Ruby sat staring at her computer screen for far too long. A frown marred her face as she read the headline: Rabid Wolves Take Over The City. Her eyes scanned the first paragraph, her eyes getting stuck on the number listed there. Five separate occurrences over the span of a month. Five. Her mouth felt dry as she clicked open a new tab.

Ruby typed into the search engine, rabid wolves. She waited patiently for it to load, then clicked on the first Wikipedia link. There wasn't much there, except the glaring fact that rabid wolves were rare occurrences in North America.

She sat back in her chair. Rare, but we've had five? In a city? She couldn't wrap her head around it. She clicked on a few other links, but nothing gave up the sort of information she was seeking. She demanded more answers, starting with where these wolves had come from in the first place.

And another thing: how was Atlas and Brody involved? It was twice now that Atlas had saved her during an attack. And she had the sinking feeling he had been at all five instances. She went back to the web browser and searched local animal control. She clicked on the link bringing her to the local animal control office in her county. She wrote down the address on a notepad and slipped it into her bag.

She checked her watch. She only had a few more hours of work, and this was highly unlike her, but the animal control office closed at the same time as her own business. And Ruby felt the sudden and inexplicable urge to go check them out.

She pulled her bag over her shoulder and stepped out of her cubicle and headed to her boss's office. This is unlike you, she reminded herself, but it was no use.

Ruby knocked on the office door and stuck her head in. Her boss smiled up at her, typing away at her own computer. "Ruby! How can I help?"

"I'm meeting a client to go over their business meeting I've been organizing. We've finally booked the venue, thank goodness. I just wanted to check in to let you know."

Her boss waved her hand in a dismissive motion. "Have fun! That's what event planning is all about, right? I'm glad you're settling in well here."

Ruby didn't stick around long to chat, worried her own guilt over the lie would catch up to her. She was half worried she'd admit to lying if her boss kept smiling at her. A wide, trusting smile. Ruby closed her eyes to quell the guilt, and then she left the office.

The animal control office was a little out of the way, and not a quick walk. Ruby spent the entirety of the thirty minutes thinking about how strange it was that these wolves had suddenly appeared in her city. And rabid. How were they coming down with rabies?

And, the question Ruby had been ignoring the most was, how did that wolf get into the rink? And what happened to that man in the bathroom?

It had her mind spinning. That wolf had no business being inside that rink. It made absolutely no sense, and yet...

Ruby shook her head. She would have to do more research later. Perhaps a back door to the rink had been propped open. Perhaps the wolf had wandered in through an open door, ignored by employees enough that it had reached the crowd of people.

Ruby rubbed the back of her neck, feeling only a little relieved when she saw the front door for the animal control office. It was a lone building, standing a little back from the main street. When she opened the front door, a bell chimed above her head.

Someone was at the front desk. They looked up at her in surprise, a question clear in their expression. "Hello there. How can I help you?"

Ruby took in the sight of the office. It was small in the front room, and Ruby assumed that the doors behind the front desk led to where the real operation took place when the workers caught wild animals. She felt suddenly nervous as she approached the woman.

"Hi. I'm not sure if you can help me, but I'm writing an article about the rabid wolves in the area, and I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the process of capturing that sort of animal."

The woman at the front desk stared back at Ruby, enough to make her nervous. Should she have gone with another excuse? Writing an article seemed harmless enough, and like a good reason for someone to be snooping around.

"Oh. I'm sorry, I can't really help you with that. We didn't take in any of those wolves. You're talking about the recent attacks, correct?"

Ruby's mind went blank. Her mouth opened and then closed. "Oh. Is there another animal control in the area? I caught your employee Brody handling the attack." A small white lie, but she was hoping to figure out if Brody and Atlas actually worked here or not. And she sure as hell wasn't going to ask them herself.

"We... don't have any employees named Brody." The woman cocked her head to the side, confused. "We're the only animal control center in this county. But this worker could have been employed by a private animal control company. We're employed by the state, you know? A free service, technically. But anyone is allowed to pay someone else for an animal control situation."

Ruby found herself nodding. Her cheeks heated in embarrassment, but at least now she had some answers. "Huh. Okay, thank you."

The woman smiled. "Of course. I'm sorry I couldn't help you. Good luck with the article!"

Ruby walked back to her office, brain spinning. So, Brody and Atlas must work for a private animal control company, then. They had to; it made the most sense. Brody admitted to taking care of the wolf problem, and had even referred to himself as animal control.

She should have dropped it. She should have just forgotten it.

But she couldn't.

Ruby didn't go back to the office. She went to the library instead, holing herself up by the communal computers.

She turned on the computer, watching the dinosaur of a monitor blink to life. She found her foot bouncing on the ground as she waited for it to boot up and load. Five. Five attacks. Five was no measly number.

As soon as the computer was ready, Ruby was searching up more animal control companies. None, none, popped up. Not a single one in the area, other than the county office she had just visited. There were a few across state borders, but too far for Atlas and Brody to be working at.

It didn't make sense.

She did a little more research, trying to figure out how many wolves resided in her state, and her stomach sank as she read the words on the computer screen: Currently, no established wolf populations live in this state.

Her chest tightened with something akin to fear. She scrolled down, and scanned each link title. Gray wolf no longer established in New England. Will wolves return to the Northeast? Are there wolves in the Northeast?

Ruby shook her head no, over and over again. Not possible. Not possible. She refused to comprehend the words on the screen. Refused to comprehend what this meant.

She rubbed at her forehead. There was a reddit link that suggested wolf sightings in New England could be wolves heading south from Canada, and Ruby latched onto that assumption, just so she could stay rational. They're from Canada, she told herself. A pack heading south.

Was that typical of wolves? She didn't know.

She turned off the computer and instead went to the nonfiction section of the library. Her eyes frantically searched the shelves for books on wolves, finding a few that looked promising. After she was satisfied with her collection, Ruby checked them out at the front desk with her library card, and then she began to walk home.

Her heart was racing. She felt anxious about running into another rabid wolf, and she found herself constantly checking her surroundings. She tried to find any hiding wolves by looking behind cars, searching between buildings, listening with strained ears for any growling.

By the time she was at her apartment, Ruby was sweating with stress. She unlocked the front door, stumbling in with her arms full of books.

She wasn't expecting to run directly into Atlas, dropping her books all onto the carpet. For a blinding moment, she forgot about the books completely, feeling herself get lost in the feel of his arms around her. His grip was steady, warm, solid. When she craned her neck back to look him in the eyes, she found her breath caught in her throat.

His dark eyes were glaring down at her. "Can you watch your step for once?" The words were rough, pissed off, nearly a snarl. He seemed to realize just how tightly he held her, and nearly shoved her away in response.

She didn't have anything to say as she stared at him. He wore his riding leathers, clearly about to head out on his bike. His helmet, which must have been in the crook of his arm, was now on the ground by her books.

He looked insanely good looking. So good looking, Ruby had half a mind to push his hair off of his forehead.

She recoiled at that thought, but Atlas clearly wasn't aware of where her thoughts had gone as he bent down to grab his helmet and her books. But as he gathered them, he froze. "Why the fuck do you have all of these wolf books?"

Her throat bobbed. "I'm interested in the sudden wolf population in our city. Which, by the way, do you and Brody work for animal control?"

She wasn't going to ask, but he was right there. And for once, with how he was crouched, she was taller than him. He was only slightly less intimidating at that level.

Atlas snorted as he stood, her books in his arms, held away from her. "No. I'm a landlord, not some animal wrangler. What a stupid question."

She blushed furiously. Refusing to let him get the best of her, she held out her arm for the books. "You can give those back, now."

He held them, right out of reach. "Or what? Will you finally move out?"

She ignored that. "You're telling me you aren't interested in what's going on with all these wolves? Did you know we don't even have wolves in this state? I researched it. Where are these wolves coming from if they don't live in the US Northeast?"

"Drop it, Ruby. Leave this alone."

His response made a shiver run down her spine violently. Fear hit her gut swiftly, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end at his warning. She heard it in his voice, the way he nearly growled at her.

But, she was stubborn. And she refused to let Atlas scare her off. "If I let this go, will you let me stay here?"

A long tense silence followed. She tilted her chin up, glaring right back at him, mouth twisted. Just as she thought he would sigh and say yes, or anything really, he gave her the books back in a rough pass off. "You'll be leaving like everyone else in eighteen days. Tick tock, Sweetheart."

Ruby felt immediate disappointment and anger at his words. She would have said something back in a retort, but Atlas stormed past her, slamming the front door shut behind him. He was making it so very clear he wanted nothing to do with her.

Ruby found herself stomping her way up the stairs to her apartment, anger flowing in her veins as she threw open the door. She tossed the books onto her table, forgetting them in an instant as she gave a frustrated yell. "I hate him!" she screamed to the empty apartment. She kicked a nearby box, and immediately regretted it. "I hate him so, so much, that asshole!"

* * *

"I hate her. God I hate her." Atlas rode his bike, faster and faster towards the pack house. Anger and lust burned under his skin at his latest interaction with Ruby Crowell. His grip on the handlebars tightened at the memory of her expression staring up at him.

"We do not hate her. Stop that," Rufias snarled back. "I'm growing tired of this, Atlas. She's ours. Stop fucking around."

"We aren't taking her, Rufias. We don't need her." Atlas couldn't take her. For a split second, he remembered how he had been crouched on the floor in front of her, looking up into those wide eyes, and his mind spun it. They were no longer in the hallway of the apartment building, but instead in his bedroom. And Ruby Crowell was not wearing clothes.

He banished that thought immediately. He wouldn't go down that road, not with this human. Mate or not, Atlas wasn't keeping her.

"You don't decide for us!" Rufias howled.

"I do decide for us. And I've decided that she isn't ours. Now, enough of this talk." Atlas wished, not for the first time, that he could shut out communication with his wolf. Rufias, most of the time, was level headed and smarter than Atlas gave him credit for. But with Ruby, there was no trusting Rufias's input.

"This will kill us!" Rufias lashed out. "You can't ignore the pull! You can't ignore who she is to us!"

That was where Rufias was wrong. Atlas would ignore her until he died.

By the time Atlas pulled up to the pack house, Rufias had gone silent in protest. A part of Atlas hated that his own wolf had turned against his judgment, but that was worry for another time. Atlas didn't have the time to deal with a human mate and the issues that were beginning to stem from it.

Brody was pacing in front of the front door. When he saw Atlas, he visibly relaxed. "Atlas, there's been another. We have him captured-"

"No one told me?" Atlas was already about to erupt in anger from seeing Ruby with those books, and hearing Rufias argue. This would push him over the edge.

"It just happened. He's still... himself enough to interrogate."

Atlas didn't ask anymore questions after that. He stormed down to their underground cells, built before his own time as Alpha. He didn't have much use for them before, but with the rabid wolves, it provided the perfect place to keep an eye on them.

Lights sparked to life as Atlas descended the stone steps to the cellar. He could hear the panting before he stepped into view of the cells. There, in the middle one on the right was a man lying on the stone ground. His body was shaking, and his labored breathing sounded painful, even to Atlas.

When the man looked up at Atlas, he tried to spit on the Alpha.

"Interesting way to try and say hello to the man trying to find a cure for your predicament," Atlas chided. He tilted his head, trying to place the man, but he didn't recognize him. "Tell me, which clan do you belong to?"

The man shook his head and groaned. He refused to answer, but Atlas didn't really need it from him. The man smelled of sickness, but he also didn't smell of any pack. A rogue, then. Which would make this now six rogue wolves sick with rabies, finding themselves on his doorstep.

This was personal, now. "Why did you come here? Surely you knew my pack would rip you to shreds."

The man tipped his head back to glare at Atlas. A violent shudder ripped through his body, and the man screamed out in agony. He scraped his nails against the stone, twisting on the floor. "Please," he moaned to no one. "Make it stop!"

"I would like to. Why are you here?"

"Searching!" was all the man yelled. He continued to writhe against the ground in pain. "He's searching!"

"Who is he?"

"Kicked out of the pack. To do his bidding-"

"Who?" Atlas was losing his patience. He felt his sharp nails poke through the tender skin of his fingertips. Rufias stirred within him, ready for a fight if that was what it came down to, but Atlas wasn't going to harm this man.

Not while he was sick. That was asking for rabies.

The man shook his head, and then the interrogation was over. Fur burst out of his skin, and the man found himself on his hands and knees, back bent in an odd angle as his body shifted into a wolf. Atlas watched it happen, used to seeing this, but deep down, he was angry. Another lost to the throws of rabies, and he was no closer to the truth.

He snapped his fingers, and a member of his pack was standing by his side, head bent. "Alpha?"

"Collect the blood samples, like the others. Bring them to the lab."

Atlas didn't wait for confirmation. He climbed the steps of the cellar, trying to keep his cool. But the moment he was above ground, grass beneath his shoes, Atlas let himself shift, Rufias coming forth with a long howl.

They would run off the anger and disappointment together. And then, Atlas would get to work.