Thorne Bay

by Jeanine Croft

  “With respect, sir, there’s no implication. It’s done. We’re mated.”

  That sounded so official. Was it like marriage? Lydia had hinted as much. I mean, I knew we’d mated biblically, but I had a feeling that, in the language of werewolves, being mated (and everything it entailed) meant so much more than just the physical aspect. Yet Tristan had stated this in such a contumelious way that I was hardly flattered by the declaration. I would make sure Tristan explained this to me later.

  Max, meanwhile, instead of erupting into a rage and forbidding the match, shifted that icy glare to me. “I see.”

  I felt my heart shrink. If ever there was a reason and a way to find me guilty and have me “put down”, Max had clearly just “seen” it during his uncanny examination of me. Through one exterminating look alone, he made absolutely no secret of the fact that he found me unworthy of his son.

  “Ironic,” he went on with a low grunt, scrutinizing both sons. “One son aimed too high and the other too low.”

  This remark, though casually dropped (or so it seemed), appeared to have dealt the wounds it had been marked to hit. Even the stony-faced Dean flinched. For the first time since I’d known him, his face burned with shame, but he set his teeth and said nothing. I understood the reference as it pertained to Tristan (given I was a lowly mutt), but who had Dean aimed “too high” for?

  Tristan’s teeth ground together furiously. “Only you would value power over love.”

  “And duty,” his father snapped. “Where do you place your duty, son?”

  “First and foremost, I have a duty to the woman I love. Unlike my father.”

  “An alpha,” Max gritted out, “does not have the luxury of acting like a love-struck puppy. He has responsibilities—”

  “To his family first!”

  “The pack is the family!” Max roared, coming out of his chair like a raging bear.

  “But the support and love of a life-mate makes an alpha great.” Tristan and his father now stood nose to nose, ice seething against fire, their teeth bared in mirrored snarls of warning. Had I really likened Tristan’s eyes to his father’s? I was so wrong—Max’s were far bluer. Far colder.

  I scurried out of the way to stand beside Dean who, I knew, would be a handy shield in a werewolf brawl.

  “Enough!” Dean bellowed, coming to stand between his brother and father. “Both of you sit the fuck down or get out of my house.”

  Without taking his eyes off his youngest, Max closed his lips over his long teeth and folded his arms across his chest. A muscle jumped menacingly at Tristan’s jaw, but he backed away and lowered himself into the chair I’d vacated. With forced calm, he gestured me over. Warily, I moved past Max (forcing iron into my spine) and took the armchair beside Tristan’s. His hand instantly locked over mine, his steady warmth effacing the clamminess from my palms.

  “You’re an idealist, Tristan. Always have been,” Max growled.

  “No, I just don’t feed into that Aryan bullshit you do.”

  Max bristled, eyes falling against our linked fingers like a guillotine. From there, they traveled to my face, condemning me for being ignoble and impure.

  “When I’m alpha, I won’t surround myself with myopic old councilmen,” Tristan went on, finally calmer. “I won’t make the same mistake you made.”

  “No, you’ve already made bigger ones of your own. Even love—” his nose corrugated up with disgust “—has its limits, boy.”

  Into this tense little scene, a stranger entered the library unannounced. He smiled an affable greeting at each of us (as though the tension wasn’t a thick miasma). The grim countenances that answered him did nothing to dim those startling azure eyes. They were clear and untroubled, and stark against the cropped espresso curls framing his face. “Didn’t miss anything, did I?” he said to no one in particular, shutting the door softly behind him.

  “We were just getting started,” Max replied, gesturing the handsome stranger into one of the armchairs.

  “Good to see you, Josh,” Tristan said, his face finally relinquishing its hostility. “How’ve you been?”

  “Good, buddy,” Josh replied in a mild southern drawl. He was shorter than the rest of us, but his powerful presence and easy confidence dominated the room completely. Once he was seated, his demeanor sobered a little. “Wish we were meeting under different circumstances, though.”

  Tristan’s lips compressed as he nodded ruefully. He then introduced me to Josh and explained that when a wolf was to be cross-examined by the Council of Alphas (which, I learned, comprised of all the alphas of one particular state—mine being Alaska), a mediator from another pack, more specifically from a different state, always had to be present during each hearing so as to keep the proceedings neutrally objective.

  “Is this m-my hearing?” I whispered. Suddenly, the guillotine blade was looming closer.

  “An informal meeting,” Max answered before promptly turning to Josh. “Have you had a chance to examine the evidence yet?”

  “Nah, won’t see it till Red Devil tomorrow. It’s all been very hush-hush.”

  “What evidence?” Tristan asked suspiciously.

  “Y’all know about as much as I do. All I know is that there were certain personal effects retrieved at the scene (by a “friend” at the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office) that were overnighted to the Athabaskans. Clothes and suchlike, I understand.”

  My face blanched as I turned to Tristan. He considered me warily but addressed Josh and his father. “How’re we supposed to plan a defense if we don’t even know—”

  “The truth, son.” Max’s interjection was sharp and almost smug. “Looks like the truth will have to set her free.” Then he shrugged. “Or not.”

  Or set Tristan free from me, I thought darkly. The guy hadn’t even tried for subtlety. I knew exactly what he hoped the outcome of my second farcical trial would be.

  “How do we know the Athabaskan’s haven’t tampered with this evidence.”

  “Why would anyone tamper with it?” Max’s curt, derisive snort visibly enraged his son, but thankfully Tristan bit his tongue. “Now,” Max continued, focusing his attention back to me, “tell me what happened, and don’t leave anything out.”

  Needless to say, my statement of the facts as I knew them filled no more than the space of a minute. And that with me stuttering and stumbling over my words. I knew nothing more than that I’d woken up covered in blood. With a full belly. An altogether damning account, and by the end of it, when I left Dean’s office, I felt like a dead girl walking.

  “I’m glad it’s Josh mediating.” Tristan kissed the side of my head as we headed up to the room I’d occupied when I was ‘sick’. “He’ll keep things honest.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “Our mothers are close friends, so we saw a lot of each other growing up. He’s salt of the earth, you'll see.”

  I nodded distractedly, my mind in ruinous turmoil. Josh could be as uncorrupted as Gandhi himself, but that didn’t mean I’d survive another Lupum Caedes. The packs were already biased against me, and there was no way I was coming out of this alive.

  Sensing the tears threatening behind my eyes, Tristan halted me at the top of the stairs and pulled me in for one of his fierce kisses. “Remember what I said last night, Evan?” He pulled me just far enough away, murmuring softly so that only I could hear him. “You’re mine…” There was a meaningful glint of steel in his gaze, urging me to remember the rest. Even if we have to run away and live like strays, I won’t let the Council hurt you. You’re mine.

  I remembered those words vividly. He’d said them right after he’d told me he loved me. I wanted so badly to believe in them like I believed in his love for me, but I felt a heavy doom building overhead even as I gave a tiny jerk of my head to evince that I understood him. “And you’re mine.”

  I allowed his vow to soothe me as much as it could, hoping it would sustain me through the litigative nights and days ahead. We were heading to
Red Devil first thing in the morning. Once there, my fate would be in the hands of those that were already prejudiced against mutts. Moreover, there was one powerful alpha in particular (arguably the most powerful alpha) who would likely do whatever he could to ensure his son was never paired off with a mutt.

  * * *

  Even if I’d wanted to run away, I’d have never made it down the wooded driveway. Dean’s house had been invaded by a werewolf army. The Yukon army—all of them as grim-faced as Max himself. There was no use in bothering. Instead, I masked my fear as best I could and was thankful that the only other occupant in the car during that short drive to the Thorn Aviation Hangar, besides Tristan, was the ever impenetrable Dean.

  Oddly, I was starting to find some comfort in his broody stoicism. There seemed to be very little any of us wanted to say, so we mostly kept our thoughts to ourselves. Every so often, I’d look back with a shudder, disquieted by the werewolf convoy conducting us north toward Coffman Cove as dawn burst over the trees.

  I was, at first, surprised to see an unfamiliar helicopter in a dreadful camo paint scheme on the pad when we arrived, but there was no need of an explanation as to whose it was. Soon after Dean’s Defender pulled up to the hangar, I watched Max, Josh, and eight other men pile into what was obviously Max’s helicopter.

  “A Bell 222,” Dean supplied, catching my open-mouthed stare as he and Tristan preflighted.

  The 222 only had two blades, though, but they were far broader than the 407’s slender blades. Flying directly to Red Devil, though far more convenient, meant my doom was that much closer. I’d been pretty much comatose when I’d been rescued from Red Devil, so I had no idea how I’d made it to Dean’s pack house. Well, I was about to find out how these wolves got around. Supposedly, we were about to do that fateful trip in reverse.

  The 222’s thundering engines were started shortly after Max climbed in. It shook the trees as its wheels left the pad, and then circled us like a beady hawk till our skids did the same. A literal Airwolf. I’d have laughed at the analogy if I wasn’t so frightened. But this was no fictional television series and Max was no romantic, cello-playing Stringfellow Hawk.

  The rest of Max’s werewolf motorcade was still packed around the pad as we soared northward. Just my luck, the skies were brilliant blue and devoid of any foul weather. I wanted so badly to call up a fog bank so that we’d be forced to delay the inevitable, but my calls were ignored and the helicopters pressed on, unimpeded, toward Red Devil.

  It was the last place on earth I wanted to be. I wasn’t the only one. Dean seemed to grow more agitated the closer we drew. It wasn’t very often that he gave anything away. It was very imperceptible at first, but, even from where he sat mostly out of sight in the back seat, it was palpable. By the time we’d refueled for the second leg, his jaws were clenched and his hands were constantly raking through the shaggy sunlit locks falling past his shoulders. I’d peeked back at him enough times to notice.

  What’s up his butt? I was the one about to die, not him.

  All too soon, we were touching down in Sleetmute where the fleet of dark Athabaskan SUVs was parked, waiting for us. Evidently, I was to be conveyed to Red Devil by the werewolf secret service. My stomach dropped as Augustus emerged lazily from his black Land Rover. He and Dean seemed to have the same bad taste in cars, though I had to admit a Defender was far more respectable than a Range Rover.

  “If shit hits the fan,” Dean said, “you know where my loyalty lies.”

  The brothers exchanged a curt and significant look before Dean pulled his headset off. Leaving us alone in the 407, he headed off to Augustus, each man clasping the other’s forearm in a perfunctory greeting.

  Knowing full well that no one—not even a werewolf—could hear us over the sound of the turbines (both helicopters were still cooling down at idle) I whispered into my mic, “Why would he help me? I killed Lydia.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “Tristan…” We both knew what everyone thought.

  He sighed into his mic. “He’s my brother, he loves me. And I love you.”

  I wished it was as uncomplicated as he’d made it sound. “He’s helping me because I’m your mate?”

  He gave a succinct nod. The gravitas in my tone had not escaped him.

  “What does that mean exactly? Are we married or something?”

  “Something like that.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Just like that? Why wasn’t I consulted?”

  His sigh was half growl. “It isn’t some tenuous human rite—there’s no flimsy document to be signed. No rings to be placed on or pulled off at whim.” He placed his hand on my thigh. “It’s out of our control, Evan. It’s something our wolves decide.”

  “Ha! So my inner mutt is a ‘disparate entity’?”

  “No.” He rolled his eyes. “When I refer to your wolf I mean your baser self—the part of you that doesn’t need definitions or titles. The part of you that obeys instinct. It just is. You can fight it, but then you’d end up going against your own nature. You’d end up like my father.”

  Heaven forbid. I watched as Tristan began flicking avionics switches off. “Was Lydia Dean’s mate?” Dean always seemed so distant and untouchable. I wondered suddenly if he’d ever even been in love. Loved anyone enough to overlook the killer inside. The way Tristan loved me.

  “No.” His mouth compressed introspectively. “He’s only ever loved two women.” He snapped the throttled closed, watching the trucks grimly. He pulled the rotor brake and the blades finally came to rest like a giant X over the fuselage.

  “His mother?” I asked, pulling my headset off. To this, I received the single nod I’d anticipated, but no further expounding was offered. “Tristan, who was the other?” I grabbed his bicep as he pulled his headset off and reached for his door handle. I needed any and every diversion I could get. Those black trucks were glinting ominously at me in the late afternoon sun. They were waiting and I was stalling.

  Tristan’s gaze was fixed to where his brother stood with the others, hand poised on the door. We watched as Dean and Augustus were joined by Max, Josh, and the other Yukon wolves. Shortly thereafter, the Athabaskan alpha emerged from her car. She stood assertive amongst those male giants, so striking that I found myself awed by her—an Amazonian Cleopatra. Whatever puissance shrouded her, it was infinitely more than just the potency of a woman’s power over man. It was a masculine power, dominant and estimable. The animus of an alpha female.

  “One son aimed too high and the other too low.”

  “Oh.” The answer was right there before my eyes! “Dean loves Aidan!

  “Yeah,” was all Tristan said before he too joined the group.

  42

  The Council Of Alphas

  As dusk rushed into the woods, so too came the ground fog. The glow from the headlights seemed to diffuse into the swelling, turbid mass, lending a sinister shade of sepia to Red Devil’s stark landscape. It was Black Devil if anything. Winter must have killed off some of the trees earlier this year, I thought. They’d been struck bare by the arctic rage. The ones that weren’t fixed in the dark like blackened skeletons were no less horrifying. Their shaggy needles seemed to move in the frozen mist, waving me to my doom. Ushering me into the lap of the wolves of the Underworld.

  In a stupor, I barely felt the pressure of strong fingers calming my jerking knee. The ominous terrain blurred steadily outside the window. My fingers were leaden and cold-soaked, like the world outside. Not even Tristan’s warmth, as he slipped his fingers between mine, penetrated my dread enough to thaw me.

  The darkness only curdled my blood further, so I tore my eyes away from the window and latched them instead to the back of Aiden’s dark head. And then to Dean, who was in the passenger seat beside her.

  The painful tension roiled palpably between the two alphas up front, icier than the viscid dread that saturated my blood. If not for my numbing terror, I’d have wondered about their past. And there was, withou
t a doubt, a lot of history between them. The sour stench of my fear, however, completely overmastered their tragic silence and any trivial curiosity I might have felt otherwise.

  Suddenly, Aidan’s SUV began to slow as she turned around a sharp bend. My heart leapt into a funereal series of sharp knells as that awful meeting hall, and those eerie double doors, appeared through the gloaming. As before, the space surrounding the looming building was packed with vehicles. Only this time there were easily triple the number that had been present at my first ‘trial’, the thirst for my blood that much keener.

  The rest of the Athabaskan convoy filed in behind us like a fleet of black hearses. My legs were stiff as I left the vehicle. Max marched past like a grave-faced undertaker, pausing only briefly to hurry us along with an arbitrary jerk of his head, eyes a frosty blue in the twilight. Swallowing the upsurging bile back down, I dragged my feet along like deadweights.

  * * *

  A raw and suffocating restiveness filled the room. There were no whispers this time. Not even an awkward cough, only bleak and wordless enmity and the unbearable magnitude of hostile eyes transpiercing. My numbness, though, never wavered. It shrouded me from a hundred glares like a wall of ice fog.

  The silent snarling and restless movements ceased instantly when Aidan moved to occupy the center of the hall. There was no blunt report from a gavel to silence the room. None was needed. She commanded absolute attention without a single quirk of her features, or gesture of those long elegant fingers. Not a single word had fallen from her lips, yet all ears were pricked intently, eager to hear what she would say. They loved and respected her, it was clear. I envied her that unchallenged loyalty.

  “Firstly,” she said, at last, turning to face Dean, “I want to extend our deepest condolences to Dean and the rest of the Southeast Regional Pack.” She held his gaze a moment. “Lydia was a good and honest woman. She’ll be missed by us all.”