I seethed, while weaving my old bike between the ski-laden SUVs on the road to Seattle. Icy wind slashed my face, but it couldn't erase the imprint of Este's lips.

Leaving Este and the pack at the height of the tourist season was absurd. Winter in the mountains is great, with glittering snow and dark spruces marching up the slopes into the low clouds. Ski hills are covered in multicolored humans zipping up and down like ants. Bonfires crackle, the frost puts blush on everyone's cheeks, and laughter floats from any group one walks past. They are on vacation, duh, and we who live there both loathe them and recharge from their happiness.

I hated not kissing Este right now in front of a roaring fireplace. I hated Steinar and his new friends for sending me on this wild goose chase. I even hated Harold for turning honest.

And I loved my fated mate, and so I revved the engine and plunged the bike between wide butts of the luxury cars, deliberately risking safety for speed. The sooner I got to Seattle, the sooner I would be done.

What specifically I would get done sooner, was a question I didn't want to ponder. I'd rather tax my reflexes to the max to avoid ending up as a pile of metal and flesh in the ditch.

Not that I went at it without a plan. I liked when things were straightforward, and I planned to force this Steinar's business to go straightforward. Este deserved clarity. If the truth about her dad hurt her, I would be there to catch her. That was the only way, for we were fated mates. I'd always be there for her and our children.

Seattle in January had all the charm of a thawing turkey. Slush splattered from under my tires. Downtown towers, finally stripped from the Christmas decor, loomed in the perpetual winter twilight. Everyone in the streets looked bundled up and lonely.

Taking all this soul-crushing dreariness in, I understood the appeal of the orange glow spilling from the Muck's windows. Rogues traded the forest for the city and severed their connection to the wolves. Or, like Este, they were born outside the pack, strangers in the human world. There wasn't anyone to teach them the simple ways of winter, but the survival instinct drove them to search a den where the kin pooled their warmth, food and faith.

The Muck's was a poor substitute for a wolves' den, but it was what they had. I parked my bike between others and walked straight in.

The lights appeared bright and welcoming from the outside. Inside it was smoky. Dim. Sweltering-hot. The lamps' shadows, tables and chairs, even booths to the sides shook with deafening music and dancers' stomping, clapping and shouting in the middle. The stench was multilayered, with fried meat, onion and garlic cloaking the individuals' scents.

I squinted and focused, sorting through them as I walked around, hoping to catch Steinar's.

Cheap booze pervaded everything, scorching my nostrils worse than cigarettes and damn onions. I would have found it weird, since werewolves' metabolic rate is too high to get plastered so they rarely try, if I didn't smell the human hangers-on.

The Lupine Council would have strung me out if my pack intermingled so brazenly, but the rogues attracted the dregs of human society. If they betrayed our secret, it was on such fringe platforms, that the Council decided it helped the packs live in shadows.

There, Steinar!

The scent came from the bar, from beyond the dancing floor.

"You're cute for a pack cur." A she-wolf shoved a shot-glass into my hands. "Dance with me?"

"I don't run with no pack," I shouted over the din. I took pains to dress to cover my Alpha tattoo. There wasn't anything else to betray me in this crowd.

"Well, I'll be damned. You have the look of a mooner. That dopey gaze, you know." The she-wolf wiggled her fingers around her eyes, to show how a follower of the Moon Goddess befuddled.

I shrugged, unwilling to deny my faith even to a random rogue. Also concerned that some of my people might be regulars here, if the she-wolf could tell us apart.

"If you're a free wolf, bottoms up!" She pushed my hand, for I was still holding the glass, swishing the transparent liquid inside it. It looked like water, but smelled like alcohol.

"For freedom!" I gulped the booze and tossed the empty glass behind my shoulder. We all loved freedom, even if we defined it differently. The liquid burned on the way down, not unpleasantly. "Happy now?"

"Very," she drawled, wrapping her arms around my neck. "You liked my drink? Then we dance together tonight? You and I?"

Uneasiness tugged at my gut. I looked closer at my chanced acquaintance. Her eyes glistened between hooded eyelids; breath came in shallow gasps. The scent of arousal was growing stronger and stronger...the she-wolf was in heat.

"Easy there, sister. I'm spoken for."

I disentangled myself and pushed into the throng of gyrating bodies, pressed to one another in a non-ambiguous way, to the vibrating beat.

"If you came to dance alone, you should have said so." She followed me. "Hey! Stop! You owe me for my Este!"

I wanted Este so bad right now, I must have misheard. There was no way she'd recognized me or have known about Este. Her voice saying my mate's name made me gag. Otherwise, I'd bought her the damn hooch.

I shoved a couple aside, eager for the crowd to hide me from my pursuer. "Let me through, heathen."

The faces turned to me, still human but their eyes lit with pre-shift hunger. Four eyes, a dozen, more... All of them glowed with similar aggression, charged with lust and rivalry. Even humans among them looked like they were—

The hell? One she-wolf in heat was normal. But all of them? This wasn't possible, but it explained the wild vibe of this party. Everyone here was driven by the primeval need to mate...when my Este shut us off for a year. It wasn't her fault, but we hadn't mated for a long, long time.

Thinking about Este soured my already sour mood. Were I on the pack's territory, I would have decimated the lot of them with my Alpha's roar. I didn't have it here, so I flexed my shoulders and cracked my neck.

Strength was one thing both rogues and the pack's wolves understood the same way. If a brawl would get me to Steinar faster, then let's have a brawl. "I said, excuse me. So, piss off."

Growls were their response.

A youngster howled louder than the booming music, shifting to a tawny, mangy werewolf. A flea-bag.

Adrenalin flooded my veins, plus something extra.

Way, way extra.

The mating energy in the air dizzied me. I roared with wild laughter. I could take him and I could take a lot of them! Then I'd rip their bleeding livers and throw them to my mate's feet, and she'd go in heat for me. And something else...Este had wanted something else.

"You want to dance? Let's dance!" I shed my human form like shackles. "Give me Dirk Steinar!"

Laughing, I blocked the first punches, whirled and lunged at the nearest opponent. The sound of broken glass was the best song to me. The humans upturned the tables and brandished bottles like clubs.

Danger pumped my blood faster. I grabbed the nearest puny human and sent him sailing toward the bar, toppling a few rival wolves like bowling pins with the body. "Steinar! Dirk Steinar!"

I had never felt so alive.

"Fuckin' junkies," someone keened. "Let's get out of here."

The path to the counter was thinning. I grabbed another human and sent him sailing.

The bartender crouched for cover just in time to dodge my impromptu missile. It hit the shelves, raining the bottles. Explosions of broken glass added to the beat. Whiskey spilled over the counter. The patrons snarled, spoiling for a fight. Oh, yeah, we had a proper bar brawl on our hands.

Rocking on the balls of my feet, hands clenched into fists, I scanned for incoming punches, but out of the corner of my eyes, by the bar...

I blocked someone's swing, used the man's momentum to drop him forward, rolled over his back, gaining the vantage I needed.

Yes, right there, by the bar was the familiar profile and a cheek dotted with silver speckles. I roared in savage delight. "Steinar! Come here! Este wants you!"

"You had enough Este, cur! If you can't hold it, stay off it, moron!"

I didn't know which of the four wolves screeched this, for they all piled on me, trying to wrestle me to the floor. This time, there was no mistake. Whatever it was, he said Este's name.

"How do you know Este?" I dragged the foursome with me in Steinar's direction.

For a second his blue gaze locked on me, full of dread.

"Help!" his mouth flapped. "Help!"

Another wolf blocked the view. "Moron, Este's the drug."

I punched his laughing maw. For a split second, he kept his footing before collapsing onto those pushing towards me.

Scarlett. Drugs. Makes sense.

The potion in that she-wolf's drink, the one I so stupidly drunk—stupid, stupid, stupid!—was as potent as whatever Scarlett had fed me a year ago to fake the mate-madness.

The insidious she-wolf must have simply graduated from individual doses for her enemies to a mass market of lawless pleasure-seekers. That didn't surprise me in the slightest. But naming her latest Goddess-cursed brew the way I called my beloved Celeste...that was low even for an Epsilon.

A guttural growl of pure rage burst out of my chest. A fresh wave of adrenaline boosted my strength to a berserker's blind, destructive level.

The fragments of thoughts popped into my head.

Scarlett, blasted Scarlett!

I couldn't rip her to shreds, so I tore into the rogues, barely swiveling my head to dodge their useless blows.

Este was right! Harold was right. Harold!

I didn't feel a scratch on me, despite the hot, sticky liquid matting my fur everywhere.

Should have driven her out of town. Should have killed her!

I must have blacked out in my fury, because when I cooled enough to check the bar for Steinar, the scoundrel wasn't where I last saw him.

Worse.

Where he had stood, a blue flame spilled from a glass of booze to licked the booze-soaked wood counter with the same feverish passion that ruled the crowd. Long lines of fire shot down the length of the bar.

"Steinar! You stupid piece of—"

Another familiar scent cut my yell off. A mountain of hairy werewolf flesh bore on me—the Brute. How a rogue, cut off from the nourishing influences of the wolves and the forest could grow this large beat me.

Last time, in the snow and the dark of the night, it didn't click that his fur had the same tint as mine, smoky-gray. His eyes were a different shade of green, poisonous green of toxic waste. He slowly flexed his forearms and snarled at me.

"Well, well, well. Isn't it Blake-the-fuckin'-Alpha."

My hackles rose, and I charged the huge rogue head-on.

"Where's Scarlett? Where's Steinar?"

He didn't dodge my grappling move on purpose. He rolled out his barrel chest to show he could take the brunt of my attack. The joke was on him, because we tumbled through the air and crashed to the floor, under the feet of the fighting mob.

The shock in his eyes egged me on. I straddled him and pummeled him, oblivious to the screams and the strands of smoke.

The Brute shoved his claws into my neck and maw, to keep me at bay.

"Scarlett!" I growled into his leathery palm. "Steinar!"

He jerked upright, a move like an earthquake and slashed me across the muzzle. The gush of blood blinded me. I couldn't hold him, despite my veins bulging with effort. We jumped to our feet at the same time.

I wiped blood out of my eyes, regaining the view of the tilting world.

Brute scowled. "Not so tough off your turf, are you, Alpha-boy?"

"Give me Scarlett and Steinar, and I might let you live."

He howled with laughter, then broke into a coughing fit so bad, tears splattered his fur. I tasted acrid smoke as well, gasped for air and ash crunched on my teeth. Behind the Brute, the flames leapt to the walls, blue tipped with orange, encircling us. The kitchen already pulsated scarlet, full of flames.

The rogues were no longer fighting; they were fleeing the fire and the onrush of sirens.

Fire. Police. EMT.

Seattle's best were converging onto the rogue's burning hide-out. At any other time, I'd cheer them on, but my answers were burning along with the Muck's. If I stuck around for too long, I'd be a witness, a victim or a combination of both.

The same thought must have occurred to my opponent. The Brute and I cussed in unison, despite hating each-other's guts.

"This isn't over!" I yelled, shielding my face with my sleeve and dashed toward the door. It was already veiled by a thick cloud of smoke.

We crashed onto the street simultaneously, like two clowns, shifting back to human form as we went. At least, he had the decency to do that and not rely on human's inferior senses to keep the werewolf secret.

"You bet it isn't!" he growled. "It's not over until I say it's over!"

"Oh, piss off..."

He raced away, howling with evil laughter and I shook my fist at his back before it blended into the crowd. Then, I hobbled to my bike. By some miracle, it was intact, despite being parked a yard away from the bonfire that the Muck's was becoming.

"Are you crazy?" Someone screamed at me. "You can't go there!"

I flipped them off and kept going into the scorching heat.

"Stop him! Somebody!"

The hysterical calls came too late.

I grabbed the handlebars, swung into the saddle and took off just as the fire found more food for its insatiable hunger and exploded into a fireball.

With a collective scream, the humans and the wolves fled, except the fire trucks that were pulling in. I envied them for a second. They were heroes, and this inferno was nothing compared to what Este was going to unleash on me at home. But I wanted to be nowhere else.