Free Fixed: Fur Play by Christine Warren Page B

father’s attention, and even his grudging respect, she had no love for the chores that accompanied the position. She took no joy in settling disputes between rivals, nor in enforcing the laws of her father’s rule. She knew she had the ability and the respect of the pack, but she got no pleasure from it. She didn’t relish the power of her station, just lived with it.
    Not that she wanted to be omega by any means. She couldn’t imagine being the lowest rung in the pack hierarchy, nor even being lost in the middle with the majority of the pack. She didn’t want to drop in rank, she just wanted to not have so much of the responsibility that went with being in charge. And that really wasn’t one of her options. So now look at her. Probably the world’s only reluctant alpha.
    She groaned and raised her head from the desk just far enough to prop it up in her hands. The real problem now was that her future stretched before her like a trap. The longer she spent here, doing the thing that made her unhappy, the tougher it would be to ever get herself out of it. The more the pack accepted her, the less chance she had to leave. So here she was, stuck in a place she didn’t want to be, doing something she didn’t want to do and telling everyone who tried to talk her out of it to take a flying leap. Not to mention maiming anyone who tried to force her out of the martyrdom she’d stepped into. Sure, that was sane.
    The easiest way out would have been to just lose a challenge. It happened to most Lupines at some point. She could throw a rank challenge and let one of the members of her pack take over her position as leader of the White Paw Clan. The 65

    Christine Warren
    plan had a few disadvantages, though, chief among them, the inability to control whether or not her opponent would let her live after the challenge. Traditionally, alpha challenges ended in death, and just because she had been lenient with her challengers did not mean that anyone else would offer her the same option. The second problem had to do with the fact that she could see no current member of the pack who was capable of taking on the role of alpha with any success. No one else had any experience or even enough good common sense to made a decent showing.
    She sighed and tried to figure out a way to convey that idea without making herself sound like the world’s biggest snob, and there really wasn’t one. It wasn’t that she believed every single one of her pack members was an idiot, just that none of them would be able to step into her shoes without disrupting the life of the pack to a fairly significant degree. While Honor had been trained for her current position since the age of fifteen, no one else had. It might be a harsh truth, but it was still the truth.
    Honor had a vision. She had plans for how she wanted to see the pack join the twenty-first century. She wanted to see them integrating with the modern world, becoming familiar with technology and engineering and science and all the fields that made humans such a threat to the continued survival of the human species. Only by understanding how the human world worked could the Lupines hope to survive the ever-growing encroachment into their territory, but so few pack members had even begun to comprehend that. Most of them had gone reactionary and preached a policy of isolation, cutting the Lupine world completely off from the human one. They saw it as the only way to preserve their culture. Honor saw it as suicide.
    The more isolated they became, the more people would choose to isolate them. And that’s the sort of thing that led to witch trials and hangings and stonings and such things. Honor would prefer the stonings not happen, so the 66

    Fixed: Fur Play
    Lupines would need to learn to live with the humans and to accept that sometimes, change became necessary. Already, their races were beginning to mingle, and she had heard rumors that the big wigs across the country (especially the Council of