~*Darwin*~
Through all the shock, the pain and the last remnants of fear Darwin's mind had huddled into a tight ball around one simple problem: why the hell wasn't Jared touching him anymore? The glorious jock usually never hesitated to use any and every chance to paw him whenever he felt like it, but now he seemed actually frightened to do so.
Had Darwin been too snappy in that gas station bathroom? Or maybe his wolf had driven Jared away, just as promised. Whatever the reason, Darwin could sense Jared throw glances at him here and there, but he never did anything more than that.
Jared even had volunteered to walk across town and buy a new car, although that probably had something to do with his credit card. There was a sad possibility that Rayne of the dark skin might get arrested if he tried to buy a brand-new Dodge Nitro with a credit card in someone else's name.
But still, that didn't rule out the possibility that Jared had volunteered just to get away from Darwin. Nibbling on his lower lip he looked through the back window of the Beetle. Harry and Rayne were standing at the trunk deeply immersed in their conversation, and even that made Darwin wince. He had had no chance to reconcile with Harry yet, but Harry seemed to be doing well enough. Without Darwin. With that rogue wolf.
It was petty of him to be jealous, but he felt justified. All of them had lost something, that was true, but Darwin had been the only one to get hurt repeatedly. Nobody seemed to care.
Well, except for Darla, he had bitten her, that counted as hurt. And Jared was out buying a brand new car with money he'd had to borrow from his estranged brother because he had nothing but the clothes on his body. And Rayne had given up his only safe haven to help them. Harry had even been kidnapped because of him, for god's sake!
All of a sudden his egoism made Darwin want to crawl out of his own skin with disgust. When had he started to think like that? No wonder Jared kept his distance, he probably had noticed Darwin's feelings before he himself had.
And adding to all of this was Darwin's acceptance of Jared's superiority. After all, Jared had fallen in love with him when he had still tried to pass as a dominant, and now he was stuck with a whiny, groveling--
The deep honk of a shiny new car ripped him from his self-pity, and not a second too soon. With a shudder he crawled out of the Beetle, threw an instinctual smile at Jared and did his best not to limp too transparently as he walked across the small parking space.
He wanted to help them load whatever goods they had left into the new car but his shoulder still hurt and bled when he tried to lift something heavy, so Jared simply shoved him into the car and told him to wait there as they finished.
Darla was draped onto the back seat this time, and Harry and Rayne took on the job of holding her steady. It left Darwin with the passenger seat next to Jared, and another good chance of getting the Alpha's attention. He'd just have to try harder.
"What are you going to do with your old car?" Darwin asked as they pulled out of the parking lot. The little Beetle looked very forlorn in all that empty space. He wouldn't miss the cramped space, but the car had enough character to look like a lost puppy.
Jared sighed, then threw a short glance into the back mirror. "I don't know. It depends on how long we're going to stay away. I'd hate to lose it to be honest, it's my first car."
Rayne hummed sympathetically. "First one's always the hardest. I still remember when I-"
"When are you going to tell us about that pack in Canada?" Jared interrupted gruffly, taking a moment to look at Rayne's dark face in the rear view mirror. Darwin could see those hard lines reappear on the jock's face. They were new, having started to appear only since Carl's pack had gone on the offensive and started to attack them. They were strong lines, very male, but also very sad to see. Jared looked positively cold, like a winter sun.
Rayne was silent for a moment, long enough to make Darwin put up with the pain in his shoulder and look back. The dark one looked down at Darla's face, obviously trying to come up with the best way to start. It was unusual to see him at a lack of words, and Darwin would have liked it on any other given day. This day he wanted to crawl back and shake him.
"I think it's best I tell you how I myself met them, maybe that will be enough to make you understand why Carl's plan will never work," he finally said, sorting through Darla's hair.
"It was six years ago, and I was very new to this whole pack thing. At eighteen you don't really think about the future the same way you do at twenty-one, or any time after that, and I had nobody to talk sense into me. My first pack didn't want me anymore, so I decided to find out about a legend, the same one Carl heard. A story about some pack up north that was somehow different, more powerful than any other pack."
He hesitated for a moment, smiling tightly. "I wanted to be strong, I wanted power more than anything. If my parents had been stronger, they wouldn't have been killed by hunters, I told myself. And since I didn't want to die, this was the way I chose."
Darwin huddled into his seat. George had always told him that there was such a thing as hunters, especially when he told the story of how he had found him as a kid. His adoptive father was quite sure that the wolf who had bitten him had been hunted and killed by the men who called themselves hunters because they never found him. It had kept their pack in hiding for weeks before they dared to show themselves in their wolf shapes again.
"It took weeks to get to the Canadian border. I didn't have a passport or visa, but you know, such things don't stop a wolf. The hunger was a bigger problem, especially because it was salmon season and there were bears everywhere." Again Rayne hesitated, then he took a deep breath and added, "and you can probably guess where this is going. I was near death and ripped to shreds when one of the mythical werewolves found me. I have no idea how he carried me to that hunting cabin, he was slightly smaller than Harry and sinewy like a teenager, but he did. And he patched me up too."
Jared huffed and slowed the car to enter the highway. "Very magical, but so far I can't find anything unusual in that," he grumbled.
White teeth flashed as Rayne grinned. "When I asked him if I could join his pack, he said no. I asked why," he threw a glance at Jared's profile and finished, "he said, because they're all Alphas."
The words didn't register at first because the sentence made little sense. There was no dumbfounded silence or gasps of shock, just the slightly embarrassed rustle of clothing as they all changed position. After a short while Harry piped in.
