Jack and Danny put their suitcases on their respective hotel beds and crashed, Danny on his bed and Jack in the chair by the door. "So how do you know so much about Two Blood packs?" Danny asked. Between work, Mr. Fitzgerald's appearance and arrest at the office, the flight and then their encounter with yet more members of Vin's pack it had been a very long day.

"I worked an accidental pupnapping a few years ago. A twenty year old black male robbed a convenience store and then when his getaway car wouldn't start he carjacked a pack member's car in the parking lot of the grocery store across the street. She ended up with two bullets in her and he took off with the car, and her two pups in the backseat. Needless to say he got hurt in the process of jacking the car and the pack finished him off when we caught up with him and the pups. I was assigned to stay with the pack in the hospital while the rest of the pack helped track down the carjacker." Jack stretched as best as he could in the chair. "I'm too beat to go out. Do you want to order in some room service?"

"Sounds good to me," Danny said.

"I spent a lot of time in that hospital room listening to the oldest member of the pack tell the pups bed time stories and history from the Two Blood's point of view. I learned a lot about them by keeping quiet and just listening. It was fascinating stuff." Jack said as he picked up the room service menu. He quickly placed an order for the both of them since he knew Danny's favorites from stake outs and similar business trips.

"Did you ever see one of them change? I've always wondered about that. I mean is it like the werewolf transformations they show in the movies or is it different?"

Jack smirked; it was just like Danny to ask about that. "It isn't anything like the movies. For one thing, they tend to strip before they change from human to wolf. They also tend to wear the least amount of clothing they can get away with so they can make the change faster." He settled back in his chair and tilted his head back and a little to the side, remembering. "There is this charge to the air when they're about to change almost like there's about to be a lightening strike. One minute their human and the next they're a wolf. There isn't any of that moaning or groaning or weird sound effects like they're being ripped apart or something," Jack said chuckling. Those werewolf movies really hammed it up in his opinion. He didn't think real werewolves or others who were changed by magic or curse went through that bad a transformation either. "What really surprised me was how honest they were with the other pups in the pack. There were six pups in all, one set of triplets and one single child besides the two who were missing. They spent almost the entire time on the hospital bed and nothing was held back from them. Not how hurt and sick the mother of the missing pups was, what was going to happen to the man who had shot her and taken the pups, nothing. They didn't make any effort at all to hide anything of what was going on from those kids. I did ask about it after the kids had fallen asleep. The elder storyteller told me that unlike we one bloods, telling the kids a lie wasn't a possibility because not only could the kids smell how hurt their aunt was, they would be able to smell what was done to the carjacker. There are very few outright lies among a Two Blood pack, there are secrets, but for the most part they are either of the Christmas present or personal nature type."

"How personal can personal be if they could smell that the guy got turned into hamburger for shooting a packmember and pupnapping their cousins?" Danny wanted to know.

"I don't think they could lie about sex or something like that, but say if someone was upset about something and just didn't want to talk about it they'd give that person their privacy and not ask." Jack said.

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Vin couldn't wait to get to Josiah's place. The pack had been apart for too long and this time he would get to see and help raise Adam. He loved kids and it was only the years of practice he had as a sharpshooter and sniper that allowed him to sit quietly and wait. Not that it mattered; his brothers could see that he was about ready to climb the sides of the van. It wasn't often that their pack included children. Although there wasn't one member of the pack that wouldn't and in the past hadn't made a good father, it was hard to find a wife who would accept becoming part of a Two Blood pack. Ezra in particular had become quite sarcastic over the matter. There just weren't that many females who could accept the seven, much less the pack.

Vin's thoughts wandered to his mother and he wondered where she fell in the spectrum of the women he had known over the last almost 150 years. Would she be like Miss Nettie, his mother of the heart? Or would she be like Grace, the girl he had met in his last life who had literally run screaming from the very idea of being surrounded by a Two Blood pack? As exciting as the thought of finally meeting his mother again was, he had no real idea of how she would react. It was enough to make him think he'd sat himself on an ant hill the way his thoughts had him squirming. He knew he wouldn't settle until he had seen Chris again. Chris would make everything alright. For a pack it wasn't a childish thought and for their pack it was even less so. No matter how his meeting with his mother went in the morning his Alpha would be there to soften the blow or to help him celebrate. The rest of his pack would be there as well, even little JD, but right now he just needed to see Chris. Without an Alpha a pack was directionless and uncontrollable, theirs more than most. Stubborn, hard headed, temperamental, childish, Vin couldn't remember all of the names he and his brothers had been called over the years but he knew that without Chris they would have been in a world of hurt because Chris was the only one who could ride herd on them. Chris wasn't a cowboy, he was a packboy. Vin snorted at the thought and waved off the looks he knew were aimed in his direction. He'd share later.

Josiah pulled up in front of the old Victorian house that he had bought years ago and everyone piled out of the van. Vin started to walk up to the porch only to be bowled over by an enormous timber wolf. "Buck! Get off you overgrown tom cat!" Vin yelled as he hit the ground. Buck responded by licking Vin's face in a demonstration of lupine excitement. Vin laughed as he tried desperately to avoid Buck's long tongue and bury his hands in Buck's fur to give him a good scratching at the same time.

Chris Larabee stepped out onto the porch and watched his pack gather around their lost brother. It was finally time. Vin was back and the pack was almost complete.