Chapter One
“Alpha, we’ve got an emergency call,” Lucas, the senior tower chief at Big Wolf airport, said over the phone.
“What is it?” Joe Villalobos rubbed one hand over his forehead. It was close to midnight and raining. The airport was all but closed down for the night, but an emergency was an emergency, and he’d better see what it was all about.
“It’s a medical flight out of Houston, heading for a hospital in Louisiana. Engine trouble. She really needs to put down, and we’re the closest. But the big thing is her cargo. She’s got some kind of human organ that’s destined for an emergency transplant, and it can’t wait. Pilot needs another plane to get the organ to the hospital within the next few hours, or the whole thing will be wasted and the intended recipient will be out of luck.” Lucas sounded worried, so the pilot—whoever she was—must have made an impression on the older man.
“Did you check out the pilot’s story?” Joe asked. The town had been having some trouble with magical folk of evil intent lately, so everyone who passed through the airport was being scrutinized more closely than ever before. Especially strangers. Joe had an obligation to protect his Pack, and he was taking it seriously.
“Called the hospitals on both ends,” Lucas confirmed, “and they check out. Both transplant teams made personal appeals for our help. Organ transplants are a big thing for humans,” he went on. “They’re rare and difficult, but they save lives, and I got the sense these people really cared and wanted to be sure the sick person in Louisiana got this organ as soon as possible.”
Werewolves rarely got sick. They didn’t need organ transplants. Medical intervention of any kind was rare, except for trauma and wound care. Patching up injured shifters was common because they lived active lives that were full of danger. But, as long as you could stop the bleeding, their magically revved up immune systems and metabolisms were able to heal most wounds, even major ones, given a bit of time.
Joe was old enough to have spent time in the human world, and he knew transplants weren’t exactly common. Generally, the donor had to have died and made their wishes known in advance that their organs be harvested and used to save other lives, if possible. Then, the organs had to be matched up with those in need and hustled to wherever the patients were, if the patients weren’t already in the same hospital. Joe had seen a few of these medical transports pass through Big Wolf Airport in his years, but not many. This was something he should probably check out himself.
He stood from behind his desk and headed out into the public parts of the airport he and his Pack had built. It wasn’t huge, but it served the shifter community well as a stopover point for those on cross-country journeys, and a regional hub for those who needed to go places by air and wanted to avoid—for one reason or another—the giant airports that non-magical folk favored.
Joe’s teenaged son, Kevin, met him as he came out of the office area. He was getting taller every day and would soon be reckoned an adult by both human and shifter standards. Where had the time gone?
“Hey, Dad. I heard about the emergency landing. Need help?” Kevin asked, in his usual, forthright manner. The boy had really matured in the last year or so and had become Joe’s right-hand-man for all sorts of situations. He was growing into his wolf’s dominant traits, and Joe had every hope that his youngest son might follow in his footsteps and be Alpha of this Pack, one day.
“Sure, you might as well come along. I want to meet this pilot myself and make sure everything is on the level before I send out one of our planes and pilots on a night like this.” As he said the words, thunder rolled in from the distance. The storm was getting closer. It wasn’t a good night for flying small planes.
The pilot was good, Joe would give her that. He watched from the hangar as the small plane made its approach. She was leaning into the winds that wanted to hurl her off course.
“Those crosswinds are something,” Kevin shouted, standing next to his father in the open door of the hangar. The rain splashed them only a little, howling in the other direction, but it was hitting the little plane viciously as it sank lower and lower.
“Pilot’s handling it well,” Joe observed, his eyes narrowing on the little plane that looked almost, at times, like it was standing still, buffeted by strong winds. “Squall picked the wrong time to come through, but she’s committed now.”
Joe had made it his business to learn all he could about every level of aviation. His mate had died due to pilot error. After he’d lived through his inner wolf’s raging need to follow its mate into death and learned to live for their children, he’d promised himself he would never lose another loved one that way. His plan had been to teach every member of the Pack that wanted to learn how to fly, starting with himself. In the past decade, he’d taken the old airstrip on the edge of town and turned it into the small regional airport it was today.
It had been a broken-down wreck of a place when he’d bought it, but he’d put the Pack to work, and they’d all rallied around him. Losing their Alpha female had been almost as hard on the Pack as it had been on Joe himself. They had done all in their power to try to keep him alive and sane during those first impossible months, and then the incredibly difficult years that had passed since. The pain of losing the one woman who could complete him was never far from his soul, but it had lessened with time as he’d focused on being a father to his three pups and, really, the entire Pack.
Now, his only daughter, Tracy, had a mate of her own and a child. That his little granddaughter was a jaguar still rankled a bit, but not as much as it had. Not since the child’s father, a dominant jaguar pilot named Hank, had come back to set things right.
Getting Tracy pregnant and flying off to who-knew-where had been a bad move on Hank’s part, but Joe wasn’t oblivious to the fact that Tracy’s refusal to tell Hank about the child had been a contributing transgression. Little Em had been two years old when her father had finally returned to Big Wolf and met his daughter for the first time.
Joe was glad they’d straightened things out and had decided to split their time between Big Wolf and Jaguar Island. Em was going to school with other little jaguars, but they spent a lot of time here, as well, as it should be. Joe didn’t want to give up all contact with his daughter. She was still a wolf, and she would always be part of his Pack, as would his granddaughter, even if she did turn into a cat.
Joe had been exploring, as best he could, the structures of some of the more successful multi-species Clans around the world, starting with the Redstone Clan in Nevada. There, a cougar Clan had brought a number of different shifter species under their protection into what Joe privately thought of as a mega-Clan, which included a few different wolf Packs. Joe had visions of doing something similar here, if he could swing it, but that would take time to grow and evolve.
That was okay. Joe always liked to think a few steps ahead of everyone else, and his plans for his Pack were grand by anyone’s scale. The Pack was what he lived for now. The Pack and his own small family, of course, though two of his pups were grown and had left the nest. Only Kevin remained living at home with him, and Kevin was nearing that age where he was becoming more and more independent. He was turning into a man Joe was so incredibly proud of, as he was proud of all his children, but Kevin… He was showing every sign of being the kind of strong Alpha personality that could keep the Pack going long after Joe was gone.