First Imprint [Book 1] ✔️

24 • Practice

SAM'S POV

The pack walked slowly towards the clearing where we were meeting the Cullens. All of us were there, including our two newest wolves Collin and Brady, who had changed last week. They were younger than Seth at the tender age of 13, but I figured the bigger our numbers the less chance of a surprise attack by the Cullens.

Jacob seemed to cautiously trust them. I wasn't so willing. They wouldn't have been expecting our numbers in case they did try anything. I had ordered the entire pack to keep that information between us.

Last week, around the time Collin and Brady had changed, a new vampire had come to the area and had broken into Bella Swan's house taking some of her things. Jacob had gone to investigate, but he hadn't recognized the scent. We hadn't been happy to learn that a vampire had been that close to us and had gotten through undetected. Bella had been lucky she'd been spending the night at the Cullen home during the break in. Not that that fact had pleased Jacob.

What was confusing was that the leech hadn't touched Charlie who had been sleeping in the house at the time. Knowing that Charlie had been that close to danger had been very disturbing to Jacob. Billy and Charlie were best friends and Jacob had probably seen more of Charlie growing up than Bella had.

The incident had led to uneasy truce between us and the Cullens. We ended up agreeing on new treaty borderlines. They were allowed on land that they hadn't been allowed before and vice versa. We were now patrolling closer to Forks than we ever had while the Cullens were in the area.

We had to be very careful not to get too close to the each other though. We almost had an incident the other day. I'd been running everyone on tight shifts, making sure everyone covered our newly established borders. Jacob had insisted on covering the Swan house, but I didn't think it was necessary as we knew the Cullens had ramped up their security around the home. So Jacob was doing coverage on his own.

The other night Paul was coming back from visiting Jacob when he ran into the vampire named Emmett. Emmett had been on his way to guard the Swan house for his brother Edward. Paul and Emmett had gotten too close. They still had a lot of hostility from their last meeting and tempers resumed. If Quil hadn't been running back from one of his evening jaunts to Makah, I'd have hated to think what would have happened.

Quil was dealing with enough on his own. Every night before or after he was done patrolling, he would make a run to Makah to check on his imprint. I hated the idea of him going alone, but I didn't stop him, knowing that I would do the same thing in his position.

He couldn't go a day without seeing Claire, it was too painful. He would sneak over and sit in the woods that were near Ronnie's house. Whenever I patrolled and could see into Quil's thoughts, he was always at Makah any more, safely hidden in the trees just listening to Claire's soft breathing as she slept at night. If he was really lucky, he sometimes caught glimpses of her.

Quil was actually the reason we were late coming to meet the Cullens. He had gotten back late from Makah. We had learned tonight that a large group of newborn vampires were planning on coming to the area. Bella believed that the newborns were the ones pillaging through Seattle raising the city's death toll. She thought that they were linked to the same person who had broken into her house. She also believed that the redheaded bloodsucker was the one behind everything. Her leech boyfriend wasn't so sure and had wondered if it was some vampire organization named the Volturi that he had apparently pissed off a few months ago.