Father's Day was never a good time for Adam. The commercials got to him, the greeting cards at the stores were a problem, and his heart especially hurt when he saw all the werewolf kids running around the pack with their dads. At times it was like a stake to the heart.

Vampires couldn't have children, not once they were turned anyway, but he'd had a child once. Michael had been two. His wife, Isabella, had been twenty. And they'd only been in New York for a few short months when he'd been grabbed on the way home from the market. The mangled scar on his neck hurt every time he thought about the family he'd lost, and what Isabella, a poor immigrant with an apparent runaway husband, must have had to do in order to survive that life.

He'd wanted to go back so many times, but in those early days, whenever he'd been around humans he'd been too tempted to feed from them. He'd been turned and dumped, left in an alley and thought to be dead by everyone. It had taken him years to get himself under control enough that he knew he would no longer be a danger to his family, but by the time he'd gone back to their little home, they'd already moved on and no one knew where the young woman and her son had gone. They were just two more immigrants lost in the droves that were swarming New York at the time. Even though he had their names, it wasn’t enough to track them down. Back then, it was so easy for people to just disappear, and unless they wanted to be found, they wouldn’t be.

Adam had tried to forget about them, to move on and hope they'd had a good life somewhere out there in the world, but the years were getting to him, and the not knowing was becoming harder than ever with the passage of time. Unlike a lot of vampires, he couldn’t lose the past in a sea of blood and sex.

He finally decided he was going to do something to find out what happened to them and whether there was anyone left in the world he could trace back to his human life. His own life was more stable than it had been since that time. Maybe that was what drove him to so desperately want to find the links to his past.

But to do that, he needed Puck's help. He waited until ten p.m. to slip out of his house and walk the half mile over to the main pack house where Puck and his vampire lover lived. Adam didn't know Armand well, but he'd helped open the door for the werewolves and vampires to live together, and for that Adam was grateful. With the werewolves, he didn't have to fight for food or deny himself a meal. He wasn't in danger in their enclave. The only rules he had to follow were that the werewolves were never on his menu and that he had to obey whatever Armand said, which was hardly anything most days. Although Adam had only been a member of the community for a year, he felt at peace with them, more than he ever had out in the human world. He would never do anything to threaten his time there with the werewolves.