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Moonrise.
Joan wandered through the brownstone, rubbing her flank along the banisters and door frames to refresh her scent. Sherlock was still awake but ignoring her, as was his wont on full moon nights, set up in the media room with a bowl of cold noodles sitting forgotten beside him.
Joan was tempted to stalk in and steal them, and on another night she would have, but this night she had other priorities.
Still, she would not rush her usual routines. She headed out into the city night, sticking to the shadows so as not to alarm the few people still out. Over the years she had gotten good at it, loping from stoop to stoop to alleyway, lurking in the corners of deserted subway platforms waiting for an empty car. She wasn’t as natural as Marcus, who she crossed paths with behind the precinct; but he had been turned as a child and grew up as a wolf in the city; Joan had had to relearn her hometown from this perspective as an adult.
Alfredo was out when she went by his place; Martha was in and came out to greet her with a bowl of water and a plate of leftover steak; she paced a wide perimeter around Oren’s house, never getting closer than a quarter mile, respecting his wishes but unable to stay completely away, especially now that Gabrielle was pregnant.
Mom and Dad were too far to check on, given her plans for the rest of the night, so after circling Oren’s she turned back toward Manhattan.
Despite making up only a fraction of a percent of the population of New York, wolves were still too numerous in the city for packs to carve out exclusive territories. By unspoken consensus, the parks were held in common, by packs and lone wolves alike, where all were free to stretch their legs and get in a little squirrel hunting. Even the humans respected the commons in a way; full moon nights were always scheduled lightly in Central Park, only the most built-up areas in use, and the smaller and less urban parks shut down completely to anyone not running on four legs.
So of course Morland Holmes and his pack had staked an unheard of claim.
Holmes had apparently booked the entirety of the Great Lawn for a private event, ensuring that humans would be scarce. Joan didn’t know if they had waiting until moonrise to move in or if they had taken control with the human powers of currency and influence and simply held it, but by the time she had tracked them to Central Park they had all 850-ish acres in hand (or tooth). Fifty strong, all in peak physical condition, the Holmes pack was well designed to take on and defeat any of the smaller city packs that might object to their staking such a territory.
The wolves guarding the borders let Joan through, however. She ran unmolested all the way to the edge of the lawn before one of Holmes’s lackeys got in her way.
It was Mr. Cook, and Joan had none of the forbearance for him as a wolf that she showed him in their human confrontation. She barely broke her stride before launching herself at his throat, teeth bared.
He had at least forty pounds on her, but Joan had been fighting (and winning) above her weight class since long before being bitten. After that first solid bite at his throat, she used her greater speed and agility against him, feinting to one flank and then nipping the other, luring him into a footrace and then doubling back on a dime to take his legs out from under him. He got in one glancing scrape of his claws near her spine, and then Joan flipped him onto his back and pinned him, fangs pressed tight against his jugular.
He submitted with ill grace, then slunk back to the treeline, leaving Joan free to continue her path to Holmes, who was sitting indolently at the center of the lawn.
He pushed himself to his feet as Joan approached, head and tail high. She circled him, bristling, a straight line from nose to tail tip, waiting for him to make a move.
He was larger than Mr. Cook in every way, taller at the shoulder and far heavier. So it took Joan by surprise when he struck out, snake-like and lightning-fast, to bite down solidly on her tail. She whipped around to strike back but he was already running flat-out.
Joan leapt into the chase feet fleet and pulse pounding. She gained on Holmes fast, but just as she pulled alongside he rounded Belvedere Castle and plunged down into the Ramble.
Here his greater size served him well, as he barreled through the underbrush with ease, barely slowed by the whipping branches; Joan floundered in his wake, cheeks and sides stung by the twigs and brambles disturbed by his passage.
After a particularly vicious branch caught Joan square on the nose, she shook herself out of her mindless pursuit. Holmes might have size and strength on his side, but Joan knew the park inside and out. She stopped dead and opened her mouth wide to quiet her breathing, straining her ears to listen.
Holmes caught on to the changed game quickly, his crashing plow through the woods coming to a halt almost as quickly as Joan’s. But whether it was unfamiliarity with the terrain or his sheer size, Holmes could not move anywhere near as silently as Joan was capable of. She closed on him on silent paws, stalking, then just before he caught her scent she put on a burst of speed to barrel into his side, slamming him into the trunk of the nearest oak.
He struck back, again far more quickly than Joan expected; she instinctively reared back on her haunches and all he caught was fur. They exchanged several snarling, snapping bites that made little real contact. Holmes closed in, crowding Joan against the trees, shoulder pushing her muzzle up so she could do little more than mouth the night air. Joan struggled, trying to claw for purchase; the leaf litter was too thick.
Finally, moments before Joan would have had to submit to avoid a broken neck, she twisted her hind legs just enough to kick off the trunk behind her, launching her body over Holmes’s shoulder.
She spun the instant her paws touched forest floor again, bodying in between Holmes’s legs and under his belly, heaving with all her strength to flip him onto his side. She felt claws raking down her shoulders but ignored them, wrestling forward to close her jaws around Holmes’s throat, pressing her own claws in tight against his vulnerable guts.
She had him.
He snarled, sound vibrating tight and angry under Joan’s teeth. Joan simply pressed down harder.
He huffed. Joan had a delicious moment to anticipate his submission, so much sweeter than Mr. Cook’s, when he changed the game on her entirely.
He shifted.
Fur melted into bare skin; claws and fangs shortened into blunt, human, nails and teeth. Because of course Morland Holmes could only be a born wolf — his size, his speed, his obscene conviction that he was entitled to anything he desired. His change entirely under his conscious control, in a way the change never seemed to be for one bitten.
He brought a hand up to tangle in the thick fur where Joan’s neck met her shoulder, completely unconcerned by his nudity and the continued pressure of Joan’s teeth against his throat. “What an exquisite beast you are, Joan. Truly I chose well when I picked you for my son.”
Joan snarled, tempted to rip and rend and damn the consequences. But though she would be the one to walk away, it would be his victory if she gave in to that desire, acted the beast of human nightmares.
Instead she focused inward, on the pull of the tide in her blood. The moon was near to setting; the vacillations in its orbit had taken it further from the earth than in most months.
She thought of her mother, sitting by her bedside in that hospital in Afghanistan, insisting to the nurses that she be the one to wash Joan’s mangled shoulder clean. And she thought of Sherlock, talking to her about cases even on full moon nights when he could hardly stand to look at her; insisting he knew nothing of wolf psychology (and cared even less), but still carrying something with Joan’s scent on his person any time they left the brownstone.
The shift was slow, and painful, but Joan pushed through it until she was just as human as Holmes was again, straddling his waist, her fingertips digging painfully into his chest.
“You may have hired me. But Sherlock and I picked each other. You have nothing to do with that.”
Now, now Joan had impressed him. She could see the light of fresh appraisal in his eyes, feel the rapidly hardening press of a different sort of appraisal against her ass. Her body responded, wildness still singing through her veins; Holmes’s mouth turned up into a triumphant smirk, and Joan pulled her hips up and away, even as she scratched viciously down his belly, raising deep red welts on his fragile skin.
Her voice rumbled deep in her chest. “You and your pack are nothing to us. Your wealth and power are little more than masturbatory displays for smaller minds, and nothing you do or say will have any effect on me or my partnership with your son.”
She reached down and gripped his prick; squeezed tight, then stripped it fast and rough. She watched the pain and pleasure war for dominance in Holmes’s face, eyes still aided by the wolf’s better night vision. It took only a few pulls for Holmes to spill all over his belly, covering himself in the stench of defeat and futility.
“This is who you are. However you challenge me, I will best you. So don’t challenge me.”
And then Joan surrendered again to the waning call of the moon, shifting back to begin her triumphal trot home.