Harper (Destined for the Alpha Book 1) Page 2

  “You really killed it tonight. You had that poor boy sweating bullets.”

  “That's awful,” Jo said. “Can we please just lay down now? I'm so tired.”

  “Me, too. You think they have coffee anywhere around here?” Ian asked as he grabbed their bags from the trunk.

  Harper extended her hand to Ian, but he ignored her. One of his quirks was that he never allowed women to hold bags or open doors. It was mildly chauvinistic, but Harper wasn't going to be the one to tell him that. Half of the reason she'd brought him was to be a pack animal.

  Harper said, “I think there's a McDonald's around here, but you should shower and sleep. We'll have to leave before sunrise if we want to reach the campgrounds at a reasonable hour.”

  “Ah, crap, you're right. It feels weird going to bed at nine, though.”

  “You'll be thanking me tomorrow,” Harper said.

  She looped her arm in Jo's as they made their way to their room. Their room number was 124, which suited her purposes nicely because it situated them on the opposite side of the motel. In the morning, she could go out, drive to the other side of the parking lot, and pick up her friends. They'd make one final stop at the local Food Lion, and then they'd hit the highway, not getting off again until they were near No Man's Land.

  The motel wasn't the sort you'd find recommended on Google Maps. It looked liked it had been painted recently, but the fresh coat did nothing to cover its underlying seediness. Blackened gum spots and cigarette butts littered the cement walkway. Each room had a single, square window with yellowed blinds. Intermittently, they glowed with the light of a television screen.

  A woman of indeterminate age hung outside room 121, wearing cowboy boots, a denim skirt, and a denim jacket of a different shade. A lit cigarette hung loose on her red lips as she drummed her acrylic nails on the brick wall.

  As they neared her, she sized them up, her dull eyes likely observing more than the average person might. As she plucked her cigarette from her mouth, Harper slowed, preparing to be spoken to.

  “Got any blow?” The woman asked. She had a raspy voice, but only a slight Appalachian twang, which told Harper she was probably in her late twenties to early thirties.

  As Harper came to a full stop, Jo tried tugging her along. In a not-so-quiet whisper, she said, “Come on, ignore her.”

  Instead, Harper extended her hand to the woman. “I'm Harper. This is Jo and Ian. And you are?”

  The woman stared at Harper's hand, but didn't take it. Appearing perplexed, she responded, “Diamond.”

  “Cool name, thanks.” Harper leaned in, giving Diamond a conspiratorial look. “No one's ever asked me for coke without being on a first name basis. That was just a bit too weird for me.”

  Diamond shrugged uncomfortably. “Well, you got any?”

  Harper sighed. “Nah, sorry. Not my scene. I have some pot, though.”

  “Harper!” Ian hissed.

  Harper went on, “We're in 124. Wanna come smoke?”

  As always, Ian got the door for them. He shot Harper a dirty look as she passed by. Diamond entered last, looking around the room with stark skepticism. She took a seat at the chair closest to the door, crossing her legs and folding her arms across her chest. Sometimes when people folded their arms, it was a sign of intractability. That they were standing their ground and would not be swayed. Other times it was a sign of vulnerability. Generally speaking, it was all in how high they positioned their arms. In Diamond's case, her arms were set low, covering her belly. Thousands of years of evolution, and humans were still protecting their guts.

  The room was basic, with only a couple of chairs, a queen-sized bed, a bathroom, and a dresser with a boxy television on it. There was only a single nightstand on the right side of the bed, which Harper quickly claimed for herself. She set her iPhone down beside the television remote, which was both Velcroed and duct taped to the stand.

  Jo went straight for the bathroom, while Ian opted to sit on the end of the bed and glower his disapproval at Harper. Half a foot shorter than her and three years younger, no amount of glowering would ever make Ian intimidating to her, though she didn't have the heart to tell him that. She playfully prodded his side with her foot as she rifled through her backpack.

  Diamond was still eyeing them suspiciously as Harper extracted the sandwich bag of pre-rolled joints.

  “Those look like smokes,” Diamond said.

  Harper wrinkled her nose. “I know. I knew I had to make a bunch of them before the trip, so I borrowed a friend's roller. I'm not really happy with how they came out. They use twice as much as a joint I'd roll myself, but we still smoke them just as fast.”

  “We?” Ian repeated. “You're the only one who smokes here, Harper.”

  “I do, too, sometimes,” Jo called from the bathroom. She was always quick to admit things herself, as if worried Harper would out her. It was a trait she'd developed being the youngest of five sisters.

  “What? You never told me that!” Ian yelled back.

  “It helps me when I'm having one of my freak outs. It's either that, or those pills my doctor prescribes me, and those make me feel like a zombie all day.”

  Harper had already lit the joint and had taken her first, long drag.

  “Face it, kid,” she said, careful to let the smoke flow away from Ian. “It beats pharmaceuticals.”

  “That's why it's illegal,” Diamond said, now confidently strutting over to pluck the joint from Harper's fingers. She leaned against the nightstand as she puffed. “Cause if people realized how much bullshit it could cure, ain't nobody would be popping pills and the industry would collapse.”

  “Spoken like a true economist,” Harper said, grinning.

  “This is good,” Diamond said. She pulled the joint back and examined it. “What do you want for it?”

  Harper shrugged. “Nothing. Just want to hang out and talk.”

  Ian's eyes bulged.

  “Good,” said Diamond, taking another hit. “Cause I don't do shit for weed.”

  “Duly noted,” said Harper.

  “Where the hell are you kids from, anyway?”

  Harper said, “Boston, at least presently. Ian's from Vermont, Jo's from the midwest.”

  “College brats?”

  Harper pointed to herself, then the bathroom, and then to Ian. “Harvard, Harvard, MIT.”

  Ian's scowl deepened. “Why do you always have to say it like that?”

  “No idea what you're talking about,” Harper said innocently.

  “MIT is one of the top universities in the world.”

  Harper accepted the joint from Diamond. “Tell me, Diamond, in your opinion, which school is better: Harvard or MIT?”

  “Harvard,” she said without hesitation. “Shit, I don't even know what MIT stands for.”

  “They have a great political science department,” Ian said defensively.

  “So does Harvard,” Jo called.

  Diamond interjected, “So, ya'll out here to see some werewolves?”

  “How did you know?” asked Ian.

  Diamond rolled her shoulders. “That's what all college kids who come through here are looking for. Take my advice and go back to where you came from.”

  “We're aware of the risks,” Harper said.

  Ian asked, “You've seen other college kids in these parts?”

  Harper heard the toilet flush in the bathroom, and a second later, the shower turned on.

  Diamond had the joint again and was burning it down at an impressive pace. She made no effort to pass it and Harper didn't ask. She wasn't an all-day, everyday smoker. Just a couple hits before bed kept the nightmares at bay.

  “Sure,” Diamond said, sounding plain congenial by now. “They usually come through in the summer. Act like it's some sort of adventure or vacation. They think they're gonna go out running with the werewolves, like the reservation is some local fucking attraction. Well, let me tell you, it ain't. Half of 'em never come back. I know that, because every
now and then, they'll find one of their cars parked out in the fringes, weeds growing over it and shit. The ones that do come back, they're either fucked up or knocked up.” She paused to wag a finger at Harper. “Pretty girl like you, them wolves will be plum crazy for you. They'll prolly kill your friend here, just to get rid of the competition.”

  Ian glanced nervously at Harper. She wondered how he could dismiss everything else Diamond said, but let this statement get to him.

  “I guess it's a risk we'll have to take, in the name of science,” Harper said, raising her voice triumphantly towards the end.

  Jo had already finished her shower, and she cheered from the bathroom, “In the name of science!”

  Harper looked to Ian, who mumbled the mantra under his breath.

  “What kind of science?” Diamond asked. “Ya'll studying the animals or something?”

  “Kind of, in the sense that we're all animals,” Harper said, sinking back into the lumpy pillow. “I'm an anthropologist.”

  “What's that?”

  After Harper had declined taking the joint back, Diamond had returned to her chair by the door. Now, she sat with her legs to the side and her shoulders relaxed.

  “It's the study of humans,” said Harper. “And more recently lycanthropes, or shifters as they're commonly known. Right now, lycanthropic anthropology is more of a buzz word than an actual field, and we're hoping to change that by showing the research community a new side of shifter culture. There's a particular pack we're hoping to study, if they'll let us.”

  “What for?”

  Ian answered her. “The pack is rumored to have over a thousand members. It's significant, because most packs destabilize once they hit two hundred. That's because somewhere around one hundred and fifty members, human and humanoid groups reach a sort of critical mass wherein—”

  Harper said, “Basically, once you have more than a hundred and fifty people in a group, whether it's in a company, or a neighborhood, or in this case, a pack, it's impossible to know and give a damn about everyone. People stop caring, they aren't able to trust one another as well, and they begin screwing each other over. Everything more or less goes to shit once you start hovering around two hundred people, unless—”

  Harper paused, briefly distracted by the sound of the hairdryer coming on in the bathroom. She raised her voice. “Unless you have a clear and consistent set of shared values and beliefs. For example, humans have shared religions, shared laws, and more recently, shared belief in corporations. Laws, in my opinion, are the most fascinating. We take for granted that stealing is wrong and murder is bad, but there's nothing in nature that agrees with these principles. We believe them because religion tells us to, or because the government enforces them. We'd like to think that we're noble creatures, but if left to our own devices, without the intervention of gods or government, we'd be no different than all of the other predators, thieving and killing our way through life.”

  Ian was shaking his head. “How much of that did you smoke?”

  “I get it, I get it,” Diamond said, her head bobbing. “But what's any of that got to do with werewolves?”

  “I'm glad you asked,” Harper said. “You see, every pack has rules, a general conduct. But the further up the social ladder you go, the less the rules seem to apply. Murder is taboo within most packs, but if a beta kills a lower ranking pack member, they may get away with it. An alpha can kill pretty much whoever he wants and get away with it. You see, while packs have rules, they're more like loose guidelines. There are no codified laws—principles by which all of their members live by, and face pre-established consequences if they don't.”

  Ian added, “This pack we're tracking, rumor is that they have a very strict set of laws that are on par with the laws of early humans. Each member of the pack, all the way up to the alpha, is held the same standards. If we can prove this, and prove that the shifters obey governance, then it's not a great leap for us to say that they can follow the governance of human laws, and therefore be entitled to citizenship.”

  Diamond's jaw went lax. “Wait, you're saying you want to make werewolves into US citizens? Like, give them social security cards and have them wait in line at the DMV?”

  Harper asked, “Is integration really that hard to imagine?”

  “They're already considering it in California,” Ian said. “There's a bill being proposed that would make shifter children born to human mothers legal citizens.”

  “All of them are born to human mothers,” Diamond said.

  “Exactly,” said Harper. “And they're getting more and more human each year. What we consider to be a shifter nowadays would be unrecognizable from a shifter even two centuries ago. Go back another few centuries, before Columbus sailed, and shifters were as big as houses and worshipped as gods. Integration is inevitable, because shifters are dying out. We don't have to raid their packs to kill them. We're killing them softly, generation by generation, diluting their gene pool with our humanity. The least we can do is give them ID cards.”

  Diamond stared at her. “I ain't living next door to no shifter.”

  For some reason, her statement cracked Harper up. Probably the pot. While she laughed, Ian did the heavy lifting.

  He said, “You may already, statistically speaking. Estimates are that 0.5% of the population of New York City are shifters, and their concentration increases the closer you get to one of the reservations. In fringe towns, one in seventy residents is a shifter.”

  “And that's just the ones over the age of eighteen,” Jo called, having finished drying her hair. “Something like 5% of children and adolescents in fringe towns are fathered by a shifter.”

  Diamond squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. “That ain't possible. I've never seen one. Well, I think I met one in a bar once. Real creepy looking fucker.”

  Harper said, “He probably wasn't a shifter. The types of shifters you'd encounter outside of a reservation are the ones that can blend in well. They also tend to be less aggressive than their cave-dwelling counterparts.”

  “Then how do I tell them apart?”

  There were ways, but Harper wasn't about to go down that route.

  “If they're doing a good job, then, you won't.”

  “Damn, just what I need, more shit to worry about.”

  “Statistically speaking, you're more likely to be in a car accident, or die of congestive heart failure, than of a shifter attack,” Ian said. “There were only sixty reported shifter killings in the US last year, and many of them were likely staged.”

  Diamond snorted. “I'm sure those statistics will make you feel real safe once you got one of them hairy fuckers gnashing its teeth in your face.”

  Jo emerged from the bathroom, the scent of her fruity shampoo filling the air.

  “That was fast,” Harper remarked.

  Jo gave a pout. “The water never got above lukewarm.”

  “Better get used to it,” Harper said. “Could be the closest thing you have to a warm shower for a long time.”

  Diamond asked, “How long you figuring you'll be gone?”

  Harper answered, “Sixty days, ideally. Should give us enough time to get the lay of the land. If there's enough quality stuff to learn, we might go back in for a second round in the summer.”

  “Ya'll are crazy. Can't say I wish you luck, though I do hope you make it out in one piece.”

  From somewhere outside of the room, they heard banging on another door, followed by a shouted expletive. Diamond was up and on her feet in the instant before a man was yelling her name.

  “Shit!” she said. She gave them a vaguely apologetic look. “I gotta go.”

  She put the joint out on the arm of the chair and then stuffed it into her coat pocket. After muttering a suggestion that they stay in school, she was out the door in a hurry, slamming it behind her.

  As soon as she was gone Jo flopped onto the bed, laughing. “I can't believe you invited a stranger into our room.”

  Ian said, “She
could have killed us. There are women serial killers, you know? And I can't believe you told her what we were doing. The highly illegal thing we're doing.”

  “Chill out. She's not going to tell anyone,” Harper assured him. “And she was harmless.”

  Harper took a moment to explain how everything from Diamond's seat choice, to the way she folded her arms, and the way she angled her body towards the door had televised that she had initially been wary of them.

  “Fine, but what if she tells someone that we have drugs in here?” asked Ian. “I really can't believe you brought that stuff.”

  “It helps me sleep. And believe me, that woman does not consider pot to be a drug.”

  Harper turned on her side and patted the space beside her. Ian rolled his eyes, but began removing his boots.

  Harper said, “I brought that woman in here to teach you a lesson. In the next few weeks, you're going to have to step outside of your comfort zone and talk to people you have nothing in common with, at least not on the surface. Some of them, you might find utterly objectionable. Still, you're going to have to be able to build rapport with them, or this whole venture will be pointless.”

  “I did talk to her,” Ian said, sounding petulant.

  “Yup, and I'm proud of you.”

  Ian shrugged off the compliment. “Guess I'll go try the shower. Where should I sleep?”

  “I already showed you,” Harper said, patting the middle of the bed for emphasis.

  “I can't share the bed with you.”

  “Jo does it all the time.”

  Jo said, “I don't think Harper has slept in her own bed since junior year.”

  “You guys are so weird,” Ian said as he disappeared into the bathroom.

  “Don't forget, you're in the middle,” Harper yelled. “You can be my little spoon.”

  Harper kicked off her jeans and then climbed under the covers. She hadn't bothered packing nightclothes, or even a spare change of clothes, aside from an extra pair of panties. Once they made contact with the pack, they would be able to procure more suitable clothing, and in the meantime it freed up a lot of space in her backpack.