Veiled Moon Shadow

Alex

Alex POV

Everything in Veiled Moon Shadow and the Veiled Moon pack seems to have been turned upside down as soon as my baby sister, Emma, the youngest member of our family, came home three weeks ago. Technically, Emma is only my adopted sister. Our father adopted her when he and Emma’s mother found they were each other’s second-chance mates and married when Emma was only five years old. Emma's father died, under mysterious circumstances, when Emma was only three years old. The bigger mystery is how Emma survived at such a young and helpless age when her father, also an alpha, did not.

When our parents first met, neither of them was interested in second-chance mates because they truly loved their first mates and felt like they were betraying their memories, but as is typical in our world, they were unable to resist the mate bond. Our dad wanted to adopt Emma because, as an alpha, he could offer her more protection when legally recognized as her parent. The family discussed Emma's mother adopting us as well, but except for Claire, most of us were already in our teens at the time of their marriage and had more memories of our natural mother than Emma would ever have of her biological father. Claire is almost five years older than Emma, and is as protective of Emma as the rest of us, though as a teenager she gets a little bit annoyed when our father designates her as Emma's babysitter.

Emma thinks that I am too hard on her and treat her like a little kid, but it’s because she scares the s**t out of me, and I always worry about her. Unlike everyone else here, and despite being the biological daughter of two werewolves, Emma is the only member of our pack to have never displayed any wolf tendencies. And that is why her presence always turns everything upside down. She does not even know about werewolves. As far as my baby sister is concerned, werewolves, vampires, witches (the supernatural kind), and every other type of supernatural being are nothing more than myths and legends. On top of that, in her far too-educated mind, they are myths that were likely created to keep a patriarchal hold on society. So, here we are, pretending that we are a bunch of basics (our term for your basic humans), no running in wolf form, no using alpha commands out loud. After a couple of weeks of acting like a bunch of basics, I can see why basic humans sometimes lash out. They don’t have wolf forms to shift into and run off for miles when someone has gotten on their last nerve. It is getting frustrating as Hell, but tonight…

Tonight, she went to bed early after spending some time with the triplet princes (Reid, Robert, and Roger), and the alpha of the nearest bear pack (Simon). It sounds worse than it is, though it annoys the s**t out of me. They, my triplet brothers, and myself are best friends and have been since our early school days. Since Emma first began coming here when our parents first met, not even a year after Emma’s birth father died, Emma has been drawn to those four, and they dote on her and are always asking about her, despite being several years older than her. Emma always relaxes when one or more of them holds her. When she was younger and less self-conscious, she would nuzzle into them, taking their scents in deeply as she asked why they always smelled like a bakery in the forest on a rainy night, or the beach boardwalk, or any one of her other favorite scents or scent combinations.