We set up the alarm, and he tripped it at top speed, so that was great. The sensors worked perfectly, but the frame rate I had the recorders set at didn't always catch him, so that had to go up...and don't get me started on the shutter speed. I just maxed that out to prevent blurring--so bad the aperture of the lenses needed to be widened, as well. That was a mess to figure out, as I'm into tech, not a photography or video buff. Thankfully, that's what a search engine is for.

        Then came when I wish I could have stopped my smart ass mouth. "Well, this works for human shapes. Is there anything else?"

         "Well, I was wondering if I was going to have to shift." That's what the Elvis Schwarzenegger creature said before he began to strip...just as my ring-tone for my ex started playing. (I had managed to find an instrumental version of Closer for her number. At the 2:30 mark, the clown show part of the whole thing, on loop.)

         I had this horrified look on my face with an eye twitch. As weres don't give shit 1 about transformation, he just cracked up as he dropped trouser.

        Got to understand, I'm pretty damn straight, this was some homoerotic nightmare, and I was more embarrassed by my ringtone than watching Michelangelo's David in full color.

         I fumbled with my phone to turn the damn thing off and missed most the shift, but not before I got an eyeful of this dude's Anaconda. He lived up to Alpha stereotype. Look, I'm a short guy--my mate has a good 2 inches on me. I jokingly call myself a tripod for a reason, but this guys junk plain emasculated me. I only saw it for a brief second but it's forever burned into my retinas. I can't unsee this.

         I had never been more straight in my life. I am terrified of what that would do to your digestive tract.

         All of that while soft. Shit. You ever seen the movie Your Highness? It's a shaft worth making a trophy out of.

         Never mind. My brain needs a filter today.

         And shit, dudes are such weird creatures--you know he will read this before I send it in, and the asshole is just sitting there with a smug grin on his face--as he didn't edit that out. Or this.

        He has a mate already, girls. That's her pride and joy. They're busy making their 3rd set of kids (twins each time).

        Anyway, wolf form caught on cameras well. Wolf form crawling on the floor did not. So, then I rigged sensors that will only come on when the door is opened or a window is shattered and catches movement at that height because the kids will set it off all day--it will text an alert to some guards every time the thing is triggered so real alarms and false alarms will be settled within seconds, but still, no one is crawling through to get at the kids, which is what McShaft wanted.

         Fine, we're set to go and I'm casually picking up my tools when Fay comes in. "What do you want to do tonight?"

         Do you. It was on the tip of my tongue, burning to get out. I didn't know what this woman was doing to me but my fear of what I just worked through was eating me alive. "I've got to get back to the office and write up paperwork. Don't know how long it will take. If it's too late tonight, Ill call you tomorrow, ok?"

          "Alright, sugar," was all she said as she hugged me and kissed my temple.

         And I got the heck out of dodge.

~~~

        We're going to have a quick walk back to Jesse Owens for a minute: that's a weird place to keep a conversation that has no real bearing on the rest of the story, right? Perhaps a point to lecture you on right and wrong like some authors do, to the detriment of their story?

         Nah.

        I mean, I am an opinionated ass, but this is a whole thing that doesn't look good on me.

        I was fleeing from a bunch of weres with preservation of my species on my mind. What most people don't know is what Darwin's full title to his book was:

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

        Right there in the title, race is related to species. The definition of that word in 1560 was "people descended from a common ancestor, class of persons allied by common ancestry".

        Species, on the other hand, just meant of a kind, but in more recent years, we attached some of what race once meant to species because people wanted to obscure the idea that race had anything to do with us being seperate species--that and kind is a Biblical word for division of animals that isn't based upon the notion of species, and there is a strong drive to move away from that, too.

         Over a long period of study, the consensus is that all races (current concept of being out of Africa, Asia or Europe-India) are the same species, without enough genetic diversity to even have sub-species. It means that black, white, purple, we're all descended from a common ancestor, and we're all the same class of persons allied by that selfsame common ancestry. So now "race" hovers around "culture" and really is a word that serves no purpose...

         Save as the root for racist.

         And man, I was having a moment.

         See, we're talking about humans and weres being mates. Just like our understanding of race and species was off some nearly 500 years ago, our understanding of the division between humans and weres was off until the age of genetics. We are the same species--as in, at least a 3rd the planet is estimated to carry were genes without being shifters themselves. That's 2.3 billion or more people are shifter stock. Whether we were once a separate species, or never were divisible, or this is the next stage of evolution for man, its all irrelevant.

          We are right now the same creature, and to hate upon either spectrum is as stupid as hating upon skin color. It serves no purpose. I got the melanin thing, but the shifting part was another beast altogether (pun intended).

         But I did not know this. I was uneducated and shoved into a world that terrified me--just like the people I so snottily felt superior to, in that conversation with the Alpha. This is how Hunters were born.

        I even for one daft moment thought about calling my ex and talking her into having human kids to raise in defense against the monsters. (This is why having an ex's phone number is dangerous.)

         I'd like to say that this madness of mine was only for the day, but it took nearly 2 weeks for me to finally calm down enough to realize that yes, while these are dangerous creatures (like any other human), they did absolutely nothing to me.

         I mean, my mate was calling me every night after work--I wasn't answering--but no one used that god-awful speed on me.

         But in 2 weeks, I was over the raging side of the conniption. Now I was just embarrassed, and shy about talking to my mate again. I mean, do you want to have the conversation where you tell someone who is hotter than you that you were avoiding them because they were beneath you?

         In fact, it took me almost 2 months to break this part to my mate. She just laughed in my face because believing religiously in this mate bond, we were made for each other and there's no way anyone is better or worse for each other. To her, everyone is inferior to me and vice versa. I wasn't even ready for that viewpoint when she voiced it.

        A month after I saw them last, she shows up at my home. There I was, shaking as I unlatched the door, stuttering through trying to speak to her...well, she knew how to handle me better than I did. She dragged me off to the bedroom and worked all the nervous energy out of me. Then she explained mates to me before bothering with asking why I avoided her for that long.

         At the time, all I said was, "I was scared, at first, then I was embarrassed".

~~~

         Well, it wasn't long until I moved into her suite with her--like a cramped apartment, but it was on pack lands, and we rented out my home for income. That allowed me to not have to require an actual cash-paying job within the pack. Don't get me wrong, I get paid, but some of it isn't in money. My meals are mostly provided to me by the pack house, we pay nothing for living here, and the space to work is a store in the small town--easiest way to hide from people is in plain sight, so as much as could run like a town, does, to the point where strangers can pay cash if they come through. So, I get IT work, all the time, from outside sources.

         Currently, we're adding a 2nd story, for a proper home, in-pack. I had been paying off my 1st place's mortgage at a rapid pace before I met Fayette, but I doubled-down, with no real expenses, and we will be debt free by the time the baby is born.

         Or babies. Weres are in the habit of being prolific.

         But with a minimalistic approach, the top floor of the shop could house 10 of us...although if I have that many kids, I may pull out all my hair and become Carl Brutananadilewski.

        As if my wife would let me get that fat. She's already concerned that I'll be a diabetic if I keep eating all the junk food.

        So, I'm still an asshole. A well cared-for, surprisingly beloved, highly flawed man in a room full of weres. And no, I don't get along with most of them any more than I do with those deemed human.

~~~

        "Carl Brutananadilewski" aka "see" Seymour Slopes is the IT tech for the Sunshine Pack, to the east of Morningside (in Sioux City, Iowa). The tiny one-street town is still not officially on Google Maps, but those who drive the area know where to find it.

        Alpha Bill Antone is the head of Sunshine Pack.