Page 1 of Collared Mate

CHAPTER 1

Henry

It’s a crisp fall evening in the greatest shifter city in the world. The kind of night where pedestrians are pulling out their Burberry and their long coats and tucking themselves into pumpkin-spiced corners.

The full moon has begun her rise, tracking up and across the city with the indifference of a celestial object who has seen civilizations rise and fall so many times she is not impressed by skyscrapers or Wi-Fi.

On evenings like this, I yearn for the countryside where I grew up. For the slow turn of the leaves, the mountains and forests in which I could roam for thousands of miles, the freedom from humanity.

But business is not done in remote forests, and shifters have been drawn to this metropolis just as humans have, and for the same reasons—to make their mark on a world that initially regarded them as nothing special.

“Henry!”

“What?”

Zack Sharp is giving me a broad grin. He’s up to something as usual.

Zack is a young guy, head of his own small pack. He’s coming up in the world, and I like to mentor the younger ones. Keep them on the right path. Help them from straying into the kind of wildness that gets everyone killed.

“Someone’s doing something they shouldn’t,” he smirks.

He enjoys rebellion far too much. But for once, he’s not the problem. I follow his eye line, and I see where he is looking. There’s a flash of something dark and low to the ground. An animal of some kind. At first, I don’t even consider that it could be one of our kind. I assume it’s a loose dog or maybe a very large cat, or hell, even some kind of misplaced wild thing.

The park at the center of the city is big enough and has enough forestry coverage that you can get a little hint of the wild from time to time if you focus your senses enough to block out all the human and traffic smells. That’s pretty much impossible to do for more than a few seconds at a time. If this city can be described as anything, it would be pungent.

“So anyway, Kirk won’t back down, so I’m like, bro, you know I’m the alpha here,” Zack is saying. “But he’s like, alphas don’t have to tell you that you’re the alpha…”

I turn my attention back to the matter of the inevitable power struggles that emerge in new packs comprised largely of young males. Zack is yapping at a great clip, so I try to listen while knowing that at the end of all of this, I’m going to have to tell him that there’s really only one way to deal with an insubordinate male, and that’s put him on his back and make damn sure he knows that the next time he gets up in challenge, the cost will be death.

“But he’s my best friend, you know? We grew up together,” Zack is saying. “So I don’t want to kick his ass, but I kinda think I might have to kick his ass.”

There we go. The young alpha might very well get to the conclusion on his own, which would save me some time and rather a lot of words.

The bushes rustle and then a whole pile of leaves is blown up into the air in dramatic fashion, thrown amok and then settling with cinematic slowness as a wolf bursts from the undergrowth and tears past at full speed in what might as well be broad daylight, in more or less the middle of the city.

We may be in the park, but there are thousands of people here. Most of them aren’t strictly visible, out of my eye line, but the smell of them is abundant. The trees cannot leach human presence out of the air fast enough to hide the fact that we are predators in an absolute sea of prey. The glut of dumb flesh is almost too much to bear sometimes.

I catch her scent: female.

She is at a full run, her ears pitched back, mouth open, tongue lolling out to allow the greatest airflow into her body. She is a magnificent creature, on the smaller side, but somehow elegant. Her pace is athletic and easy, her fur gleams in the growing moonlight. She shines with wildness and freedom and for a moment all I can do is admire what she is.

Her scent wraps around me for a moment before the wind sweeps it away. There is a tingling inside me that feels like recognition. Something I haven’t scented before. It’s thrilling. Definitely female, definitely unbred. Someone I need to claim. The intensity of the desire shocks me with its force. I feel myself get immediately hard with an erection that throbs in my pants so intensely it hurts.

That is the most intoxicating scent I have ever experienced, and it is only present for a second, but in that second I feel the full capacity of my alpha capabilities in all their glory. It takes a great deal of effort, more than I’ve ever had to expend before not to come out of my skin and shift into my animal self, bound after her, pin her, and mate her so savagely she knows she belongs to me and can belong to no other.

I stop myself with the last shreds of my human sentience.

Shifters are forbidden to take their wolf forms in human populations for obvious reasons. Each pack handles matters like this with the utmost seriousness. In the case of repeat offenders, silver collars are installed to prevent shifts.

Whoever that little girl was needs a silver choker fairly quickly, I’d say. She needs to learn that the rules against taking wolf form are there for a reason. To protect us, and to protect humans. The cost of living in a world full of people is having to pretend to be people.

“One of yours?” Zack asks.

I laugh. “Not one of mine. Mine know better.”

“Not one of mine either,” Zack laughs. “One of Rick’s maybe? I’ve heard he’s having a hard time getting full control.”

My chest tightens at the mention of Rick Swale. For most, he would be considered the city’s top alpha, leader of all the packs, the most influential, powerful, and charismatic of us all.