~1~

"You're not really pack you know." The woman who had come up with Hoskins said. Vic had driven up right while Owen was in the middle of exercises with his raptors, perfect timing as usual and she'd come up to the rails with him. He had noticed her, the only one who was calm and unaffected even as one of the handlers came close to falling over into the cage. She'd just watched without any expression on her face which was unusual to say the least.

There was at least some awe that should have shown. The raptors inspired it even if his feats with them didn't. Hoskins was too impressed by them in fact, something that always rubbed Owen the wrong way but the woman's sheer lack of reaction was disconcerting.

"Who are you?"

"Masrani asked me to look over your project." She said, still cold.

"She was feral, raised by wolves." Hoskins clapped a hand over her shoulder and for a brief moment Owen saw thunder make its way onto her face. "Simon thought she'd have some insight you could use."

Vic never did have a way with women. The way Owen's raptors looked at him alone should have told him to back off but he never did take the hint. The days of Vic's visits were when his girls were most organised. Owen was pretty sure they thought if they did well on the exercise he'd let Hoskins in as a treat for them to rip apart.

Whoever this woman was, she wasn't taking it. The hand Vic had left on her shoulder was pulled away at an angle that had Vic on the ground to stop it from breaking and she must have twisted some ligaments anyway. Hoskins on his knees in front of this frankly tiny woman, it was all kinds of amazing.

"Careful where you put your hands. Wouldn't want something to happen to it now would we?" she let his wrist go only after scratching her nails over his pulse briefly. If she had his girls' claws Vic would be bleeding to death already and they all knew that.

"File your reports." Vic told Owen before stalking off, rubbing his wrist.

This was turning out to be a day of oddities. Hell, maybe Owen would go home to find Claire there beaming and discussing their second date in board shorts.

"You gotta teach me how to do that." Owen said his eyes pinned on the quickly retreating car. Hoskins was running out his tail tucked firmly between his legs.

"Some things can't be taught."

Owen laughed. He had been judged and found lacking and he had enough humility to submit to her judgement for the time being. "Owen, Owen Grady." He stuck his hand out but she only took it after she gave him a once over. He felt naked but not in the good way.

"Maxine Laverne." She offered a thin knife's edge smile that didn't reach her eyes.

"So you were saying something before about my pack?"

"They don't think of you as pack. You're an alpha, sure but you're not necessarily their alpha. Frankly I don't know if it's possible for you to be the alpha."

"And why is that?" Owen didn't appreciate being told his position in his pack but she hadn't gone out of her way to offend him yet and Masrani for all his enthusiasm for dinosaurs wasn't a complete idiot. Unlike Vic he listened to Owen when he was told not to get too close to the raptor cage and she had done the same. For that alone he was willing to listen to her.

His girls had been misbehaving of late. Dr Wu said it was a by-product of his girls going through the dinosaur equivalent of puberty but that didn't make it any easier for him to handle. They were getting restless, only last week Blue and Charlie had gotten into a fight and when he'd gone to break it up it had taken a lot of coaxing for him to manage them.

"You're male. We don't know if raptors have female alphas and their mates or the other way round."

"The team at Isla Sorna-"

"Observed them during hatching season, I checked. Dr Wu said that as far as he knows Raptors have a fertility period once every four years only which means that the behaviour they observed was not necessarily what counts as the norm, there were too many variables and nesting behaviour is a good way of judging how the raptors fight due to their protective instincts taking over but it's not an insight into everyday behaviour. Even if it was the norm since all the dinosaurs are engineered to be female they might not accept a male alpha."

"So me being a dude is more of a problem than me being human?"

"You've been having troubles lately with them haven't you?" She said knowingly and a muscle in Owen's jaw twitched.

"Dr Wu says they're going through 'puberty'."

"And that makes them sensitive to pheromones, yours in particular. Besides that you're a bipedal which is a commonality. They know you're different in other ways, softer, more hairy and quite obviously clawless but these things they are used to. They grew up with you."

"I imprinted on them when they were hatched." He said, wondering where she was going with this.

"You're Dad. You put food on the table, you tell them what to do but there's a generation gap. You're not part of their clique even though you're in the family. You don't spend as much time with them as they do with each other. You're not pack. What I saw today with you rewarding good behaviour, that is training behaviour not alpha behaviour. You might run into problems later."

"Later?"

"In case someone decides to fight you for the Alpha position. You might not even realise in what way the challenge presents itself and then you'd lose them. You need to define your place in the pack clearly and solidify it. They want you as Alpha you just have to prove yourself to them."

"And I suppose you have a solution to this?"

The thin sharp smile turned real, reaching her eyes giving them an unholy gleam a bit too reminiscent of Blue. Her teeth were bared slowly in a grin and he just caught the sight of the tip of her tongue running over them in one swift motion before she spoke.

"You need to hunt with them."