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"Don’t joke about that Bad enough to put up with two of theoing ho, but she was pretty cool"

"I didn’t say she wasn’t pretty cool; I said I’ home I kind of like her," she said with reluctance "All most people want to do when they find out who I a wishes or how I deal with pruned fingers Betsy’s so self-involved, she doesn’t care about any of that With her it’s all cut to the chase so I can go home and catch the Macy’s sale"

"So you like her because she’s self-involved?"

"Really self-involved To an astonishing degree It et the feeling she was like that in life, too"

"Yes, but I think in un-death she hides behind it a little She’s not as ditzy as she see"

For her? Or for us? Fred didn’t know, and was too exhausted to care But when she’d slept a while she’d give the ht Betsy Taylor had been the most terrible wonderful person she had ever met Or the most wonderful terrible person It wouldn’t do to let such a person slip off her radar

Not at all

Incomer

CHAPTER ONE

TEN YEARS EARLIER

She was happy she was born during the worst winter Massachusetts had seen in decades--since 1994, the old-tie usually happened around their birthday Which er and chaos of her first Change, she didn’t have to worry about running into any of the three million three hundred thousand tourists who flocked to Cape Cod in the summer and fall Tourists didn’t have much interest in Massachusetts in mid-January, even the ferociously rude ones

More cla so hard the sand flew ten feet and hit hard enough to scratch glass (if there had been a glass sheet in the middle of the beach in the middle of January) The moon was full and soared above her, fat and white The histled off the Atlantic and chilled her, but not as much as it would have if she was down there in her tender pink skin and her pale hairless hands and her pale hairless feet

She wasn’t! So that was good! There was a ti paws, and this was paw ti for her dinner, the hole already so big if she wasn’t careful she’d slip on shifting sand and topple into it She was not known for her grace, on four feet or two Wouldn’t that be a funny thing for her Pack mates to see! Here is your future alpha leader, the one whose hairy butt is sticking out of that hole

Ha!

Even if she didn’t get her teeth on the cla for her dinner was intoxicating She would decide when and what to eat! Not Mother! She would decide if it was clams or rabbit or both or neither! Not Mother! She would blow off erosion concerns and decide how raphic Institution! She was thirteen; she wasn’t a baby cub anymore Those decisions should be hers, but herstubborn Double stubborn!

She can’t even Change, she’ll never Change, but Mother decides? It’s wrong-bad

But that ful; worse, it was disloyal and mean Her mother hadn’t been born to the Pack, but that was okay She and Lara’s father had met on an elevator, and conceived Lara on that elevator, and that was okay; that was life in the big city Her mother was the alpha female and, thus, the full fat hts, and that wassorta okay Lara would owe Mother respect all the days she was the alpha female, and all the days after, when Lara herself was And she wouldn’t be for years and years and years and years and years, and it would be years-long, it would be years-forever before she would lose her

Thoughts for thinking later So rass and rot and fish and cold and wood and a thousand others, each one begging to be followed to its source, each one calling her like chi for supper No, she would run down the dead fish up the beach No, she would dig No, she would flush rabbits fro Why was she digging again? Oh Supper-food

A seagull who thought he had dibs swooped above her and dived, then pulled up at the last instant He soared above her and dived again, all the tiht up and her teeth snapped shut a bare inch fro it in ot you, gull-bird! More of that if you get too close! Might get you next tiht

There had never been a ht in the history of forever