles until his stretching skin felt like it was on fire.

Before he’d even caught his bearings, the alpha had looked up at Avery, a seven-foot-something bear monstrosity and smelled the alpha on him.

At the time, he hadn’t known what it meant to have alpha magic. He didn’t understand why the hideously mutated fox went for his neck when he stumbled, unused to operating such weight. No one told him that a lone alpha wasn’t welcome on a were-pack’s established territory.

Melissa’s promise of protection was shattered. Avery was run out of not just the city, but the entire state.

He learned a lot after that. He learned about alpha magic deriving from a stronger grade of the werevirus, mutating to mimic shifter dynamics.

He learned that, unlike shifter family groups, where having multiple alphas born into the pack wasn’t uncommon, the patchwork were-packs often had unstable politics, and two alphas in one territory opened the werecreature in power up to threats for control.

Avery didn’t want to be a werecreature, and he didn’t choose to be an alpha.

He had no desire to control a pack, but that didn’t matter.

None of it fucking mattered—a lesson he learned in city after city as he worked his way through Ohio to Michigan.

He was debating drowning himself in the greatness of Lake Erie until he found a ramshackle building in Pontiac where chronically packless werecreatures had an uneasy truce.

Having a pack to provide safety in numbers is critical for a werecreature who wants to survive, but no existing pack would take an alpha who’d sprout into a giant mutant bear every time the moon turned into a dinner plate.

That left starting his own pack, but no one wanted to be deferential to a five-foot-four punk for the rest of each lunar cycle.

Hulking out and nearly killing a human who tried to mug him before getting nailed by Parahuman Civil Compliance was the worst and best way to get him out of that reclaimed building in Pontiac.

It won him that ticket to Dennings Farm, which wasn’t much better in terms of security, but a real bed, consistent access to food, and an escape from endless territory battles was too good to refuse.

So, while he made it here, those eight months of misery have caught up to him.

Last night, Avery unwittingly messaged an alpha shifter on a hookup app only to discover him to be the nicest person he’s ever met.

And then Avery rewarded the guy’s kindness by passing the fuck out and dipping without even a morning handy to take the edge off.

Avery needs to run.

Not, like, away . Just run until the numbness comes back, until he’s breathing too hard from exertion to let the anger tighten his chest.

In addition to being home for an impressive six-hundred people, Bliss Township is snuggled up with the Wilderness State Park, which isn’t too far from Dennings’. He’ll run there until he’s so tired he has to drag himself back, which will hopefully happen before two .

That decided, Avery hops a fence, ignoring the little shock he gets when he bumps one of the electrified wires installed to keep animals from escaping.

He starts at a casual jog, looking around and straining his enhanced senses to make sure he doesn’t cross paths with anyone who’d be keen to start shit.

Once he’s far enough from the farmland, he breaks into a full-out run.

He powers down a field, weaving between sparse trees, and even though he knows this is far from testing his endurance, it still amazes him.

Before turning, Avery couldn’t last more than a couple minutes at a normal run.

He was a typical nerd, preferring to stay inside and read or watch shows when he wasn’t working shifts as a receptionist at a behavioral health clinic.

His trim figure was more metabolism than exercise, and he was far from having any muscle mass to brag about.

Now, ten minutes into the attempt to clear his mind, Avery isn’t even winded. Being on his feet so often has toned his legs considerably, and he’s already started to notice his arms and torso developing faster than a human’s would, even with aggressive strength-training.

A sudden urge to shift brings Avery to an abrupt halt, his stomach sloshing. The flare of instinct is so intense he briefly thinks he’ll vomit, and it takes a moment for the motion sickness to ease.

Avery doesn’t know how to control his shift.

He’s been told it hurts less when you lean into it, but without the mentorship of Melissa’s pack, he’s never been taught what that means.

It’s horrible every single time, painfully transforming into a huge, clumsy mutant.

Full moons are the only times when every werecreature on the farm is left to their own devices after tying up loose ends after lunch.

For obvious reasons, Farmer Dennings doesn’t want a horde of balls-out werecreatures prowling around his farm.

While Avery has heard that learning to partial shift allows greater control during a full moon, he couldn’t begin to guess how he’d initiate the transformation, much less halt it partway through.

He looks around the field, scenting the air in case there’s something there he can’t see.

Nothing comes back other than a few wild animals, all of whom will hopefully run for cover when toxic magic from the werevirus begins to leak into a dangerous aura.

Avery has never meant to harm or kill anything, but one time he came back to himself at dawn naked, covered in blood, and staring at a half-eaten moose carcass.

Learning to control those violent instincts would be a relief, but it all comes down to Avery being strong enough to stop the warped ursine from taking over.

Sucking in a breath, Avery tries to focus on that inner beast, approaching it in his mind the way he would an actual bear. Awkward, since he’s never been stupid enough to approach an actual bear . Getting mauled doesn’t sound fun, and being the one doing the mauling isn’t that much better.