If I skirted the speed limit, I'd have ten minutes before the wolf was at my door.
MY ROOMMATE'S CAR WAS IN THE DRIVEWAY, LOOKING right at home next to the '78 single-wide trailer where I lived.
Very expensive cars, like true works of art, shape the environment to suit themselves.
Just by virtue of being there, his car made my home upper-class--no matter what the house itself looked like.
Samuel had the same gift of never being out of place, always fitting in, while at the same time he conveyed the sense that here was someone special, someone important.
People liked him instinctively, and trusted him.
It served him well as a doctor, but I was inclined to think it served him a little too well as a man.
He was too used to getting his way.
When charm didn't cut it, he used a tactical brain that would have done credit to Rommel.
Thus, his presence as my roommate.
It had taken me a while to figure out the real reason he'd moved in with me: Samuel needed a pack.
Werewolves don't do well on their own, especially not old wolves, and Samuel was a very old wolf.
Old and dominant.
In any pack except his father's, he would be Alpha.
His father was Bran, the Marrok, the most ?berwerewolf of them all.
Samuel was a doctor, and that was more than enough responsibility for him.
He didn't want to be Alpha; he didn't want to stay in his father's pack.
He was lone wolfing it, living with me in the territory of the Columbia Basin Pack, but not part of it.
I wasn't a werewolf, but I wasn't a helpless human, either.
I'd been raised in his father's pack, and that was close to being family.
So far he and Adam, the local pack's Alpha--and my lover--hadn't killed each other.
I was moderately hopeful that would continue to be the case.
"Samuel?" I called as I rushed into the house.
"Samuel?" He didn't answer, but I could smell him.
The distinctive odor of werewolf was too strong to be just a leftover trace.
I jogged down the narrow hall to his room and knocked softly at the closed door.
It was unlike him not to acknowledge me when I got home.
I worried about Samuel enough to make myself paranoid.
He wasn't quite right.
Broken, but functional, I thought, with an underlying depression that seemed to be getting neither better nor worse as the months passed.