Fixer

Wade

When my little brother was fifteen, he kissed a boy. Someone from our werewolf pack saw him and told Alpha, and that was the end. The end of his life, because wolf packs have ironclad rules and one of them is, Thou shalt not be gay, ever. Shawn died. And the extra gut-punch on top of losing my brother was that the man who obeyed our Alpha’s order to kill Shawn was Dustin, our Fixer, a man I’d thought was my good friend. The man I’d secretly had a crush on.

Once Shawn was dead, once Alpha let me loose, I ran fast and far. I wanted to kill Dustin, to smear his guts out on the ground and dance on them, but he had four inches, thirty pounds, and fifteen years of fighting experience on me. He was pack Sixth to my Fifteenth. In a fight, I’d always lose. Still, as I made a new life a long way from the pack, I vowed that one day, I’d find Dustin and end him. Then, one spring night, I woke to a very familiar wolf peering in at me from the fire escape. I had my shot at revenge at last.

Dustin

Pack Fixer is a title, a job, an avocation. It’s also a prison, bound by vows to your Alpha and one sole commandment: protect the pack. My father, who was Fixer before me, taught me all kinds of ways to cover up evidence that might reveal werewolves. I could pick locks, alter photos, confuse, drug, blackmail, and eliminate threats. I was up on all the new technology that was growing by leaps and bounds here in the 1970s. I understood video, knew what a motion detector could do. And I used my skills to kill an innocent boy.

Well, that’s what my Alpha thought I’d done, what he’d commanded of me. What Shawn’s brother Wade believed, when he escaped our pack and vanished. In fact, Shawn was still alive and I was no longer Fixer. But it took me seven years to find Wade, to give him the good news. Question is, will he kill me before I can tell him he still has a brother?

Fixer is a hurt-comfort, second chances prequel novella set in the 1970s, thirty-seven years before the events in Unacceptable Risk.