This is a work of speculative fanfiction. No profit was made nor was intended to be made. All right to to Twilight and it's sequels and prequels belong to Stephanie Meyer and Little Brown Publishing company. I make no claim to ownership on any of those right nor to any intellectual property of Stephanie Meyer.

AN: Thank you to those who have read, reviewed and/or added this story to their favorites. I enjoy hearing what you think, so feel free to review. I'm sorry for the delay, between family stuff, traveling for Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and then traveling for New Years.. and some hefty writer's block... well this chapter took it out of me. Thanks to Midnitestarr and Melwolfgirl for each helping me in their unique way. And to my beta Pippynz for making sure this wasn't total drek before you all read it.

Chapter Five:

Sometimes you just need to wake up.

Sometimes you just need to... wake up!

When Ingrid woke up the next morning her head felt like it was stuffed full of cement. It always did the day following an inappropriate loss of her control. She remembered Seth, Sam and another wolf, she thought his name might be Brady, getting her out of the bar before she could beat that logger to death. She remembered telling them what had happened and talking to her brother. That was it though. She must have fallen asleep, Ingrid had a pretty good idea of who had taken her home and put her to bed. Seth. What was she going to do about that situation? Ignoring it had led to her act of insane violence and she couldn't let that happen again. Perhaps it couldn't hurt to get to know him a bit better? She still had no intentions of getting romantically or sexually involved with Seth, but maybe indulging him in his need to get to know her better would help in keeping his pack from pushing at her.

Eventually she got up and made her way into her kitchen. Once there she was again greeted with a Clearwater handing her a cup of coffee after having started a fire in her hearth.

"Your family likes my kitchen." she said.

"Huh?" Seth asked.

"Your sister... you know what... never mind." Ingrid was suddenly very much aware of the fact that she had very little idea where she wanted this conversation to go and even less of an idea on how to get it there.

She took the mug in her hand, breathed in the scent, took a sip and sighed. "Coffee... the ambrosia of life."

Seth let out a snort. "Addicted much?"

"The only thing that I love more than a mug of hot coffee is my twin."

Seth's eyebrows raised. "I'm sorry, coffee isn't an addiction for you, it's a religion. Is Starbucks where you go to pray?"

Ingrid just smiled and handed him a bowl. "All I can cook for breakfast is scrambled eggs and I don't have any eggs. So... Rice Krispies?"

They both sat down to big heaping bowls of snap, crackle and pop. For a little bit there was total silence, then Seth began to fill the silence with questions. As Ingrid listened and answered she realized this was how it always was, he asked... she answered as much as she felt like it. She never asked him anything. The question was though, was it because she had no interest or because she was angry?

"Look Ingrid..." Seth seemed unsure how to proceed. "How sure are you that you aren't going to phase?"

"Absolutely positive. Why?"

"Because." he said. "You shook like a leaf in that bar. You looked exactly like we do when we're about to phase from anger. How can you be so sure? I mean, your bloodline isn't even diluted, from what you've told us you're a direct descendent, on your father's side, of the most dominant wolves in two countries. So I don't understand how you can be so sure."

Ingrid leaned back into her chair, knocking back a swig of coffee, now wishing it had some kick of the alcohol variety to it. The nice thing about not being a shape shifter? Alcohol was still useful.

"The average age to shift in Norway and Sweden is twelve years old. That's not because we force it on those we think will shift or because we're genetic freaks. It's because the vampires are swarming all over the fucking place for damn near six months every year. Fall is bad, but winter is hell on earth. By the age of fourteen... if a child of a shifter hasn't phased, they aren't going to. I'm twenty two, trust me... it's never going to happen for me."

Seth looked at her and narrowed his eyes, like he had heard something he needed clarification on. "You sound a bit disappointed. Why?"

"Well... two reasons. The first is that while being a wolf blooded gives me a certain amount of status and rank among my people... wolves have more. They also have more freedom, once they get themselves under control that is. Being a full, fluffy member of a pack is a massive honor, one that all of us wolf blooded had hoped would be ours... and it isn't." She paused for a second, collecting her thoughts, then continued on. "Not that I'm turning cancerous with jealousy or anything, but that freedom you have, when you change forms, I would love to experience that.. just once."

Seth snorted "We feel more like it's a bit of a curse for the most part."

"Than you and your pack are fools Seth." Ingrid's voice was hard. "You have the power to protect your people against threats that no one else can, the ability to live long enough to see things that the rest of us can only dream of. You get to make a difference and stand between innocent people and evil and hold that line, you should be thankful. Most people can only have daydreams of being that useful and important."

Ingrid nearly shook in her anger and disbelief. None of her people would ever dream of being so dismissive of the gift of shape shifting that Fenris had given them. To do so was to tempt him into taking it away. And the Doom Wolf was singularly savage in dealing with ungrateful whelp, or at least... that's what the myths said about him.

Seth held up his hands in a symbol of surrender. "Can we chalk this one up to cultural differences? Something tells me that there's a ton of things we do differently and this is only scratching the surface."

Ingrid nodded, then continued. "The other reason is the anger. I can't channel it the way you guys do. After you've shifted, that anger, that fuel... it's been mostly used. I mean unless you truly have an anger management issue, most of you aren't walking violence bombs. But for a wolf blooded, it's like we have this wolf spirit in us, that's smaller than the ones of the regular pack members... and it can't get out and it tries, tries to make us shift... but it can't. After a while... it's like it goes psychotic inside of us. Without the proper support system of a pack, or damn near iron clad control... my kind end up dead or in prison. So, yeah... we have major violence management issues. The less dominant your wolf parent or parents are, the worse it is. Wolf blooded children of omegas never leave their pack's territory."

Seth eyed his imprint carefully "But you're the daughter of the Jarl, so for the most part, you have the iron clad control."

"Yep." Ingrid finished her coffee and poured herself another cup.

After that they ate and drank in a sort of companionable silence. Each going over their impressions of the other... again. They did this a lot, this constant assessment of the other. For Seth, he was trying to make a connection with his imprint, a good part of him was doing it unconsciously. For Ingrid, it was sizing up a threat and she too did it mostly unconsciously. Still though, the mental circling around each other did not stop. No imprint in his pack's history had ever actively fought the imprint like this, with an absolute and total refusal and it made Seth's inner wolf lurch about in confusion. If the tug of war made him chew tablets of headache medicine... well Seth didn't feel the need to mention it.

After cleaning up from breakfast, Ingrid made Seth take the first shower and she sat on the ottoman and looked warily down the hall as she listened to the water. She realized Seth wasn't a threat, but he was still a wolf and she was still in territory that belonged to a pack not of the Fenrir. Ingrid had training and instincts that made it hard for her to totally relax in that situation.

When he finished and got out, Ingrid took his place, letting the almost scalding hot water massage away the tenseness from all the stress she had been under for the last three weeks. She knew that no one here understood how she felt, how this imprint felt like prison to her, like she couldn't breathe. Back home not only did everyone know how she felt... but for the most part they agreed with her. No one liked Dagmar all that much and while his pack still followed Gunnar and respected his strength, he had lost a portion of their love for how he had treated his wife and children when he imprinted. Ingrid had run with her father and brother's pack long enough for everyone to know to just leave her the hell alone about the subject of imprinting and Dagmar... let alone Marit.

As she toweled herself off afterward she remembered something that her friend Enni said once: "Your family is like a fire. When it's contained, the flames keep us warm and help us protect our people. But if it ever slips out of the fireplace, those flames will burn us all alive... it'll be civil war."

Ingrid hadn't bothered to disagree... the constant stress of that situation had made her leave, she just wondered what could possibly be the reason for her to be the perfect baby maker for Seth. Unless there truly was some sick fuck up there who thought this situation was funny.

Walking back into the main room of her house she saw Seth fiddling with one of her camera lenses. The most expensive one.

"I'm not saying that that lens is more important than your life... but it's a close second."

Seth looked over at her. "You have so much camera equipment, why?"

Ingrid spent the next few hours explaining how all the equipment worked, the fundamentals of photographic composition. How portraiture was different from landscape photography which was different from still life photography. She showed him some of her portfolios, her eyes shining as she talked about one of the few things that made her truly happy.

Seth watched her face as she spoke, this was a side of her that he had never seen before. This was an unguarded Ingrid, someone who was happy. It made him incomparably sad that he had yet to cause her to be happy. The ruthless urge that was imprinting kept screaming at him to make her happy, to make her choose him... and could he please get to making little wolf babies! He was twenty years old and up until he looked at Ingrid he hadn't really thought about kids, but now the urge to reproduce was thrumming in his veins. Every time he saw her neck, he wanted to bite her on the back of it... he was starting to think that his wolf had gone nuts in there... or just spastically horny.

Except... that when he wasn't wanting to mate her in a far more primal sense than he was displaying... he wanted to go hunt an elk and drop it at her feet to prove that he was a good provider. Seth was seriously considering jamming a ball gag into his wolf's mouth and then sticking a straw into a bottle of some strong scotch to level himself out. All these damn urges, some of them contradictory would just not stop. And to top it all off, because the Shitfest Olympics of 2010 weren't over yet... he had the insane urge to call up her twin and demand that Magnus cede any rights to her over to Seth's pack.

He was sure that getting buck with that beta brother of her's was about the dumbest thing he could do right now. Save for jumping Ingrid. So he smiled and listened to his imprint talk about her artistic passion to him whilst silently threatening his wolf with everything up to and including castration so that it would shut the hell up.

When he finally left for patrol, he was cranky, sarcastic and an all around pain in the ass to be near. Eventually Quil had enough and yanked on his tail so hard that Seth went ass over heels. After that... he just thought about the Seattle Mariners, which was still depressing... they were in yet another losing streak.

XXXXX XXXXXX

The following afternoon Leah was polishing off a plate of brownies when her little brother plopped into the kitchen chair next to her. Leah had moved out of her childhood house years ago but she came home once a week to spend the afternoon and then dinner with her mother and Seth.

"Things not so happy in imprint land?" she asked.

Seth actually growled at her. "Yeah Leah... it sucks okay? Are you happy now? You found someone who feels EXACTLY like you do about imprinting. Someone who hates it just as much... fuck... she may actually hate it even more than you do. And she's my imprint!"

He paused for a second and then leaned his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. "And I don't blame her. I'll never forget how much you cried when Sam broke off the engagement, how angry you were at Emily, how sick you got." He pulled a hand over his eyes and then let it flop down to the table. "Looking at Ingrid makes me think of you. How if Emily had visited just a few years later... you could have been just like Ingrid's mother, how your daughter or son would have grown up to be Ingrid."

Leah's head was down, neither sibling would meet each others eyes"I know, I used to think that what happened between me and Sam was as bad as it could get but I was wrong."

She reached over and shoved a brownie in Seth's mouth. "Eat, brownies make everything better. I think I ate La Push and Forks out of brownie mix after Sam imprinted."

"I remember." he replied... around a face full of chocolatey goodness. "It was the only time you would come downstairs. The kitchen constantly smelled like Duncan Hines brownies."

Leah cleaned up the mess and looked around the kitchen. Moving out of this house had helped her a great deal. Living someplace else, someplace that held no memories of her and Sam, of her father, it made things easier. She could walk in the front door of her apartment and be confronted by images of only her. In a life where nothing was hers anymore, not even the sanctity of her own mind... living alone kept her sane.

"I'm not gleeful Seth. I mean yeah... I'm not going to lie, it IS nice to have someone who agrees with me about how much bullshit imprinting is. But I don't like seeing you hurt, you're miserable and I hate that. I guess you could say that I'm really conflicted right now." she said.

Seth washed down the brownie with milk. "You aren't the only one Lee. After what happened to you and then watching Quil become a shell of himself with Claire... imprinting isn't something I've wanted. I was hoping that it would pass me by... it's supposed to be rare. But I'm the fourth one to imprint. Damn near half the pack is imprinted... how is that rare?"

Leah smiled at him. Seth had always tried to support her, first before they phased when she was reeling from what had happened between her and Sam and then afterward, when she was grieving their father and having her skin crawl from being forced to share minds with her former fiance and all his thoughts about Emily. Seth had always been there. Maybe not always happy about it, what young adolescent male would be? Nevertheless, he had always been loyal.

After she had moved out, she had one bad night, awful actually. She had thought that the day she moved away from home, it would be to move in with Sam and that's what they had been planning until her cousin came to visit. So walking into that empty apartment by herself had been depressing. After that night though, she had never looked back and she had her brother to thank for that. He was the one who told her to move out, to get away from all the damn ghosts haunting her... to be satisfied with life again. She wasn't all the way there yet, but she had started down the road because of Seth. Looking down at him, she wished she could figure out how to do the same for brother.

"You know Seth, the elders say that each wolf has to be what his imprint wants him to be. Maybe you're so upset because you want something that she's unable to give to you." Leah said. "Maybe you should accept what she can offer to you now and then see if it changes later. But also accept the fact that it may never change."

Seth banged his head on the table. "You mean be happy about the fact that my imprint bond is all fucked to hell and go with it?"

"Pretty much... yeah. Besides, it could be worse... she could have been a preschooler." Leah replied.

Seth threw the brownie pan at her head. "Shut your mouth."

As they cooked dinner for their mother the two siblings talked and joked. Regaling each other with jokes heard and silly mistakes made. They hadn't patrolled together lately... so this was the first they'd really been able to spend time with each other since Seth had imprinted.

Later, after Leah went home that night, she thought about the woman who had imprinted on her brother. She wanted to get to know her a bit better. Why not just go back over to her house and say hello? She sighed as she gathered everything together for her meeting with Jake, Sam and Paul tomorrow. The schedule wasn't working anymore and it was time to go over it... again. She had time in the morning though... yes, the morning. She would stop by Ingrid's house and see if she could get to know her brother's reluctant imprint then.

XXXXX XXXXXXX

Ingrid was working in her dark room when she heard the doorbell ring. When she got there she saw Leah Clearwater at her front door.

"Come on in." she said.

Leah stepped through the front door and took a better look at her surroundings than she had the first time she'd been here. The place was decorated in warm, reddish toned woods and looked like it had been built in the twenties or thirties. All the furniture seemed to be upholstered in greens and dark browns. As she walked through the rooms following Ingrid she noticed that there were books and photo albums everywhere... but little in the way of personal decoration. The house was comfortable but besides letting one know that the person living here liked to read and was a photographer... it said next to nothing about Ingrid.

Leah was led into the kitchen and given a cup of coffee.

"I'm almost done in the darkroom, just give me five minutes and I'll join you." Ingrid said as she hurried back into the room at the end of the hall.

Leah looked over the kitchen while Ingrid was gone. The woman clearly had a love affair going on with coffee that rivaled Leah's long and deeply committed relationship with chocolate. There were several different kinds in canisters all over the counters. The kitchen looked like it was older than the rest of the house, like it was the sole survivor of an earlier property. There was copper cookware hanging over the enormous farm table in the center of the room, though from the patrols that the pack ran by her house, Ingrid never had any guests to actually need a table this large.

When she came back in, Ingrid watched Leah looking over her kitchen with the eyes of a hawk.

"Trying to figure me out for your brother?" she asked.

"No." Leah replied. "I'm trying to figure you out for myself. You're interesting."

"I try. So... you hungry?"

"I could eat." Leah said. "Though, I'm a wolf... I can always eat."

Ingrid called for pizza delivery and then sat with Leah at her table. Looking at the she wolf, the woman looked like having a regular conversation was akin to having minor surgery done. Less than comfortable.

The Norwegian finally cracked. "Okay, we can stare at each other until the food gets here or we can try talking. I promise that I don't bite... not that it would hurt you if I did."

Leah took a deep breath and then fired off the question she had been wanting to ask Ingrid.

"You said that being the only female wolf in my pack must suck back when I spent the night here. Are there more of my kind where you're from?" Leah's voice was so hopeful that it was almost painful to listen to.

"Yeah. Plenty. My father's pack has four and when I left there was a fifth girl who was showing the signs of being a pre phase. Though, whether she turns out to be like you or like me remains to be seen." Ingrid slid her some more coffee. "Fenrir packs are pretty big, even the urban ones are a bit sizable, though rural packs are always the largest. Anyway, four or five female wolves is about the average for each pack. They are definitely a minority, but they aren't rare."

Leah's eyes shone with tears. The sheer emotional weight of not being the only one anymore was tangibly off her shoulders. It was like something had shifted inside of her. She was no longer a freak, no longer unique and alone. Even if she never met any of these female wolves, the fact of their mere existence was... paradigm shifting.

Ingrid raised that eyebrow of her's. "I take it that your pack hasn't had a female in it for a long time?"

"Try never." replied Leah.

She smiled brightly at Leah. "Well it's only 11am, but this still calls for a celebration... besides it's not like we aren't going to be eating pizza."

Ingrid got two beers out of the fridge and uncapped them then handed one to Leah. "Cheers. Here's to knowing that you're not alone anymore."

Leah drank to that and soon thereafter the pizza delivery man came and the two drank a few more beers and ate . It turned out that they saw life in very similar ways, beyond their opinions on imprinting. Life had been hard on both women, taken away a lot of things from them and left them with little that they could do about it. They had ended up with a mindset that valued self sufficiency above all things.

As Leah got up to leave to head on over to her meeting Ingrid called out for her to wait. Then she disappeared into her office and came out with a large manilla envelope with a bunch of papers in it which she handed to Leah.

"I remembered about that plot of land that your alpha wanted you guys to keep an eye on. The one with the crystal huggers on it. Anyway, I called one of my friends in my pack, Enni, she's damn good with a computer and she got me all this info on the history of that particular parcel of real estate. It's quite the tale." she said.

Leah took the envelope. "Come with me... you might as well brief me at the same time as Jake, Sam and Paul."

Ingrid sighed and agreed, after offering to drive Leah, who had 'wolfed' it up to her house, then she put some shoes on and got in her car. As she drove, she sincerely hoped that this meeting would go better than her last one had. She was really not looking forward to butting heads with a beta on a regular basis. It wasn't particularly good for one's health. So with a certain amount of trepidation, she drove to Sam Uley's house and hoped they could get along better or at least not so openly get on each others nerves.

When they arrived, the three male wolves seemed surprised at Ingrid's presence but not so much surprised that she appeared to have struck up a sort of friendship with Leah. The she wolf told them why Seth's imprint was there and they all went and sat at the kitchen table.

First the top four discussed the patrol schedule. It was Collin and Brady's senior year in high school coming up. They started next week and it was important that they graduated on time and with decent grades. The pack had learned some hard educational lessons with some of the older wolves and were determined to show that they had learned from them with the twins. Not for the first time did Sam and Leah both express their relief that they had been finished with high school when they phased. After figuring out how to cut the two youngest wolves some slack without running the rest of the pack into the ground they discussed some treaty specifics having to do with the Cullens. Veggie vamps still threw Ingrid for a loop, but she said nothing.

Eventually Leah told them about the info that Ingrid had gathered for them and they all turned to her. For a moment Ingrid looked like she wasn't going to say a word and then with military like precision, she began.

"I'll spare some of the in depth stuff for you to read about, it's all there in the report. Anyway, that land was owned by the diocese of the Catholic church that is responsible for Forks, La Push and the surrounding areas, from the turn of the century till 1944. Before that it was in the court system as to who owned it, the Quilluete tribe or the town of Forks. The diocese offered a sum of money to be split between both groups in 1903 and both the tribe and the town accepted that and the land became the property of the church.."

She pulled out the court case paperwork and the legal sale documents and put them on the table, then she continued. "The church used it as a camp for under privileged urban children ages 5 to 12 until 1933. That's when it gets ugly. It was right in the middle of the American Great Depression and the camp had more kids than they would normally be allowed to have on the property. There weren't enough counselors and there were a few accidents. There was talk about shutting the camp down early that year but ultimately, it stayed open. Ultimately and unfortunately."

Ingrid pulled out the accident reports that Enni had forwarded to her and handed them to Paul who had reached for them. Then she continued, though this time with a pained look on her face. "There's no easy way to say this. On the night of August 2nd, 1933 there was what can only be called a massacre at the camp. Only two children survived. A little girl named Dorothy O'Grady aged 10 and a little boy named Joseph Visselli aged 8. Every single other human being was killed, a lot of the bodies weren't found, though the amount of blood spilled was inconsistent with human life. In other words there was too much blood spatter all over the place for the missing to have lived. The two survivors were found hidden in a tree, whether they climbed up it or where placed there by one of the older kids or adults to save their lives they never said. Both grew up to be severely emotionally affected by the incident and Joseph Visselli was institutionalized by the time he was 13 and stayed that way until his death at the age of 53."

"Jesus." Leah muttered.

"How in the hell do we not know about this?" asked Paul.

"Because the church did their level best to keep it out of the papers." Ingrid replied. "At that time the Catholic church, hell any church had far more sway and power than they do in today's society. No reporters were allowed in and the clergy put a lot of pressure on the parents of the children killed to not talk about it. People knew, but the gossip dried up quickly when there simply wasn't enough put out there to fan the flames. If you jogged the memories of your grandparents, they'd probably remember the incident or at least the talk about it if they were too young to have actual memories of it first hand."

Jake rubbed at the headache that was growing behind his eyes again. "Save me from G-d's followers, they screw up more than they help sometimes."

Ingrid dumped the rest of the papers onto the table and finished the gruesome tale. "The killer or killers were never found and even though the area was combed thoroughly for the missing bodies, they were never found either. The diocese held onto the camp for eleven years after that, but as you can imagine... no one wanted to work there after they found out what had happened. Finally the church sold the land back to the federal government in 1944 and it lay fallow until a few months ago when the Fellowship of Self Actualization and Happiness bought it. Those would be the crystal huggers. They appear to be a cult that has mixed Christianity with your basic British Isles pagan beliefs."

Then with a flourish she pulled out some photos. "While there were no reporters allowed in, the crime scene photos still exist and I have friends in low places and was able to get some copies made. I've seen this kind of thing before. The savagery, the way these bodies look. A vampire or group of vampires did this. If I had to hazard a guess I would say it was newborn. The overkill is obvious and their thirst is immense, if changed and then abandoned... this is what they will do."

Everyone grimaced when they looked at those photos, not a single one of them was hard enough to not be moved and disgusted by the sight of the children's bodies. Sam pushed them back into the envelope, not wanting them to pollute his table for a second longer.

Jake looked over at Ingrid and his voice was heavy when he spoke. "Thank you for getting this information for us. Though I have to say that I find it a bit disturbing that you can spot a newborn attack just by looking at some photos."

She shrugged and replied "I don't have my tattoo for show. I earned it."

As they discussed further possibilities about the cult and what they were doing up there to make Charlie so suspicious, Leah and Paul left for their patrol. Both were talking about the information and finishing each others sentences as they walked outside to phase. The anger leaked out of both of them and it was hard not to feel a bit sorry for anything they found while they were running. Leah and Paul were the exact same level of dominant and when provoked they had the exact same level of savage anger. Though Paul had always needed a bit less provoking than Leah. Regardless, right now... they were provoked and Jake and Sam were more than a little bit relieved that they had a channel for it.

As Ingrid got up to go to her car and head home the alpha and the beta stopped her on the front porch.

Sam looked her over and finally said what he and Jake had been wondering how to phrase. "Look, Seth told us what you told him about you not phasing. But still... at that moment, you truly looked like you were going to slip your skin and pop claws. Are you sure? Maybe you just were never provoked enough."

Ingrid stood by the driver's side door of her car and looked at Jake and Sam. "When I was ten years old I hid in a closet with my brother and listened as vampires drained my mother dry. He's a wolf, that started the process for him. If that didn't do the job... nothing will."

Jake and Sam watched her drive away, neither of them could find a reason to argue with her.

AN: Just to squash any hopes or speculation, I feel it necessary to point out here that Ingrid is not a she wolf in hiding. She will never change and I hope that that does not ruin things for anyone. It is a question that I have been asked and felt should be answered.