He shifted and looked up at me with uneasy wolf eyes. I scratched him between the ears and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.”

He walked out from behind the truck and started down the lane to the sound of happy cheers and applause.

“Would you look at the size of that wolf?” said old man Lou, slapping his knee.

“That’s a Cleary wolf all right,” replied Jules’s dad.

Once everyone had got a good look at Jules’s wolf, I took a deep breath and shifted. I looked down and saw my claws digging into familiar turf. Home soil. The shift felt unusual. It felt pristine somehow. Almost surgical. I thought it might be the stress, but then I looked down and noticed my fur. Something was different. There was no hint of gray. No fluffy tufts of black. It was white.

Pure white.

Snow white.

Whiter than white.

I stepped out into the sun and walked down the lane to where Jules stood. Dappled applause started but quickly faltered and faded to silence. Faces that had been pictures of pride seconds ago now read as confusion. One or two of them scented the air. No one moved and no one said anything. Eventually, my dad ducked into our house and came out with a pair of jeans for Jules and me. He tossed them to us. We shifted back to human form and quickly got dressed.

As we did, the hush that had befallen the pack changed. Eyes went round. Mouths too. Jules’s mom clamped a hand to her mouth to stop the startled cry that rose from her chest. She was too late. The sound came rushing out of her as an anguished whimper. There was no hiding it; they’d seen my mark on Jules. There was no way they could miss it. Dalton and the brothers closed ranks. They gathered like thunderclouds.

“Just what the fuck did you boys get up to at that cabin?” sneered Dalton.

There was no point in denying it. It wasn’t just the mark. It was the scent of our mating and it was our designation too. All of it was plain as day. None of it was what they were expecting. None of it was what they wanted.

“If we’re not welcome here, we understand and we’ll leave." My voice sounded a lot stronger than I felt. “We’ll get our things and we’ll be gone in under an hour.”