Moonlight Desires

Chapter 2

Seth had heard people say they couldn't believe their eyes, but for him, his nose was usually the problem. Even in human form, his sense of smell was stronger than the average person's, and he had never really learned how to develop it as well as his cousins had. Of course, they all had the advantage of growing up in a family pack. He, on the other hand, had just started finding his half-siblings and cousins within the past year, and any dreams he'd had of a big happy pack were quickly dashed. The relatives he found on his father's side might have been willing to answer the occasional phone call or text exchange about a werewolf matter—heavily coded, of course, in case a human happened to see or overhear—but they had never once invited him to a full-moon shift and any time he had tried to ask, subtly or otherwise, he was never given a definitive answer. The general, if unspoken, consensus was that if his biological father couldn't be bothered to teach him, it wasn't their responsibility to take up the mantle either.

For the most part, having never had one, Seth didn't miss being part of a pack. With the nomadic lifestyle of a wrestler, he wouldn't have been around to contribute much anyway. Packs were supposed to be like a family, and he had vowed that whenever he started a family of his own, they were going to be his first priority. Right now, fulfilling his dreams of wrestling came first, so it was easy to push everything else to the side, or at least that's what he thought. Then he had encountered another werewolf yesterday and suddenly his human thoughts were just as tangled and intense as his wolf ones.

He hadn't planned on stopping in that particular forest, but since the event had been relocated, he was forced to improvise. He hadn't even meant to stop in that specific stretch, but he had seen the car pulled over and the angle was awkward. If someone had just pulled off to the side to go for a hike, a piss, or a quickie in the forest, Seth would have thought they would have parked more carefully. When he had gotten out of his rental SUV to see if he could spot anyone, he thought he caught a whiff of a familiar scent, but with the full moon calling, he couldn't take the time to try identifying it. Instead he made a note of the make, model, and licence plate of the vehicle and then drove on further ahead, giving himself a healthy amount of space from the abandoned car, and headed out to welcome his wolf.

Except there was already a wolf there—a werewolf, not a natural one like he occasionally encountered in the more remote areas. He had tried to chase her down—he was absolutely positive it was a female werewolf, mostly because of the size—but he had lost her trail not far from the car. The arrival of two curious humans made him temporarily retreat, and by the time they had left and it was safe to resume investigating, the other car was gone as well, the female werewolf's scent fading by the second. It held a peculiar note, though, a distinctive scent he was used to smelling every couple of weeks backstage: hair dye. Specifically vegan hair dye, the one Becky used to get her trademark fiery orange locks.

At first he thought it was on his shirt, perhaps. He had talked briefly with her earlier in the evening and meant to catch up with her later, but Natalya said something about her not feeling well. Yet her scent was in the air, fresh though fading. He had tracked it as far as he could in several directions: back to the spot where he had spotted the wolf and completed his own shift, up the tree where the scent trail seemed to have stopped, down to where the car had been haphazardly parked. The singular scent lingered along each of the three trails, along with others he associated both with her and wrestling.

She can't be a werewolf. Wouldn't I have noticed before? He had thought it all the way back to his SUV, which he drove to an abandoned barn so he could have a power nap. It lingered in his head all the way to the hotel, where he asked the desk clerk if a distressed red-headed woman had arrived; he was given an evasive non-answer that was full of corporate jargon like 'client confidentiality'. When he caught a hint of her scent in the elevator, that question slowly fell away only to be replaced by another: Why hadn't she noticed me? All of it disintegrated as soon as he stumbled into his suite, set the alarm on his phone, and fell face first onto his bed.