by Mark Henwick
I was already zeroed in on the main problem. The guy who complained about my turning the music off. He still hadn’t even looked around.
“We’re not in the army,” he said.
Oh, man, if there was a prize for surly...
In two steps, I reached the sofa and grabbed the back of his sweatshirt, ripping it as I lifted him like the dumb cub he was. I dropped him onto the floor.
“I said stand.”
Everyone got up, Mr. Surly quickest of all. Anger was burning right through that beer and lighting his face up like a tomato.
“You’re right,” I said. “You’re not in the army. It’s far worse than that. You haven’t figured it out yet, but you’re in my pack.”
“Alex is the alpha,” one of the billiard players said. He was still holding his cue.
“That’s Mr. Deauville to you when you’re talking to me, and sir to his face.”
“He said to call him—”
“I don’t care what he said. He’s in El Paso. I’m here. You have to deal with me, and I say he made a mistake with you. You’re in the pack, but you are not pack members yet. You’re an ill-disciplined rabble with too little to do and no brains.” I glared at them. “I don’t know if I want you in my pack.”
There were glances from the others to Mr. Surly. He was more dominant than them, and he’d been practicing on this impressionable group. The others were looking to him for an indication of how to react. He was the stereotypical alpha—big, handsome, full of muscles and sex. Bloated with his own opinion of himself.
I’d put him in a spot and he decided he couldn’t back down. He took a swing at me.
Good. I’d gotten tired of talking.
I swayed back, grabbed his wrist and let the weight of his punch pull me around. I jerked his arm straight, slammed my fist into the back of his elbow and swept his legs out. He fell face down. I twisted his arm and shoved my boot into his armpit.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” I said. “And you can’t move or I’ll dislocate your shoulder. That’ll hurt even—”
One of his girlfriends came at me.
No time for this shit.
I dislocated Mr. Surly’s shoulder and punched his girlfriend in the face, knocking her onto her back.
He was screaming from pain. She might have wanted to, but she had no breath, not when my knee landed in her stomach.
I got up quickly. I was out of range when she vomited her beer all over the floor.
The rest stood where they were, shocked into immobility, apart from the billiard player. He put the cue down in a hurry.
It was rougher than the army, but the process felt like a comfortable old coat I hadn’t worn in a while, and it worked just as well on werewolf cubs as it had on recruits.
Next phase. Give orders.
“Which of you knows how to put a shoulder back?”
One of the smaller guys made a dazed movement with his hand.
“You! And you!” I pointed to him and the nearest girl. “Put his shoulder back.”
They moved forwards as if I were compelling them, their mouths open but silent.
“I can’t hear you,” I said.
“Yes,” they muttered.
“That’s yes, ma’am to you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Better. You two,” I picked another pair at random. “Go get supplies now and clean up this mess on the floor.”
They fled.
“The rest of you, go stand against the wall.”
I let my dominance off the leash. Werewolf manners would keep it at a minimum around pack members, but these idiots didn’t get that courtesy.
I kept it up while the shoulder was painfully put back in place, the mess was cleaned and those involved joined the rest of them against the wall. Mr. Surly was cradling his arm and, werewolf or not, it was going to hurt for a while.
“You have disgraced your pack,” I said very quietly and began to stalk up and down the shivering line.
“I’m within my rights to kill you.” I had stopped in front of the two who’d attacked me and glared at them. They couldn’t meet my eyes, so I moved on. “As for the rest, I should expel you from the pack. It would save me a lot of grief and you a lot of pain.”
They were silent and scared.
“It’s taken you a day to go from members of the El Paso pack to rabble. That must be some kind of record. Did you feel your new co-alpha had been cruel, leaving you behind? Poor little cubs. That meant you weren’t important. And that if you were second-rate, the co-alpha in Denver must be too.”
Twitches. Faces flushed. Shame.
Stupid thought processes, but groups do that sometimes. Now they were realizing it.
Time for the stick and the carrot.
“Let me tell you how it’s going to be, and then I’ll tell you why you might become pack members, if you pull yourselves together.”
“If you want to get into this pack, this is your daily routine from now on until I say otherwise: you will get up at 05:00, and you will have fifteen minutes to make yourself, your bed and any belongings you have here ready for inspection. You will be told the standards you will be held to, and inspected by people who know every trick in the book. Trust me, you will not want to fail those inspections. You will then have an hour of training before breakfast, and training will continue throughout the day, punctuated by meals. To start with, this training will be mainly in hand to hand combat techniques for you to use on two legs. It will be delivered by people who are better at it than you’ll ever be. And it will hurt.”
Utter silence. A dawning realization began to drain the color from their faces.
“As you progress, there will be instruction in four-legged fighting techniques. There will also be training in whatever I think would make you a valuable member of this pack. You get no choice and no options on what you get taught.”
A couple of them were standing a little straighter with a hint of a positive reaction. I noted them.
“During the day, you’ll have no access to anything not essential for your training. That’ll change after dinner, when you’ll be allowed computers and cell phones. You can chose to use that time to complain to someone you think will show the slightest sympathy, but the purpose of providing you with those facilities is for you to plan the arrival and integration of the former El Paso pack. If you create good plans that I approve of, you’ll be given budget and authority to implement them. It’ll be your responsibility, your success, or your failure, and the pack will know it.”
There were a few I’ll show her expressions, which were exactly what I was looking for, and I felt a whole lot better about them than when I’d started this speech.
“The best of you might get a chance to become trainers yourselves, because every single wolf in my pack will pass this basic training, or will not be in my pack.”
I scanned the line up and down. Just because a few of them looked as if they might be up to it wasn’t a reason to give them any uncertainty about the downside.
“Lights will go out at 21:30 and you will fall asleep immediately. If you do not fall asleep, then the regime for the next day will ensure you do on the following night, whether you want to or not.”
Now for the bigger stick.
“This will be entirely voluntary. If at any time during this training you elect to leave this pack, your request will be honored and you will be escorted out of Southern League territory. You will never come back. There is no way back. There is no third alternative.”
And finally the biggest.
“I will inspect each of you personally a week from now, or at any time your trainers think you would benefit from an inspection by me. There are three outcomes that could happen from that session. You will return to training and redouble your efforts, you will become outcast, or you will die.”
I’d need to talk to them again, but that was enough for now.
“Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
Nods. Mumbles.
/>
Not good enough.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Yes,” from all of them.
I sighed. “You will address me as alpha, or ma’am. Now, I said I wanted to hear you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Better.” I waved Scott forward. “This is Scott. He is one of your lieutenants while your training is going on. You’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
I rocked on my heels like Top would have done. “You’ll start right now by changing and taking a run around the estate with Scott while I organize instructors for your formal training.”
This was a huge gamble, but I had one of my gut feelings about Scott.
He was self-conscious as he shucked his clothes, but as soon as he changed, that lip curl came back. He was a mild-mannered man on two legs and a dominant, aggressive wolf on four. I just hoped he was smart enough to keep it to dominance displays and didn’t try fighting anyone at the moment. He was going to have to be trained in the arts of fighting as a wolf. Just as I would.
The cubs shifted shape and I could see by their wolf body language they were accepting me as alpha now, even Mr. Surly. They were less sure about Scott.
That was okay, because I had one last little surprise to spring on them, and I could sense her approaching now.
The door opened behind me and Rita came in.
“Your other lieutenant, Rita.”
The cubs obviously recognized her. Every single one of them crouched a little lower.
They knew her, and Rita scared the crap out of them.
I made myself a mental note: I had to find out what had gone on in the borderlands between El Paso and the New Mexico pack’s territories.
Meanwhile, my little plan was getting better and better.
“Like a run?” I asked her. “This mangy crew needs work.”
She showed the same smile I saw on Skylur occasionally: small and cold and brief as winter sun.
“Tove and Yelena are in the main living room,” she said as she stripped.
I called Bian on the cell.
“Wolves are going to be running in the yard for a while. Please don’t shoot them. And I need to talk to the Colonel about an Ops 4-10 training regime for them.”
She snickered.
“That didn’t take you long, did it? Hold on, I’ll put you through.”
While I waited, I opened the French doors at the end. There was a snow-filled patio with a beautiful view of the Rockies.
The cougar stepped past me, almost daintily, and then looked back at the cubs as if one of them was lunch.
I waved them out, and they came obediently, if reluctantly, keeping as much distance between them and Rita as they could. Scott lowered his head and snapped at the heels of a couple of lingerers, including the limping Mr. Surly. I could almost see the human grin on Scott’s face. He was enjoying this far too much.
Then they took off, dark shapes racing through the snow, chased by Scott and Rita.
“Amber?” Colonel Laine’s voice came on the cell phone. “I hear you’re chasing wolves through the yard.”
“Scott and Rita are. I need your help. The thing is, I want to make my pack a whole new kind of pack, starting with these cubs. They don’t realize it, but they’re in a dangerous place here in Colorado, and we’re in a war. I need to put them through an accelerated, basic Ops 4-10 training, starting as soon as they get back from their run and keeping on going until everyone’s been through.”
I described the plan forming in my head.
“Can do,” he said. “Need something to keep the troops interested. I’ll send Annie to start things off and I’ll get a couple of other sergeants to brainstorm a schedule.”
He signed off, leaving me wondering who else I needed to talk to about this scheme.
Alex. He’d need to know what was happening here.
Felix and Cameron. Well, they wanted me to talk to them. Now I had something to say. I didn’t think they’d bite my head off for this. In fact, they’d probably want the whole Denver and New Mexico super-pack to go through the training.
In which case, we’d need somewhere even bigger than Haven.
And, if the New Mexico packs were involved, I’d need to talk to Zane.
Oh, joy.
It seemed, having plotted to have him distracted in one direction, that I’d managed to find a way to reverse that.
Chapter 49
No response from Alex’s cell, so I texted him the bare details and put off talking to our alphas until I’d spoken to him.
Jen’s cell still wasn’t being answered, so I walked back down to the main living room, wondering what I might need to say to Tove if she’d looked out the window and seen wolves running through the snowy gardens.
That’d have to wait. Yelena was there, slipping off the couch and into my embrace with that slinky dancer’s grace.
“Missed you,” I whispered. “Everything okay?”
“Of course. Put out tongue,” she ordered.
I knew what was coming, but I played along and she pretended to examine it.
“Hmm. Still licking knives.”
I laughed. “Guilty. Where’s Tove?”
“Trying on her new clothes. She wants to show you.”
“She wants my approval?”
Yelena grinned. “Not what she said, but I think yes.” She shrugged. “You paid for them.”
I sobered. I hadn’t expected that from Tove. She was more difficult to read than I thought.
We sat down to wait.
“So... what happened in New York?” I said.
“Lot of talk. Strange. It seemed like little stuff, but they said I knew more than I thought I did. Said it was useful information on the Domain. I think because they hear nothing for so long, anything is something.”
“They were friendly about it?”
“Yes. No problem.”
“And Skylur?”
I would have been able to tell if she’d been bitten, but I wanted to make sure.
“Very busy man,” she said. She knew what I was asking. “Too busy even for Jen.”
“I thought the idea was he needed to have business meetings with Jen.”
“She’s with business team. They’re too busy to care whether she’s been bound by Skylur or not. I went to see her when they finished talking to me. She’s fine. Really. She gave me orders to come home.”
I smiled. High as she was in my House, Jen couldn’t really order Yelena back here and everyone knew it. But Yelena would have had to be sure that Jen was under no threat to have left her. That made me feel happier.
“Did you meet Skylur’s new Diakon?” I asked.
“No. Saw her and Skylur together, but I didn’t speak to her.” She frowned. “She’s old Athanate. Roman. Two thousand years I think. Very tough. Basilikos, but I think not Basilikos like Matlal.”
Both of us felt Bian approaching.
“A good summary, Diakon Vylkove,” Bian said. “Basilikos, but not like Matlal.”
She’d completed her teleconference with Skylur while I’d spoken to the cubs, so there was a clear limit on how much could have been said.
“But why?” I said. Why pick a Basilikos as Diakon? Skylur must be talking to every Panethus House in the world, persuading them he hadn’t lost his mind.
I didn’t need to voice the full question.
“What he said was that Emergence is coming too quickly. If he had longer, he might try to persuade Basilikos Houses to change their ways. If humans weren’t so alert, he might try to eradicate the worst of Basilikos. But it is what it is, and his alternative is to try for a new, expanded party that splits Basilikos and takes in the more acceptable of them. Isolate and marginalize the extremists.”
Skylur was famously persuasive, but he hadn’t gotten through to Bian on this point.
“I can, almost, see his logic. From a pragmatic viewpoint,” Bian went on. “Diakon Flavia had been running the New York Athanate right under
the noses of the Warders for over a century, and in all that time, it’s been a refuge, like Ireland is now.”
“Yes, refuge. Which means mix of diazoun Houses that follow Panethus and Basilikos creeds,” Yelena said. “I heard something else strange about Flavia: she’s not the only ruler of this little association. She shares the role with a Panethus House.”
“And they just get along together?” I asked, stunned.
“Yes. But not just that. The Panethus co-ruler, House di Firenze. He was her Blood slave. Her toru. She freed him when she infused him.”
It made no sense to me. Basilikos did not free their slaves, any more than they would make them Athanate. Or co-ruler of a little association hiding out under the very noses of the Warders.
Had I been guilty of a knee-jerk response when I’d heard about his new Diakon? Was there something clever in Skylur’s decision? Had he seen something in the Long Island Athanate that he thought would work in the wider world?
I believed it—wanted to believe it—enough to wait and see.
And yet, Bian was still angry about something. Her eyes were starting to vamp out to black.
“What else?” I asked her.
She grimaced. “Diakon Flavia doesn’t know the real reason behind Colorado becoming a closed Athanate community. Skylur’s used her to tell everyone else that it’s because we’re testing out the effects of your infusion.”
“Let me guess. She wants results.”
“Lots of them. Now. And she’s really unhappy with Haven being used as a temporary stop-off by your new pack. Unacceptable risk, she calls it.”
“This is crap,” I said. “On the infusion, we’ve hardly had time to observe how Scott has reacted. On the pack, it was Skylur himself who gave permission.”
That got a slightly twisted smile from her.
“Not our best argument on Scott,” she said. “I’ve evaluated him, and he seemed fine. You trust him enough to put him in charge of training your cubs.”
She was right. Not an argument I could have used against Diakon Flavia.
Strangely enough, getting me angry was calming Bian down.
“Look,” she said. “Skylur’s trusting us to give her something. I understand that Tullah is the priority for reasons Flavia doesn’t even know about. But if we go ahead with Mykayla today, I can spin that enough to give us a couple of days.”