1
The strange wolf smelled rotten, wrong, and a little wild.
Mateo stalked the scent deep into silent pines blanketed with heavy snow the moment he arrived in the mountains.
It concealed another scent, as enticing as the first was horrifying. Every few miles, he’d catch a whiff of wild roses and woman, and his wolf was ready to abandon its pack to follow like an obedient puppy for the rest of its life.
What is wrong with you?he demanded of the beast that shared his soul.
But even his human half could smell it. It was fantastic, impossibly evoking Nonna’s lasagna, the brine of the sea, and the scent of baking bread that wafted out of grates outside bakeries on early New York winter mornings.
The third scent was the one he didn’t smell: his own trail the moment his paws hit the snow. That meant he didn’t know where his den was, which meant he was embarrassingly lost in the woods, and the rest of his pack was going to laugh him into the next state.
His wolf stood frozen in indecision: enemy ahead, paradise somewhere in the trees, and home vaguely behind.
The decision was taken out of his hands when a shift in the wind brought a fresh blast of snowflakes into his eyes and the stronger scent of rot.
The world fell away as his senses homed in on the strange wolf. The woods were profoundly silent, at least to his city ears, where his wolf was always overstimulated. He braced, though he could not have said what he sensed. His stalker was silent and invisible. A breath of wind? A dash of magic?
He turned his head just in time to miss a death latch on his throat by stained canines that snapped in the air an inch from his fur.
He snarled and danced back, and his attacker growled low, claws digging into snow-churned ground. Mateo squared off, rapid calculations spooling through his brain as the wolf paced, reconsidering strategy now that they’d lost the element of surprise. The stray was smaller than him, but most wolves were. This wolf’s fur was matted and his breath was rancid, which meant it might be crazier and thus more dangerous than it seemed.
Mateo figured it was a stray, but now that it was close, he could smell other wolves on it. This wasn’t a loner. It had a pack around here somewhere, all as pungent as it was. The smell was bizarre. It lacked any hint of civilization. Any wolf he met in New York always had an under scent of motor oil and polyester even in its fur. This guy smelled like wool and forest.
He wished he could shift and ask what the hell it was thinking.
Well, Nonna, you wanted me to get back to nature,he thought grimly as the wolf made its move.
The stranger feinted right, then dodged left at the last second, and Mateo’s wolf tensed. He roared as dirty claws sliced down his shoulder, missing his jugular by a matter of inches.
If that gets infected, you asshole…he thought before the wolf rammed into him, and they slammed into the foot of a pine tree.
For a second, he was distracted by a sweet scent of the scraped bark, a cross between butterscotch and vanilla. He scrambled to his feet, dismissing trees that smelled like dessert when they got injured.
The wolf growled, the sound vibrating from its claws to the tip of its tail, and Mateo braced.
Ninety-five percent of the time, his wolf was a big marshmallow because it was exactly where it wanted to be at the head of its pack. That hadn’t been true when he was growing up. To Mateo’s human half, content to spend his days getting lost in computers, it felt like he’d been sitting on a volcano. His wolf had to submit and harbored a nearly endless rage because of it. Keeping the beast remotely near the same zip code as sane was a dispiriting, exhausting slog filled with endless fights to the top of his pack, dragging Mateo kicking and screaming the whole way.
Now his wolf ran his family and answered only to his terrifying eighty-something-year-old great aunt, who was now a thousand miles away.
He’d forgotten this rage.
The crazy wolf in front of him didn’t know anything had changed, that it had poked the beast, literally, and now was probably going to pay with its life.
This is the stupidest way to resolve conflict,Mateo said without the slightest hope of success.
This time, when the strange wolf lunged, Mateo’s wolf exploded, launching off its hind legs with front legs extended and teeth bared, heading straight for the throat.
The other wolf had already launched and was flying through the air with no way to stop itself.
Even in a fight to the death, Mateo’s brain idly calculated the angles and realized they were going to hit each other and then a tree.
He tried not to pay close attention as his teeth sank into fur. From the lack of an immediate rush of blood, they’d missed the jugular. But just as he predicted, the two wolves tangled together and slammed into another tree, landing hard beneath it and scrambling for the upper hand as snow tumbled off all the branches above them onto their heads.
It was wet and heavy, and Mateo was shocked by how much had accumulated just since he’d left the cabin. There had to be at least a couple of inches on top of weeks-old snow.
His wolf launched again, and the other yelped as Mateo’s got a good hold on the scruff of its neck. It couldn’t kill from this position, but it could immobilize the other like a helpless pup. Before it could let go and aim for its throat, Mateo hauled on the reins as hard as he could.
