The Alpha's Oracle

by Merry Ravenell

  “Do the IceMaw have dealings with the SableFur?” Hix asked nobody in particular.

  “The SableFur don’t deal with anyone but themselves,” I said. “I trained in SableFur. They’re large, wealthy, and even have three Oracles.”

  “You spent time in SableFur?” Gabel asked.

  I gave him a look like he was dumb. “All Oracles in this part of the world finish their training at SableFur. I didn’t train close to the heart. I’ve lived in a few packs for training but finished in SableFur. Aaron sent them on their way. Does Aaron deal with GleamingFang?”

  “Hmmm.” Gabel murmured.

  Donovan said, “IceMaw has a direct path into SableFur through their southern pass, true, and does have dealings with GleamingFang, but SableFur is still on their side of things. Nothing that happens between IceMaw and SableFur doesn’t also happen between GleamingFang and SableFur. Or GleamingFang and IceMaw. All the motions of those scouts are exactly the same, except for the increased northern patrols along the Shadowless ridgeline.”

  Gabel’s hand stole a caress across the small of my back. I jumped. Donovan noted it with a sharp look. Not hostile. Sizing me up, reevaluating who I was in the order of IronMoon.

  I wanted to tell him if he figured it out, he should share, because I had no idea.

  Was the Bond slowly gnawing at my resistance? Was I just so tired I was slipping beneath the waves and didn’t realize it?

  Was it something else I dare not name?

  Or was it just a glorious trap from Gabel, leading me to believe there was no fight left to have, that he had succumbed and drifted beneath the waves, and he’d burst from below and gulp me down at the final minute?

  Because I could see him hitting me from below like a shark gobbling up an unsuspecting seal.

  I didn’t intend to die a seal.

  Did Donovan see it? Did he smell it all those symptoms Flint swore betrayed Gabel and I? True hunters were so sharp.

  Stop worrying about the hunter, Gianna. He’ll see you’re worried and then start looking for clues.

  Gabel’s hand slid across the small of my back once more.

  I jumped, eyes widening, Hix caught the movement and reached for me before realizing I wasn’t about to fall over. My cheeks burned with mortification and anxiety and pleasure. Gabel’s hand was warm and strong across my back, and so, so pleasant. I wanted to just arch my back and purr like a silly kitten, even as Donovan stared at us.

  “Can you go back?” Gabel asked the hunter.

  “I can easily find their trail.”

  “No. IceMaw.”

  “Aaron’s Hunters are sharp. Sharp as me. They caught my scent. No one is going to stay there as a spy without them knowing. Aaron has hunters and scouts all over his northern edges. You want me to pick up the wolves’ trail again and see where they’re going?”

  “I’m sure I don’t care at this point.”

  I bit my lower lip. The MeatMan might be very interested to find these wolves.

  Gabel left my side to go to his desk. He opened one of the innumerable small drawers and pulled out a roll of bills secured with an elastic band. He threw it to the hunter. “Your payment. The women aren’t on the menu. Go into town and pay for it if that’s what you’re after, but you know my feelings on it.”

  “Haven’t forgotten.” Donovan held up the little roll between two fingers. He brought it to his lips like it was a cigarette, and grinned. “Thank you, Alpha. Lady Gianna.”

  Gabel returned to me, and his hand on my back did as well. “The IceMaw.”

  He said this as if he didn’t still have his arm around me, and his hand on my back, fingertips just a few inches from my rump, and there weren’t still three wolves pawing through records and trying very hard to pretend like they weren’t seeing anything. Or hearing it.

  Was Gabel trying to sow the seeds of rumors? Or was he just oblivious to how he was acting, and he couldn’t help it, like Flint had warned me?

  “I know nothing about them,” I said.

  “I know very little. It is time to find out some more.”

  “Gabel, I told you. I’m not a security camera.”

  “Of course you aren’t, buttercup. I meant old-fashioned spies and research. I don’t have a specific question for the Moon anyway. Not on the IceMaw, at least.” He caressed my cheek.

  I wanted to believe him so badly it hurt. The Bond wanted to believe, and by now, the damn thing had slid its tentacles into every part of me. Those tentacles implored me to believe everything would be fine. Because love conquered all, and the Bond was sacred, and the Moon would not let anything happen. Have faith. Right? In movies and fairy tales, supposedly.

  “I’ll leave you to that, then.” I looked at the boxes and saw the three wolves looking at us before snapping back to their work.

  Crap.

  “What I was looking for wasn’t here anyway.” I slipped out of his grasp. He tried to hold me for a moment, then released me. “I’ll see you at dinner, Gabel.”

  By the time dinner rolled around, Donovan was scrubbed clean, his beard and hair trimmed, and even the dirt under his fingernails had disappeared. In jeans and an old flannel and workboots, he had plans to go twenty miles into town later that evening to spend his earnings. He was a member of IronMoon but rarely about, as Gabel had him in the field hunting and scouting prey.

  Wolf or deer, Donovan didn’t question and didn’t care.

  He was thin, not so tall, and except when he spoke, he was unremarkable. The sort of man who melted into his surroundings. Nobody noticed him. His voice had an educated timbre, though, and he spoke as a very learned man. He enjoyed ancient Greek tragedies, apparently.

  Even though he told Hix, Eroth, Gabel and myself of what he had seen in the south, I couldn’t shake the feeling he watched Gabel and I for clues. I listened carefully, hoping he’d tell me something that would lead me to the MeatMan and MeatTaker. Even if he did tell me something, I still didn’t know if I could tell Gabel. Would that be a betrayal of trust?

  Oracles are supposed to forget the answers and the questions. We’re not supposed to get cluttered up with other people’s concerns. Like the visions in the bowl: there, then gone. On to the next one. Their question, their answer, not our concern.

  But it had been my concern. It had started in my forest, with the RedWater wolves I had put down around me, and now I had had a subsequent vision with the specter of one of the RedWaters leading me to a many-color drawing of the Food rune.

  Gabel, the two Betas, and a few of the other senior wolves went to talk after dinner. Gabel did not invite me, but if I had wanted to attend, I could have. Instead, I went on to bed.

  * * *

  ~*~ Dreaming ~*~

  * * *

  The road was wide enough for a car. There were two tracks of dirt and a strip of grass running between. The road dipped and bobbed over the spine of a tall hill, affording me a view of the countryside on either side: trees in autumn colors, beautiful, silvery-grey morning sky, and little dots of buildings.

  I was in human form with the two RedWater wolves, walking into town.

  Their tails wagged. Each one was missing their canines, and their fur glowed with the luminescence I had seen in the grotto vision. A light that did not touch anything else around it, and seemed trapped within the shafts of their fur.

  We came to a blind hill, and as we crested the top, the road stretched out flat and split three ways. The horizon suddenly became obscured by mist and low-hanging autumn clouds. One road led to a raspberry thicket so thick it would blot out all the sunlight. One road led to a thick, churning river dotted with a pattern of huge rocks. The third to a thick mud pit with a surface pocked by gurgles of air from below.

  I tried to step off the side of the road to go across a hay field, but green mist obscured my vision. The wolves whined and herded me back to the road.

  No going off the path. No way around. It was forward or back.

  I inspected each option. The raspbe
rry thicket was too dense to see through, and the thorns sliced my skin at the slightest touch. The rushing river thundered, but there were rocks that might have formed a series of jumps to the other side. My feet sank an inch or two into the muck, and the smaller RedWater wolves sank even more. There was nothing to grab onto if things went badly during the crossing.

  All these choices seemed terrible. The wolves agreed.

  I turned and walked back to the main road, determined to go back the other way and see what lay beyond where we had started.

  My father stood in the middle of the road, and beyond him, the road had turned into a busy, old-time looking village of narrow, wood houses with orange firelight and gas lanterns illuminating thick-paned windows. Some of the human-form wolves who passed by us frowned at me in disapproval and hurried away, shielding themselves from the sight of me.

  My father stood with his arms folded and his ankles spread, staring at me with a stern expression, one I remembered from childhood. “There is no place for you here.”

  “Why? What have I done?” I frowned, not understanding my banishment from the town.

  He pointed with three fingers to the three paths. “Go.”

  “There’s no way through any of those.”

  “There is no place for you here.” He frowned at my defiance.

  “May I at least pass through to the other side?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I resisted, not convinced I should do what my dream Father wanted me to do. There were tricks and tests in dreams. He had no authority over me. I looked past him, trying to spot a quick path through the village. If I shifted and bolted, I might be able to outrun the human-form wolves, who would need to squirm and wriggle out of their clothing.

  Oh, I was naked.

  That might explain the looks and disapproval.

  “I’ll put clothes on,“ I offered.

  “We’ve burned them.” My father grabbed me with both hands, his strength crushing my arms, splitting my flesh down to the bone, and he flung me backward into the dirt. My head snapped against a rock and red brambles cracked my vision.

  “Donovan makes you nervous. Or are you just reading survival books for dinner conversation?”

  I was doing reading on getting through thickets, across rivers, and across bogs of sucking mud. Understanding the real-world mechanics and connotations of whatever I saw in visions helped me understand the Moon’s point. It also meant I acquired a large array of random and obscure knowledge.

  “I had a dream last night,” I told him. “Although yes, he makes me nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “He was watching us. You are careless.” I rubbed the back of my head where it had cracked against the dream rock. I obviously wasn’t injured, but vivid dreams left an impression for a day or two.

  “Careless?”

  “You making me stand at your side for Eroth’s victory, you putting your arm around me yesterday,” I reminded him. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf, then went over to the balcony edge, gripped the railing, and leaned down to speak to him.

  He stood in the center of the lower floor, arms akimbo. “He wasn’t here for the victory, and you think he would care about me touching you?”

  “That’s not the point, Gabel. The point is you’re careless. Donovan is a hunter, and they don’t miss even the slightest things on a trail. All it will take is one innocent comment from him, and it’ll put the whole pack on our scent.”

  Gabel frowned with thought.

  “This is where you have some witty comment about playing with your prey.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just feeling a little... paranoid? We notice things when we’re aware of them.”

  “I have visions, not hallucinations.”

  “But Donovan was not here for Eroth, so I don’t know why—”

  “Flint figured it out,” I interrupted Gabel. “He confronted me with it.”

  He titled his head with a sharp jerk to an inquiring angle. “Did he drag this out of you after he walked in on us?”

  “I wish. When he caught us he took me aside to warn me the symptoms are obvious, and it’s a secret that won’t keep. If Flint figured it out right away, you don’t think a true hunter isn’t going to piece it together in a matter of minutes?” My voice bordered on panic. I wasn’t ready for whatever Gabel was going to say. I wasn’t ready for all this to come apart.

  Gabel didn’t move or speak.

  “Oh, by the Moon,” I breathed. “You thought you had it under control. You really thought you were doing a wonderful job.”

  I gripped the railing, quivering from all the emotions clotting up within me. There was absolutely nothing Gabel could or would say that would bring me any comfort.

  “Not exactly,” Gabel finally said. “Don’t look so ashen. I’m afraid you will faint and fall right over that railing.”

  “I’m not capable of such maidenly dramatics.”

  He broke from his position and headed for the stairs.

  “Stay down there, Gabel. Don’t come up here.” I didn’t want him anywhere near me. I didn’t trust myself right then, feeling through the tangle of emotions, because the Bond was the most real, tenuous thing right then, and if Gabel was anywhere near me, I knew what would happen. I knew what I’d grab onto just to have something in the storm.

  “My office, buttercup. I’ll go where I want.”

  I backed up away from him as he approached.

  “We’ll just go in circles, buttercup.” He gestured to the wrap-around balcony. “Stand still so I can talk to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “I’m not asking you to talk. I’m talking, you can listen. Then we trade. That’s how it goes.”

  I didn’t want to do that either, but I put my back to the wall of books and eyed him, steeled for whatever had to say.

  Gabel’s presence felt huge, looming over me, hot like the air from that grotto, inescapable. The Bond howled and struggled like a beast against its chains, surging forward, and I had a glimpse of what he had been fighting.

  He didn’t want to have this conversation anymore than I did. Small comforts.

  “I’m not unaware of what I’ve been doing.”

  Uncertain Desires

  My whole body stiffened. My heart muscle included, so tight it could barely pump blood through my body.

  His body was as tight as mine, his hands curled into fists, his jaw clenched. Anger, frustration, and raw intensity coursed through him.

  This wasn’t a conversation he had been expecting to have. This was not a time and place of his choosing.

  A cornered Gabel was a dangerous man.

  His whole body moved with one slow, careful breath.

  “I know what I’ve been doing.” Steel threads laced through his voice.

  “Then why have you been doing it? You know what will happen. Your pack—”

  “Our pack.”

  I breathed in through my nose. Yes. I was an IronMoon now, by right of Marking, by right of conquest, by right of kidnapping, by right of the Shadowless throwing me away, by right of tribute. Whatever method anyone cared to invoke, I was an IronMoon. “Our pack will expect the vows. They still think this was all serious. You and I are the only ones who know what really happened, and why you really Marked me.”

  The sour feelings bubbled up from within me, and I contain them before they leached into the Bond and mixed with his intensity.

  “So is that it?” I pressed, not caring, not afraid of him. What could he do to me that he hadn’t already done? Punish my flesh? There was so much worse than that. “You’re just doing this to prove you can? That the pack can’t make you do anything, and fuck expectations, you are Alpha Gabel of Iron Moon?”

  “I have always told you the pleasure in any challenge is the risk of failure. It’s not a challenge if you might not succeed.”

  “Gabel, I swear by the Moon, I am done with your games, and I’ll castrate you in your sleep tonight
if you don’t speak plain.”

  He twitched. “Buttercup, you’re so fierce under that pretty exterior of yours.”

  “Want a demonstration? Drop the pants.” I snapped my teeth together.

  “You are also so distracting. I thought you wanted to talk about a different kind of antics. But if—” he reached for the button of his pants.

  I smacked his hands. “Stop it! It’s not about sex. That’s the Bond whispering in your ear, and you don’t even realize it.”

  “I do know where I stop and the Bond begins,” Gabel retorted.

  “Then act like it.”

  “I am. Am I not allowed to contemplate if this is something I want?”

  “Not without asking me first!” I screamed. “Not without asking me what I want!”

  Gabel backed up two quick steps.

  Anger poured through me, burned me, tears choked my throat, my heart twisted, and the Bond shrieked and writhed.

  “Everything has been about what you want.” The words bubbled with tears and mingled with the deep well of pain I had tried to bury. “You have not asked me one time what I want. Now you’ve decided you want to take those vows after all? Did you expect I’d swoon into your arms? The ends don’t justify the means, so don’t think just because the Mark didn’t fester, and the Bond is alive, it makes what you’ve done acceptable. Where in this do I get to say I don’t want to take them? Where do you even ask me what I want? Or do you assume because I’m the female I’d want to?”

  Tears poured down my cheeks. The Bond wept and moaned, swinging back and forth like a hammock in a storm.

  I’m sorry seemed like such a pathetic offering. A penny thrown into an empty fountain.

  “I hate you!” I shouted. “I hate you! I hate myself for wanting you! I hate myself for what you did to me, what the Moon made me for, to fit into your soul like some fucking puzzle piece! I hate all of this, and I hate you!”

  You want to hate me.

  But he was smart enough not to say it.

  I stood breathing hard, exhausted and spent, and grieving.