Heat Race - Tanya Chris Page 0,91

of paper was a family tree, diagramming relatives he’d never met in neat, hand-written boxes. Someone had taken the time to draw this up for him, but it didn’t say who.

“Need more time with that?” Jasper asked.

Saul startled. He hadn’t heard Jasper coming. Maybe because he’d been absorbed in the letter but probably because Jasper could walk on wolf feet even in human form. Saul waved him forward, and Jasper joined him at the base of the huge chestnut tree he was using as a backrest. Jasper stretched out on the patchy ground beneath the tree, looking more like a cat than a wolf. He put his arms behind his head and stared up at the sky through the tree’s branches.

“Want to share?”

“It’s from the town where she was born, but they don’t know where she is.” He handed over the letter.

“She didn’t go home?” Jasper returned the letter after a quick scan. “Either there was nothing calling to her there, or she was afraid your father would find her if she went there.”

“She had a lot of family.” Saul handed him the other sheet of paper, the one showing all his aunts and uncles and cousins. Even grandparents, though they might be dead by now.

“I knew it!” Jasper waved the paper excitedly. “Your mother’s family goes back to the town’s founders.” He traced his index finger up through the generations. Saul hadn’t scanned that high yet, choosing to focus on the relatives who might still be alive, but he followed Jasper’s finger to the names at the top.

“This here is an uber-alpha/omega pair. Xander and Albertus Woodhaven. Three hundred years back, but there it is. I knew you had some uber-alpha in you—had to, with the way you heal. And that means we all trace back to a founding family. Nature said it was time to make a new pack, to try this whole alpha/omega breeding thing again, and fate found the right wolves to do it.”

Saul had never had anything about his family to feel proud of, not since his mother disappeared anyway. This was new and sort of special. His father was still a violent, dangerous asshole, and his mother had still run off to save herself at his expense, but he came from good stock and would do good with it. He folded the paper and tucked it carefully away.

“What do you say we head out to Woodhaven tomorrow?” Jasper suggested. “If I’m remembering correctly, it’s not far from Kettlestone, where your father’s from.”

Saul nodded, his heart racing with a combination of fear and excitement. He might have family in Woodhaven, and they might be good people who’d be happy to know him. But they might not. Which would leave him without even the fairytale he’d always told himself, the one in which somewhere there were nice people who wanted him.

This here pack ought to be all the family he needed, but he couldn’t squelch the flicker of hope that he would find more.

ELIAS

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Every morning when Elias dropped off Jack Henry, he strained to keep track of him as he drove away, listening for his heartbeat, breathing in the lingering traces of his scent. He swore his senses were getting stronger, as if he could borrow Jasper’s wolf ears when he needed them, but even Jasper wouldn’t be able to listen in on the dance studio from all the way down at the library.

Elias had to trust that Jack Henry would be okay. Jack Henry was right to insist on trying to restore normalcy. If they were going to add a baby to their pack, they needed to do it from a place of security, not a place of fear.

Sometimes Elias got excited about the possible future joy of a child, but just as often he drifted into morbidly reflecting on all the bad things that could happen. Jack Henry would need surgery to get the baby out, and though a c-section was probably as safe a procedure as there was, surgery was surgery, and omega reproductive anatomy wasn’t human reproductive anatomy.

Dr. Morris had plenty of enthusiasm for delivering an omega’s baby, but he didn’t have any experience doing it. Not to mention that the pack lived way out on a lonely patch of land with only one car and no phone. What if something went wrong and they couldn’t get Jack Henry to the hospital in time?

Alice had done a damn fine job patching Saul up. Yes, Saul’s metabolism made everything knit faster, but she’d