The next morning, I’m sitting at the dining table in a cozy red and gray Shaker-style kitchen with six shifters, including Mack and Bennett, and I can’t stop thinking about how small.

Back in the Boones, my father’s pack, we viewed six as a small family, not an entire pack. But, given that I was a rare exception, the sole child in a family of two, just my father and me after my mother died, I think I recovered more quickly than any other shifter would have to learn a pack could be this ...