Tarnished

by Rhiannon Held

  Silver’s muscles tensed and her expression chilled. “They spend nearly all of their time in wolf. I can’t.”

  Andrew winced. He hadn’t even thought about that before he made the stupid joke. Dammit. “I’ll just have to win then, won’t I?” He tried for a weak laugh. That was what he was trying not to think about: he had no wish to join the Alaska pack either, but if Rory beat him, he’d have few choices.

  Silver laughed suddenly too, her timing suggesting Death had said something. “Oh, enough gloom,” she said, and yanked Andrew’s head down for a deep kiss. He grabbed her ass to pull her closer to him and she wiggled away, laughing brightly. She ran a few steps into the trees and turned back to grin at him.

  Andrew checked the wind to make sure Sacramento’s thug was well gone, then grinned right back and followed. Now this was the kind of chase he could get into. John could wait a little for his call about a trespasser on his territory.

  2

  Susan gave her son a last gentle push on the park swing and then stepped back to let his father have a turn. Edmond laughed and slapped his little hands on the top edge of the swing’s basket. John let the baby’s momentum wind down before pushing again.

  Susan leaned the side of her forehead against the metal bar of the swing set. The sun warmed the back of her dark peacoat, left over from work clothes though she’d shucked the bank-appropriate blouse and slacks the moment she got home. The metal was cool in contrast, part of the mixture of chill and warmth she loved about spring. Though spring also meant mud, of course. No matter the quantities of wood chips dumped on this playground, little feet always dragged bare streaks down to mud under the swings.

  “You going to see that romantic comedy this evening? Whatever it’s called, I forget.” John wobbled the swing side to side with a grin, and Edmond shrieked with delight. They both had the same smile, which drew one from Susan. She suspected that Edmond would someday grow into his father’s rugged looks. John reminded her of an old-time cowboy, if one had survived into the twenty-first century, and got a job at a software firm. He was a little clean-cut for a cowboy today, though, brown hair combed into order for once. Not for work, since he’d had Edmond today while he telecommuted, so it must be for whatever thing he had tonight.

  “I might hang around my apartment. Much as I hate to waste an evening off.” Susan slid into the next swing over. That one was the style for older children, wide and bendy enough to allow an adult’s hips. She pushed herself only a few inches back before falling forward, conscious of not stressing the structure. However hard it was to wrap her head around the idea of the father of her child being a werewolf, his pack made good babysitters. Usually, that balanced out the hassle of John wanting her to keep her own place rather than move in with them. “Besides, why would I want to go alone when I could subject you to the sap later?”

  John stepped sideways and gave her a sudden shove. Susan shrieked in surprise herself and tried not to fall off, laughing. John caught her against him on the way back and kissed the side of her head. “Cruel.”

  Susan leaned her head back into his warm solidity. His muscles moved as his phone rang and he reached down to slide it from the holster on his belt and answer it. On seeing who it was, John pulled back so quickly Susan almost fell backward. She twisted to frown at him as he answered with a curt greeting.

  “You ran into who?” John listened for a moment. “Lady.”

  Edmond started to fuss so Susan stood and pulled him out of the swing. The diaper bag was at John’s feet, but when Susan stepped over to collect it, he startled back and strode out of earshot. Susan glared after him, juggling the weight of Edmond on her hip and the bag on her opposite shoulder. She assumed the call was about werewolf stuff. Had to be. She’d noticed lately that John avoided touching her when anyone from that other world of his could see. This reaction to a phone call was a little much, though.

  John strode back a moment later. “We’d better get home. My guests just came over the pass.”

  Susan pushed the diaper bag at him. “Which means they’re not going to be here for another forty-five minutes at least. What’s wrong?”

  “He hasn’t even arrived, and Dare has already collected trouble to bring with him.” John sighed, scrubbed at his face, and accepted the bag. “Lady. It’s never his fault, but…”

  “I’ve known people like that.” Susan smiled, but John didn’t laugh at the humor. It seemed he’d stepped fully into what she thought of as his alpha persona before they even got back to the house. Or maybe this was the real John, and the relaxed, playful guy he was when they were alone was the persona, but Susan somehow doubted it. She mentally cursed the phone call for making him switch over sooner.

  John slid the bag onto his shoulder. He started to step away, but he reconsidered a second later and pressed a hand to the small of her back as he kissed her hair. “We’d better get back. I have some stuff to take care of before they get here.”

  Susan sat on her curiosity and didn’t ask what that stuff was. She knew he wouldn’t answer, and it was easier to not have that stubborn silence become reality. She’d decided he was worth it, alpha persona and all, so there was no point picking at it, however much she was dying to know.

  * * *

  As they neared Seattle’s den, the land opened up for Silver to look ahead of them, the view no longer blocked by the nearest mountainside. A river curled, branched, and branched again through the tallest of trees, not wide but very deep and churning, always fighting on its way to the sea. By now, she was familiar enough with what the poison had done to her mind to look harder. Not river, not trees, but something else with a heavy weight of meaning she could sense but couldn’t touch. With time to spare in their journey, Silver pushed and struggled to touch that weight.

  Paths. It came to her like blinking away tears so the world sharpened and ceased refracting at the edges. She was seeing paths, much traveled by humans, not rivers. Refraction remained, an uncertain sense she was still missing something, but Silver relaxed and let it slide away again. She trusted Dare to navigate for them both.

  As they drew up at the den, Silver’s other worries tightened around her. Death must have sensed this, because he returned just as her hand started to feel empty, loose by her side. She buried her fingers in the warm fur of his ruff. She always caught herself expecting that it would be chill, chill as the sky of a night in the new without the Lady’s light or warmth. Death was as black as that sky, without even the points of stars to fill him, but warm anyway.

  “You’re practically shaking like a doe,” Death said with her mother’s voice, exasperated. Silver lifted her hand in surprise, and found it steady. Death was just being a cat. She smacked at Death’s ears, but he danced out of the way. “Why do you fear your mother’s pack, your birth pack?” He returned to his favorite male voice, presumably that of a Were dead generations ago. Death had no voice of his own.

  Silver looked ahead, but Dare had enough distance that he could pretend he didn’t hear her talking to Death, and she could pretend she didn’t notice him pretending. “I don’t fear them. I’m not looking forward to dealing with them, that’s all.” Silver clenched her hand. They’d undoubtedly be as pitying as they had been on other visits, when Dare’s pack nature had gotten to be too much and he’d made some excuse to see other Were. Pity, pity the poor cripple. Scarred by the silver, unable to use her arm, unable to shift. Barred from the Lady forever. Pity her.

  “You’re as pack by personality as he is,” Death said, not looking back as he paced ahead over the dozens of paw prints leading to the den’s entrance. Silver hurried to catch up. “You want to claim you’re not lonely, just the two of you, no other wolves?”

  Silver said nothing and kept going past Death to catch up with Dare as he clasped hands with her cousin, Seattle, both measuring their strength while pretending they weren’t. If she tried to defend herself against Death’s too-perceptive questions, he only came up with even more infuriating ones.


  “Seattle,” Dare said as they released their grip. “It’s good to see you. Sorry to have apparently brought trouble, but I hope to be able to get off your territory quite soon.”

  Silver heard a hint of gritted teeth in Dare’s voice when he used her cousin’s title. This was no romp through a field for Dare either, meeting another alpha while he had no status of his own. She saw his discomfort even more clearly in his wild self. When Were’s tame selves were ascendant, their wild selves usually followed quietly at their heels. Dare’s wild self exchanged snaps of teeth with Seattle’s before they both settled back behind their tame selves and their polite masks.

  “I’ve sent people out to deal with that trouble. I appreciate the warning. Welcome.” Seattle stepped aside and gestured into the den with more of that politeness that none of them believed.

  Silver let Dare go first. As she passed her cousin, she stooped to ruffle his wild self’s ears while checking it for new scars. At the back of her mind, Silver knew that she was the only one who could see wild selves, but that gave her all the more reason to check, since no one else could.

  Tame selves did not form scars, except for injuries caused with silver, but wild selves did. Silver glanced ahead at the band of roughed, bleached fur over the back of Dare’s wild self. In contrast, Seattle’s wild self looked weak with his pretty fur and muscles that flexed without the catch of scar tissue.

  Seen together, the men’s tame selves formed a different contrast. Seattle was broad-shouldered and muscled where Dare was lean; Seattle still looked young, while Dare was silver-marked in the locks of white hair among the dark at his temples.

  Seattle pulled her out of her thoughts with a squeeze of her shoulder that he extended into an arm across her back, guiding her inside like a child. “Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?”

  Silver punched him in the side and he let go immediately. At least he learned. Sort of. He was family, so the smothering was a little easier to take from him. “I’ve yet to shatter into pieces since you saw me last, cousin.”

  Seattle muttered an apology and hurried inside to get them drinks anyway. Silver ignored hers when he offered it. Something was amiss in the den. Dare and Seattle started making strained, meaningless conversation while they drank, all about the things she couldn’t see, so Silver slipped away, Death padding beside her. His tongue lolled out in a self-satisfied expression, so she guessed he approved of her curiosity. No wonder. Curiosity often led to trouble, and Death loved to see people off-balance.

  The smell of one of the rooms caught Silver’s attention. Seattle’s human lover looked up as Silver approached, wariness written across her body in the awkward way of humans: they didn’t know what they were doing so they couldn’t hide their emotions, but neither could they choose to make a clear statement of a few emotions rather than always a muddled mess of several.

  The human pushed to her feet. “Hello.” She laughed, mere awkwardness, not warmth. “I know we’ve met before, but I’ve forgotten your name. Are you here to talk business? Should I be out of the house already?”

  “Silver.” Silver frowned, trying to suppress the sharp flash of frustration when the human woman’s name slipped out of her mental grasp. Names, at least, she’d been working on, trying to strengthen her memory for them through practice. She frowned at the woman, trying to find the name by studying her. She was shorter than Silver, more curved, especially in the hips, and her short hair was an undistinguished brown. Without a Were’s wild self to provide the rest of the appearance, it was a little like trying to recognize someone with half her face covered. Humans always looked so lonely.

  Like Silver herself, she supposed.

  Death butted his shoulder into the side of her knee as he passed to investigate the woman. Silver half-smiled. At least she did have someone to walk with her in place of a wild self.

  “Susan,” the woman said finally. Her eyes had been on Silver’s injured arm in the pause and Silver realized that she’d forgotten to tuck it into her pocket when she and Dare arrived. The snakes inscribed there were dead now, only the diamond-backed white lines of their shed skins remaining. Silver traced them with her fingertip, thinking of when they had hissed and bitten her with every movement, before Dare had killed them.

  “I suppose Seattle told you the story of what happened to me?”

  Susan shook her head. “Seattle—that’s some kind of title, isn’t it? I’ve heard the others call him that.”

  Silver winced. Her cousin was keeping his lover in staggering ignorance. Clearly, she was intelligent enough to begin to put things together without his help. “He hasn’t told you anything?”

  “Some things, about how our son will grow up.” Susan shrugged, expression tightening. “I know I’m not supposed to know about you guys at all, but now I do, I don’t see that it matters how much more I find out. But he clearly wants to keep me…” Susan hesitated. “Separate from that part of his life somehow, including making sure I know as little about it as possible.”

  Silver smiled, thin-lipped. “To protect you, probably. I understand about people trying to protect me by keeping things from me.”

  “And what are you going to do about it?” Death said, brushing past Susan’s legs, first on one side, then the other.

  Silver grinned, a quick flash that seemed to take the human woman aback a little. “Maybe I’ll have to tell you myself.”

  Susan’s baby began to cry from somewhere deeper in the den and Susan reacted to the sound like she had werewolf hearing. A mystery of motherhood, perhaps. She pushed right past Death but hesitated halfway out of the room, desperate curiosity warring with the maternal instincts in her body language. “I do want to hear about you guys, I’m sorry, I just have to—”

  “We can talk later,” Silver assured her and Susan disappeared with a nod.

  Death came up beside her and yawned, white teeth stark against all of his blackness. “You might want to be careful. Her safety now is in being unseen. Knowing too much might give her the tools to put herself in danger.”

  “Life is more than safety.” Silver rubbed her bad arm. “But you’re right. I should make sure she understands the risks and give her a choice before I continue.”

  “And if you’re both extremely lucky, any choice she makes will even matter.” Death wandered off through the den in the direction of Dare and Seattle. After a moment, Silver followed.

  3

  Andrew stuck to small talk with John, waiting for Silver to get back before he got to the real point of the visit. As his mate she was as concerned with a challenge for alpha as he was.

  Silver pushed through the door of a downstairs bedroom a moment after John’s human girlfriend jogged upstairs in response to the baby crying. Silver joined him in the kitchen, where he stood awkwardly opposite John, both with barely touched beers. She pressed up against Andrew, her bad side closest. He touched her bad wrist, and when she tipped her chin in a tiny nod, he tucked it into her front jeans pocket for her. It gave her a slightly more natural look she liked.

  John offered her another open beer and Silver accepted it with a dry smile. “Talking to Susan?” he asked.

  “I was quite interested to find out how little you’d seen fit to tell her.”

  Andrew looked down at Silver in surprise at the sharpness in her voice. What was that all about? Of course John had told Susan as little as possible. He shouldn’t have told her about Were in the first place. He was only trying to keep her safe.

  “You should tell Silver that,” a male voice said behind him.

  Andrew swallowed hard when he heard that familiar voice. Death was a manifestation of his unconscious. Nothing more. No black wolf hulked at the edge of his vision in the doorway to the kitchen, and that black wolf didn’t laugh when he caught Andrew turning his head to avoid seeing him. “Better yet, tell her that you’re going to do something to keep her safe,” Death said.

  Andrew suppressed a wince. If he ever did that, Silver would hand hi
m his own balls on a platter. He looked up the stairs after the human woman. He hadn’t ever considered Susan in that light. Perhaps he should drop a word in John’s ear about the care and feeding of strong-minded mates.

  “So you’re going to challenge at the Convocation?” John asked Andrew, sounding desperate to change the subject. “I assume, at least, given your timing. I invited Portland over like you asked, so she’ll be here to discuss it later tonight.”

  “Yeah. I quit my job in Ellensburg and moved out of the apartment. Maybe it’s a little early, but I was going insane.” Andrew rubbed his temple. The last time he’d been in the human workforce and not on Rory’s payroll as enforcer, it had seemed much simpler, but since then he’d grown accustomed to holding more authority as a Were. He had a tough time giving it up among the humans.

  John raised his eyebrows. “You were working at the university? College students?”

  “The work-study types were about as intelligent as the paper clips, but that wasn’t the only problem. The department was underfunded and didn’t have a clear place in the university hierarchy. Add in an absentee head—” Andrew waggled his hand, and John nodded in understanding. Few Were liked dealing with the mushy undefined structure so many humans pretended they wanted.

  John tipped back his beer. His scent soured, and Andrew wondered if he was stalling to avoid something.

  “Silver and I are going to crash at one of those extended-stay hotels,” Andrew said. No alpha would want another dominant Were in his house for too long. Did John fear that he was inviting himself in for the couple weeks until the Convocation? It was so frustrating not to know anyone he could stay with on this coast. He hadn’t been able to go home since he broke with Rory, so all of his and Silver’s belongings were packed in the trunk of the car. “I plan to avoid Sacramento until the challenge is settled, but if he comes looking for trouble again, he’ll come looking there.”