I smelled it first. The intoxicating scent of vanilla and strawberry, wafting along the street.

I let the irresistible scent guide me forward, savouring its richness. I knew I was getting close.

The Elderflower soap factory was on the other side of the street, partially obscured by the mad spider's web of wires suspended above the street on crooked telephone poles, its twin concrete smokestacks belching into the sky, the faint din of machinery emanating from its innards. The blue and red Elderflower Pack flag flew proudly on a tall flagpole erected in the front yard of the factory, under which workers were loading crates of soap into trucks for distribution.

The day had passed uneventfully. I had called the dealership and to the demonstrator. A dealership rep would be coming tomorrow morning with the bus to show the features. Elsewhere, on the roads, there had been several crashes reported on the radio. Only one of them had been fatal.

It was five o'clock. The cerulean sky was beginning to darken and the clouds were starting to turn pink, framing the faint outline of a crescent moon. The faint smell of decay emanated from the grimy pavement. In the margins of the street, now thrown into shadow, workers were eating under dim lights in the many small eateries crammed along the sidewalk. Loud, fast-paced lycanpop was blaring out of a ghetto-blaster somewhere. Surrounded by piles of rusty car parts and puddles of muddy water, a mechanic was beating the back end of an old Peugeot into some kind of recognisable shape in the front yard of his workshop. A couple of children were playing on the dusty footpath, kicking a ball made of rags.

Above, the mercury-arc streetlights were beginning to flicker on. A large, well-illuminated billboard stood on steel poles above the labyrinth of wires, the beaming portraits of several Alphas vying for attention from the passers-by below.

I stood on the side of the street, watching for a lull in the traffic. A Lancer Evo and a Golf R streaked past, far ahead of the other traffic, one in pursuit of the other. Probably two young rogue entrepreneurs with money to burn, having a drag race to destress after a hard day's graft. Countless mopeds buzzed past.

The traffic thinned momentarily, and I crossed the road at a rapid pace. On the other side, I ducked into a narrow alley that skirted around the soap factory. The sweet scent of vanilla was almost unbearable here, sickly and overbearing.

The Willow Security headquarters were a cluster of prefab buildings in a vacant lot behind the soap factory. The prefabs had been painted, rather crudely, in the colours of the Willow pack, blue and green.

Tim was outside, throwing something into a wheelie bin. "Oh, hey, Jim."

"Where's Thurgood?"

"He's in his office."

I could hear the sound of spirited conversation coming from the second floor of the main building on the lot. I half-ran up the set of rickety wooden stairs bolted to the side of the prefab, taking two steps at a time.

If there was anyone to ask about the strange incident of the girl in the nighttime, Thurgood Mathers was probably the best. Having a wide range of contacts and informers through his private security business, he had a pulse on pretty much everything that was happening in the Independent Territories.

Thurgood was at his desk. His face was beet-red and he was speaking into the phone in the artificially clipped tone of someone trying very hard not to yell. "Look. We took the thing apart. We mashed it to dust with a hammer. It was 100% solid plastic. No metal or electronic stuff at all."

There was an expensive-looking stereo system mounted on one side of the room. A pile of CDs stood on the floor. Pavarotti. Callas. Caballe.

Thurgood had had this crazy idea of becoming an opera singer when he was younger. He had it all planned out. He would leave his pack and cross over to Zirconia, smuggling himself across underneath one of the trucks that transported goods across the border. He would find his way to Canterbury, the capital and largest city, where he would find a job and enrol in university, studying music.

But then the plan had gone to pieces. The Alpha of his pack had died suddenly of a heart attack, and Thurgood was forced to take the helm, and take over the private security business.

He gritted his teeth. The veins on his forehead bulged slightly. "Yes, Kaden, of course, Kaden. See you later."

He slammed the receiver down. He leaned back on the office chair, which gave an audible creak as he reclined.

"One of his pack guards captured a kestrel with a tag from a human research institute on its leg. You know. A little piece of plastic with a serial on it, just so they know it's the same bird if they ever catch up with it again. Now he's gotten it into his tiny mind that the humans are using birds to spy on his pack and he wants my pack sentries to help him kill every single bird in the woods around his pack territory. And he wants them on guard to kill any birds that fly towards his territory. You can't make this shit up. Humans couldn't make this shit up."

Thurgood was referring to Kaden Lancaster, his young, handsome, unstable and general moron of a neighbour, the Alpha of the Salmon Creek Pack.

I sat down at the coffee-ringed table. "Convince him."

"I've tried. He isn't listening. Keeps on babbling about how the birds are evil or some gibberish like that. And he's been getting worse lately, for some reason. It's like talking to a nuclear bunker." He took a swig from a hip flask. "They've all been getting worse. Just when you things are getting somewhere, the carpet gets pulled from under your feet. Anyway. What was it you came here for?"

I briefly described the events of last night.

"Never seen her," He said. "Sounds like the culprit is a possessive lover. Shock. Disorientation. The classic symptoms. But now that you've mentioned it, something weird did happen last night around the pack territory. But I don't think it was related."

I felt a chill run down my spine.

"Around midnight we heard the sound of a low-flying helicopter. It hovered for about a few minutes. We saw lights but it was too high for us to see details."

"Did Kaden see it?"

"If he saw something he would have called me. He always calls me. He calls me every time his new cook can't make spaghetti bolognaise the way he likes. He goes through new cooks like I go through cigars." Thurgood sighed. "It's hilarious for a while. And you laugh. And then you realise this kid's in charge of eight hundred, nine hundred people. People of flesh and blood, with hopes and dreams. And they're all going to get screwed over by this muppet."

I noticed a slim volume sitting next to the phone. The cover had a black background, with THE POSSESSIVE ALPHA'S OMEGA MATE written in wispy cursive text over a grayscale image of a muscular, bare-chested male model.

"What the hell on earth is that?"

"That," Thurgood said, gesturing towards the book, "is the greatest work of literature ever written in the English language."

I vaguely remembered hearing of the book before. Self-published by a human writer named Elisha Collins. It had been languishing in an obscure corner of Amazon when it was discovered by chance by a Zirconian lifestyle blogger, whereupon it had gone viral. Overnight, Collins became a household name. It had topped the Canterbury Post-Gazette's Bestseller list for the past three months.

"There's a scene where she starts smelling the scent of vanilla and then she finds her mate. I don't think I've ever laughed that hard in my life."

The walkie-talkie clipped to Thurgood's chest suddenly crackled into life. "Code 3 at the corner of Roberts and Grayson, all units alert. I repeat, code 3, all units alert..."

"Shit, shit, shit." Thurgood holstered his service weapon. "Carjacking in progress. Gotta go. See you at Congress. Oh, and I got a new ride. It'll blow your mind away when you see it. Just wait."

That reminded me that the 34th Annual Pan-Lycan Congress was in three days. I made a mental note to start packing.

He rapidly strapped on a bulletproof vest. "Latest design. Adapts to your body when you shift."

Thurgood headed out the door. Beneath us in the roughly rectangular courtyard formed by the arrangement of the prefab buildings, security guards were bundling into pickup trucks.

I walked slowly down the steps, watching as the pickups as they sped away, lights flashing, sirens blaring.

Out on the street, dusk was swiftly falling. There was only a thin band of dirty yellow light on the edge of the horizon. The street had mostly emptied out, and shopkeepers were pulling up the heavy metal blinds. The soap factory was still clanking away, the bright white glare of its fluorescent glow spilling out onto the street, the night shift slowly filing in through the gates.

Next to the soap factory was the dark silhouette of a warehouse, its gates shut, grounds empty, its windows unlit. The flag of the Thunder Falls pack flew above it, waving slightly in the wind.

I suddenly felt cold. Up in the night sky, the stars were coming out.

I spotted the familiar profile of a Interpack bus heading my way on the outside lane, bobbing with the undulations of the road. I flagged it down.

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I searched long and hard for a book name that nobody had used, but if your story is in fact called The Possessive Alpha's Omega Mate, the book mentioned here is completely fictional and not based on any real book. 

If the media doesn't work, the song is "Reggae Vibes is Cool" by Bernoldus Niemand, the alter ego of James Phillips. You can find it on Bandcamp.