Nobody knew when Cole's birthday was.
This wasn't unusual — Cole had arrived at Shadowmere young, before Darius was Alpha, in the specific way of wolves who came from territories that didn't formalize much, and the records from that period were sparse. If he knew the date himself, he'd never said so, and nobody had thought to ask, because Cole was the kind of person around whom certain questions didn't arise. You didn't ask Cole where he was from. You didn't ask Cole how he felt about things. You didn't ask Cole what he wanted for his birthday, because the question implied a birthday and the birthday implied a number and the number implied a person whose history had ordinary features like dates on a calendar.
Luna had found it in the archive.
Not the original record — that didn't exist,
