“Tell me everything,” I said when I stopped laughing.

“It was a long drive. Like seriously long. We were on the road for days. On the way there, I started to wonder if it was going to be worth it. The van was packed and all three of us were crammed into it. My mom made us listen to ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ over and over and over. I nearly lost it. If you were there, Sully, you’d have lost it for sure.”

I nodded supportively. It took an unbelievable amount of shit to make Jules come close to losing it, so I could only imagine what he’d been through.

“It was nice when we got there. Florida is cool. The beaches are pretty great. The pack lives in Cedar Key near the national forest. It’s pretty cut off from everything, but you can reach the mainland via this highway that’s built over the ocean. My dad loved that. He couldn’t get enough of it.”

“Yeah, I heard him mentioning it a couple of times back there.”

Jules rolled his eyes. I could tell that he’d spent just about all the time he could handle with his parents over the summer.

“So, what was Auggie’s pack like?”

Jules blew out a long breath. “I tell you, Sully, it was different. Way different to here. There were kids running around all over the place and the alpha is a woman.” That was rare, but not unheard of. “The pack was so weird. There were other alphas in the pack. Just like part of the pack. Like it was no big deal. There were lots of omegas. Almost all of them mated. Some betas were mated with alphas, some with omegas. It was wild.”

“Wow. That’s hectic.” I’d heard rumors of packs like that, but I was so used to the way things worked in our pack, I was finding it hard to wrap my head around such a thing. I couldn’t believe Jules got to experience that. I couldn’t tell if I was jealous or not, but I was very impressed. Dalton, like his father before him, strongly believed in a one-alpha pack. They believed that the rest of the pack should be made up of betas, and a few omegas who “served the pack in their own way,” as Dalton put it. “How did it work? Did the other alphas respect the pack leader? Wasn’t there a lot of trouble?”

“Nah, they all loved Louisa. I could tell they really, really did. One of the other alphas, this guy named Brad, he told me he’d put his life on the line for Louisa like that.” Jules snapped his fingers, to drive the point home.

“Wow,” I said again. “What does Auggie think of all this?”