Feral Northern Shifters 2

Trey’s mouth kicked up into a smile. “No. Not us. I was FBI at the time, I had good credentials. I can be quite persuasive when necessary and I explained that you’d come up through the foster system.”
“I didn’t. I looked after myself.”
Trey shrugged. “With all your mysteries, it wasn’t difficult to get Robert to believe you were in trouble. And it wasn’t difficult to get him to believe I wanted to help you. Because I did.”
“Right.” Ethan flushed then, because he sounded like he was nineteen years old, not twenty-nine.
“You’re rattled. You have a right to be. You’ve been human for just over a week after being cougar for years. You’ve been accosted by the Winter pack twice and you watched them murder Lila.”
He was also starving, but didn’t want to admit that weakness. As casually as possible he picked up a muffin that Robert had left sitting on the counter. He took a bite and chewed. “What do you want from me?”
“The same thing you want from me. Help with finding Bram. He shouldn’t be feral. He won’t fare as well as you have.”
Ethan couldn’t help it. He laughed. When he was done, he added, “There’s actually nothing wrong with feral, if wolves leave you the hell alone.”
“You’re a bit of an exception, and you’re a cougar.” Trey shook his head, his expression thoughtful. “You’re also damn lucky Bram got you out before someone could ID you. So you owe him.”
“ID me?”
“There are very sophisticated tracking devices and from what I understand, Doug was about to pass you over to a group of people who would have stuck a transponder in you, in which case you wouldn’t be wandering around the city by yourself right now. These people can be hard to escape once they have their claws in you. The paramilitary wants to understand shifters and you do not want to be their means of doing so.”
Ethan swallowed, finding the muffin a bit dry. “You found me.”
“Sure. By other means.”
Ethan didn’t even know if he could believe this guy. It could all be bullshit, but instead of expounding, Trey returned to his earlier point.
“We have to find Bram. From all accounts, he is a highly social wolf. On his own, he won’t do well at all.”
“I don’t want to hunt him,” Ethan protested. “I know what it’s like to be hunted.”
Trey’s gaze became a bit hooded, a bit impatient, probably with Ethan’s assumptions. “You know what, Ethan? So do I. We’re not hunting . We’re trying to find the boy.”

Chapter Twelve
Find the boy .
    Well, thought Ethan, since Trey was probably in his forties, maybe Bram seemed like a boy. More than once, Ethan had been tempted to say something like, I thought you told me he was twenty-four .
But that was pedantic and beside the point. Especially since Trey and his crew came out every full moon and did a sweep of an area. It had been three months since Ethan and Bram had fled the Winter pack’s compound.
During the first month, Ethan had been unable to relax, on constant lookout for betrayal and lies from Trey. He’d even made a point of setting up an emergency cache in a cave a half day’s run away—a retreat in case he had to flee at short notice.
Nothing bad happened. In fact, Trey handed Ethan ID and rented him out a place to live.
Exhausted by his constant wariness, Ethan gave in during the second month and decided to trust Trey and the wolves he’d been introduced to. Even if he still thought getting stabbed in the back was a distinct possibility.
Trey got Ethan a job.
By the third month Ethan started thinking of them as friends. If the wolves hadn’t worked so hard in searching for Bram, Ethan might have thought he’d been tricked, for reasons beyond comprehension, into this rather strange life where his new best buddies were a pseudo-pack of loosely related wolves who came to visit once a month.
Pseudo because there were only four of them and they didn’t live by pack dynamics, but rather like a family. They didn’t even all live in the same city, given that Trey was still in charge of the Winter pack and the others had homes in different states or provinces.
Despite the friendship they offered him, Ethan didn’t run with the wolves. He was welcome to, but it made him uncomfortable, reminded him of the times wolves had run after him. Instead, he did his own kind of searching—none too effective. But to date, Trey and the gang hadn’t found Bram either.
Just in case, Ethan stayed within hearing range