Prologue—The Herd
There were very few people that Manfred Dorn couldn't read like an open book. For instance, he knew his best friend, Sidney Klein, was a lot more intelligent than people gave him credit for. He just had an innocent outlook on life, an innocence that sometimes bordered on naivety. Manny knew how much his girlfriend, Ellinor Sparks, wanted to meet her birth parents, even after they had abandoned her as a toddler. And he knew Ellie's adoptive brothers, the twins Carson and Edward, only acted stupid to keep everyone smiling.
He could read them as easily as he could read the humans, because he knew them so well. He'd known Sid since he was very young, and he had assumed a protective role over the slightly younger boy, like an older brother. Manny's own younger brother, Finnley, had died in an attack that had also taken Manny's parents. Manny had been taken in by the Kleins when he was fourteen, and therefore, Sid and his three sisters—Lizelle, Brynn, and Tallisa—had become Manny's siblings.
Ellie and her brothers they had met later, at the beginning of high school. The caramel-haired girl had immediately intrigued him, as he couldn't read her at all. That was how he had known her, and her brothers, were part of their world. Falling in love with a girl like Ellie had been a hard task, mostly because Ellie hadn't known what she was. Manny had tried to help her as gently as he could, but subtly had never been his strong suit. In the end, it had worked out, and Manny now knew who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
No, there weren't many Manfred Dorn couldn't read like an open book. That, however, was before he had met Diego Kestrel.
From a very young age, Manfred Dorn had known he was a Therianthrope. It was obvious, really, if you knew what you were looking for. His hair was the colour of rich, dark chocolate, and his liquid brown eyes burned with the light of the sun when he was angry. He had always been tall for his age, and strong.
When his parents had come into his room once when he was about six years old, they had been unsurprised to discover that an animal had replaced their son. After all, they were Therianthropes, as well. What was surprising, however, was the type of animal that had replaced their son. Manny was a woolly mammoth. In the thousands of years of the history of their kind, none of them had ever shifted into an animal that was not their family's animal, and none of them had ever shifted into an animal that was extinct.
Aleighsha Dorn recalled a story as her son slumbered on, of an ancestor of theirs whose name had long been forgotten. The story told of how he had been kidnapped as a baby and then returned to his father by an unusual pair of animals, a Woolly Mammoth and a Giant Ground Sloth. It seemed her son was part of something, something larger than her or her husband, something larger than their entire world. Sighing slightly as she stood, Aleighsha Dorn had followed her husband out of her son's room. There would be so much to teach him, and so little time to do it in. They could no longer afford to put off his training. Aleighsha rested a small hand on her swollen belly, rubbing small circles. Her husband, Hector, would start his training in the morning. She, on the other hand, would be waiting for their second son.
Finnley. That would be his name, after her father.