Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When the call comes, James doesn’t bother to ask how Johannah got his number. Wolves have their ways, their networks.

“James!” Her voice is warm, as familiar as if it’s been ten days rather than ten years since they’ve seen each other. “How’ve you been?”

He and Johannah had worked on a television show together. It was a novelty and a comfort to have another wolf on set, but they hadn’t kept in touch afterwards. Different territories, different packs.

“Oh, the usual. Working hard. It’s nice to hear from you.” James is far enough along now that phone calls from past acquaintances usually aren’t because they miss his company. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about the small talk when it only leads up to him being asked to read a script, or procure some tickets, or cast a friend of friend in a bit part.

“Your show was brilliant,” Johannah says. “You’ve done so well for yourself. I always knew you would.”

That means something, coming from Johannah. Only a wolf could have any idea how hard it’s been for James to accomplish what he has. So he lets himself bask in the compliments, even if Johannah’s only buttering him up for what comes next.

Her tone shifts, a little more guarded but no less warm. “My boy Louis is in London as well.”

Louis had only come to the set with Johannah once, but once was plenty. Even ten years later, James remembers what a little terror he was, riling up all the young actors who’d been obediently following Johannah around all week. Somehow, nobody got mad at him. James thought then that Louis would be an alpha someday, if only because James couldn’t imagine any other wolf being willing to take responsibility for him.

Louis must be close to grown by now, James realises. It’s unexpected to hear he’s in the city. Going by scent and rumor, James thought Amy Winehouse was the only other wolf in London these days. Wolves aren’t meant for the city. Amy’s living proof of that.

Johannah keeps going. “He’s got some friends, wolves too.”

“How many?” James can’t help the surprise in his voice. One teenage werewolf in the city is improbable enough. It’s hard to believe there could be more.

“There’s five of them altogether.” She laughs, the sound bright and a bit nervous. “They could use someone to look after them.”

James is immediately suspicious. Loose affiliations of werewolves are volatile. Wolves need a place in the scaffolding of a pack, to brace something up and know how they’ll be braced. He’s not interested in looking after a bunch of teenagers while they create that structure from scratch, paws and teeth pinning each other’s throats until the only one not on the ground becomes the alpha.

Then he realizes Johannah may be suggesting something else entirely. “I’m not an alpha,” he reminds her. “I’d be a rubbish alpha.”

Johannah laughs, surprised. “That’s not what they need.” She doesn’t seem worried.

“I’m kind of a rubbish wolf at all, to be quite honest,” James admits. “Not much of a role model.” He’s not trying to talk her out of anything, exactly, but it’s only fair she should know. He can’t remember the last time he shifted outside the full moon. Barely even considers himself part of his pack anymore, miles away and not in touch as often as he should be.

“Don’t worry about that,” Johannah reassures him. “I think you’ll rather enjoy them.”

“What are they doing in London?”

“They’re like you,” she says, fondly. “Meant for bigger things.”

***

Even though he’s expecting them, James still looks through the peephole when the doorbell rings. The five faces more than fill the lens. James is no stranger to crowds of werewolves, and yet he’s never seen so much hair hanging in so many faces at once.

He tugs open the door wanting to hustle them inside like contraband. The impulse is irrational, since the boys are thoroughly human, right down to the Abercrombie and Jack Wills logos they’re plastered with. But it seems impossible that the neighbours won’t notice a porch full of such obvious wolves.

The boys are pressed in with their arms draped over each other, a formation, with the one who must be Johannah’s boy at the point of it. It concentrates their scent so that James can’t pick them out individually. All he gets is a collective lungful of adolescent werewolf, nervy and hormonal and ready to take on the world. They’re too close together, too much altogether.

For a man at his own front door, James feels oddly unsettled. Five pups hadn’t sounded like very many on the phone, not even enough to fill his sofa, but this pack seems to take up more room than most.

“You must be Louis.” James stretches out a hand and the one in front separates from the formation. A handshake is an awkward and inadequate way to greet another wolf, but this lot is going to have to get used to shaking hands in the industry, aren’t they.

“Louis Tomlinson.” He looks James straight in the eye, chin up and grasp firm. “Thanks for having us.”

“Come on inside, I’ve got some lunch ready.” James steps backward out of the doorway and the boys file in one by one, introducing themselves. And, more importantly, giving James the opportunity to catch their scents.

James had watched some of their X Factor videos after Johannah called, and learned to pick out Harry, Niall, and Zayn. He kept getting Louis and Liam confused, but he won’t have that problem again. In person, Louis reeks of alpha.

Liam, the next one through the door, decidedly does not. He smells strangely domesticated, more Great Dane than wolf. “Thank you for having us,” he echoes Louis, smiling and nervous as he shakes James’s hand.

Niall’s next up, with a scent like grass and sunshine. Then Zayn, and James can’t quite put his finger on what Zayn’s scent reminds him of. Something warm, like gingerbread, or maybe that’s the colour of his eyes.

James doesn’t even bother trying to figure out what Harry’s scent is. He just takes a few breaths too many before he realizes he’s probably been gripping Harry’s hand for a few beats too long. Whatever he smells like, it’s compelling.

Harry doesn’t seem fazed. “M’Harry,” he says, grinning and leaning just a bit in toward James before he drops his hand.

James closes the door and shakes his head to clear his sinuses. By the time he flips the Yale lock and turns back to the boys, they’re already shifting, melting into it easy as butter. They leave a mess of hoodies and scarves and unlaced boots behind them as they scamper towards the kitchen, the wolves just as leggy and half-grown as the boys. They’re moving too fast and close for James to tell who’s who.

One of them (shaggy and dark, maybe Harry?) takes the turn too fast and goes sprawling past the kitchen doorway with his paws pointed four different directions. The two behind him fling themselves on the floor to slide into him, yapping and nipping at each other’s necks.

Once they sort themselves out of the pile-up and follow the rest of the pack into the kitchen, toenails clattering on the hardwood, James picks his way after them through the discarded clothing. Maybe that’s why Johannah sent them here, so James could teach them some manners. He sighs. Louis doesn’t seem the type to take direction well, for himself or for his pack.

The pups are milling around the kitchen. Liam, the tallest, has his paws up on the counter in the vicinity of the breadbasket. Louis is trying to climb him. James makes a sharp noise and Liam drops to the ground with a chastened expression, dislodging Louis, who does not look chastened in the least.

“All right.” James claps his hands. The wolves settle down on the floor in front of the sink, orienting themselves toward him. “I’ve got a pot of soup on, if you’d like to shift. Or if you’d rather stay like this I can give you mince.”

Louis steps forward a couple of deliberate paces and sits down almost on top of James’s feet, never breaking eye contact. He barks once, short and demanding.

James nods and opens the refrigerator. The beef was intended for meatloaf tonight, but he supposes the soup will do just as well later. He separates the stack of soup bowls on the counter and portions the meat out between them.

The pack is surprisingly restrained when James starts to line the bowls up on the floor, waiting until all five are down before they surge forward. James remembers, too late, that his dishes aren’t ideal for this. With no traction, the bowls slide along the floor as the wolves bury their snouts in them. Zayn neatly secures his under the lip of the counter, but Niall chases his bowl all the way across the room before he manages to pin it between his paws. Harry and Louis, eyes on their escaping food, collide with each other and spring back with yelps of surprise.

Despite the chaos of the meal, the whole pack politely follows Harry’s lead and nudges their empty bowls toward the sink when they’re finished. Then Louis darts toward the back door, pawing at it demandingly. James winces at the scratches in the paint and hurries to let the pups into the garden before Louis can do any more damage.

The garden is the reason James bought the house. It’s surrounded by a high brick wall, safe from the eyes of the neighbours, and has a back gate to the greenbelt that runs behind the neighbourhood. He’s put in a water feature, a low oblong basin that’s just the right height for a long drink when he comes home the morning after a full moon. It’s the one and only change he’s made around the house to indulge his wolf.

Louis’s got Liam backed up on the edge of the basin, nipping and batting at Liam’s paws until he loses his balance and topples in with a splash. With obvious satisfaction, he watches Liam struggle out of the water. Liam vigorously shakes himself off all over Louis, both of their tails wagging with delight.

James ladles himself a bowl of soup and settles into a patio chair. The December air is chilly, but that’s not a problem for a wolf, even in human form. The pack is running from one end of the garden to the other, colliding and pouncing on top of each other. Harry keeps getting distracted chasing his own tail. Louis sets his paws on the gate to the greenbelt and looks back at James, an inquiry. James slowly and deliberately shakes his head back and forth, a firm no.

For a moment, James considers joining them. The realization that he feels better equipped to keep this strange pack in line as a human than as a wolf is disappointing. His wolf is 45 kilos of muscle and teeth – how can his flabby human form feel more powerful than that?

He thinks back to the boys shifting without hesitation in the front hall. James remembers it being that easy when he was a teenager, bones pliant as candlewax and skin stretching and snapping back without resistance. Lately his shifts feel more like ice in a blender. Some of it’s age, but mostly it’s his own fault. He’s let the wolf fade from a habit into a monthly appointment. His body’s lost the ease of shifting without the moon to compel him.

James loses track of time watching the pups wear themselves out. When Liam flops down at his feet, he’s surprised to realize that the winter light is fading behind the trees. Louis follows, sitting on top of Liam’s head, and Harry drapes himself over Liam’s hindquarters. Liam’s eyes close happily. Zayn and Niall collapse against the pile, Niall gnawing gently at Zayn’s ear.

James reaches down with both hands, scratching behind ears and under chins as the pups rub against his feet and ankles, scenting him. It’s oddly soothing to feel coarse fur under his hands and warm wolf bodies pressing against his. Harry’s the first to roll over for a belly rub, and the others follow. But not Louis, who sits back and keeps a watchful eye on James.

“If you wouldn’t mind shifting, it would be nice to talk,” James proposes diplomatically. Although the request is for the whole pack, he directs it to Louis. Louis inclines his head to James and starts toward the house. The rest of the pack scrambles to their feet and follows on Louis’s heels.

James weaves through them to open the door, and the wolves pad toward the front hall. He puts the soup bowls in the dishwasher as the sounds of laughter and scuffling start to trickle back toward the kitchen.

Louis is the first to appear, now in jeans and a striped shirt, hair just as artfully mussed as it was before he shifted. “Sorry if that was rude,” he says, leaning against the frame of the kitchen doorway. “We can’t shift where we’re staying, and we’re all a little desperate for it.”

James is stabbed by the memory of his first London flat, three roommates and not an ounce of privacy, not a tree within a kilometer. He remembers full moon nights in the park, bundling up a packet of clothes to leave under a tree and hoping it would still be there in the morning. Remembers the physical ache of wanting to shift as easily and frequently as he had between moons at home, curling up under his covers and tamping the urge down tight while his roommates clinked bottles in the kitchen. “It’s all right. Just, maybe a little warning next time, yeah?”

Louis grins, looking far more wolfish than his human form ought to. “How about that soup, Jamesy baby?”

James’s hand reaches to flick on the burner, automatic, a reflex of hierarchy. He flinches when he realizes it. He’s 32 years old, for god’s sake. It’s an embarrassment to jump at a casually tossed command from a teenage alpha.

While the soup heats, James stares into the refrigerator. The beef’s all gone, and the soup’s hardly going to satisfy the pack after exhausting themselves in the garden all afternoon. He unearths a block of cheese and turns to count the slices in the breadbasket. Enough for cheese toasties all around. Proper werewolf chef, he is.

***

Over the meal, the boys tell him more about the record contract they’ve just signed and the X Factor experience that led to it.

“Is there a wolf behind the scenes there?” James asks. It’s hard to believe that these five wound up a band by coincidence; more likely, someone with some influence was aware of their commonality. James has never gotten close enough to scent Cheryl Cole, but he’s had his suspicions.

The boys look nervously at each other. “Not our secret to tell,” Louis finally answers.

James doesn’t push the issue. Instead, the pack tells him about catching the scent of other wolves in the crowd at auditions, trying to figure out which of the thousands of other bodies in the queue it belonged to. About getting cut and then put together as a group, gritting their teeth and wordlessly coaching each other not to let the wild swing of emotions tip them into a shift. About spending their first full moon together at Harry’s stepdad’s bungalow, sitting on their haunches around the fire and howling, affections born of giddiness and good fortune and shared ambition effortlessly tightening into a pack bond.

James shivers, unspeakably jealous. What must it be like, at the start of everything, to have the comfort of pack when everything around you is unnatural? To have someone to back you up when you make excuses around the lunar calendar. To be able to be yourself in front of somebody else, at least some of the time. Even a little bit of the time.

“Where is it you’re staying now?” he asks, changing the subject.

Louis answers for the pack, again. “We’re all at Princess Park.”

James suppresses a wince. He’s been to his share of parties at Princess Park. By the time he had enough money to live there, he was old enough to have no interest in doing so.

“Louis and I have Ashley Cole’s old flat, it’s sick,” Harry adds.

“Nice bit of woods around there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but it’s no good for us,” Zayn says. “Security cameras everywhere.”

“What have you been doing for the full moon?”

Zayn shrugs. “Going home when we can.”

“But then we’re not together,” Liam says. James understands. It was always hard for him to come home from the city, his own evolution thrown into sharp relief against the sameness of pack. And it was still his pack, still is to this day, in theory at least. It must be worse for the boys, with new bonds, new loyalties, to separate and run with packs that are no longer their own.

“Once everyone came to Cheshire with me,” Harry offers.

“Once,” Niall spits, with vehemence. Everyone’s eyes flick toward Louis. James can well imagine what a disaster it must have been to have Louis on another alpha’s territory.

Louis diverts. “We went camping once too, before it got too cold.”

“And before we got too famous,” Zayn says wryly.

It must be an impossible trick nowadays, for the five of them to slip their handlers and fans and the press, travel someplace wild, and set up a campsite. It’s not being a wolf that’s hard, it’s the in-between of it, getting yourself to a safe place by moonrise and securing your clothes and making sure your secret’s safe when you plunge back into humanity in the morning. Nobody was very interested in James when he first moved to London; he’s not sure he could have managed it otherwise.

“Well, you should come here this month.” Heads perk up, a canine reaction. “It’s this Thursday. Come Wednesday so you can get settled a bit.” If they’re restless with the waxing, he ought to keep an eye on them.

“Are you sure? We don’t want to put you to any trouble.” Liam’s brow is furrowed. Niall tries to be subtle when he kicks Liam under the table, but James doesn’t miss it.

“It’s no trouble, there’s plenty of space. And where else would you go?”

The boys look at each other, and James realizes that there was no plan B. What a disaster, this pack trapped in an flat or trying to sneak past the paparazzi to a park.

“Come every month,” James says, with conviction, wanting them to know how important this is, “at least ‘til you’re old and rich enough for houses of your own.”

“Well, it’s only a matter of time,” Louis says matter-of-factly, pushing his chair back from the table and carrying his dishes toward the kitchen.

The boys drift toward the television while James tidies up. He means to ask if he can call them a car, but when he walks into the living room, the question won’t come out. The pack is overlapped on the sofa, heads in each other’s laps and toes tucked under each other’s legs.

James’s breath catches with the sense memory of pack, the comfort of other wolf bodies bumping shoulders and touching noses and butting heads. The energy between the five of them fills the house, warms it.

He retrieves his laptop from his office and sets up at the other end of the sectional to work while the boys thumb through their phones in companionable silence. Without meaning to, he gets absorbed, his sofa feeling newly comfortable.

When he looks up, he’s surprised to see that four of the five pups have shifted. It hasn’t much changed their position on the sofa. They’re still curled up together, nestled among the hoodies and t-shirts they’ve shed. Only Louis is still human. Zayn and Harry have their heads in his lap, and his arms are stretched out to curl around Liam and Niall on either side. Louis’s head is tipped onto the back of the sofa, seemingly asleep like the rest of the pack.

James rises to his feet and moves slowly toward the light switch, trying not to wake them. When he looks back at the sofa, Louis is watching. He doesn’t look like he’s recently woken.

James speaks softly, knowing wolf ears will hear him from across the room. “You’re welcome to stay. Do any of you need anything?”

Louis shakes his head no, a small and silent motion.

“There’s a guest room at the top of the stairs. And I’ll leave the kitchen door open.”

Louis tips his head in acknowledgment. “Thanks,” he murmurs, so soft and low that James almost misses it as he turns toward the kitchen.

He cracks open the back door and props it with a cookbook, heavy enough to keep the door from blowing all the way open but no challenge for a wolf to push aside if needed. Although the pack looks perfectly content, moods can change quickly, especially when the moon’s close to full. If any of them need some air, it will go badly if the option’s not available.

James pads quietly through the living room on his way to the stairs, noting five wolves and no humans on the sofa. Even when he closes his bedroom door behind him, the house feels good, full. It’s the easiest he’s fallen asleep in months.

It doesn’t last. Sometime after midnight, James wakes to the sounds of scratching and whining. He stumbles through the stripes of moonlight on the carpet to open the door. Niall and Harry are recognizable by scent before James’s eyes adjust to the dim of the hallway. They sit on their haunches gazing up at him, heads tipped sideways at matching angles, while his sleep-fogged brain catches up.

“Is everything all right?” he asks, nonsensically, as if they’re in a position to answer him.

Harry threads past James into the bedroom, touching his snout to the back of James’s knee as he passes by. Niall’s right on Harry’s heels, tail brushing against James’s leg. Still hazy with sleep, James closes the door before realizing his error. He opens it back up and leans out into the hallway to see if the rest of the pack is lurking. Nothing.

Harry and Niall are up on the bed when James turns around. “Do you… need me to show you the guestroom?” James asks, puzzled.

Harry ignores him, busily tromping a circle into the pillow on the undisturbed side of the king bed. After three rotations, he settles down and tucks his nose to his back paws. Niall curls behind him, chin over Harry’s ribcage.

James blinks. His side of the bed is still warm when he crawls back under the covers, as if he’d never gotten up, like this is all a curious dream.

Even before he came to the city, he’d always had a reason to shift. The moon was full, or the pack was convening, or there was good hunting, or something was threatening. He’d never shifted just to curl up for the night. This pack is more wolf than he’s ever been. Certainly more wolf than he is these days.

The scent and the warmth of wolves close at hand make it easy to drift back to sleep, even with the sounds of puppy snuffling in his ear. But James is soon shocked awake again, this time by two wolves landing on the bed in rapid succession. Through some combination of sight and scent and logical deduction, he recognizes Liam and Zayn. Liam plants his paws on James’s chest and nuzzles his cheek in a greeting of sorts. Then he and Zayn pile themselves against Harry and Niall.

James doesn’t bother to go back to sleep this time, waiting for the last shoe to drop. He’s watching the door when Louis stalks in a few minutes later. Plainly, this invasion was not Louis’s idea.

Louis jumps up and sits at the foot of the bed, nose resting on his paws, ears tall and alert. James peers down at him over the top of the duvet and shrugs his shoulders into his pillow, a don’t-blame-me kind of gesture. Louis flashes his fangs at him.

James tries to focus on the intermingled scents and intermittent snores of the four wolves next to him, instead of the watchful eyes of the disgruntled one at his feet. Still, sleep’s a long time coming.

Chapter Text

In the car park the next day, James rifles through the supplies in his glove box. A packet of jerky. A pack of gum for stress chewing. A collar and tags and a carefully forged set of veterinary records for a Siberian Husky named Carl. A vial of peppermint oil.

James upends the vial over the tip of his pinky and dabs the oil under his nose, checking the rearview mirror to make sure the result isn’t too obvious. It won’t block all of the scents, not by a long shot, but it should take the edge off. Otherwise, the cages of gerbils and guinea pigs and rabbits at the pet shop make it hard to think straight. Everything smells of prey.

The car’s already fragrant enough after his stop at the grocer’s, with two roasts, three chickens, and twenty pounds of mince. Wolves eat a lot of meat, growing wolves in particular.

Inside the store, he heads straight for the display of food and water bowls, breathing as shallowly and infrequently as possible. He picks up one of the largest dishes and runs his nails along the underside, wondering if the nonskid coating is likely to stand up to a wolf. It seems sturdy enough. He stacks up five of them and heads for the register.

As he rounds the corner to the shop’s main aisle, he nearly runs into a short man with an enormous shaggy dog on a lead. James can’t tell what breed, probably something that ends in -doodle. The dog greets James, canine to canine, jumping up to paw at his shoulders and sniff him from neck to hindquarters.

“Easy, Fluff!” Her owner tugs at the lead. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s got into her.”

“It’s fine,” James assures him. “I’m a dog person.”

“You must be.” The man gestures toward the stack of dishes in James’s hand, and then back at his dog. “She’s still a puppy, fifteen months.”

People love to talk about their dogs. “That’s a fun age,” James responds distractedly, attempting to drift toward the compelling aroma of the dog treats display.

“Yeah, she’s a handful.”

“I’ll bet.” Is that a bin of antlers? It smells like deer, and another creature James hasn’t encountered before. Elk? Reindeer? Moose? Do moose shed their antlers? “Have a good…” he starts, but the man’s still talking.

“Tears up the house if I don’t run her in the park for a couple hours every day. We haven’t been out yet today, s’probably why she’s all over you. What kind’s your dog?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, I’m in a bit of a rush,” James apologizes, making a regretful gesture toward Fluff and her owner as he backs away from them toward the antler bin. He’s been a fool, avoiding the pet store. How long have they been selling antlers? Why was he not informed?

He shakes open a paper bag and fills it with several handfuls of antler pieces, resisting the urge to bury his nose in the bag before he folds the top closed. On his way to the register, the rack of leads and collars catches his eye. James realizes he doesn’t have anything sized for a half-grown wolf, and emergencies happen. Balancing the bag of antlers in the crook of his arm, he adds a cheap nylon collar and a matching lead to his stack of dishes.

“Go through a lot of these?” asks the cashier at the counter, scanning the bowls one by one.

“It’s nice to have extras on hand,” James says, noncommittally.

“What kind of dog do you have?”

“Not one of my own.” This seems like as good a time as any to test out the cover story he’s been mulling over for use in the event of unexpected attention. “I’m fostering some puppies.” Lies always go down easiest when they’re mostly true.

The cashier makes a fond noise. “Must be nice, to have puppies in the house.”

“Yes,” says James. “Yes, it is.”

***

The bag of antlers seems faintly ridiculous once James gets it home. He’s disappointed in himself. Usually he’s got better control. He chalks the impulse purchase up to the waxing moon, and puts a handful of antlers in the brass bowl on the dining table. They’re decorative, at least. The rest of the bag he banishes to the garden shed.

Not that it does any good when the pack arrives the next night. Louis’s expression changes as soon as he’s led them inside, and he darts past James into the dining room. James doesn’t realize disaster is coming until he hears the crash. He takes off after Louis, the rest of the pack crowding him along.

Louis’s head pops up on the far side of the table as they round the corner into the dining room, a smug and triumphant expression on his face. A scratch down the table top and an overturned chair strongly suggest that he slid down the centre of the table into the bowl of antlers and toppled over the far edge, taking the bowl with him and scattering its contents across the far end of the room. As James takes in the disaster scene, the rest of the pack ducks past him and scampers around the table to snatch up the antlers.

“All right, Louis?” James asks. The skin above one of his eyebrows is split and swelling, blood trickling down from the gash. “Let me get you some ice.”

“Nah, it’ll heal.” Louis waves an antler at him dismissively, and sure enough, the cut’s closing even as James watches.

James feels a pang of jealousy. The less time he spends as a wolf, the less his body taps into whatever werewolf energy makes their species heal so quickly. He wonders if One Direction’s management will suspect anything when none of the boys ever comes down with a cold or complains of a sore throat, and then realizes that the excuses the band will have to make one night a month will probably add up to a regular history of illness and injury.

The boys are each holding pieces of antler, smoothing their fingers over them or bringing them close to their noses. Niall tests his between his teeth. They all look ridiculous.

“Are you prepared to deal with something like that in public?” James asks. “It can surprise you anywhere, there’s sheepskin rugs, and deer heads on people’s walls, and, and… and models with rabbit fur collars on their coats,” he finishes quickly. (It was a deeply embarrassing incident and James has tried for years to forget about it.)

“Alright, we get it.” Louis rolls his eyes and positions the bowl back in the middle of the table. “Not in public now, though, are we?”

The boys eye each other. Clearly, nobody wants to be the first to deposit an antler back into the bowl.

“You going to shift and take those into the garden, or should I order pizza?” James finally asks.

Three meatball and caramelized onion pizzas later, the boys hook a Nintendo DS up to James’s television and defeat him at Mario Kart at least fifteen times. James finally cedes his controller to Liam and goes to grab a bottle of water from the kitchen, realizing en route that the landscape of the house has been transformed. The coat rack is draped with colourful hoodies and James nearly trips over a pair of enormous high-tops in the front hall. (Are there really only five pairs of shoes on the floor? How can five pairs of shoes take up that much space?) An assortment of garishly coloured energy drinks has populated the refrigerator and two shopping bags are taking up space on the counter.

James peeks inside one of the bags as Louis follows him into the kitchen. Special K. Curiously Cinnamon. Coco Pops. Corn Flakes.

“Your cereal selection is shit,” Louis announces, depositing a paper plate into the bin. “We had to take matters into our own hands.”

“You can leave it in the pantry if you’d like,” James says. “I’ll make eggs and sausages tomorrow too. Protein to get through the day.” James knows he should relax, that the pack has made it unscathed through several moon cycles already, but he worries all the same.

“Thanks, that sounds amazing.” Louis has the pantry door open, unloading boxes of cereal. “We’re in rehearsal all day.”

“Good luck with that.” It’s hard to focus right before a full moon. James doesn’t envy the vocal coach who has to wrangle the boys tomorrow.

“Yeah.” Louis laughs. It sounds a bit sinister.

James wraps the leftover pizza in foil and stacks up the boxes at the end of the counter. They can wait until tomorrow to go out to the bin. “I’m heading upstairs soon.”

Louis makes a neutral sound. He’s rifling through the pantry, more like a raccoon than a wolf.

“Do any of you need anything?”

“No, thanks, I think we’re good,” comes the answer from the pantry.

James tries to deliver the next bit in as neutral a tone as possible, as if he’s offering extra toothpaste. “There’s a spare bedroom and a sofa bed in the basement, and the guest room upstairs as well. Sleep wherever you’d like.”

The noises from the pantry stop. “We will.”

James cracks the back door with a cookbook again. In the living room, the screen’s gone dark and the boys are sprawled out on the sofa, except for Harry, who’s on the floor with his back to the sofa and his head against Liam’s knee. Liam’s kneading at Harry’s head with one hand and tapping something into his phone with the other.

“G’night.” James pauses at the bottom of the stairs. “Any of you need anything?”

The boys murmur goodnights from the sofa and James escapes upstairs, safely removed from whatever the pack’s going to decide about sleeping arrangements.

He leaves his bedroom door cracked when he turns out the light. It barely wakes him when the pack slinks in to pile themselves on the far side of the bed.

James sleeps well, better than he should the night before a full moon, and wakes up Thursday morning to Louis’s cool blue stare. The rest of the pack’s still asleep, latticed together like pie crust, breathing evenly. Harry’s tail is tickling the side of James’s face.

“Look, I don’t know what the problem is here,” James hisses at Louis, propping himself up on his elbows. “Am I supposed to be kicking them out? Why are they here if you don’t want them to be?”

Louis hops off the bed and shifts on his way out of the room. “They can sleep where they want,” he says, without looking back.

***

Thursday’s clear and cold, and James is restless in a different way than usual. He can’t decide if being around other wolves has settled him or disturbed him. Both, maybe. Tonight’s shift feels like something to anticipate, not just a tick box on his calendar.

Sunset’s barely past when he gets home after his last meeting, but apparently the pack’s not inclined to wait for moonrise. James unlocks his front door and they’re all around him, barking and jumping and standing on their hind legs to paw at him. They’re nowhere close to full-grown, front paws barely reaching his chest, but they’re still a lot.

“All right, all right, all right.” James bats them away, extracts himself from Niall’s jaws playfully clamped to his forearm, scratches Liam’s ears before nudging him away from where he’s leaning heavily against James’s thigh. “You should eat something. There’s no good hunting out there.”

The pack crowds him into the kitchen, circling around his knees. James is not pleased to see that last night’s pizza boxes, which he’d neglected to take out to the bin in the morning, have been reduced to chewed remains scattered across the kitchen floor and out the back door. Apparently he should have puppy-proofed the house before leaving a key under the doormat.

James scoops handfuls of beef mince into the new dog dishes (he’s not the most creative werewolf chef, but nobody’s complaining) and lines them up on the floor. The dishes stay put when the pack digs in. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and sends Johannah a photo of five puppy heads bent over dinner. Then he sends a photo of the wreckage of the pizza boxes.

Darling boys! Have a good night! xx comes the reply.

The pups run into the garden after dinner. James makes himself a sandwich and watches them out the window. Even though they’ve shifted already, they’re still full of the restless energy of the imminent moonrise. There’s more teeth in their wrestling and more abandon in the way they fling themselves across the lawn. James pounds on the window when Louis attacks the garden hose, and Louis ignores the warning.

Louis’s got the hose unreeled halfway across the garden, fangs sunk in, when James catches up to him. “Drop it,” James orders. Louis shakes his head back and forth, hose twitching in his jaws. James repeats the command. Louis jumps up and tries to bat James with the hose.

James points at the gate. “Do you want to go out?” he asks in an ominous tone, trying to make a bargain sound more like a threat.

Louis drops the hose and trots over to the gate. The rest of the pack convenes alongside him. James tries to set some ground rules, wishing he’d had a chance to do this before they’d shifted. “There’s not usually anybody out here, but stay away from the path just in case. Don’t leave the greenbelt. And keep the howling to a minimum.” He hooks the gate back to a ring in the garden wall and the pack goes streaming into the woods and out of sight.

James rolls up the hose and picks up the remains of the pizza boxes. He can feel the moonrise coming, prickling at the back of his neck and in his wrists. Part of him is glad to be left alone. When he can’t wait any longer, he leaves his clothes hanging over the back of a kitchen chair and goes into the garden to let the moon pull him along.

Shifting’s not exactly a gothic, bone-cracking, face-rending ordeal. There’s pain, certainly, but not in a way that’s unnatural. It’s pain like running a marathon or climbing a mountain. Pain that comes from your body being used to its best purpose, working the way it was designed to work. Johannah had theorized that shifting produces the same surge of oxytocin that comes with childbirth, euphoria fuzzing out the pain so it’s less than a memory.

But, like marathons and childbirth, shifting goes easiest if you’re young and in good practice. Neither of those qualifications apply to James. Muscles tense and cramping, lightheaded and gasping for breath, he lands on four paws as the moon peeks over the trees.

James shakes himself until he’s comfortable in his skin and trots past the gate into the woods. The pack’s scent is impossible to miss. They’ve already marked the territory up from one end to another, as if there’s any risk they’d be challenged for it. Although the greenbelt is well saturated with James’s scent, he’s never felt possessive about it. The city is foreign territory, all of it, even the parts with trees pretending to be nature.

James can hear the pack crashing around on the far side of the ravine. There’s no chance he’ll catch any small game tonight with that racket going on. Rats or squirrels aren’t great eating, but at least they take the edge off the need to hunt, give him something to stalk and pounce on and sink his teeth into. He slinks through the underbrush toward the pack instead.

As he gets closer, he circles wide around the noise and approaches from the direction that won’t carry his scent toward them. Almost on his belly, he creeps under a low bough at the edge of the clearing where the pack is behaving like perfect idiots, wrestling and jumping on top of each other and rolling on their backs in the moss. Harry and Liam are reared up on their hind legs, pawing at each other’s necks. James can’t tell if they’re trying to knock each other over, or if pawing at each other is the entire point of the game.

James waits until they stumble within reach of his hiding place. Then he pounces, bursting out of the brush and colliding shoulder-first with Liam. Liam collapses, yipping and squirming and taking Harry down with him. James manages to keep them both pinned while he smirks up at Louis.

Louis has his hackles raised and teeth bared, and doesn’t break the aggressive pose even after enough time passes for him to catch James’s scent. James starts to worry that he’s misinterpreted the rules and crashed awkwardly into a party he’s way too old for.

Then Niall and Zayn flop on top of him and the rest of the night passes in a blur of fur and teeth and constant motion. The greenbelt’s barely enough space for James on a good night, and it feels overcrowded with six wolves, even with the pups nowhere close to full-sized. The only options are to be in each other’s space or to keep moving, and they do both. For once, the traces of petrol and pavement that back up the greenbelt’s scent of damp earth and ivy are completely obliterated, erased by the overwhelming smell of too many wolves.

James loses himself in it, a little. The shift usually has him glancing up at the moon, probing at its arc to figure how much longer he has. Tonight the hours pass without a thought.

He picks his way back to the garden gate when the sky’s turned faintly pink. After drinking deeply from the basin, he shakes the water off his muzzle, feeling worn out and energized at the same time. The sky lightens and the moon releases its hold, and James shudders back into humanity.

The pack filters back into the garden as well, but doesn’t bother to shift. James latches the gate once they’re all inside. The pups pile themselves up in the corner of the garden that will catch the first of the morning sun, and James goes inside to shower and catch a couple of hours’ sleep.

When he leaves for rehearsal later that morning, after two cups of coffee and a half-dozen scrambled eggs, the pack’s still sleeping in the winter sunshine.

***

After the full moon, the pack starts to show up at James’s house more often. Harry texts him paw print emojis and bad jokes. Niall fits steaks on the grill like puzzle pieces. Liam, the human, leaves a tennis ball in the garden; Liam, the wolf, noses the damp ball into James’s hand and looks up at him expectantly until James throws it for Liam to fetch over and over again.

James invites them over, encourages them to stay, worries about them penned in by the high-ceilinged hallways of Princess Park. The pack spends afternoons in the garden and evenings on the sofa. Garishly coloured boxes of snacks crowd the pantry and video game controllers trail around the living room like tentacles.

At first, James enjoys having their energy in the house. The kitchen bin gets tipped over a few times, and the morning paper is a casualty every day that James doesn’t wake up early to snatch it off the front porch, but James had expected those inevitabilities of puppyhood. He’s getting used to all the physicality, too, the pack constantly bumping shoulders and scenting necks and jumping on top of each other, whether in wolf or human form. He doesn’t remember his own packmates seeking contact quite this much, but he can’t say for sure; after all, it’s been a while.

So he chalks it up to pack dynamic when Liam wraps his arms around Niall from behind and covers the top of his head with kisses. He assumes it’s an alpha thing when he sees Liam stretched out on his stomach watching television with Louis draped all along his back, toes digging into the base of Liam’s calves and teeth biting at the back of Liam’s neck. He even manages to shrug and go about his day when he looks out the back window and sees Zayn and Harry slouched into one patio chair, Harry licking at Zayn’s collarbone.

It’s harder to ignore when he rounds the corner at the top of the stairs and finds Zayn straddling Niall on the hallway floor, kissing him with more tongue than James thinks is warranted on a Tuesday morning. Or when he comes looking for the kitchen scissors and finds Louis perched on the granite countertop like an ornament, forehead to forehead with Harry and one hand buried in his curls, while Harry’s hands disappear up Louis’s Leeds Festival shirt.

“Don’t mind me,” James says sarcastically, fumbling in the junk drawer for the scissors.

“We don’t,” Louis responds absently. Whatever it is that Harry’s hands are doing under Louis’s shirt, it appears to be remarkably effective. James grabs the scissors and hastily retreats, feeling like an intruder in his own kitchen.

That night, when the whole pack’s tangled up on the sofa, James makes up his mind to say something.

“Do you do this in public?” James asks, trying his hardest to make it a question and not an incredulous shriek.

“Do what?” Louis asks lazily.

“This.” James flaps his hands at them, at Zayn with his arms around Harry and Louis, Harry nuzzling Zayn’s neck, Louis’s legs across Liam’s and Niall’s laps.

The boys exchange shifty-eyed glances. “Not exactly,” Niall says. He nudges closer and hooks his chin over Liam’s shoulder.

“What does ‘not exactly’ mean?”

“Well, the sofas are always too small,” Liam explains, as if that makes any sense. James notices that his ankles are interlaced with Niall’s.

“Every time we do an interview it’s like they can’t remember there’s five of us,” Louis adds. “There’s always only one sofa, and it’s never big enough.”

“So we pretty much have to sit on top of each other,” Harry finishes. His voice is a bit muffled by Zayn’s neck. “But it’s not like we’re snogging each other on camera.”

Louis snorts and reaches over to pinch Harry’s leg.

Harry bats his hand away. “Not usually, at least,” he amends.

James gestures toward the lengthy expanse of the sectional sofa between him and the pack. “There’s plenty of space here.”

Nobody makes a move out of the werewolf pile. “We’ve kind of got used to it, to be honest,” says Liam, settling his forearms more definitively across Louis’s legs.

“Nobody seems to mind,” Louis adds, tilting his head back to rub against Zayn’s cheek.

“You can’t just behave like a bloody pile of puppies and expect people to take you seriously,” James says, aghast.

Louis raises his eyebrows. “Again, nobody seems to mind.” Zayn scratches him behind his ear. Louis’s eyes drift half-closed.

“What are they supposed to do, break you apart with a stick? You just, you can’t…” James cuts himself off, frustrated. Every wolf instinct he’s ever reined in, every scent he’s ignored, every production he’s ever turned down because a show conflicted with the full moon, everything he’s done to succeed in this city against all his instincts, and this lot just shows up with their noses in each other’s necks like they can barely be bothered to act human.

“Jamesy baby, do you need a cuddle?” Louis croons, smirking at him.

“No,” James snaps. “No, I do not need a cuddle.”

Without discussion or warning, the pack explodes off the other side of the sofa and launches itself at James. Knuckles scrub at the top of his head, sharp knees dig into his thigh, his nose is smashed into in somebody’s flank. Someone’s licking his ear (presumably Harry).

James jabs out with his elbows ineffectually and struggles to stand up. It’s token resistance at best. Everything smells of wolf.

Chapter Text

On a dreary January night, James arrives home after an anticlimactic dinner date (if there’s a good way to ask, “How do you feel about werewolves?” he hasn’t figured it out yet). He’s just unlocking the front door when his mobile rings.

His contact photo for Louis – a blurry shot of him chasing Harry through the living room with a lightsaber – is on the screen, but it’s Zayn’s voice on the other end of the line, sounding strained. “Can you come over?”

James stops in the front hall. “What’s going on? Where’s Louis?”

“He doesn’t know I’m calling you.” Zayn pauses. “He probably wouldn’t want me to.”

“What’s wrong?” James hears a crash and a yelp in the background. “Who’s shifted?”

“It’s Niall. He shifted inside, couldn’t help it, and he won’t shift back and there’s no way to get him outside.” Zayn takes a shaky breath. “We don’t know what to do.”

James is already swapping his dress shoes for leather trainers as Zayn finishes. “I’ll come your way right now.”

Zayn gives him the address, and his own mobile number. “I’ll let security know you’re coming. Tell me when you’re close and I’ll meet you out front.”

James starts to shrug out of his overcoat, having no more need to pretend the cold bothers him. Then he remembers its deep pockets. He leaves on the coat and retrieves the collar and lead from the drawer of the hallway console, coiling up the lead and shoving it down into a pocket. Just in case.

At the estate, the guard at the gate wordlessly hands him a visitor pass when James tells her he’s here to see Zayn Malik. James pulls into the circle drive and sees Zayn leaning against the side of a decorative archway, chin tipped down into the collar of his jacket. He looks small, dwarfed by the building’s Italianate excess. There’s nothing subtle about Princess Park.

Zayn pulls open the car door and slides into the passenger seat. He directs James to a parking bay. “Thanks for coming,” he finally says, as they walk back toward the building.

“How’s Niall?” The gravel path crunches under James’s feet. He reminds himself not to hurry, that they can’t do anything that appears out of the ordinary.

“Still wolf.” Zayn pauses, rubbing the back of his neck guiltily. “We went out tonight and it was kind of a lot. Should have stopped at a park or something, but we thought he’d be all right once we got home.”

Poor judgment, maybe, but James can well imagine how difficult it would have been to stop at a park. “Couldn’t think of a good story to tell the driver?”

“Yeah, that.” Zayn shakes his head. “Please pull over so my mate can run around for a bit, and oh by the way, he’s a wolf.”

“Did you try getting him outside?”

“How the fuck are we supposed to explain a wolf to security?”

“I can help with that.” James’s voice echoes in the building’s high-ceilinged entryway as the door closes behind them. He follows Zayn quietly through the overdone hallways, noting security cameras at every corner.

It’s just the two of them in the lift, and Zayn picks the conversation back up. “I don’t know how Louis is going to react to you being here.”

“Bit late to worry about that.” James rolls his eyes. “Why’d you call me, then?”

“He’s shifted too,” Zayn admits, and suddenly everything makes sense. “Thought it might help calm Niall down.”

James grinds his teeth as the lift pings and the doors slide open.  A spooked wolf trapped in a luxury flat is problem enough. Add a second wolf, territorial and outranking James, and the exit strategy becomes a lot more complicated.

Zayn stops several doors down the hallway from the lift and knocks softly. The door opens a crack. When Zayn slips inside, James sees him brush past Harry, who’s positioned to block the exit. James follows Zayn and quickly closes the door behind him.

He’s surprised when Harry turns and throws his arms around him. “I’m glad you’re here,” he mumbles into James’s shoulder. James realizes he’d all but forgotten that confident, magnetic Harry is only sixteen, and the rest of them not much older. In a tasteless flat that screams popstar on the rise, it’s jarring to have a scared kid in his arms.

It hits him then that that’s why they’ve called him, that’s why the lot of them aren’t thinking straight enough to solve a relatively simple wolf problem. They’re irrational teenagers. The bar to being the adult in the room suddenly seems very low, and James is surprised to find himself confident that he clears it. He’s spent more than a decade ready to deal with some sort of urban werewolf crisis. The crisis seems a lot less daunting when the wolf in question isn’t even him.

James pats Harry on the back and scratches his head. “We’ll get this sorted,” he tells him, trying to project confidence. “It’s going to be all right.” Harry sniffles and nods against his shoulder, then straightens up and beckons for James to follow him around a corner into the main room of the flat.

It’s in disarray, chairs scattered and sofa cushions askew and carpet a stinking ruin. A lamp tipped over on the floor casts Liam’s sharp shadow on the far wall. Niall is in the centre of the room, on the floor, paws splayed wide and ribs heaving. Louis is by his side, nose to Niall’s neck. At the sight of James, Niall scrabbles backwards and Louis growls low.

James puts his palms up and stays at the edge of the room to confer with Zayn. Liam joins them, wrapping an arm around Harry and letting him tip his head against Liam’s shoulder.

“Can he ride it out here?” James isn’t optimistic, not with the flat smelling like this. But Niall has to shift back sometime, and it would be a lot easier not to move him.

Zayn shakes his head. “Maybe, but does he have to? He’s miserable.”

“And he’s tearing the place apart,” Harry adds.

James moves on to the next possibility. “How about the park out back? Can we get him down there?”

“It’s all cameras,” Zayn reminds him. “Security’s going to notice if we walk into the woods with a wolf and walk back out with Niall.”

So much for the easy options. “Can we get him back to my place?” James feels the collar in his pocket. “Can he wear a collar, just to get to the car?”

Zayn bristles. “He won’t run.”

“It’s about appearances.” All of the boys look at him skeptically. “Put on a collar and he can pass for a malamute. No collar and he looks like a wolf. Or at least it looks suspicious, nobody takes a dog this size out without a lead.”

James doesn’t add that it’s a Saturday night at Princess Park, which means all sorts of surprising and festive things could happen in the hallways. If something startles Niall, maybe he’ll bolt, or maybe worse.

Zayn and Liam look at each other in silent conversation. Finally, Zayn acquiesces. “He can probably handle it, if he knows we’re going outside.”

“Will Louis shift back?”

“Not ‘til Niall calms down, he won’t.”

It’s not surprising that Louis is opting to be irrationally single-minded instead of making this situation easier in any way. James knows better than to argue, though. “All right. Do any of you have another collar and lead we could use for him?”

“Not me,” Liam says hastily.

There’s an awkward silence. Zayn looks at Harry, who is looking carefully at a spot on the wall.

“Haz?” Zayn says pointedly.

Harry blinks slowly, still not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Fine, yes, I have a collar.”

“Go get it, then,” James directs, not sure why it’s got to be such a production. “And get some clothes for Louis while you’re there. Liam, can you grab some for Niall?”

While Harry’s gone, James turns his attention to Niall. He starts slowly toward him, talking in a low, calm voice, knowing his tone matters more than the words. “We’re going to get you out of here,” he murmurs, “and you can go in the yard, you can go in the woods, but first we have to get you out of this flat and into the car, and I’m so sorry but the only way is to wear a collar for a little while.”

He reaches Niall and kneels in front of him, touching the top of Niall’s head gently. Niall’s shaking, but he doesn’t back away. Louis, apparently on board with the plan, scoots backwards a few inches to give James space.

James rubs his thumb over the soft fur between Niall’s eyes, repeating reassurances about fresh air and running in the woods and the crescent moon. Finally, he holds out the pet shop collar for Niall to sniff.  “Do you think you can do this?”

Niall whines faintly. James figures it’s as much of a go-ahead as he’ll get. Niall lets him drape the collar over the back of his neck, but as James tries to bring the ends of the clasp together, Niall growls and snaps his teeth. James jerks his arm back just in time.

He sits on his heels for a moment before trying again, scratching behind Niall’s ear with one hand while he feeds the collar around his neck with the other. But Niall snaps at him again and James backs off. “Zayn, can you try?”

Zayn nods and holds out his hand for the collar. James watches as Zayn curls up next to Niall and buries his fingers in Niall’s fur. His face is inches from Niall’s, and he’s whispering softly enough that even James’s wolf ears can’t pick up the words.

Harry opens the door quietly while Zayn’s busy with Niall. He shoves a collar and lead into James’s hands as he crosses the room to join Liam, who’s reappeared with a backpack in hand. James turns so that he can inspect the collar in the lamplight.

It’s considerably nicer than the cheap nylon version Zayn is successfully buckling Niall into. It’s made of layers of soft black leather, with a fancy brass fastener. James can hear Liam snickering. Harry’s looking up at the ceiling, face flaming red.

James very carefully does not allow his face to make any kind of an expression. “Do you want to get it on him?” he asks Harry, offering the collar back to him.

Harry backs away, palms up toward James and still furiously blushing. “No, it should absolutely not be me.”

James decides not to argue the point. Whatever the explanation is, he doesn’t want to know it. “Zayn, Liam?”

Zayn’s still on the floor, now with Niall’s head resting in his lap. James thinks that Zayn’s demonstrated success at collaring Niall makes him the logical candidate to repeat the procedure with Louis, but neither he nor Liam volunteers. “I think,” Zayn says after a long and awkward pause, “it would probably go over best from someone who’s not pack, right?”

That, James thinks, is definitely false. But he doesn’t have any better options, so he sinks down as low as he can go, trying to find an angle where he can look at Louis without making direct eye contact. Louis gets to his feet and stalks a couple of paces toward James. It looks more aggressive than accommodating.

“If you’re not going to shift,” James starts, delicately suggesting the option of resolving this the easy way, “you have to walk out of here looking like a dog, and that means a collar and lead.”

Louis lifts his lip and growls, a sound all the more foreboding for how soft it is.

“I’m going to put this on you now,” James says, holding out Harry’s collar for Louis’s inspection. Louis doesn’t move a muscle to sniff it. He locks eyes with James, foiling James’s resolve to avoid eye contact with a pissed-off alpha, and keeps up the low and constant growl. “We’ll have much bigger problems if you bite me, so please don’t.” He realizes that sounded more pragmatic than deferential, so James tacks on one more “please.”

Louis’s growl doesn’t let up the entire time that James is threading the collar around his neck and fumbling with the decorative but inconvenient buckle that was definitely not designed for a dog. But he behaves himself, and James gratefully snaps on the lead and gets to his feet.

He passes Zayn the other lead to connect to Niall’s collar. “Are there stairs?”

“Yeah, at the other end of the hall. I think we can get straight outside from there.”

“Perfect.” It’s a relief to be able to avoid the lift.

Zayn is already on the floor softly explaining the plan to Niall, stroking the top of his head with one hand while the other sneaks the lead under his jaw to the loop in the collar. He keeps talking, low and soothing, while Niall gets to his feet: “We’ve just got to get down the stairs and outside. It’s going to feel better once you’re outside, it’s going to feel better, I know you can do this. You’ve just got to make it down the hall, and we’ll all be right with you.”

Louis moves over to stand shoulder to shoulder with Niall, so Zayn hands off Niall’s lead to James. That works, actually, for what James has in mind.

“All right, boys?” James asks, and Louis nudges Niall toward the door. Niall’s tossing his head, still unsettled, but at least he’s moving in the right direction.

Harry goes to open the door and James motions to Liam to turn off the lamp. “Listen, all of you,” James says before they move into the hallway, “if we run into anyone, let me do the talking.”

He directs the boys into a sort of formation around the wolves, Zayn and Liam in front and Harry hanging back with James. Louis urges Niall along as they move down the hallway. When they reach the stairwell without encountering anyone, James breathes a sigh of relief. Niall flinches at the thunk of the fire door opening, and his whining echoes against the concrete as they start down the stairs.

They all gain momentum as they descend, trying to get to the bottom of the stairs before anybody joins them in the stairwell. Niall’s pulling at the lead by the time they reach the ground floor and crash through the exit, all of them feeling better with their first bracing breaths of January air. Niall’s gulping lungfuls of it and straining to follow Zayn as he leads them in the direction of the car.

As they approach the car park, James sees a beam of light coming from around a corner of the building. Zayn and Liam freeze. “That’s security,” Zayn hisses back at James, a second before a short stout woman in a polyester uniform follows the light from her torch into view.

She skims the light past the boys and raises her eyebrows when it lands on the wolves. “Mr. Malik, Mr. Payne, you know this building’s pet-free.”

James has a decade of werewolf excuses stored up, constantly prepared for a nosy neighbour asking, “When did you get a dog? And such a huge one!” or “Did you hear that racket in the greenbelt last night?” or “Early jog this morning?” back when the morning after a full moon meant struggling into dew-covered clothes and sneaking out of a park at dawn.  He’s never had accomplices to the cover-up before, but he’s ready when Zayn and Liam look back at him helplessly.

“Right, these won’t be back,” James says apologetically, stepping around the pack toward the guard and trailing the leads behind him. Niall yaps and James trusts that one of the boys is getting a hand on his collar. “The lads kidnapped my dogs as some kind of prank, and I’m taking them home now.”

He’s not looking at Harry, Zayn, and Liam behind him, but he hopes they’re giving off an air of youthful prankishness. It shouldn’t be a stretch, since that seems to be One Direction’s entire brand.

A fond expression crosses the guard’s face. James assumes the boys are looking appropriately endearing, but then he realizes she’s focused on the wolves. “Good looking dogs. What are they?”

“Malamutes. Still half-grown.” James shifts from foot to foot, trying to sidle into the beam of the guard’s torch to block Niall and Louis from view.

“How much bigger are they going to get?”

“Oh, probably double.”

The guard relaxes her torch toward the ground. “I’ve got a basset hound myself.”

People do love to talk about their dogs. “A great breed,” James offers. (Not true, James knows basset hounds to be ill-mannered creatures who never react in an appropriately deferential manner when their super-sensitive noses tell them that James is a superior form of canine.)

He’s about to make an excuse to keep moving toward the car when the guard steps around him, extending a hand toward each wolf. “Hello, you handsome boys!” she croons.

Louis darts in front of Niall and lunges toward her.

Everything’s happening too fast. “Down!” James shouts, throwing Niall’s lead at Zayn and scrambling around the guard to get ahold of Louis as he frantically scans the lit windows of Princess Park for the silhouettes of any witnesses, anybody who might complicate whatever he’s going to have to do to manage a werewolf mauling.

Louis’s paws are on the guard’s chest and his snout is at her neck. James’s thoughts race ahead to the blood, to the papers, to which of the boys would be any help with disposing of a body...

But the guard’s laughing. “Oh, what a friendly fellow you are,” she babbles at Louis, petting his sides as he determinedly licks her chin. “And such fuzzy ears!” The distance between the guard and Niall opens up as she’s driven incrementally backwards by Louis’s enthusiasm.

James sees that Zayn is backing Niall in the opposite direction. He leaves Louis to his charm offensive for a good long moment before tugging -- very gently -- on his lead. “I’m so sorry,” he tells the guard, trying to sound sincere. “I don’t know what’s got into him.”

Louis drops to all fours and positively grins at her.

“Oh, I don’t mind,” the guard says, to Louis, in a babying kind of voice. She bends down to scratch his ears. “You’re just my new friend, aren’t you?”

“Yes, he’s quite a friendly one.” James edges toward the car and tugs more insistently at Louis’s lead.

The guard doesn’t stop them. “Have a good night,” she calls after them, “and no more pranks, lads.” James sees that Harry’s beaming at her angelically as he walks backwards toward the parking bay, their neat formation dissolved.

“Well done, Louis,” James murmurs as soon as they’re out of earshot.

Harry turns and catches up with the wolves. “Such a good boy,” he coos at Louis, through barely suppressed laughter.

Louis sidesteps and bites him in the arse, then knocks him off balance with a headbutt. “Heyyyy,” Harry drawls, unfazed even as he stumbles. Liam catches him by the elbow and hauls him back into step.

When they finally reach the car, James can feel the tension start to dissolve. He collapses the back row of seats and opens the tailgate for Louis and Niall to jump inside. He knots Niall’s lead around a cargo ring and removes Louis’s. Meanwhile, the three boys pile into the middle row together, overlapping to fit, leaving the front seat empty.

“Music?” James asks.

Zayn looks at Harry and Liam on either side of him. Neither has an answer. Harry, eyes tired, slowly tips his head downward and lands in the curve between Zayn’s neck and shoulder. “Best to keep it quiet,” Zayn finally answers.

James does. Niall’s whining is the only sound on the uneventful drive home through the nighttime city. James exhales as he pulls into the driveway, adrenaline draining away and leaving a bit of self-satisfaction in its wake. He’s handled this, he’s smuggled two wolves through London, he’s kept the pack and their secrets safe. Not a bad night’s work.

James gets out of the car first and directs the boys as they unfurl themselves from the back seat. “Harry, can you get the gate? Zayn, Liam, you stand here, and here, and point Niall the right way if he needs it.”

Once Zayn and Liam are positioned to block the escape routes between the car and the gate to the garden, James opens the back hatch and finds Louis already on his feet. “You two, straight back to the garden as soon as I get your collars off. All right, Niall?”

Niall half-closes his eyes. He’s panting as he gets to his feet.

“Louis, lead him along?” James unbuckles Louis’s collar first and beckons him out of the car. Then he clicks open the fastener on Niall’s collar, meeting no resistance this time, and steps back so Niall can follow Louis out of the hatch and back to the garden.

Once they’re on their way, James stuffs the collars in his pocket and locks the car. He follows the pack into the garden, where Zayn and Harry and Liam are already shedding their clothes and haphazardly draping them over the patio chairs.

Niall sprints a few laps around the garden and then slows to a trot. Whatever’s inside him that caused this mess, it’s winding down like a clock. James can see his breathing returning to normal, slowing from shallow panting to huffs of cloud visible in the cold night air. Finally, he flops down in the middle of the garden. The rest of the pack piles up on one side of him, each touching Niall with a paw or a snout while leaving him mostly open to the night.

James unlatches the gate to the greenbelt, but the pack seems content to stay where they are. Taking one last look at them over his shoulder, he unlocks the back door and leaves it propped open.

As he sheds his coat in the front hallway, James remembers that he still has both collars in his pocket. He returns the nylon one to the drawer in the hall table and hooks the leather one on the doorknob so Harry won’t forget it when the pack leaves. He really ought to get Harry a collar that’s a little less…dramatic.

As James climbs the stairs, exhaustion starting to set in, he realizes it must be well after midnight. He peeks through the blinds one last time before he crawls into bed. The pack’s still in the centre of the garden, but something looks different about their position. James does a headcount and comes up with only four wolves.

Louis’s probably gone on a run in the greenbelt. He deserves it, after tonight. Still, it’s Louis, so James can’t overlook the possibility that he’s up to no good. He slides on his slippers and pads downstairs to the kitchen.

Louis is at the kitchen table, shirtless and in track bottoms, sinking a teabag into a mug of hot water. He looks exhausted.

“Mind if I join you?”

Louis gestures wordlessly toward the kettle. James flicks on the burner and the whistle starts building almost immediately, the water still hot.

“Niall doing all right?” James feels like he ought to ask, even though he’s just seen Niall sleeping peacefully in the garden.

“Yeah, they’re outside.” Louis fishes the teabag out of his mug and sets it to drip on the table. “He’s claustrophobic.”

“That ever happen before?” James restrains himself from swooping Louis’s teabag into the bin.

“Sort of, like how he gets in crowds and stuff. Not to where he’s shifted, though.” Louis rubs a hand into his forehead.

James retrieves a mug from the cabinet and adds water. He sits at the table opposite of Louis and concentrates on his steeping tea. The kettle clicks as it cools down, loud in a silence that’s not quite companionable.

“I did a summer of Shakespeare in the Park once, not too long after I moved to London,” James says abruptly.

Louis gives a “so what” kind of a shrug, but he doesn’t say anything, so James pushes on.

“There’s no stage lights, so it seemed like a sure thing to end before moonrise.” Louis is looking at him now, attention piqued. “And it did, every show up until the full moon. Someone in the audience passed out or something, some kind of a medical incident, and we had to stop the show while the medics came and wheeled her out on a stretcher. It set us back so act three ended nearly in the dark.”

“What did you do?” Louis asks.

“Skipped curtain call and ran into the closest grove of trees, still in my costume.” James usually plays this story for a laugh, when he has another wolf to tell it to. But tonight he’s remembering the desperation he felt during the play’s final lines, sweating and cramping, all of his body’s energy going toward the shift and nothing left to fight it. “I had to stay there all night, and spend the next day trying to find a tailor who could fix my goddamned Elizabethan breeches in time for the next show.”

He’d pressed himself flat in the not-quite-tall-enough grass around the sparse trees, terrified of being spotted, barely moving a muscle all night long. When dawn came, he clutched the remains of his costume around him as best he could and prayed no one would see him on his way to his car.

“It worked out, so,” Louis says, tucking his fingers around his mug, unperturbed and unimpressed.

That wasn’t James’s point. “I thought about that tonight, is all. How it feels to be that close to everything crashing down.” James isn’t quite sure how to say what’s occurred to him. “It must be hard, with five of you, so many more ways for something to go wrong.” So many connections out of your own control, he wants to say, how hard it must be to know that if anything happens to a packmate, you’re going down as well.

Louis is playing with the teabag, wrapping the string around his finger and towing it in a wet circle on the tabletop. “I’m sorry you got dragged in tonight.” James sees the tip of Louis’s finger reddening where he’s pulling the string of the teabag too hard.

“Don’t be sorry, I’m glad to help.”

James meant it to be reassuring, but Louis stiffens. “They shouldn’t have called you.”

“I’m glad they called me,” James insists. “I’d be upset if they hadn’t.”

Louis’s eyes narrow, and he folds both of his hands tightly around his mug. “We’ve got people telling us what to do all day long. Pack stuff, that’s ours. We can handle it ourselves.”

In light of the evening’s events, this last bit is so patently untrue that James has to push back. “Apparently your pack didn’t think so.”

It’s a low blow, and James should have expected Louis to stand up so quickly his chair slams into the wall, to leave his mug clattering beside the sink on his way to the back door. “Wait, Louis, I’m sorry. Hold on.”

Louis pauses with his hand on the door, tension in his shoulders. James scrabbles through the junk drawer at the end of the counter, finally putting his hands on the kiwi slice keychain attached to his spare key. He holds it out toward Louis. “Here, take this.”

Louis stares at him for a long moment. Finally, reluctantly, he takes the key.

“Come here anytime,” James says, feeling almost like he’s pleading. “Don’t let it get to the point where anybody shifts in their goddamned flat.”

Louis shoves the key into the pocket of his trackies. “Thanks.” He doesn’t sound like he means it.

***

James has never considered a dog door before. His wolf is tamped down tight enough that an unplanned shift doesn’t even seem like a possibility. But the morning after the Princess Park incident, he’s on the phone to his handyman. The next day, there’s a hole in the door to the garden.

James walks in to inspect the progress as the handyman’s fitting the dog door into the opening and tightening the screws.

“Must have a big dog,” he comments to James. “What sort?”

“Don’t have one yet.” The boys are at rehearsal all day. No risk of a pup or five running through the kitchen. “I’m getting one soon. Just trying to get everything in order.”

The handyman has a puzzled look on his face.

“A malamute,” James adds.

“Oh,” says the handyman, looking around the kitchen. “Thought you already had one.”

James follows his gaze. For the first time, he recognizes the collective effect of the scratched floors, the mangled plastic container under the table, scraps of magazine clinging to the baseboards from the last time Louis and Niall chewed up the post, a chunk of plaster missing from the wall. God only knows how the pack managed that last one. “Just kind of a mess lately,” James says lamely, the only explanation he can think of.

“I can fix that drywall while I’m here, if you want,” the handyman offers, pointing at the scar on the wall. “Probably going to need someone else to do the floors, though.”

***

The problem with the dog door, James learns, is that the pack can use it to get back into the house just as quickly as they got out. So much for James’s technique of tossing several soup bones into the garden for the pack to follow out the door. (Louis had given him a look of “Are you fucking kidding me?” the first time James tried it, but five minutes later he’d been sprawled on his belly in the garden with the rest of them, gnawing away.)

It’s a bad time to lose the best puppy wrangling trick in his arsenal. The pack sticks around his house for a few days after Niall’s incident, and it’s a little much. There’s no reason the rest of them can’t go back to their flats, and really no reason Niall couldn’t just stay with one of the others while his flat is being cleaned, but there they are.

James can barely manage to convince them that it should just be Liam and Zayn to come with him to set the flat in order on Sunday, but Louis eventually concedes to his logic. All five of them can’t go because no one wants Niall to see the flat in its present state, and James can’t risk the suspicion of going by himself. He’s dug up the contact information for a crime scene cleaning company known for its discretion, and after he and Liam and Zayn ensure there’s nothing suspicious left in the flat, he calls the crew and engages them to clean up after a malamute kidnapping prank gone wrong.

In theory, James’s house should have plenty of space for them; it’s always been far too big for James alone. But in practice the pack continues to find new and ever more annoying ways to fill it up. If Louis isn’t fighting Harry up and down the stairs with plastic lightsabers, he’s leaping over the sofa to ambush a fleeing Liam with a Nerf gun. If James isn’t tripping over Zayn asleep in the middle of the front hall, he’s elbowing aside dirty dishes and bowls of rising dough on the kitchen counter. (Apparently Harry used to be a baker.)

One day, James lets himself in the front door and hears a “Hiiii-YAH,” karate-chop style, coming from the kitchen. It’s followed by a wet sort of crunch and a collective groan.

He makes his way into the kitchen just in time to see Louis toss an apple in a lazy arc toward Liam, who’s brandishing the cleaver from the kitchen knife block. Liam slices through the air and connects with the apple, lodging the knife halfway through it. Everyone cheers.

James is equal parts horrified and impressed. Apples in various states of disintegration litter the floor, and a few juicy splotches mar the cabinets. “What’s this, then?”

“Fruit ninja!” Liam announces. “Harry, you’re up.”

“Gimme the banana, Louis.” Harry picks the chef’s knife up off the counter and takes a wide batting stance, gripping the knife handle in both hands.

“It’s ninjas, not cricket,” Louis complains, but he winds up and lobs the banana at Harry like a boomerang. Harry lets out an unholy shriek and swings the knife wide. The banana falls to the ground in two pieces. James can’t help but join in the applause.

“Give James the tomah-to,” Harry says, pointing at the sad winter tomatoes on the windowsill above the sink.

“Tomay-to,” James says automatically. Harry does a bit of a soft-shoe hop and points his knife at James with a flourish, grinning. James, veteran of stage and screen, will never turn down a cue, even one delivered by a clumsy teenager brandishing a deadly weapon. He bounces on his toes, and he and Harry sing, “Let’s call the whole thing off!” in perfect unison.

“Less singing, more ninja,” Louis demands. “Zayn, the tomato, if you please.”

Harry passes his knife to James, and before James has a chance to object, Louis throws the tomato at him, hard. James dodges and swings at the same time and manages to just nick the tomato. It plops to the floor, leaking a spray of seeds onto the hardwood.

“A solid first effort,” Liam encourages him. James reluctantly turns the knife over to Niall, already anticipating his next turn. He doesn’t return to his senses until every piece of fruit in the house is in ruins on the floor, and all five of the pups are trying to dodge clean-up.

James’s takeaway from Fruit Ninja is that a certain level of creativity is needed to keep the pack engaged enough to burn up their energy. He finds himself in search of new ideas, and soon enough one sticks.

Chapter Text

The following Wednesday evening, James pitches it over spaghetti hoops on toast. (He’s reaching the outer limits of his werewolf chef repertoire.) “Do you want to go hunting?”

Their reactions are varied. Harry looks skeptical. Zayn looks interested, which is unusual. Niall is grinning, which isn’t. Liam looks at Louis, waiting for his reaction.

“Hunting what?” Louis asks. His tone is casual, but every line of his body sharpens.

“Deer.”

Louis’s eyes narrow the tiniest bit. “Yeah, we could give that a try,” he says, stretching his arms above his head, fingers linked, tone still carefully casual. But James knows what predatory anticipation smells like. Louis wants this bad. “Where at?”

“Richmond Park’s full of deer.” James used to think about this a lot, when he first moved to London. But hunting large game is meaningless and usually fruitless without a pack, so eventually he’d let the idea slide, and only just remembered that now he’s got other wolves to try it with. “If we’re smart about it, one of them won’t be missed.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow night?”

“Yeah.” Louis smiles, wolfish, genuine. “That’d be amazing.” The pack’s practically vibrating, picking upon Louis’s emotions and amplifying them.

James feels it, too.

Just before midnight the next night, they park around the corner from the most isolated pedestrian gate to Richmond Park. James pulls the parking brake and flips on the dome light.

“All right,” he says, turning to address the pack. “We’re going to walk in a bit before we find a place to stow our clothes and shift. Stay together, and no messing about. We’ve got to hunt, eat, and get out well before dawn.”

“Have you quite finished?” Louis asks, reaching for the door handle.

“One more thing.” Much as James wants this, he’s still nervous about turning the pack loose in London. They could be seen, they could be separated. He’s got some precautionary measures planned, and he’s wrapped them in bad jokes like a pill wrapped in bacon.

Actually, he’s plotted the next few minutes like a stand-up routine. Or, rather, the kind of bit he’d do if he had a talk show, outlining the jokes and depending on the celebrity guests to do their part. The research required him to spend more time on Sugarscape than he ever expected to, but it’ll be worth it if this goes well.

James slides a red collar out of the bag in the console and hands it to Liam in the passenger seat. “This has my number on it,” James says. “Look at the nametag.”

The engraved brass tag is sewn flat to the collar, leaving no jingling bits to interfere with perfect stealth. Liam squints at it under the dome light, and laughs. “It says my name is Bruce!” His delighted crinkly smile is exactly the reaction James was hoping for. “Thanks, James!”

“Can’t very well put your real name on there,” James explains.

“Where’s mine?” Harry asks, anticipating where this is going and making grabby hands toward James. James hands him a green collar. Harry inspects it – “Stevie!” – and grins. Two down, three to go. Although that’s not really a fair tally, since Liam and Harry are the low-hanging fruit.

It took James an hour of dedicated internet searching to find an Irish flag dog collar. He hands it to Niall. Harry looks over Niall’s shoulder to read the name.

“Awwwww, Clover!” Harry announces to the car, ruffling Niall’s hair. Niall rolls his eyes but doesn’t protest, either at Harry or the alias. James hands Harry the last two collars to pass through to the back row.

“Hey, mine doesn’t have a name,” Zayn complains, inspecting his yellow collar and sounding like he might actually be disappointed.

Harry and Niall crack up. “Cos you’re the mysterious one!” Harry brays.

Louis looks at James, eyebrows raised. “Rogue?”

James shrugs. “It was either that or Prince.”

“It’ll do,” Louis decides. James is suspicious. He didn’t expect this to pass without protest.

“Wait,” James intervenes as Louis scoots toward the door. Apparently he wasn’t clear enough. “These are to wear tonight.”

Louis freezes, hand on the door latch. “We’re not going to wear collars.”

“They’re for if you’re seen,” James explains. Niall and Harry scoot to either side of the middle row like they’re escaping the line of fire, giving James and Louis a clear view at each other. Backs to the windows, they’re looking between James and Louis like they’re watching a ping-pong match. “People don’t expect to see wolves. They’ll want to think we’re dogs. Collars give them a reason to see what they want to see.”

“We’re mighty hunters, James,” Louis sputters. “Don’t take away a wolf’s dignity.”

“Dignity won’t mean much if you get shot.” James pauses to let the threat sink in. “A loose dog in a collar gets left to run home. A wild animal gets a tranquilizer, or worse.” And James doesn’t say it, but if anyone gets lost – if, god forbid, anyone wakes up naked and alone somewhere in London --  he wants them to have his number to call. “If you don’t wear them, we’re going home right now.”

Louis pauses, clicking his fingernails on the door handle. “Where’s yours?” he demands.

James pulls his collar out of the glove box and works off the dangling tags to deposit in the drink holder.

He’s always thought the sounds of dogtags are integral to his Siberian Husky image. Even if his thick fur makes it difficult to see the collar, the clinking of his nametag, registration, and proof of immunization conveys domesticization just as effectively. The disguise is premised on being seen and heard, but tonight, the goal is to be neither.

He’s never thought about camouflage for urban hunting before, when he hasn’t had any other wolves to hunt with. In theory he could take down a smaller, slower deer on his own, but there’d be no joy in it. Hunting is about teamwork, about knowing that another wolf will be at the deer’s right shoulder when you cut in on the left. About weaving together in pursuit, trusting scent and sense to place each other. About knowing that the kill will nourish all of you, nothing wasted.

James admits to himself that he wants this, that he’s going to be sorely disappointed if Louis digs in his heels and James has to follow through on the very parental threat to turn this car around. He holds up the collar to show Louis, eyebrows raised.

Louis stares back at him for a long moment. Finally, he nods once, decisive. “All right,” he says, “let’s do this.”

They hike into the park for a bit, far enough to be well out of range of the car’s remote locks, and find a patch of trees with branches low enough to keep their clothing and keys hidden. The boys click on the collars, which James sized to more or less match the collar Niall’d worn to get out of Princess Park.

As James secures his own collar, he has a moment of panic, afraid his body won’t cooperate. It’s been at least seven years since he’s shifted outside of the full moon. But the boys begin to shift around him, their scents sharpening as their wolves come out, and James focuses on the smell of wolf and trees and rotting leaves. He tugs on those threads, braces his feet, and pulls himself hand over hand into the shift.

The pack is already moving toward the other side of the copse when James comes through it. He shakes himself quickly and bounds to catch up with them. They emerge into a winter field, dead grass crisp under their paws, and start to run.

The sounds of London outside the park aren’t muted to wolf ears, and tall buildings dotted with pinpricks of light are visible beyond the treetops. They have to cross altogether too many roads and paths, the scents of people and cars filtering up around them. Wild or not, it’s still the fastest and farthest James has had the opportunity to travel in years. Part of him hopes the herd is far away and elusive, that there’s an excuse to run just for the joy of it for a little while longer.

But soon enough they come to another stretch of trees. Louis puts his snout to one of them and glances back at James. James meets his eyes and dips his head to concur with Louis’s instinct. The bark’s been recently nibbled, and the scent is sharp around the trunks. The herd’s been through here not long ago.

They pick their way across the woods, paws silent in damp leaves. At the edge of the trees, they slow to a stop with another field unfolding in front of them. Moonlight catches the skim of snow on the north-facing slope, just enough illumination for sharp eyes to see movement across the field. The breeze carries the scent of the herd toward them.

Then James is sprinting without a thought, kicking into another gear he’d forgotten he had, bounding through the dead grass fast and untethered. He knows without looking that the pack is doing the same. James thinks of the bag of antlers in his shed, a dusty shadow of a scent compared to the rich, wild fragrance of deer that’s all around him now. He feels something unfolding in his chest, power in his limbs, lungs full of winter air smelling of earth and ice and pack and prey.

The fat, placid deer have never seen a four-legged predator in their lives. But as soon as one of them catches sight of the wolves, all of them run. James feels a flash of… not empathy, exactly, but a kind of kinship. They’re all of them urban wildlife, unnaturally civilized, instincts dulled intentionally or complacently. Give them a chance to be predators or prey, though, and the wiring they’ve buried crackles instantly to life.

James scans the fleeing prey for the fattest, the slowest, the weakest, and knows that the other wolves are doing the same. They give chase individually for a little while, scattering and confusing the deer, seeing which ones will tire first, enjoying the hunt. Gradually, the pack coalesces. James can tell when they’ve all recognized the same fat doe, a little slower than the rest of the herd.

Without exchanging a sound or a glance, each of them knows what to do. Zayn and Liam get out in front of her, darting back and forth and confusing the doe while the rest of the herd races further and further away. James is on her left shoulder and Louis to the right. Harry and Niall are hanging to the back, the usual position for younger wolves observing and learning. James realizes, too late, that this may be their first hunt.

They chase the doe through the fields until her sides are heaving and her pace is slowing noticeably. Finally, she stumbles.

James meets Louis’s eye when the hitch in the doe’s momentum puts them in front of her for a split second. He knows Louis is going to go in, and he lets him do it. The rest of the pack circles when Louis’s jaws close on the doe’s neck and her blood wets the grass, its coppery tang stinging their noses a second later.

Louis hangs on while the deer struggles. James leaves him to it, until a flailing hoof connects with a sound that almost certainly means Louis has a broken rib. James moves in and seizes the doe by the nose, cutting off her airway to bring a quicker end than blood loss will.

The pack closes in once the deer stills. Euphoria can wait until they’re human again. Right now, consuming the kill efficiently is the most important thing. They’re vulnerable, in an open field in the moonlight, attention focused on the fresh and fragrant venison in front of them instead of on the possibility that someone could spot them.

The wolves work together to tear open the deer’s belly and pull away the hide. James stays alert for sounds in the distance over the immediate smacking of jaws and growling tussles over the prize bits. They eat quickly, pulling the carcass back and forth and leaving nothing but hide and bone and blood in the snow.

Louis is red up to his eyeballs from shoving his snout into the carcass in pursuit of the heart and liver. Satisfaction radiates off him as the other pups clean off his face, deferentially licking and snuffling at him in a way that seems more proud than tidy.

James finally starts to nudge them back the way they came. The moon’s still high, but it’s been hours, and leaving the remains of a deer in the park is enough of a risk without sticking around the crime scene any longer than necessary. He watches the way Louis moves as the pack picks up the pace, noticing that he’s seemingly unaffected by the kick the deer landed. His rib’s healed already, then, probably helped along by the adrenaline of the hunt and the consumption of several pounds of fresh meat.

When they reach the copse where their clothes are hidden, James pauses at the edge of the trees, before they lose sight of the moon. He tips his head back and howls, low and tentative at first, then settling into a high and hollow note that feels like it’s thrumming in his bone marrow.

Howling ought to be for communication, but he’s not sure what he means to say. It was a good night. It was a good hunt. I’m glad we’re here together. Whatever the message, he feels it echoed back at him as the pack joins in one by one. James picks out Zayn’s pure high notes and Harry’s throatiness as all of their voices twine around each other, climbing into the night sky.

It’s an indulgence, and a risky one at that. But if anyone comes looking for the source of the noise, there won’t be any wolves to see. And James and the pack will never come back here; they can’t, not after leaving a deer’s picked bones for anyone to find. James soaks in the pack’s last notes and then orients himself toward the tree that hides their clothes. The shift back comes easier, almost without any effort at all.

***

The next day, James feels more settled in his body, like he’s just had a good massage. He’d hoped the hunt might have a similarly calming effect on the pack, but when he walks in the front door the next evening, it’s obvious nothing of the sort has occurred. He follows a path of crumbs to the kitchen, passing the discarded bag of crisps from which they issued forth.

He’s inclined to be forgiving as soon as he realizes the music blaring from the kitchen is Take That. But then he rounds the corner just in time to see Louis tackle Liam into the bin, which topples with a theatrical crash, spewing butcher’s wrap and teabags and takeaway containers in an arc across the kitchen floor.

The only surprising thing is that the two of them are human. James had assumed that the ongoing series of bin-related mishaps was attributable to the wolves.

Harry’s baking something chocolate, at least judging by the mess on the bowls and spoons and measuring cups scattered across the counter. There’s flour on his shirt and his nose and on a good portion of the kitchen floor. When Harry turns toward the oven, James sees the disaster coming, and the warning he shouts is already too late.

Harry trips over the felled bin and lands on top of Liam and Louis, slopping batter over the side of the baking tray he’s holding. It’s not a large pan, and yet the contents manage to splatter all three of them, with plenty left over to hit the floor.

Niall doubles over with laughter at the kitchen table, and then flings himself on top of the pile for no good reason. Zayn holds up his phone to take a picture and moves closer to get a better angle. Somebody grabs him by the ankle and yanks him down.

Louis’s face emerges from the pile and grins up at James, unapologetic and decorated with a stripe of batter across one cheek. “Jamesy baby chips and gravy, how was your day?” The last bit is garbled, presumably because Niall’s started tickling him.

James hears the voice of the man from the pet shop in his head: “Tears up the house if I don’t run her in the park for a couple hours every day.”

He claps his hands loudly and ominously. The pack stills. James lets the silence build before announcing, “All of you, get your shoes on and meet me in the car.”

James expects that Louis might resist on principle, but apparently being horizontal and covered in brownie batter makes him disinclined to pull rank. He and the others are picking themselves up abashedly and Niall’s handing out paper towels when James heads upstairs to pull on track bottoms and a hoodie. He hears the front door close behind them while he’s tying his trainers.

On his way back through the kitchen, James sees that the bin’s still sideways and the kitchen floor’s still smeared with chocolate, but at least they’ve picked up the rubbish. He detours to the garden shed on his way to the car. James’s tenure in the recreational league may have been short, but the paraphernalia endures. He emerges with a mesh bag of playground balls in one hand and a pump in the other.

After tossing both items in the back of the car, James climbs into the driver’s seat and slams the door with emphasis. The boys fidget uncomfortably. Harry’s still got flour on his nose. James drives and does nothing to break the silence.

“Where are we going?” Liam finally asks.

“We’re going to the park,” James answers grimly, hands tight on the wheel.

Niall follows up. “What’s at the park?”

“It’s a surprise,” James grits out, trying his best to suggest that it won’t be a pleasant one.

He doesn’t tell them anything until he parks beside the tennis courts and orders the pack out of the car. They walk beside James toward an empty court with the nets down for the winter, exchanging puzzled glances.

James lines them up along the baseline and stands before them with his hands linked behind his back, letting the moment built. When they’re all staring at him, baffled, he pulls a red sweatband out of his pocket and over his forehead, snapping it with his thumbs for emphasis. “We’re going to play dodgeball,” he announces.

The pack blinks at him.

“Dodgeball?” James asks, making eye contact with each of the boys in turn. “They got to dodgeball before you left school, didn’t they?”

Louis looks to the boys on either side, and then back at James, wide-eyed. “I’ve always lived and breathed dodgeball,” he announces.

James is immediately suspicious. “Have you ever played dodgeball before, Louis?”

“No,” Louis admits, matter-of-factly. “No, never played.”

James rolls his eyes. “Two teams. Niall and Zayn are captains because they’re the least covered in chocolate.”

As any intelligent wolf would, Zayn picks his alpha first. Niall takes Harry, and Zayn completes his team with Liam. That leaves James to join Niall and Harry on what he expects will be the losing team. But he’s not out here to win, anyway. He’s out here to run the pups into the ground.

James lines up the balls between the empty net posts while Niall and Harry wait expectantly on the baseline. On the other side of the court, Louis and Liam are lazily shoving each other around. Zayn is sat with his back against the fence, sleeping.

This is only going to work if he can tap into Louis’s inability to concede anything to anyone, ever. James is going to have to prod his team into going all out, and expect that Louis will respond in kind. He drapes one arm over Niall’s shoulders and the other over Harry’s, drawing them into a clumsy huddle.

“Look at them over there, complacent,” he starts. “Counting us out. Are we the losers here?”

Niall and Harry look at each other. “No?” Niall answers.

“That’s right, Niall! We’ve got this! We can take this!” He’s ramping it up now, crescendoing into the motivational speech of his life. “Are you going to bleed for me, Niall?” James screams, ignoring the slightly idiotic feeling it gives him. “Show no mercy! Go for the face, go for the legs!” He starts to jump up and down and Harry and Niall follow his lead, breaking the huddle with a yell and spreading out along the baseline with game faces on.

Louis, Liam, and Zayn line up on the opposite side, elbowing each other and laughing. The attitude only lasts a few seconds after James calls the start of the game, just long enough for Harry to dart to the center of the court and take Liam out with his first throw.

Louis’s eyes narrow, and James is rewarded with the kind of fight to the finish he’d been hoping for. Liam trudges to the side of the court and the remaining boys throw themselves into the game, flinging themselves to the ground for loose balls and running in to take shots at close range.

Harry’s accuracy turns out not to be a fluke, although it’s tempered by epic interludes of clumsiness. Running while looking over his shoulder to spot any incoming balls, he crashes into the chain link fence at the edge of the court and goes sprawling. “I’m okay!” he shouts, scrambling to his feet and waving his arms in the air. James watches a scrape from Harry’s shoulder to his elbow heal so quickly it seems to waver in his vision.

Zayn’s the next to fall victim to Harry’s aim, and Louis doesn’t last much longer once it’s three against one. He collapses theatrically on the court. “Good times, James, can we go home now?”

“Best of three,” James yells back at him. “Come on, back at it!”

Louis huddles with Zayn and Liam, gesturing energetically. They bounce back in the second game by focusing all of their energies on the main threat. James winces when Harry goes out with a shot to the crotch. There’s nothing werewolf healing can do to take the edge off that.

James tries to play defense and drag the game out as long as he can, but it ends too quickly with Harry down. And James is barely worn out, which means he hasn’t even begun to drain the pups’ energy reserve. He stalls before the third game, ordering the pack through an increasingly ridiculous series of calisthenics. Even when he pushes his luck by demanding wheelbarrow races, they comply.

Once the pack is breathing hard, James calls the start of the tiebreaker game. He and Niall cover Harry while Harry picks off the other side one by one. When Louis goes down for the last time, James tosses Harry over his shoulder in a victory celebration and leads the pack back to the car.

Louis claims the front seat on the way home, the first time he’s done that. Usually he and Zayn are conspiring in the far back. James starts to wish he would have stayed there when – in the space of 30 seconds -- Louis shucks off his shoes and props his filthy socks on the dash, rifles through the console, discovers Carl’s veterinary records in the glove box and compliments James on his deworming.

James realizes, too late, that these annoyances were merely intended to distract him from Louis’s true motive. As soon as James starts some music and deposits his phone in the cup holder, auxiliary cable trailing behind, Louis scoops it up. With impeccable timing, he thumbs open the screen before the phone has a chance to lock.

James suppresses the instinct to make a grab for it. Louis thrives on power struggles, and James is at a disadvantage, seeing as he needs at least one hand on the wheel. He tries to formulate a plan, but he’s distracted by thoughts of each and every one of the misguided selfies on his camera roll, wondering which one Louis is about to text to god only knows how many of his contacts.

“Jamesy baby,” Louis announces in a shocked tone, “you’ve been holding out on us.”

“How so?” James asks, trying not to appear nervous in any way about Louis holding James’s complete professional and personal life in his destruction-prone hands.

Louis waves the phone at him. “I believe I am looking at a playlist entitled, simply, ‘Boybands.’ Am I correct?”

James exhales, relieved. “Indeed you are.” There’s no shame in acknowledging one’s comprehensive boyband playlist to a real live boybander.

“Well, we have to listen to it.” Louis stabs a finger at the screen definitively, and the first guitar notes of I Want It That Way are unmistakable.

James checks the rearview mirror when he hears, “You are… my fire… my one… desire,” coming from the backseat. Niall’s got one of Harry’s hands clutched in both of his as he serenades him with performative earnestness. Harry flutters his lashes at him.

By the first chorus, everyone is singing along. “Tell me why,” Louis breaks in, pointing at Zayn and bopping from side to side. “Ain’t nothin’ but a heartache,” Zayn and Liam respond from the back of the car, clutching their chests.

The energy in the car ramps up as the song unfolds, and James realizes that dodgeball didn’t even begin to wear them out, but the singalong is such a delight that for a moment he doesn’t care.

Following Louis’s gestured directions, Harry takes the bridge. “No matter the distance, I want you to know, that deep down inside of meeeeeeeee…” he howls, that mouth of his opened wide.

A moment later, with “you are… you are… you are…” echoing from the backseat, Louis points at James. It feels like a test. James scrunches up his face to hit the high note -- “Don’t wanna hear you!” – and is rewarded with an approving nod as the rest of the car changes keys and launches back into the chorus.

He checks the rearview mirror again as the last chorus fades out. It’s all jazz hands and unselfconscious grins back there. James himself feels effervescently happy in a way that’s entirely disproportionate to the occasion. Apparently there’s something transcendent about a boyband in a car, having a singalong.

James feels like the idea has potential.

Chapter Text

The night of the dodgeball game, the pack piles onto James’s bed as they usually do. But Louis curls up with his packmates instead of positioning himself like he’s guarding them from James. The shift in pattern continues the next night, and the night after. James doesn’t understand why the boyband singalong somehow broke the ice, but he’s sleeping a lot better without the uncanny feeling that Louis is watching him in the middle of the night.

Although the tension around the pack’s sleeping arrangements seems to dissipate, the intended effects of dodgeball don’t last more than overnight. By the next day, the pack is once again bursting with energy, and uncontrollable as ever.

It’s more and more noticeable because they seem to be spending more and more time at James’s. Every time James goes down to the basement, where the boys’ clothes and miscellaneous property have accumulated, there’s a larger pile of hoodies and another guitar there. Every week he adds more litres of milk to the list for his big shop, but they manage to drain them dry all the same. Every day they find a new way to push the boundaries of the house’s capacity for activity, for noise, for… for personality, James thinks, covering his eyes as Harry strolls through the living room in a golden thong.

James can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief when the boys go to LA the last week of January. He’s not even sure what they’re doing there. All that matters to him is a few days of peace and quiet, with no messes to clean up, and no out-of-control yelling about FIFA matches, and no further damage to the house. Louis tweeting “Jamesy baby chips and gravy” at him from thousands of miles away is positively blissful compared to Louis in person sliding down his banister and scratching up the back door.

Taking advantage of the emptiness, James has a crew come in to buff the scratches out of the hardwood floors and reseal them. On the last night before the boys return, he arrives home to the setting sun slanting in through the living room windows, making the polished floors gleam. The sofa cushions are tidily arranged and magazines are stacked on the coffee table instead of sprawled across the floor. The riot of video game controllers has been tamed, each one wrapped up in its cord and stacked on the bookshelf by the television. For a moment, James’s house looks like a credible adult lives there again, instead of… well, instead of a literal pack of wolves.

He remembers that moment a few days later, when the steady, cold rain’s returned and so has the pack. James pulls into the driveway after an atrocious day fighting with various stakeholders about the direction of his next project. His shoes pinch and his toes are wet. He unloads a stack of files from the passenger seat and curls them into his chest, hunching to protect them from the rain as he makes his way up the slippery steps, briefcase sliding off of his shoulder. He stops to grab the post and paper from their boxes on the stoop, even though the only way to hold them is to tuck them under his armpit, because he knows that once he’s inside he’s not going to want to go out again.

James braces himself for the pack’s onslaught when he opens the front door, but none of the pups greet him. As he dumps his briefcase on the floor and his files on the console table, he hears the thump of running paws approaching. He braces himself again, but there’s no need. Niall streaks through the hallway without stopping, a flash of fur with Harry on his heels, and they both go sliding through the kitchen doorway.

As the clatter of their toenails recedes, James hears growling and snapping coming from the living room. He rounds the corner to find magazines strewn across the floor, along with wisps of fluffy white stuffing spewing from the limp remains of a sofa cushion. Louis and Liam are tearing at a second cushion between them. Louis growls and digs in his paws, and James hears the fabric rip. More puffs of stuffing drift to the floor between the two wolves.

“Boys! Knock it off!” James yells, and they don’t even seem to hear him. Louis tosses his head back and forth, trying to rip the cushion away from Liam. Liam lets go, well-timed so that Louis stumbles with his own momentum, and pounces on top of Louis.

If James was a wolf at the moment, he’d bark a sharp warning to get their attention and then knock one of them across the room. As it is, the noise of frustration coming out from between his gritted teeth seems small and inadequate to express the level of rage he’s feeling at the state of the room and the obliviousness of the wolves. He grabs the newspaper from under his arm, letting the rest of the post fall to the floor, and starts swinging at Louis and Liam as they try to pin each other on the floor.

His first ineffectual blows land on backs or haunches, not even interrupting the wrestling match. Then, through a combination of luck and good timing, he manages to swat Liam straight across the nose.

Liam hits the floor with his chin to the ground and forelegs crossed over his snout. He looks up at James with the saddest of eyes, whimpering. James feels a split second of guilt.

Then Louis’s teeth sink into his ankle and all he can feel is stabbing pain and a shivering wash of adrenaline. There’s nothing playful about it. Fangs break his skin and James kicks against the unyielding pressure of Louis’s jaws. As he hops on one foot and beats at Louis, he feels like the most horribly ineffectual werewolf of all time, smacking puppies on the nose and trying to fight off an alpha with a rolled-up newspaper.

“Control your goddamned pack!” he shrieks at Louis, embarrassed at the uselessness of his tone even as he hears it coming out of his mouth. He kicks out with a burst of anger and humiliation, his ankle screaming as Louis’s teeth dig in, but the move is strong enough to dislodge Louis, who lands a few feet away and immediately shifts.

“You don’t touch them,” Louis growls, advancing toward James, and being human doesn’t make the growl any less menacing.

“Or what?” James asks, spreading his arms wide. “Or you’ll leave? Leave my house intact and my floors not ruined and no fucking mess of stuffing everywhere?” He’s yelling by the end of it, maybe even spitting. “Go on and go!”

Louis waits him out impassively, arms crossed. “Don’t touch any wolf in my pack again.” His voice is lower than James has ever heard it, dangerously calm.

“Don’t pretend you’re on the high road here, you fucking bit me!” James’s ankle throbs at the reminder. He can feel blood soaking through his sock, starting to pool in the heel of his shoe.

Louis shrugs with indifference. “What, you’ll heal.”

“I’m a 32-year-old shit werewolf!” James screams at him. “I don’t just fucking heal!”

Louis turns and walks out of the room. Liam scrabbles to his feet and follows, shooting one last disappointed look at James on his way out the door.

James stumbles over to the sofa, wincing with each step on his left foot. The pain intensifies as the adrenaline recedes. The room seems too bright and blurry, and he fights back nausea as he collapses onto the sofa.

With his bitten leg propped on his other knee, he tugs the laces out of his shoe and tries to work it off gently. The injury still screams in protest. James feels woozier as he peels down his ruined sock to inspect the damage, finding a series of jagged puncture wounds all around his ankle. Kicking Louis away made it worse, widening some of them from punctures to torn flesh.

James flexes his foot up and down and rolls it from the ankle, focusing on deep breaths so that he won’t pass out from the pain. It moves in all directions. All major tendons intact, then, and hopefully bones as well. Limping toward the bathroom seems too overwhelming, so he unbuttons his shirt and strips off his vest, wrapping it around his ankle to control the bleeding before too many more droplets hit the floor.

Harry and Niall peek around the corner of the hallway, eyes sympathetic. They trot over to James when he acknowledges them. Niall jumps up onto the cushion next to him and Harry sits in front of him, propping his chin on James’s leg next to his battered ankle. James scratches at the top of his head. Harry closes his eyes and grins.

“Some comfort animal you are,” James tells him. “You’re just in it for the ear scratches.”

Harry gives him a look of rebuke, then tips his head to the side and nuzzles James’s calf.

James rolls his eyes. “Fine, you’re comforting.” Not enough to distract him from his ankle, though, still throbbing with pain in time with his pulse. “Off with you, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go get some stitches.”

Just then, Louis yells Niall and Harry’s names from the garden. They’re off like a shot, scrambling over the debris on the floor without looking back. A second later, James hears the dog door flapping with the force of their exit.

Well, a little sympathy was good while it lasted. Whatever Louis is convening the pack to discuss, it’s probably not going to result in anybody else comforting James.

James limps into the kitchen, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind him. He wraps two tea towels over the vest around his ankle and clumsily knots the corners together, purposefully not looking out the window toward the pack.

Ankle bandaged, he retrieves a pair of flip-flops from the hall cupboard and heads back out to the car, buttoning his shirt as he goes. It’s only once he’s situated in the driver’s seat that he realizes he has no idea where the closest urgent care centre is. Werewolf healing means that his species can generally avoid doctors. James doesn’t know what his bloodwork might show or whether being part canine makes his body temperature a tick higher than a human’s. He hopes that the doctor doesn’t want an x-ray; who knows what that might reveal about his malleable skeleton.

As he drives to the location his phone tells him, James starts to piece together a story in his head. A stray dog, average in description, no owner in sight, attacking him as he walked through the park on his way home from work and running away when James hit it with his briefcase. Vague enough to convince anyone that reporting it to the authorities would be useless.

The odor of disinfectant in the reception area pricks at James’s nose but can’t overpower the human scents of blood and bile and anxiety. Several others in the queue look to be in worse shape than James. He hasn’t bled through his towels, at least.

After checking in, he resigns himself to a wait. He passes the time on his phone searching for dog bite treatment recommendations and trying to decide whether the medical or the veterinary recommendations are more applicable to him. Looks like he’s in for antibiotics either way.

When his name’s finally called, he follows the medical assistant to a curtained cubicle, surprised when he stands up to find that his ankle’s not protesting as much as it had on the way in. He follows the assistant’s direction to have a seat on the exam table, paper crinkling beneath him as he swings his feet up. After a series of medical history questions, which James answers with a mix of half-truths and total omissions, the doctor joins them.

“So you’ve tangled with a dog?” she asks as she washes her hands in the exam room sink.

“Yes, a stray in the park,” James said. “Didn’t even get his name.”

“How long ago did this happen?” the doctor asks, pulling on a pair of disposable gloves.

“Two, maybe three hours,” James says. “I came straight here.”

The doctor gently but efficiently unwraps the tea towels. Once James’s ankle is exposed, she pauses, tipping her head to one side.

“Three hours? Are you sure?” the doctor asks.

James looks down at his ankle. It’s still a mess of blood, but most of it has dried. The puncture wounds are already starting to close. His blood, which is no longer seeping out to ruin innocent tea towels, runs cold.

“This looks more like two or three days ago,” the doctor says. “It’s healing up nicely.”

There’s no cover story James can think of for the unexpected vigor of his werewolf healing, especially with the bloodstained towels on the table beside him demonstrating that this injury was gushing blood within the last couple of hours. He decides to go with a dual approach of pleading ignorance and changing the subject.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he says, shrugging. “Am I going to need stitches?”

“Definitely not,” the doctor says, with the casual dismissiveness of someone who’s used to urgent care patients overreacting and has an hours-long line of them waiting outside to be dispensed with. “You do need a course of antibiotics, though.”

She washes and bandages the punctures that remain open and hands him a scrawled prescription. Although James suspects that werewolf healing will take care of the germs more effectively than any pill, he fills the prescription anyway.

When he arrives home, the house is dark and quiet. James goes into the kitchen to find something to eat, only just realizing that he’s spent hours at urgent care without a thought for a meal. He flicks on the light and notices that the bin is standing upright in its corner. Apparently he’s grown so used to it being toppled that seeing the bin in its rightful state qualifies as a surprise.

He retraces his steps through the entryway and into the living room. Traces of stuffing still drift across the floor, but something else looks strange. It takes him a minute to figure it out. It’s not the magazines, which are stacked on the coffee table. Perhaps they’re not exactly neat, but at least they’re not on the floor. Suddenly, he realizes that the video game controllers are gone, every single one of them, along with the Nintendo and the Xbox and the Playstation they belong to.

With mounting unease, James checks the basement next. It’s as empty as it was the first time he included it on the list of sleeping options he explained to Louis. No guitars, no clothes, not even a toothbrush on the sink.

James takes the stairs up from the basement two at a time, heart pounding. He slows for the stairs to the upper level, not wanting to wake the pack if they’re sleeping upstairs. Which surely they will be.

They’re not. James’s bed is empty. But there’s something on the bedside table. As soon as James flips on the lamp, he can tell what it is. His stomach sinks. Five collars are stacked on the table, flat brass tags catching the lamplight, pointedly abandoned.

It doesn’t make any sense. But then James remembers yelling “Go on and go!” at Louis, pain shooting up from his ankle and the living room in shambles around him. His chest clenches.

He hadn’t really meant for them to leave.

James dials Louis’s mobile. He’s not sure what he intends to say. The call rings and rings and finally goes to voice mail. James hangs up before he can figure out how to say, “Come back any time, even though you bit me.”

He goes back downstairs to the kitchen, flipping on lights in the dark house on his way. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge, sitting cold and lonely in the middle of the top shelf with no accompanying phalanx of energy drinks. The house is too quiet when he sits down at the table with a plate.

James starts to worry about the pack’s abrupt return to Princess Park, penned inside with no way to shift. He tries Louis’s mobile again after he finishes eating. Still no answer.

James paces restlessly around the house, too much space to roam and too much silence to fill with worrying. Finally, he makes up his mind to go and find them.

The security guard at the Princess Park gatehouse is the same one from the night of Niall’s shift. James tells her that he’s here to see Louis Tomlinson, and adds “… and Zayn Malik,” as an afterthought, using the same name that got him through the gate on his last visit. But this time, instead of waving him through the guard says, “I’m not expecting any guests under those names, sir.”

“I know,” James agrees. “But I’m a friend of theirs, do you remember me?”

The guard is unsympathetic. “No.”

James tries to figure out whether there’s anything he can say that will get him through the gate without creating the possibility of a tabloid leak along the lines of, “Something’s wrong with One Direction!”

“I haven’t heard from them, and I’m a bit worried,” he tries. “Could you tell them I’m here?”

The guard’s face softens, and for a moment she looks almost sympathetic. James’s hopes rise. “Sir, there’s no Louis Tomlinson or Zayn Malik in residence here.”

“But I was here with them just a few weeks ago!” James can’t believe it’s true.

“I’m sorry, sir, that’s all I can tell you.”

James turns back to the steering wheel, confused and increasingly worried. He’s at a loss.

“Will you be going now, sir?” the guard asks, a directive phrased as a question.

“Yes, thank you for your help,” James says automatically. He releases the brake and loops around the gatehouse back toward the main road.

Then he notices a pair of black cars parked a cautious distance away from the estate entrance. Someone’s waiting behind the wheel of each one. Paparazzi, James realizes. For a moment, he takes it as a sign that the boys are still in residence after all, but then he realizes they could be waiting on anyone. The pack’s not the only big name at Princess Park.

James pulls to the side of the drive. This has the potential to be hugely embarrassing, but the paps are as likely as anyone to know where the boys are.

The figure in the first car rolls down the window as James approaches. He doesn’t give any indication that he recognizes James, or raise the long-lensed camera that rests on his lap. Thank goodness.

James gives a friendly wave. It feels backwards to be approaching paparazzi rather than the other way round. “Hello, do you work here often?”

“Often enough,” the pap says, guarded.

James steels himself for possibly the most humiliating question he’ll ever ask. “Do you know if the One Direction boys are still living here?”

“Nah, near as we can tell they moved out a couple of weeks ago. Haven’t seen any of them come or go in about that long.” The pap smirks. “You a big Directioner, James?”

“I do love a boy band,” James says, squirming at the pointed use of his name, powering through the embarrassment with the hope of some lead on how to find the boys. “Any idea where they went?”

“Nope.”

James thanks him and walks back to his car. He’d recognized that the pack was around the house increasingly often, but it had never occurred to him that they’d moved in. His first reaction is annoyance. How very like Louis to appropriate his house without even letting him know, let alone asking his permission. But as he sits behind the wheel, with no idea what to do next, the implication hits him and he’s suddenly sick with horror.

He’s turned a pack of homeless werewolves out onto the streets of London.

Chapter Text

James scrolls through Twitter, hoping someone’s seen the boys around town tonight. Finding them at a party or a club seems like his best hope. Part of him knows it’s better if they’re not out and about, since that would at least mean they’d found someplace to spend the night, but James has a hard time believing they could so quickly land somewhere that would be safe in the event of a wolf emergency.

After having no luck on social media, James considers calling Johannah. But he doesn’t want to worry her, and if she knows where Louis has gone, she’s probably also been instructed not to tell James.

Next, he reconsiders reaching out to Zayn or Liam or Niall or Harry. At first, the thought of trying their mobiles felt too much like an attempt to undermine Louis. But now that James knows they don’t have even Princess Park to hole up at, his need to make sure they’re safe feels much more urgent. After some deliberation, he decides his best target is Niall, easygoing and reliably fond of James.

Where are you?

Relief floods through him when a reply comes almost immediately.

hey cordo!

It doesn’t answer his question, but at least somebody in the pack’s alive and cheerful. James tries again.

Are you ok?

It takes Niall longer to reply this time, especially when James sees it’s only two letters:

ya

Then, after another pause:

lou said you didnt want us around

James types frantically.

That’s not true.

I’m worried about you.

Where are you?

Niall texts back the name of a club, exactly the kind of place where James would expect the bouncer to lift the velvet rope for an underage boybander. (Although James can’t picture any bouncer, or bartender, or anyone else, really, saying no to Harry in any circumstance.)

Can I pick you up?

Reading his message back, James realizes it might not have been clear. He adds:

All of you

James is expecting a lull while the pack consults, maybe a few minutes’ wait for Louis to call him and negotiate. But Niall texts back almost immediately.

ya ok

in back

txt when u get hre

James starts driving before it occurs to him to wonder why that was so easy. Anything that seems easy with Louis involved usually means Louis has the upper hand and James just hasn’t realized it yet. He can’t think of anything to do differently, though, so he keeps on toward the club.

When he pulls into the alley in back, a black-clad security guard shines a torch in his window. “Is someone expecting you?”

“I’m One Direction’s driver,” James says. Like most of the cover stories he’s come up with where the boys are concerned, it’s both ridiculous and true. He taps out a text to Niall, hoping they’ll come outside quickly so no one gets suspicious.

But the only person who emerges is Niall, waving cheerily at the security guard before he climbs into the passenger seat.

“Thanks for coming,” he says, scrubbing a hand through his sweaty hair. “It was getting to be a lot in there.”

James immediately remembers the last club-related debacle. “Are you feeling all right?”

Niall waves off his concern. “Fine, fine. Just regular tired of it, not gonna wolf out.”

There’s a pause. “Are the others coming?” James finally asks.

“Eh, they’ll be along. Harry was right behind me.” Niall’s confidence is justified a few minutes later when Harry’s unmistakable silhouette lopes out the door.

“Hello, James!” Harry folds his limbs into the middle seat gracelessly. “You texting Zayn or am I?” he says to Niall.

“I got it,” Niall responds, thumbs already tapping.

“They don’t know you’re out here?” James asks, surprised.

“Zayn has to get Liam alone first,” Niall explains. “He won’t go with Zayn if Louis is right there.”

“Zayn’s second,” Harry explains. And that makes sense, although James hadn’t realized it before. Louis wields his authority with such bold strokes that Zayn’s quiet power goes unnoticed. “I think Liam wants to come with, he just needs Zayn to be his excuse.”

“How do you know?”

Harry and Niall glance at each other for a long moment, expressions unreadable. Finally, Harry answers. “Liam likes plans, and right now Louis doesn’t really have one.”

James is suddenly nervous. The pack peeling off one by one feels a lot different than all five of them hopping into his car at once. “Is this going to cause problems, you being here?”

“No more problems than we’ve got already,” says Niall, shrugging.

“…than you’ve got already?” James echoes. Aside from the awkwardness around sleeping arrangements, he’s never picked up on anything out of alignment in the pack’s dynamic.

“We didn’t want to leave,” Niall says.

James feels a small thrill of satisfaction, or maybe it’s just happiness. “I didn’t want you to either,” he says. It seems like a confession.

“Yeah, we thought we could work it out.”

“I hit Liam with a newspaper,” James admits.

“I know!” Niall dissolves into laughter.

“God, I wish we’d seen it, the look on his face…” Harry snorts. Then he turns serious. “Louis bit you, though. I could see why you wouldn’t want us around.”

James realizes he hasn’t thought about his ankle since he got home from urgent care. He tests it now, rolling it in a circle above the brake pedal. All he can feel is the tug of the medical tape holding the dressing in place. No pain, no other sign of the injury.

“I really do,” James says. “You’re… rather a lot, but you do make the house a home.” Saying it reminds him of the extent to which the pack apparently took that to heart. “Didn’t quite realize you’d moved in, though. Maybe a little warning about that, next time?”

“Your place feels like home,” Niall says, shrugging. “We thought you knew. We should stick together, right? The werewolves of London.”

“Why’d Louis want to leave?” James asks. “I mean, I know I kind of told him to, but he’d just bit me, so.”

Harry tucks his feet up on the empty seat next to him. “It’s like, if all of this hadn’t happened, we’d still be living with our families, in our different packs, and those packs would have an alpha, and that’s not the same thing as our parents.”

“I think Louis misses that less than us?” Niall continues. “I mean, not that he doesn’t miss his mum and his sisters, I know he does, but in real life he’d be at uni by now, or something, not at home like us.”

“So you’re kind of like our cool London parent,” Harry finishes.

James feels like this might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to him. He basks in it for a moment before following the thought to its logical conclusion. “And Louis doesn’t want parenting.”

“Exactly,” Harry says, pointing at James.

Niall shrugs. “Doesn’t mean he doesn’t need it.”

The car door opens and Zayn climbs in. He claims the far back seat without comment and reaches forward to muss up Harry’s curls.

Liam pokes his head in the door next. “Sorry about your sofa, James,” he says, puppy eyes impossible to stay mad at. “And, um, the magazines, all of them, and all the times we knocked over the bin, and that thing that happened to the wall…”

“It’s fine,” James says. “Sorry about swatting you.”

“Oh, no apologies, I absolutely deserved it.” Liam’s grinning as he shoves Harry’s feet to the side to make room for himself in the middle seat.

The car falls silent again. Raindrops are starting to hit the roof and the windscreen, each individual splat audible inside. “Where were you planning on staying, if I hadn’t found you?” James asks.

“Louis thought maybe Ben Winston’s, for tonight at least,” Niall says. “His dog doesn’t like us, though.”

James knows Ben Winston. Once, from across the room, he’d thought Ben might be a wolf. He’s got some alpha about him. It was a disappointment when they finally met and Ben smelled prosaically of leather and wool.

“I’d rather be a wolf at your place than sleep in Ben Winston’s attic,” Zayn says.

“Have any of you tried to convince Louis of this?” James asks. It’s dawning on him that this looks increasingly like a coup, even if the pups don’t see it that way. And he’s the one driving the getaway car. This looks bad, very bad.

The boys eye each other, wordless pack communication. “We were sort of hoping you could handle that part,” Niall finally says.

“It looks like I’m kidnapping you!” James bursts out, gesturing wildly at the pack. “There is no way Louis is going to listen to a thing I have to say when you’re all sitting in my car.”

“I dunno, you did get him to put on a collar,” Zayn says.

“Twice,” Liam interjects.

“…so you must have some kind of persuasion,” Zayn finishes.

Harry points toward the back of the club. “It’s him,” he says, and James sees Louis shove the exit door out of his way like it’s personally offended him.

He slides out of the car, feeling the bright hum of adrenaline thrumming under his skin. James has no idea what he’s going to say, but saying it from the driver’s seat of a car full of Louis’s pack could only make it worse.

Louis confronts him in front of the car, advancing on James in the headlights’ glare. “Is this a challenge?” His posture shows he’s ready for one.

“No!” James takes a step back, palms up and belly exposed in a show of vulnerability. “I don’t want your pack.”

“You’re acting like it.” Louis takes two more steps forward, measured and ominous.

James ducks his head, tries to convey as much deference as he can. “I don’t want your pack,” he repeats. “I just want you all to be safe.”

“We don’t need you for that,” Louis snarls.

You do, James thinks, but he knows better than to say it. You’re wolves in the city and you’re not even grown and somebody, somebody has to take care of you.

What he says is, “You needed me at Princess Park.”

“No we didn’t.”

“You needed me when you apparently moved into my house without telling me.”

Louis is unfazed. “Moved out just as easy.”

“Look,” and James’s voice is rising, “look, it’s hard doing this. I know, I’ve been doing it for so long.  The shifts, and your instincts, and the moon, and just, just everything, it’s so hard. You shouldn’t have to do this on your own.”

James feels it so heavily right then, all the weight of a decade of suppressing his wolf into submission, walking through London every day overwhelmed by senses that take in more information than his human body can respond to, a wolf coiling inside him wanting to run and stalk and hunt. He wants to make it easier for the boys, somehow, and all he can do is repeat himself. “You don’t have to do this on your own!”

…like I did, he realises. That’s the end of that sentence. You don’t have to do this on your own like me.

But they’re not doing it on their own. They’ll never have to. They have each other, and they’re going to keep having each other, and James is a lone wolf. Again.

There’s nothing he can offer them that they don’t already have. This isn’t about protecting them, not really. It’s about him being lonely. Lonely and selfish. James realizes that he just wants them around, filling the house with their energy and wrestling in the garden and snoring next to him at night, and now he’s fucked it all up.

James holds out the car key to Louis. “Look, just take them home,” he says quietly, rain starting to drip down the back of his neck. “Stay until you can make some kind of arrangements someplace else. I won’t try to talk you out of it. I just don’t want you on the streets until then.”

Louis looks at him for a long moment before he nods once and takes the key from James. James watches as Louis climbs into the car and turns to say something to the pack. He adjusts the driver’s seat forward and James moves out of the headlights’ beam. Niall gives him a small wave through the passenger window as Louis pulls away. James watches the rearlights recede.

The car brakes halfway down the alley. James follows it, hoping.

Louis rolls down the window as he approaches. He looks at James, a serious expression on his face. “You’re not a shit werewolf, Jamesy baby. You should know that.”

It’s not what James was expecting. “…thanks?” he manages.

Louis grins an evil grin. “I’m still taking your car, though.” He hits the pedal, and they’re gone.

After the car screeches around the corner and out of sight, James pulls out his mobile to call for a car. Then a sinking realization hits him. He feels one pocket, then another, and confirms that he left his wallet at home in his rush to find the boys. Good thing his ankle’s not bothering him.

James uses the long, wet walk home to reorient himself. Even if tonight hadn’t happened the way that it did, the boys were always going to leave for the X Factor Live tour next week. It’s time to get used to being a lone wolf again. Get those instincts back under control. Maybe he should make time for a trip home; he’s well overdue for a visit with his own pack. Maybe if he spent more time with other wolves he wouldn’t have gotten so attached to the pups.

The house is dark and quiet when James arrives home, shoes squelching and hair soaked. But his car’s in the driveway. That’s the first good sign. The second is the five pairs of shoes in the front hallway.

He hangs his wet raincoat to drip in the hallway. A cup of tea would be nice, but not so necessary that he’s willing to take the time to make it and put off learning what he’ll find upstairs. He settles for toweling off his hair in the kitchen and tossing the used towel and his soaked socks in the general direction of the washing machine.

Upstairs, the pack is piled on the bed, all five of them. No one looks up when James comes in, not even Louis. James doesn’t care whether Louis is feigning sleep or not. Either way, there’s a message there.

The heady disorientation of the shift, uninvited and easy, takes him by surprise as he stands in the doorway. He feels it rippling up his back and barely manages to unloop his belt and get his shirt over his head. Moments later, he’s on four paws, kicking his hind legs out from his pants. He feels a giddy runner’s high and, for the first time, understands what Johannah must have meant about the oxytocin.

James jumps on the bed and curls up next to the pack, back against Harry and Zayn. Niall sighs and James can feel the exhalation where Niall’s nose is grazing his spine. James sighs, too. He falls asleep surrounded by the scent of wolf, of pack, of home.