Another Half

November 2010

Thanksgiving Day

“It’s time to call Saxe Oaks, Beta. We haven’t heard from Dad since he left and he promised me he’d be here last night. Give me Alpha Chett’s number. I’ll call him if you won’t.”

Thanks to Nakon’s coaching, Rex had finally realized the mistake he had made the previous night. He had asked Beta Enrique if he thought it was a good idea if they called Saxe Oaks inquiring about Alpha Brian’s whereabouts.

Well, Enrique hadn’t thought it was a good idea at all, claiming he didn’t want to come across as “some desperate lovesick she-wolf tracking down her mate.”

Fortunately, Enrique’s own mate had been sitting next to him eating dinner, and she gave him a hard smack on the back of his head.

“Is that what you think of me? A desperate lovesick mate?!” she had asked.

“Ow! My love,” Enrique said with a gulp, “I think you heard wrong—”

Smack!

“Ow!”

The look of abject panic on Enrique’s face made Rex grin and he chose to leave the dining hall at that moment.

That’ll show him, Nakon commented satisfied as they left.

By the time noon rolled around on Thanksgiving day, Rex couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong and went to Enrique’s office to demand they call Saxe Oaks. His father never went more than a couple of hours without responding to Rex’s texts, and all Rex’s calls went straight to voicemail. In fact, Rex hadn’t so much as received a text from his father that he had arrived at Saxe Oaks, which was very unlike him.

“I haven’t heard from my dad, either,” Ax said. They both stood in Beta Enrique’s office. “The last thing I got from him was a text telling me they were arriving at Saxe Oaks and that he’d call my mom and me that night. He never did.”

Beta Enrique sighed, “See? They arrived. Brian took several cases of the good stuff, y’know. They’re all probably still drunk out of their minds.”

“Let’s make sure,” Rex said, letting some of his alpha authority slip into his voice to make Enrique take him seriously. He didn’t want to do that to Enrique or anyone until he was officially an alpha, but it felt worse to do nothing and wait. But the move wasn’t lost on Beta Enrique.

“Fine!” Beta Enquire was more than a little irritated as he opened one of his desk drawers and took out a small notebook—-a phone directory. “I’ll call that moron Chet right now and then you two pussies can leave me alone, but if your fathers arrive while I’m on the phone with him, so help me, I will fucking make you pay for it!” He grabbed the office phone after glancing at his phone directory and dialed.

Rex grinned and glanced at Ax, who rolled his eyes.

“I saw that, Ax!” Beta Enrique said through his teeth.

“Why do you think they haven’t called?” Ax whispered. “My mom’s worried, and she never worries. She doesn’t feel her bond with him anymore since last night.”

Rex opened to answer that he didn’t know when Enrique shouted, “What the fuck do you mean they never showed up?! Lance texted his boy that they were arriving in your territory two fucking days ago!”

Enrique’s face had turned red despite his brown skin as both Rex and Ax stared at him. Rex had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that was quickly hardening into dread.

“Why didn’t your mom say something last night?” Rex finally whispered back.

“I dunno. She didn’t want to be called paranoid, I guess.”

“That doesn’t make sense! Alpha Chet, why would Lance text that they were arriving if they intended of going somewhere else? Why would they turn around at the last minute? Brian doesn’t operate that way and you know it!” Enrique shut his eyes and took a deep breath while he listened. “So neither you nor anyone in your pack hasn’t seen him or Lance or any of the guards at all?” Pause. “That’s strange. Fine. May we have permission to scout your territory and look for them? We want to track them—-” Another pause. “No? No?! Why the hell not?! Hello? Hello?! Fuck.” Enrique stared at his phone before slamming it down. “The asshole hung up on me.”

Rex and Ax looked at each other. Ax looked considerably pale.

“Now what?” Rex had no idea what to think as the dread he had been feeling turned stone-heavy in his stomach.

Beta Enrique ran his face with one of his hands. “Fuck. I don’t know yet. We can’t go into Chet’s fucking territory, but we can track them from here and see where it leads us. If they arrived in his territory, we’ll know. If they left there via another route like the moron suggests, we’ll know.”

“It will take a long time,” Ax said.

Enrique shrugged. “I know, but unless one of you two geniuses comes up with a better idea, it’s all we got.”

Rex spent the rest of Thanksgiving Day gathering trackers and warriors to form several search parties for his father and his group.

For three weeks they searched for his father and his party. They tracked him all the way to the border with Saxe Oakes’s border, but Alpha Chet still wouldn’t let them enter his territory saying that Alpha Brian and his group obviously trespassed and took off somewhere else instead. Alpha Chett even placed several sentinels around his border to make sure no one from the Azul pack would trespass.

“That’s not suspicious at all,” Sergio muttered when they received that particular report. Rex and the rest agreed.

Unfortunately, the search parties didn’t track Alpha Brian’s exit on the border with Saxe Oaks that was touching unclaimed land, and the Cerulean River pack’s alpha didn’t authorize them to enter onto his lands to search, either.

“I don’t want anything to do with whatever you shits have going on with Chett,” Alpha Nash from the Cerulean River had said. “He’s one nutty motherfucker, and I don’t want to start a war with him.”

Rex and his pack spent several days searching among the mountains that surrounded the packs, while other search parties covered every street, every corner of Azul City, all to no avail. They traveled northwest up the highway corridor, as far as Cobalt Lake pack’s borders, but there wasn’t even a whiff of anyone in Alpha Brian’s missing group.

All the while, Rex replayed his last conversation with his dad at night at the expense of several hours of sleep. When he wasn’t out searching for his father, he spent his time in the gym decompressing, taking out his fear and frustration by destroying punching bags.

Finally, a week before Christmas, Beta Enrique got a text from a blocked number.

You’ve got mail waiting for you at the entrance.