Charmed Wolf

attempt at nonchalant masculinity. It sat uncomfortably on his skinny frame, nothing like Rune’s panther-like suavity.
I blinked away the memory. “Because I do,” I answered, keeping my attention on my best friend even as I spoke to her son. “Natalie. Talk to me.”
And she did, but not about the reason she’d come. “Bad date?” she asked, reaching up to finger one damp curl.
I shook my head, unsure how to respond to that. I mean, obviously Rune wouldn’t be my Consort. But I couldn’t quite make myself say the date had been bad. It had been...
...irrelevant. “Natalie,” I prodded, reminding her about the elephant in the room.
She took a deep breath. “I need a favor.”
“Anything.” Well, anything except holding the baby. But Natalie and I had come to terms with my disinterest in her younger spawn months ago. In my opinion, children became human at the age of five or ten or, depending on the child, sometimes as late as fifteen.
Kale was human. The baby was not.
Natalie’s response pulled me back to the more important issue. “My mother had a cerebrovascular accident.”
I blinked. I had no idea what that meant, which wasn’t strange. Natalie was a scientist and sometimes she forgot to speak English. “I’m guessing that’s not good?”
“A stroke,” my friend translated, her breath catching in a hiccup.
That I understood. I pulled her in into a sideways hug, the best I could do with the baby between us. Then I released words I couldn’t share with pack mates. Words that would make an Alpha look weak.
“Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry.”
Here with Natalie, I could be myself. I could be myself and hold tight to this human who had no wolf inside her. Since I wasn’t capable of doing what I really wanted to—pushing wild strength through her skin—I settled for rubbing her nonexistent fur.
Meanwhile, I waited for more tears. But none came. Instead, Natalie shook her head and pulled herself together. “I need to see her, but Kale has school....”
And his dad couldn’t dependably get his name right, let alone peer into the dark recesses of a twelve-year-old’s insecurities. The baby had been a last-gasp attempt to repair a broken relationship, but instead a second child had finally pushed Natalie over the edge into filing for divorce.
For that, at least, I owed the infant a debt.
“I can stay with friends,” Kale observed from his perch by the sliding door. He wasn’t even looking at us. Instead, he peered out at the horizon. The moon, he and I could both see, was just barely peeking up between a gap in the trees.
When Kale turned around to face me a second later, wordless understanding passed between us. A memory of our conversation last week when Kale had demanded to know why I no longer let him come for sleepovers. “It’s because I’m a boy,” he’d guessed.
“No,” I growled, wolf leaking through my human skin as I answered. “At the risk of sounding trite, it’s not you, it’s me. There are challenges here every night after the moon rises. Not human appropriate. We’ll do sleepovers again after I’m confirmed as Alpha.”
And...he’d nodded. Accepted that I had a life he couldn’t be part of, even though he’d been my little buddy ever since he’d learned to wash his hands without help.
Now he was remembering our understanding. I could tell by the way his eyes dropped to the plant in his hands, the way he gently fluffed up leaves that didn’t require fluffing. His mother was into chemistry and he was into botany. His nervous motions were akin to hugging a security blanket around his shoulders.
Natalie had overheard the sleepover conversation then, but she forgot in the midst of her pain now. “You have gender clinic Tuesday,” she reminded her son, oblivious to the silent discussion Kale and I had engaged in. “I’ll probably be back by then, but just in case, you should be with someone you’re comfortable with driving you there. If you want to come out to your friends....”
This time, Kale’s gaze fell to his toes. The kids at his old school hadn’t taken well to his change of pronouns. In the new school district mandated by the move out of Natalie’s ex’s house, he’d introduced himself as Kale—he/him—with no complicated backstory.
Like most transgender kids, though, Kale hadn’t biologically transitioned. Not at twelve years old. Instead, he took hormone blockers, a way of putting off the decision until he was older. The fact he trusted me to drive him to his gender clinic warmed my icy Alpha heart.
“Of course, I’ll keep the kids,” I jumped in, accepting the fact that challenges would be a little more complicated for the foreseeable future. I was Alpha, though. I could handle complications.
Of course, as soon as I spoke the baby cooed and waved her hands at me. I swallowed. Shifted my attention to Kale. Please, my eyes said.
And he was a good kid because he strode across the room and put down the plant so he could pick up his little sister. “Who’s a cutie pie?” he asked, crossing his eyes then sticking out his tongue.
The baby slapped him on the face. He laughed. I cringed.
“Are you sure? I don’t know how long I’ll be.” Natalie was standing now, sliding from foot to foot. She either needed to use the bathroom or....
“Your flight leaves soon.”
“Yeah, but if you don’t feel comfortable with Hazel....”
“We’ll be fine,” I told her. And, since she wasn’t a wolf, she couldn’t hear my lie.

Chapter 5
I left the baby with my old nurse, whose eyes lit up as if Hazel was a treasure rather than a ticking poop bomb. “Oh, the little toes!” she cooed. “How long can we keep her?”
“Days,” I promised. “But you won’t be on call 24/7. Bring her to the nursery in the morning and they’ll take over. If you get tired of the baby before then....”
“I won’t.” She turned away as if I intended to snatch the baby back. “My little darling.