The Alpha She Left Behind

Wren was growling in her sleep again.

Runa heard the sound, low in her daughter's throat and completely unchildlike, through the baby monitor she had yet to get rid of despite the fact her daughter was five years old and strongly disliked being referred to as such. She was already halfway down the hall before her brain caught up with the fact her body was in motion.

The room was dimly lit save for the night light shaped like a crescent moon Wren had picked out herself at some point. The kind that came without explanation, a fact Runa strongly suspected was the reason she still had it three years later after buying it on an impulse.

Wren was curled up tight beneath the blankets, her fists pressed against her cheeks, her jaw working back and forth as though she had something to bite down on but no item readily available. Her skin was too hot. Not burning up, not by any means, but warmer than it had any right to be on a five year olds frame and when Runa pressed two fingers against her daughters wrist the beat there was too fast, too skittering to be healthy.

"Wren." She made her voice even, all the years of practice in the emergency room informing her that any hint of hysteria in her voice would be read and exploited by her patients no matter their age. "Wren, baby, wake up for me."

Her daughter's eyes flew open and for the briefest heartbeat were not the brown ones Runa expected to see.

They were gold, rimmed right up to the edges of her vision, no hint of a pupil visible, and then just like that the strange dream eyes were gone and Wren was looking up at her mother with the usual expression of sleepy confusion, annoyed that she had been disturbed from her rest.

"Mama? Why are you making that face."

Runa didn't have an immediate answer for that because she was still sitting on the edge of the bed, her daughter curled up against her chest already dozing off again within the minute, heart rate slowing back down to something resembling normalcy.

She reached for the thermometer on the nightstand by sheer muscle memory and paused halfway there, staring down at her thumbprint smudged against the plastic before shaking her head and checking it none the less.

Ninety nine point one, she read. A perfectly normal temperature for a child with a fever of one hundred and one, for a wolf pup with a dangerous change in her system, for an animal that wasn't supposed to come into this world for another three years minimum and now here she was, growling in her sleep and looking at Runa with eyes the color of the midday sun.

Runa remained in the room long after her daughter fell back asleep with a hand pressed against her temple, sifting through the numbers she knew were coming with an anger she couldn't direct anywhere safe. Five years old. Much too soon, even for a pack pup and Wren wasn't supposed to be that. She was supposed to be a secret until Runa knew how to tell her, until she had worked out the words and their meaning for herself on her own time, her own schedule.

The wolf in her daughter had other plans.

She did not return to her own bed but sat on the cold tile hallway floor outside Wren's door with her knees pulled up against her chest, the same way she sat outside patient rooms on particularly bad nights when she still worked the overnight shift, and stared at the box in her closet she hadn't opened in five years. The one marked with an Ashwood address hidden inside the lining of an old jacket she still had yet to toss out along with the rest of her mother's things.

Her phone rang out on the nightstand at six the following morning, before she had even had a chance to make coffee, a number she didn't recognize but knew the area code for.

She almost let it go. Five years of strange calls, most of them coming from numbers like the one currently ringing out her phone, and a single folder of voicemails she had no interest in listening to on an old automated line filled with people who didn't know when to give up.

She answered it anyway. Something about the events of the previous night left her a hollow place inside that a conversation might fill.

"Is this Runa Voss?"

A man's voice, older, and careful on the other end of the line, the careful inflection informing her immediately of the name he was about to give.

"Depends who's asking."

"My name is Halden. I'm Beta of Ashwood." A pause, because he knew she might need one to consider ending the call and she would be taking that pause if she had an inch of sense. "I'm sorry to bother you without warning. I know what that name probably means to you."

"You wouldn't be wrong." She kept her voice even, moved to the kitchen window where she could see the yard begin to grey out with the coming dawn, the distant sound of Wren's small feet on the hardwood flooring down the hall notifying her a new day was about to find her daughter awake and asking for breakfast like none of this had happened. "What do you want, Halden."

"Doc Emory passed three weeks ago. Heart, in his sleep, quick if that means anything to you." It wasn't, not really, she would never claim to have known the man, but she let him finish. "We haven't been able to find anyone who can treat wolves properly since. Not out here. Not without questions we can't afford to answer."

"And you thought of me."

"I thought of the best wolf physician I've heard of in fifteen years, that already happens to know what we are." Another pause, longer this time and loaded with the weight of every word in it. "I know what we did to you. I'm not pretending otherwise or asking you to forgive us. I'm asking because I don't have another option and pack is dying without proper care, suffering deaths they shouldn't be able to suffer. That's my pitch. I don't have a better one."

"You could have led with an apology instead of a body count."

"I could have. Won't be honest if I do. Bodies are why I'm calling you before the sun is even up."

Runa stood in her kitchen with the phone pressed against her ear and stared back down the hallway at her daughter's partially open bedroom door, the slice of golden light from the night light spilling out onto the floor, and thought about eyes that were not brown for a single second in the dark.

She thought about how there was no one else alive who could explain what was happening to her daughter. No specialist halfway across the states. No stranger forum where her anonymity was assured. Just her and the dying remnants of Ashwood and a man she had once considered his friend asking her to come back to the thing she had sworn to leave behind.

"I need to know something first," she said. "Is Kade still Alpha."

The silence on the other end stretched out long enough to be an answer.

"He is," Halden said carefully. "Runa, I have to ask. Does he know there was ever a reason for you to ask that question this way?"

She hung up before she answered him.

Down the hall, Wren's door opened and her daughter emerged rubbing at the gold flecked eyes she would soon remember in color only back to their default brown, asking what was for breakfast like the previous nights events had never occurred at all. Like five years was an acceptable age to be changing into something monstrous.

Runa knew what her answer to Halden was before she had ever answered him at all. She had known since she had felt that heart hammering away in her daughters breast at three in the morning. She just wanted to be angry about it for another day.

She called Halden back two days later, not one, because she'd meant what she said about needing to be angry first and one day hadn't been enough.

"I have conditions," she told him, no hello, no softening it.

"I'd expect nothing less." He didn't sound surprised. He sounded like a man who'd been waiting by the phone. "Name them."

"I keep my own house, off pack land if there's anywhere close enough. I'm not living inside Ashwood's fence." She watched Wren through the kitchen window, out in the yard chasing a moth with a kind of focus that used to just look like a kid being a kid. Now Runa saw everything different. "Nobody comes near my daughter without my say so. Not curiosity, not questions, nothing. If anyone so much as scents her twice, I'm gone the same day."

"Understood."

"And Kade doesn't know I'm coming until I'm already there. I'll tell him myself, in my own time, or he doesn't get told at all."

That