“They’re coming,” my father says.
We’ve been waiting for two days. I hate waiting. I feel like I’m doing nothing.
I know that I’m not. When Micah and Mason went out to round up our allies, he found out that a few stalwart friends infiltrated Didion’s men and are sabotaging wherever they can, mainly in regards to weaponry. That explosive that blew up Aaron’s car still haunts me. It’s the most unshifter-like behavior I can think of from a group that’s supposedly are all about preserving the most traditionally shifter way of life possible.
Bunch of hypocrites.
We’ve heard varying estimates as to how many wolves Didion’s got. I’ve heard anything from one hundred to a thousand. Well, I’ve got about five hundred people in total defending the estate and thereby defending the entire clan.
So...it’s hard to tell how this is going to go down.
“I don’t smell anything,” I say to my father.
We’re standing on the east wing balcony. I can see a few stretches of road beyond the estate and I can make out a few of our wolves; little dots trotting back and forth, on patrol and on the lookout for any of Didion’s men.
“I can smell them,” my father says slowly, and just as a breeze sends the scent upwind, I catch it. My jaw tightens and I catch the scent of a whole bunch of shifters that aren’t us. I don’t know everyone’s scent by heart but this is definitely something different. It’s faintly metallic, which is odd. And just like we surmised, it’s coming from the east. That’s good.
I distributed walkie-talkies around to some of the men who can then signal wolves.
“Micah, they’re coming from the east,” I say into the walkie-talkie. “Get ready.”
The attack, when it finally comes, is both sloppy and brutal. There are more wolves on their side than I’d thought there would be. I really didn’t think Didion would find many allies and I suspect he’s brought up some people from Oregon to join him. They’ve got numbers. The horde of wolves is visible not just from the east but from the woods. They just keep coming just as we knew they would.
It’s dispiriting to me, how many shifters Didion and the Hardwidge men were able to convince to join them. Then again, I’m sure he gave them the hard sell on their joined philosophy of bringing back the old ways of shifters, saving the future. Through brutality that is.
I take a deep breath and watch the wolves come streaming down the road toward the estate. Already our wolves on patrol are coming up against them. I watch two of Didion’s clash with one of ours and then go rolling out of sight into the woods.
“Okay,” I mutter, stepping back inside. “Let’s get down there.”
Downstairs, the place is packed but now we all head outside, mostly toward the woods though I make sure to have men around the front gates. All but a skeleton crew of those who would remain human, hiding around to keep watch and communicate as needed, are shifted. I head out to the back and shift, trotting down to stand in front of my father and my brothers near the rose garden. It’s getting on toward evening now. Mason came home as soon as he could get away and I’m grateful. Not that I love putting anymore of my family than necessary in harm's way.
I can hear them all coming; us and them. I feel a keen sense of territoriality. They’re coming to destroy my family and my home. This is the place I played as a child and learned to lead.
They won’t take it from us.
I throw my head back and howl and my father and brothers join me. And then I hear the rest of our men out there, the ones who aren’t already engaged in battle, howling along with us. I feel a strength coursing through me and I don’t feel panicky at all. When the howl fades I crouch, ready to attack and when the first of the Hardwidge wolves come pouring out of the forest with their teeth bared, I do not hesitate.
We ate a lot of meat before the battle to strengthen us and I feel as if my blood is alive and electric. The thing is, I like the fight. I don’t enjoy hurting anyone but there is a rush to it. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, it doesn’t seem like something a person should be proud of but I find myself growling like a mad wolf as I leap forward and catch the oncoming enemy by his throat and we go tumbling hard to the ground.
Wolf shifter combat is notoriously brutal. We go at it with tooth and claw and the fights are ugly and fast. Unless two wolves are perfectly matched, one usually wins out or gets away and retreats pretty quickly. I also certainly don’t enjoy killing other wolves at all but that’s the only option now as my paws pound the grass and then the mud of the woods as we begin to push the enemy right back. My teeth sink into the grimy fur of throat after throat and flank after flank.
I go at it in the woods for a while and we seem to be pushing them back rather well and then I see my own people running east which probably means somebody somewhere has been signalled and I follow.
Didion’s men are coming around the front so I head back through the woods and I’m let back in through the house to go to the front. No one has breached the line of the woods. It only occurs to me now that Olivia’s wards are holding well. They haven’t broken through them although I suspect they’ll try. It’s almost amusing to watch them be physically repelled. They’ve broken up the gates but an invisible force is holding them back as I watch from a window inside. They run back again, seemingly to regroup and I shift back just as my dad, in human form, comes running in from the back.
“The wards are holding,” I tell him. “I can’t tell if they have a warlock or anything out there or not…”
My blood feels hot, almost as if it’s too hot for my body. If Didion is out there at the gates and I take him down...the battle would be half over. If we can figure the warlock or witch who might be trying to break the wards and take him out before he breaks them, it would be probably three quarters over.
My dad is standing there in his opulent foyer with a ripped up and bloody shirt. His human hands are scuffed and bloody and his limp looks worse when he walks up to me, his mouth caked and gory with blood.
He’s short of breath when he says, “You look like you’re waiting for permission to go out there and finish this,” he says, panting. “Don’t wait. You and me, son. Let’s go.”
“Hey!” Aaron appears behind us. We all look pretty messed up and gross and pretty much like serial killers but to my surprise Micah looks the worst even as he flexes and fixes me with a steady glare, his sandy blonde hair slicked with blood and dirt.
“Not without us, you don’t,” Micah says, all but licking his chops. Sometimes I forgot what he went through at that Hardwidge compound. Before that, I didn’t even know how strong he was.
We all nod at each other and then I throw open the front door of the estate and we shift. They smell us coming but there’s not much they can do. To our surprise and delight, we find Jack Didion and a shifter I recognize as the lackey to Alice’s brother. I heard a rumor he was Jack’s lieutenant. Looks like the rumor was true. Sure enough, down the road I spy a human who I can tell from here, doesn’t smell like a shifter. He’s trying to stay out of the way but he’s holding a candle and his eyes are fixed on the house as he mutters to himself, two other younger men standing with him and chanting along.
A warlock.
I glance at Micah as we run down the drive to the open gates, on the attack. I try to nod in the direction of the warlock, hoping he’ll get me and he gives me a nod.
I wouldn’t want to be that warlock right now.
Meanwhile, there’s Didion and his men, all in wolf form now as they rear back, bearing their teeth and refusing to run as we pound through the gates. Didion and I run straight for each other.
I’ve never wanted to kill anyone more in my life.
I can’t get to his throat because he mashes his head against mine so that we see stars and then we roll into the dirt, scrambling to find purchase and I roll us so I’m on top of him, kicking with my legs. He’s good at dodging and he’s fast but I can feel his age. He’s not going to last.
I don’t know what’s going on around me. There is only Didion and I at each other’s throats, every muscle in me tense, my focus a laser that is centered only on defeating Didion and preferably not ending his life. The only reason I would is so that we can question him and find out if he has any men hiding out there with some kind of back-up plan for his defeat.
But I’d still rather kill him.
His claws are long and sharp. They’re not the dulled claws of older alphas. I feel like they’ve been enhanced somehow, perhaps with magic. I shimmy and shift even as I catch his shoulders in my jaws and bite down as hard as I can manage, feeling him quake with pain. It makes me want to hurt him more, to hurt him as much as he hurt Olivia and tried to hurt Michelle. With a twist of our bodies, it all happens quite suddenly. I catch the soft tissue of his belly in my mouth and I rip through it like butter just as I feel the white hot pain of his claws ripping through my shoulder. It hurts like hell, his claws make a tear from the top of my shoulder down the center of my chest and it’s bloody as hell but it’s not too deep.
I won’t die.
But he will.
It’s over abruptly. I’m biting through stomach, through organs, his blood hot in my mouth and I can feel him slowing, his weight suddenly heavy when I roll us and he’s half on top of me. Then all at once he’s perfectly still and I reflexively scramble to get out from under him only to jump back and get my bearings for a split second to find the next fight.
Except there isn’t one.
Not here anyway.
There’s only my father and my brothers left now, and a couple of wolf corpses here on the road. I shift back and run to Micah, who’s standing there in the road, catching his breath, staring at the dead warlock.
“Micah!” I shout, and a sharp stab of pain blooms in my shoulder as the shock of my injury wears off. I’m bleeding pretty badly but it’s not a gusher anyway. “Where are the other two?”
“Took off,” he says, wiping his bloody mouth before he spits into the street. “They were just paid to help the wizard here. He’s dead. Didion?”
“Dead,” I say, looking around for my dad who I could swear was just standing here.
Now he’s sitting in the road looking pale with pain as Aaron runs over to him.
“Dad?” I say, kneeling beside him.
“I’m fine, just hurt my leg a little.” He sees my shoulder and grimaces. “You need that wrapped up.”
“But…” I shake my head, still panting. They’ll never break the wards and get in now, not with the warlock dead and with their leader gone too, the rest will probably flee or surrender. But I need to see that happen before I can rest. “The woods…”
“You’re gonna bleed out, dumbass,” Micah says, rubbing my back. “Get inside. We’ve all but won.”
It’s the “but” that worries me but they won’t leave me alone until I go in and head to the kitchen where a few shifters are waiting with medical supplies for the wounded. Marie Vallen is the alpha’s wife from Tacoma and when she sees my shoulder, she glares at me like I’ve done something wrong.
“You sit down right now,” she snaps. I sit at a stool at the counter. It’s quiet in here. Weirdly quiet considering there’s still chaos going on outside. But the wards Olivia cast are too strong. Nobody’s getting inside. We’re safe. My mate is safe. And Jack Didion is dead.
A couple hours later, the last of the enemy has surrendered.
“Baby, your shoulder!” Olivia says, appearing in the doorway of the study.
I’ve been waiting for Olivia to appear from out of the basement for what seems like hours because my mother won’t let me move from my seat in the study due to my injury. The place is still full of our people and there’s a hub-bub of people being stitched up and looked after.
There are some casualties, of course. I’m thankful it’s nobody from my family but when guilt starts creeping up on me somebody from my clan will walk up and shake my hand even as I’m bleeding. Calling upon people to fight for you and then seeing some of them lost is not something I’ve quite experienced before. There was the raid on the Hardwidge compound, of course. But nobody died.
We are helped though by shifter stamina and strength. In the end, we’ve lost twelve people. Obviously, I’ll be providing for their families after this. It’s my responsibility and will hardly make a dent in the Tremblay piggy bank.
Olivia grabs a chair and sits beside me looking more worried than I think my injury warrants. Considering my ability to heal quickly, I don’t think it will even slow me down for more than a day.
“I’m fine, sweetheart,” I say, leaning over to kiss her hair. “I’ll be just fine.”
She takes a deep breath and nods. “Aaron says you killed him.”
I can’t read her tone but she doesn’t look very upset. “I...Yeah. I had to.”
“I’m glad you did,” she says softly. “I mean I’m not happy you had to do it or anything… I’m just glad I don’t have to worry about him ever again.”
I understand what she means. I can’t imagine the complicated feelings she must be having over the whole thing. “We captured everyone,” I tell her. “No escapees this time. But I don’t know if we can keep them all prisoner. Not all of them. I think we might have to...change some hearts and minds on this one.”
“I trust your judgement,” she says, smiling fondly.
“Me too,” I say, sighing. “My judgement was to take your advice and let people help me.”
“See? Excellent judgement. So we won the war.” Olivia scoots up a little closer and wraps her arms around my neck. “What next, my big alpha mate?”
“Now...the future.”
Epilogue
Six months later…
“To our mates!” Xander says and the girls and I giggle as our guys get to their feet, all four Tremblay brothers all in a row on the other side of the dining room table. They hold their champagne glasses up.
Everyone’s wearing tuxes tonight. It’s just a regular full moon tonight and it was Micah who got it in his head to make it a formal event in celebration of the new pack laws that Alice has gotten passed by the clan by an overwhelming vote.
The clan looks a lot different than it used to since, what most shifters in Washington call, the Battle of Tremblay Manor.
There seems to be a new understanding that things have changed. Interacting with humans is something to be careful of but I don’t think it’s going to have the stigma it used to. I imagine there are going to be more human mates. I’m imagining the “fates” or whatever force it is that pairs shifters with their mates for life is actually trying to save the shifters.
My theory is that by evolutionary necessity, humans will be able to have shifter children.
At least...that’s what I’m hoping.
“To our mates!” All the brothers say.
Everyone takes a sip of their champagne...except me. I actually pretend to sip it but not a drop slips past my lips. I glance around to see if anyone has noticed and immediately Xander squints at me across the table. I wasn’t going to tell him yet. I was going to save it for when we were alone. I’ve only had the news a day.
Michelle once told me that when she was pregnant, Aaron could smell it on her. I wonder if Xander hasn’t yet because I’m fully human? Whatever the reason, I’m happy to surprise.
Except the way his eyes are widening as he looks at me pointedly not drinking my champagne, I think that surprise is spoiled now.
“I think Tremblay Company deserves a toast to!” I say, getting to my feet and weakly attempting to distract Xander.
“Hell yeah, it does,” Xander says, raising his glass. “Stock’s just broken a record after the Ethical Works Initiative.”
Mason looks a little sheepish and he waves a hand as if attempting to dismiss both of us. “That was as much Olivia’s idea as mine-”
“Yeah well, g
ood job listening to Olivia,” Xander says, winking at Mason. “God knows, it’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”
After a typically boisterous dinner that goes late until the boys along with Luna and Alice are starting to get edgy to go shift, the couples pair up and go for a little walk as the moon rises.
Xander wraps an arm around my waist as we make our way out to the breezy evening. He’s leading me in the direction of the rose garden but that seems to be where everyone else wants to go to.
“Used to be,” Xander says, “that the rose garden wasn’t packed with canoodling Tremblays every full moon. And now look at us?”
I spy Micah and Luna giggling and running off to go make out behind a particularly tall hedge and it makes me chuckle. “Well, it is very romantic. Maybe you guys could put in another garden? Plant some begonias or something.”
“Oh yeah,” Xander says wryly. “Nothing more romantic than begonias.”
The way he says that makes me laugh and we stand there, facing each other and I watch the way he looks at me like he can’t imagine being with anyone else. He twirls a lock of my hair around his finger before kissing me softly.
“I saw you at dinner,” he says, laying soft little kisses to my cheek and my jaw and making his way down to my neck. “You don’t like champagne suddenly?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, wrapping my arms around his waist.
He leans back and smiles slyly. “Is there something I should know?”
“Oh, Xander Tremblay, I’m guessing there are about a thousand things you should know,” I say, laughing.
“Maybe if I tell you something you’ll tell me something,” Xander murmurs into my throat. “How about that?”
“You can try.” I grin and pull him tight against me. I love this flirty Xander. It’s become one of my three favorite versions of Xander.
“Okay. How about this… I bought your old apartment building in Lynwood.” He leans back and smiles, smug as anything and I squint at him, genuinely confused.
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