“We need to talk,” he whispered. I glanced at him, and nodded.

“Luke.” He nodded.

Luke smiled. “Kai.”

We walked towards the house together and I passed Sadie with her straight black hair and muscular body. She was very pretty. I had fair milky skin and pale blonde hair. I felt plain compared to her exotic beauty. ‘You look like an angel,’ Kai told me inside my head as we reached the door to his home.

I blushed but recovered quickly. “Okay, first thing on the agenda, you need to get out of my head.”

He led me to his office without another word and closed the door. His office was nicely decorated with modern masculine colors, dark blue and grey. I sat on the brown leather couch and Kai sat on the edge of the large wooden desk. He towered over me.

“I will teach you how to keep me from reading your every thought. But I will never fully be out of your head. What’s the next thing on your agenda?” He smiled.

Okay, he was willing to teach me to keep my thoughts to myself.  That was a start.

“I need to call my mother.”

Kai sighed. “It’s best that after a wolf goes through the change, that they fake their death. I took your car off of the road and hid it under some fallen trees. One call to the police saying I found it while jogging would do the trick. Your blood… is all over it. They will think animals took your body.”

My mind was reeling. “I’m not faking my death!” I stood. “I am all my mother has.” I let images of my childhood filter through our bond, of my mother being beaten trying to keep him from hitting me. Then I stopped. “She’s all I have, too.”

Kai closed the distance between us in a second. Kai’s jaw clenched. ‘Who hurt you?’  he asked.

“Don’t,” I told him fiercely and tried to side step him. He moved in front of me.

‘Let me in,’ he pleaded and for once looked vulnerable. He stared into my eyes.

‘No.’ I pushed back into his mind. I stared back, not looking down like I should. Showing him that he couldn’t force me; he didn’t own me. Alpha or not, I had a say and I could take care of myself. He stared back unwavering. ‘Challenge,’ my inner wolf said. Shit, what was I doing? My forehead broke out in sweat. That’s when he kissed me.

He leaned in slowly, keeping his eyes locked on mine. When I felt his breath on my lips I closed my eyes in submission and he grabbed the back of my hair and slowly tilted my neck back. He pressed his lips onto mine, ‘I win,’ he taunted playfully in my mind. A shock went through my system when our lips touched. He kissed me deeply for a few more seconds and then pulled away. I felt like I had been waiting to kiss him since I first saw him.  He looked as stunned as I felt. Before I had time to think of something to say, the hairs on the back of my neck stood. ‘Foreign Wolf,’ my inner wolf said.  I smelled something off, something bad.

“Shit,” he swore and bolted outside.

I ran after him and noticed the other wolves began to perk up and some of them shifted into their wolf forms. Kai stood on one of the picnic tables.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in through his nose.

“Portland Pack just crossed our border; seven wolves about twenty miles away.” He growled and looked at me.

“Where were you born?” he barked.

I jerked back at the power in his voice. “Portland,” I answered.

A rumble went through the pack and one of the wolves that had shifted, howled. My body had chills. “What’s wrong?”

“When someone is changed, the Alpha of that pack who changed them becomes that person’s pack. That’s why you’re mine. But there is an old magic law that states that the Alpha from the pack of the changed human’s birthplace can fight to claim him or her if they can reach that person in twenty-four hours. It’s been sixteen hours since I changed you.”

My breath came out in rasps. “So the Alpha from the Portland pack is coming to claim me?”

Kai’s eyes blazed yellow. “No.” There was power behind that one single word. “He’s coming to try. I was hoping you were born in Michigan or some place a bit farther away.”

Emma stood next to me. “If it was a submissive male, he wouldn’t even try.”

Females are rare. She had told me. ‘Foreign Wolf.’ My pack sense was tingling. They were on OUR territory and there was nothing we could do because of the rules. I could feel the irritation coming off of Kai.

As Kai barked orders to the other wolves to take up positions at the perimeter, I leaned into Emma.

“I think it might be a good time for you to tell me about killing a werewolf 101,” I whispered.

Emma swallowed. “Two ways. Extreme blood loss or silver poisoning. Our power to heal is in our blood. If you decapitate or tear into a wolf enough, they will die before they can regenerate.”

I nodded. “Okay, so keep my head on. Don’t touch silver. Got it.”

Emma looked at me, shocked. “YOU don’t fight the Portland Alpha, Kai does.”

“Oh.”

“You’re the prize,” Emma told me.  “And there’s something you should know about changed wolves. The Portland Alpha is a changed Wolf, he wasn’t born that way and so he has a… gift. He is immune to Silver.”

“A gift.” I let that sink in. “So all changed wolves have a gift?”

Emma nodded. “You will, too. Once you shift for the first time it will begin to manifest. The lycanthrope virus binds to the human DNA and then it activates.”