Kyra
She spent the next few days trying to get the lay of the land.
It was frustrating, but she couldn't seem to get that shifter out of her head.
She'd never been particularly interested in males, but Derek had caught her eye, and she wasn’t sure why. He was handsome, yes. But he’d hit on her in an all-too-common way; there had been nothing remarkable about what he’d said. But the feeling he’d given her? Now that had been more than remarkable.
Oh, she had dated, when it had been convenient. It had helped her learn about human males and how they acted. But most of her time had been spent helping her coven. They had been working on enacting this particular plan for years. She was all too eager to help them succeed.
Once she got revenge on this pack, she might finally get a moment's peace. The need for revenge had eaten at her for over a decade.
Derek did not seem to notice anything different about her.
But there must be some kind of noticeable difference, right? Why else would his pack have been so opposed to her parents’ relationship? Why would they have been so opposed to her very existence? If she could blend in as a typical shifter, then what was the big deal? Why did it matter if she was human?
If she spent more time with Derek, she’d have to find a way to work that into the conversation.
Over the years, she’d tried asking Victor and the other coven members, but they often understood far less about pack dynamics than she did.
She still found it so incredibly hard to believe that a pack, a wolf pack, was supposed to be the same as family. Maybe the bonds were supposed to even be stronger. So how could they turn away one of their own members in a time of need? She wanted that answered.
She wanted to know why they were in Anchorage. It still surprised Victor that they’d made the move. He’d always said wolf shifters were entrenched in their habits and unable to change.
But moving so many miles away seemed to indicate otherwise. Unless the change was forced on them.
But whatever the reason for their defection from the wilderness, it made them much easier to infiltrate. From what the coven had taught her, a pack in the wilderness is a pack on guard. It's a pack that keeps track of every member’s movements. But a city pack, well they were much more relaxed from what she'd seen. Their members came and went in fluid motion, just like humans. There was a lot less security and a lot less accountability.
Alone in the outskirts of Anchorage, she contemplated getting a job. At first, she considered a job where she could see a lot of people. The library didn't have enough visitors. The cafés and diners would probably be the best place, but she didn't want to be tied to long shifts. A job would be too time-consuming. She needed the freedom to move in and out of the pack, once she was able to gain entry.
The best story was that of a college student. Because she was young enough to blend in. And she could register for one class and actually show up on campus for that time, in case anyone ever checked. The rest she could say that she was doing remotely. No one would doubt her.
If she needed to become a bigger part of the community, then she would be asked to volunteer at one of the preschools. They often accepted interns who were studying early childhood education, which was what she claimed as her major.
Thanks to her coven, her background check was impeccable. She had no affinity for children but saying that she wanted to be a teacher meant she seemed less threatening. She was afraid that her genetics, plus living with a group of vampires for most of her life, would make her seem a little more forbidding than a normal human woman, but she’d learned to round out those edges.
She needed to be seen around town, so she went to the grocery store. Kyra made a point of speaking to the cashiers, even though she didn't feel friendly at all. She had wanted to just focus on going after the pack. But the coven had other plans. They had not revealed them to her yet – she only knew that they involved revenge, which was her main goal.
If the pack Alpha ended up dead, then she was happy. If the pack was dismantled and destroyed in the process, then even better.
She never wanted any young shifter to go through what she’d gone through. No one deserved that, especially if they were a child, and their only crime was having the wrong bloodline.
She’d asked quite a few times to be let in on the specifics of the mission, beyond the infiltration. She knew that her mission was to get the Alpha and his leaders to see her as a member and to trust her. But she needed to know the overall plan too, the ones the vampires desired. Because unlike her, the vampires felt no need for revenge. They weren’t angry about anything.
“I need to know more of the details,” she’d told Victor. “I can’t make them trust me if I don’t know why.”
“Not yet,” Victor said. “The time isn’t right.”
But the coven insisted that subtlety was crucial, and that she must do everything in her power to blend in with them, until the moment was right.
All of that was churning in her mind as she pushed her cart through the grocery store. She picked up a steak and a ham and dropped it into the cart, and then remembered that a human woman her size would probably have other items besides just meat. She added some ground beef, frozen corn, some tomatoes, and a few bags of lettuce. She did enjoy making tacos from time to time, even though it made the vampires complain about the smell of cooking meat. Apparently, ground beef on the stove smelled exceptionally bad to them.
She’d asked if it was because it had once been an animal, but none of them even wanted to contemplate the reasons. Unfortunately for them, she cooked a lot of meat. Wolf shifters craved it, and it seemed necessary for them to keep their energy up. Sometimes she hunted, but that had been much harder in Seattle. It was easier here; the vampires’ weird house was close to the woods, so she could step out and find rabbits, deer, or elk, without any real effort. She could also fish in the ocean or the streams, although she wasn’t as good at it as her father had been.
She could remember him catching trout in Alaska, before he moved them south. Then he’d caught catfish, all the way down in Mississippi on humid summer nights. The timing had to be exactly right, to catch fish as a wolf. When she closed her eyes, she could still smell the scent of the lake water when they’d lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and she could hear the sound of the insects buzzing at night.
It hadn’t been easy for him to live as a shifter without a pack after he’d been exiled. He’d taken the rejection hard, and although he’d chosen her mother over his pack, it still hurt, even though he rarely spoke of it.
They’d bounced around for years, from state to state, and later from country to country, trying to find a place to fit in. But no one wanted a rejected wolf shifter and his human wife, and his little hybrid daughter. Her throat stung as she remembered him. It was just so fucking unfair. She swiped her eyes and went to check out. There was no point in crying. She had a plan, and she would make that coven pay.