Life on the run has made you a pretty good liar, Kate, Tom decided. Kate was actually seventeen, and Tom was a year younger. He’d been looking forward to his eighteenth birthday pretty much all his life. He’d always imagined it would be the day he’d walk out the front door and suddenly find himself a man, ready to make his mark in the world.

That was before he’d got tangled up with Kate and her family, and found his future screwed to hell.

Found himself a freakin’ werewolf.

‘So …’ There was a pause as heavy as the gold chain around the trucker’s neck before the next question: ‘Is Tom your boyfriend?’

‘Not really,’ Kate said, turning her head away to look through the window. ‘No.’

Tom indulged himself in a bitter half-smile. How could Kate ever begin to think of him as boyfriend material, knowing what he had become? Knowing that if they ever did get together …

He imagined the look on the trucker’s face if Kate told him the whole story: that her whole family was lupine – werewolves; creatures believed lost to legend, but in reality part of an active and totally secret subculture whose population stretched clear around the world. That, as a pureblood female, Kate’s latent lupine nature would be woken if she mated with another ’wolf. And that Tom had been kidnapped by Kate’s family and held prisoner in their house while they turned him into future son-in-law material –turned him ’wolf too.

The plan hadn’t worked. Kate didn’t want to embrace her lupine heritage. The thought of it turned her stomach. She was determined to stay human. So she and Tom had escaped. But in doing so, they’d made many enemies in the lupine community – including Kate’s crazy mother, Marcie Folan.

The real joke in all this, Tom reflected, was that with all they’d been through trying to stay alive, he had never felt closer to anyone than Kate.

‘So you and Sleeping Beauty in the back there …’ The trucker was trying to sound casual. ‘You’re just good friends, right?’

‘Right,’ Kate replied, a hard, tired edge creeping into her voice. ‘But Tom is pretty special, you know?’

Special.

Uh-huh. More special than anyone could’ve guessed, Tom thought wryly.

He was what the lupine community termed a silverblood – someone with exceptional resistance against the ’wolf-change. They’d turned him in the end, but he’d come out of the whole process a wereling. ‘Very rare,’ Kate had informed him, quoting some ancient, secret text: ‘A wereling is a resister whose humanity and compassion prevails in the ’wolf.’ Which seemed to mean that when the change was on him, Tom could hold on to some struggling, screaming human part of his nature that loathed what he had become.