Outcast (Supernaturals Book 2) Read Free Page A

have shown weakness, and would have probably been an automatic expulsion from the pack. The man was torn; I was sure. In his place, I don’t know what I would do. Either way you hurt one of your daughters.
    The Council’s justification for their insistence that the Alexanders keep Leigh out of family gatherings once Danielle and Dave started dating was that she wasn’t a supernatural. When Mr. Alexander had refused to comply with the Council’s edict, they had ordered Dave and Danielle to split up because the Alexanders were technically no longer fully pack after claiming Leigh and moving outside of pack territory. Their refusal to obey pack orders on the matter concerning the couple would further demote their status in the supernatural world.
    Mr. Alexander had tried to argue that even though Leigh wasn’t his by blood that didn’t mean he loved her any less and didn’t mean she was any less his daughter. The argument hadn’t worked when Leigh was an infant, and it didn’t work that time either.
    The Council had given the Alexanders a choice: shun their eldest daughter or keep their middle daughter from being with the man she loves. Mr. Alexander didn’t want to lay the decision off on his middle daughter, but considering he wasn’t going to outcast one daughter because another had a crush on a guy, he decided that Danielle would have to be the one to decide between her sister and her boyfriend. The Council hadn’t liked his decision but had understood it.
    What the pack hadn’t realize was how much Danielle loved Leigh and how much Dave loved Danielle. Danielle chose Leigh. Dave and her parents had initially tried to talk her out of it since at the time Leigh was making plans to move to Washington for graduate school because of a writing award she had won, which was going to pay for her first year. They thought it a ridiculous choice when Leigh wasn’t going to be around anyway.
    I wasn’t there when the couple split up, but Dave told me most of it later that night. She invited him to her parent’s home, explained how she felt about the Council’s ridiculous rules, and told him that she could no longer be with him. Dave understood her reasoning, but was annoyed that there was so much drama over a mere human. To an extent, he held to some of the same beliefs the pack did when it came to humans and other non-pack members, but his love for Danielle held more power over him.
    The following week he filed a formal request to leave the pack, so that he could be with Danielle. When he took his decision to Danielle, she told him she didn’t want to be the reason he left his pack, but if he did, she would leave with him. Her parents weren’t happy with the idea of them leaving the pack but said they would support their choices and even said they would consider joining a new pack with them.
    Our Council wouldn’t hear of them leaving, of course. That would make the pack look bad. Would bring shame down on the Council. They also, we would all find out later, feared Dave starting his own pack and taking a great deal of the Pine Hollow—that’s the name of our town and pack—pack members with him if he did so. Therefore, they tried to work out a second option.
    What the new agreement boiled down to was that over time, the Alexanders would separate themselves from Leigh as much as possible. The separation was a necessity that the Alexanders knew they would have to do anyway, considering the life span of the average shapeshifter. Leigh would eventually notice that her parents and siblings weren’t aging normally, so in order to keep their supernatural status a secret, they would have to extricate themselves from her life somehow before she grew suspicious.
    The next stipulation was that the Alexanders had to move back to pack territory if Dave and Danielle married. The family had moved to a small town twenty-minutes south of Pine Hollow right after Leigh was born per the orders of the Council. The move kept them