Page 4 of Lone Wolf
"Yeah, I do," Oscar agreed. "I was thinking," he continued in a too-casual tone. "It's been nearly a decade, no one's going to recognize you. Not meaning that you should be going home to Montana Border, but maybe a visit in one of the other packs."
"Are you out of your mind?"
Oscar shrugged. "Not like we can't do up paperwork for you. But no, I was thinking about something different." He looked Damian up and down. "Answer me honestly—how long has it been since you got laid?"
Lysoon, too long. "You're thinking of Nevada Ashes."
Oscar nodded.
Damian tipped his head back and stared up at the sky, deepening toward evening. Nevada Ashes, a pack notorious even among the other packs.
Once upon a time they’d been a pack called Rogue’s Hollow, somewhere in Ohio. Overcrowding had led to madness and the humans had gone in with guns blazing. The ones who’d survived had been loaded on freight cars and shipped out west in an eerie echo of the first Enclosure. They’d been dumped in the scorched desert like so much vermin, to live or die as well as they could.
And they’d lived.
But now they were Nevada Ashes, a name chosen in memory of the dead they’d burned, as had been the law since shifters had first been forced inside these walled enclaves. There, they'd taken advantage of human laws and built themselves a way to survive out there in the unforgiving desert.
He’d asked his father about the enclave once, when he’d been about sixteen and the hormones of a teen-aged alpha had been riding him hard. He knew, through the distorted lens of teen-aged gossip, that the entire front of the enclave was brothels. Which, to sixteen-year-olds still trying to negotiate the urge to mate and the needs of polite society seemed like a smorgasbord of possibilities. His father had quickly disabused him of that idea.
“They sell their very identity to tempt their customers,” his father had raged. “They have no pride, they bow and cater to the humans, and make themselves no better than dogs, owned and dependent on the hand that abuses them.” He’d gone silent a moment, then added in a soft voice that somehow seemed more angry than the shouting, “They are a disgrace to the name of shifters.”
Though Damian'd done exactly that in the army and he still didn’t quite understand where the line was drawn between the two. One young untrained shifter, in exchange for a roof and steady meals and some money to help keep his mother and his family in their home. And then sold himself again, when they’d come to offer him this deal with the devil that was slowly killing him.
But to smell a shifter, touch one… He was hit with a wave of homesickness like a knife in the gut, only worse, because he couldn't pull this knife out. Knew it wouldn't ever heal. How could it?
He was a ghost.
"I'll think about it," he said sharply and thrust himself away from the car. "See you tomorrow." He refused to look at his partner, just got into his car and drove out of there at a speed that would have gotten him in trouble if he'd worked anywhere else.
Luckily he didn't.
CHAPTER FOUR
That night, after a short, heavy sleep that left him almost feeling as if he’d been drugged, Damian pulled out his laptop and set it on the kitchen table.
And stared at it.
No, it was disgraceful. He shouldn't participate in something that degraded his people.
But Lysoon, he missed being around shifters.
If it isn’t you, it’ll be someone else.
His mother would never forgive him.Those poor creatures, she would have said.What other choice do they have though? It’s a wonder they can look at themselves in the mirror.
But somehow, without even noticing, he'd opened the laptop and a list of search results glowed on the screen before him. Maybe hewasgoing lunar—he certainly hadn’t pressed those keys. Had he?
Nevada Ashes--Fantasy with an Edge of Danger
Couldn't hurt to look.
It was...a nice website. Clean, elegant looking, with an edge to it. Professional. He'd have thought he was looking at a modeling agency.
Pictures of the buildings themselves showed him rooms that wouldn’t have been out of place in a luxury hotel, though he could easily pick out which were the more expensive of the brothels and which were the least, just by the decor. Silver looked like it would be the hardest on the pocketbook, and he wondered idly what exactly that extra money got you, then gave himself a mental shake, like a parent shaking their pup by the ruff. He shouldn’t bethinkingthese things.
Except, he was.
He clicked through out of morbid curiosity to see if he could figure out what it was that would make this one top of the heap.
