Tarnished

by Rhiannon Held

  Andrew hauled back and slapped him. “Seattle! If you don’t start taking care of your pack, you. Will. Lose. Them.” He knew he sounded angry, and he played that up to get the man moving. John growled and jerked out of reach, hands coming up in fists, but automatically, like his mind was still elsewhere.

  Underneath the show of anger, Andrew felt wrung out. He hurt with the weight of the what-ifs for Silver, hurt with sympathy for the pack and their distress. He was the one who’d brought Sacramento here, but he couldn’t truly help them. That had to be their alpha. “They’re hurt, they’re scared. They need their alpha with them, helping each of them, not just his mate. Susan is stronger than I ever expected, stronger probably than you realize. She’ll survive.”

  That, finally, brought John’s eyes to his face. He stared at Andrew for the space of a breath, then another, before he turned and headed back inside. Andrew could only hope it was to talk to his pack and not to follow Susan again. He stayed outside for about a minute before he couldn’t stand it and went back in to check that Seattle was doing his job.

  16

  Things were relatively simple for Susan for a few hours. She nursed Edmond, checked his diaper, put him down to sleep, and locked herself in John’s bedroom. As evening dragged into night, she gave in and took several allergy pills to knock herself out until Edmond needed feeding again. She didn’t remember any dreams, but then again it felt like she never got deep enough into sleep to have them. After she got up the first time she only dozed until morning was far enough advanced that she could check on Edmond again.

  A plate of breakfast waited beside John’s door when she got back from the nursery, and Susan took it in with her. After some consideration, she called in sick to work again. Unfortunately, she soon found that, alone with her thoughts, they overwhelmed her.

  She’d killed someone. She’d pulled the trigger, she’d seen the blood well up on Sacramento’s temple. She’d seen the body fall. How could she have killed another person? Not human, but still a person. But hadn’t she stopped him from killing Silver, maybe Dare? She’d grown up taught that capital punishment was wrong, but what about self-defense? Or defense of people she cared about, anyway. Could she have stopped him without killing him? Would a bluff with the gun have been enough? She had no idea.

  It all circled back. She’d killed someone. She’d had to. Hadn’t she? But what would the Were think? John’s pack, or the others? She had the vague sense that Dare had defended her from Sacramento’s thugs. She presumed they would tell people about her. Susan supposed she should be worried that they’d show up to kill her, but she couldn’t get past the crisis of what she thought of herself.

  She’d killed someone.

  She was on the floor, curled with her back pressed against the end of the bed, when someone finally knocked. She didn’t choose to answer, so the knock came again. John’s voice followed. “Susan?”

  “I know perfectly well you can break that lock. Do it if you’re going to, or go away.” Susan hadn’t meant it to come out that acid, but wasn’t it all John’s fault? It was his world that had forced her to kill, one of his kind that had been hurting them. If he’d fought Sacramento earlier, then Silver wouldn’t have come, and his pack would have been safe.

  She just didn’t want to deal with any of it right now. John, or Were, or anyone until she could breathe again without the pressure of the thought that she’d killed someone.

  John did go away, after a while. She could hear his voice as he talked to the others, a little more commanding now. When he knocked again, she shouted, “Go away!”

  Edmond crying outside the door startled her out of her thoughts next. She pushed to her feet immediately. She opened the door to find Dare there, the squalling baby in his arms. Susan reached for the baby and hooked her toe around the bottom of the door, ready to close it on Dare the moment she had Edmond.

  He didn’t let Edmond go. “You don’t have to say anything, I just hope you’ll listen,” Andrew said, low. He relinquished Edmond once he was inside and shut the door before Susan could ask him to. She didn’t want to face John yet. She didn’t know if she’d scream at him for being a Were or fall sobbing into his arms. Dare was enough of a stranger she could keep better control.

  Edmond quieted when she nursed him, sitting on the edge of the bed. She didn’t bother trying to cover up. Were didn’t care about nudity, and she didn’t have the energy to care on her own account.

  “Well?” she said when Dare settled on the room’s chair, leaning forward with his wrists resting on his knees. “Get it over with.” Even considering what he might say made the emotions swirl in closer. Susan’s heart pounded as her eyes teared up. Was he here to say the Were wanted her executed? Did he pity her?

  “How much did Silver tell you about what happened to my wife?” After a moment, Dare exhaled on an amused note, probably at the surprise on Susan’s face. She hadn’t expected him to say that.

  “That she was killed. And your in-laws kept your daughter.” She had to climb out from under the morass of her own situation, but Susan did remember her politeness after a moment of looking down at her own son. “I’m sorry.”

  “Mm.” Dare rubbed a thumb over his opposite palm for a few moments, maybe choosing his words. “A rival pack killed her, and then I killed them. Seven of them, the majority of the pack’s fighters, including the beta. After the first couple, the rest probably surrendered, but I didn’t pay any attention. I killed them all and tore out their throats.” He paused, repeating the measured movements with his hands. “Were believe that when we die, Death takes our voices back to the Lady. To tear out the throat is to deny what you’d call the soul that rest. Symbolically, of course. I don’t believe in Her literally.”

  Andrew—having been trusted with what he’d told her, she couldn’t think of him as Dare anymore—paused again as if for some reaction. Susan had no clue what to say. It must have been much worse for him, but that was Andrew. He was better at all of this stuff than she was.

  “So I fled home. Boston took me in. Kept me from killing myself.” Andrew’s rubbing thumb stilled and then he let his hands fall, tone giving the admission no more weight than the sentence before it. “Gave me some advice. My daughter was three years old at the time. Benjamin told me that I was probably thinking I had done something so wrong, so evil, that I needed to remove myself and the possibility of further evil from the world.”

  He paused and Susan wondered what he expected her to say. She didn’t want to end it, she realized, confronted with that thought. She wanted to run and run until she’d outrun all of this and didn’t have to think about it anymore. Run until she wasn’t someone who’d killed anymore.

  “And he told me that there was no evil I’d prevent by removing myself that could ever outweigh the evil I’d do by depriving my daughter of a father. The kind of father I would be, if only I always remembered to live as the father I’d want her to have. Live like that, and it’s hard to do evil at all.”

  “I don’t want to kill myself.” Susan exhaled on a note of breathy hysterical humor and Andrew smiled in reciprocal punchiness. But there was more to it than that. She wasn’t sure how Andrew did it, made the words ring with something that had nothing to do with the actual physical sound of them. Maybe he hadn’t reacted in the same way, but Andrew had been where she sat now. He’d picked himself up. He was proof it could be done. He’d done it for his daughter. She had a son. A son, and a lover, and friends in this pack. “But thank you.”

  Andrew pushed himself to his feet after a last pat to her knee and opened the door. Silver peeked inside and the two of them exchanged a look, communicating Susan wasn’t sure what. “Are you next?” she asked Silver.

  Silver shook her head. “My dark hours had different sources than yours and Dare’s.” She looked at the floor. “Death offers ‘This too shall pass.’ Which is the sort of thing only he can get away with saying, because it’s completely true but also such bullshit.”

 
; Susan looked down at Edmond. Full, he squirmed around to try to stand up on her thighs. She did have a son. And she was luckier than Andrew had been, since no one was trying to take him away from her. All in a rush, Susan wanted to get it over with. Maybe John would be angry at her for doing it, maybe he’d be disgusted or pitying, but she wanted to know. Better to rip the Band-Aid off. She stood and held Edmond out. “Would you guys put him down for me? I’m going to go find John.”

  Silver nodded, and held out her good arm for the baby. Susan eyed her sling. Silver was practiced in using one arm, but what about with a broken collarbone? Andrew must have had the same thought, because he took Edmond before Susan had to say anything to Silver. “You won’t have to look far,” Andrew said, tipping his head to John coming up the stairs. Andrew and Silver slipped off toward the nursery.

  “John?” Her voice came out wavery.

  John’s head was down, so Susan couldn’t read his face, but his body slumped like the very definition of hangdog as he came into the bedroom with her. She sat down on the side of the bed with a thump. Not angry at least, then. She swallowed the phrases that crowded into her mind. She’d had to. She hadn’t wanted to. Sacramento could have killed John too, if the bullet had gone somewhere else in the struggle.

  “Susan,” he began, and her stomach twisted with nausea as she waited for him to come out with it. “I love you.”

  Susan’s laugh at the unexpected words came out half as a sob. When he lifted his head, John’s expression held only guilt and worry. She held out an arm and he sat beside her and drew her into a tight side hug. She’d really needed to hear that. It seemed out of character for John, though. Like he avoided physical affection in front of other Were, he’d never been one for stating that out loud. The handful of times he had stood out in her mind. When she’d told him she was pregnant. When he’d first held their son.

  “Who told you to say that, Silver or Andrew?” Susan twisted to see his answer in his face, but she didn’t even need that. His muscles told her everything when he froze. The urge to scream came back. Dammit. Why was affection so difficult with John?

  John turned so he could get both of his arms around her, tone a little panicked. “He didn’t say to—say it. Well, he did, but he said to say whatever was true, not that specifically…” He trailed off, perhaps in hopes she’d say something and rescue him from further flailing. Susan stayed silent. She needed so badly to hear this, and maybe John needed badly to be forced to say it too.

  After a stretching pause, John drew in a deep breath. “I love you.”

  He sounded so earnest that this time Susan leaned her head against his chest to release him from further verbal efforts. “I’m sorry I killed him.”

  “No, don’t be sorry for anything.” His voice was emphatic. “I’m sorry. If I’d fought earlier, Sacramento wouldn’t have been able to draw any of you into danger. You did what you had to do.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “Andrew thought you might kick him out, once all this was over. Thought of it immediately, like he was expecting it all along. Would you really have tossed him and Silver out, or was it all an act because he had a gun to your head?”

  “I had to say something to end the call quickly, but…” John trailed off like he was considering lying. That would be the easy answer, Susan supposed. After all, if he said he wouldn’t have done it without being threatened, she could never prove otherwise. She punched him in the side, letting him see from her glare that she’d heard the pause. She wanted the truth, dammit.

  “He’s not part of my pack,” John finally mumbled. He looked as sheepish as he sounded.

  Susan tugged away from him, not breaking the hug, but putting a sliver of distance between them. “That didn’t matter to him. He and Silver have been nothing but kind to me, when many of your own pack barely tolerate me.”

  “I know.”

  Susan blinked at him. She didn’t quite know what she’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been such easy agreement.

  John spoke into her silence. “You have to understand, Dare doesn’t just have a decade on me in age, he’s got much more experience. He lived in Europe, and let me tell you, their inter-pack politics aren’t just metaphorically bloody like they are here. And it sounds like he was the glue holding Roanoke together, and they’re hardly simple, either. Not like out here where it’s one alpha, one pack, one territory. That’s what I took over from my uncle. Simple.” John let out a long sigh. “Or that’s what I thought I took on, at least. Life is never that simple. I’ve been realizing that for a while now.”

  Susan stared at the carpet in front of them. Someone had lost a big puff of fur, not just individual hairs. “I’m especially not simple, aren’t I? What I am, I mean. And now what I’ve done.” As admitting to herself what she’d done grew easier, the looming thoughts of her future pressed down to fill that space. Her throat grew almost too tight to get the words out. “What are they going to do to me?”

  John pulled her against him. “I don’t think anything of value in life is simple. You’re my fresh air, the place I can be myself and not think about the responsibility of my rank or how I might fail it. But now I have failed it.” He let a long breath trickle out. Susan didn’t say anything. Her heart rose a little to hear him say that it had been the real John she’d been seeing when they were alone, but he was right. He had failed them in some ways.

  “I don’t think I’m built to be like Dare. He takes responsibility for…” John laughed, low. “The world, really, as he meets it, person by person. He wants to protect them all. But I know I can protect you. They’re not going to do anything to you. I won’t let them.”

  “Do you get to ‘let’ them?” Susan let her anger at John rise and cupped it in metaphorical hands for a moment to warm her. It was all very well for John to say “there, there” and tell her it would be all right. She was smarter than that. But then, what else could he say when the situation was out of his control?

  “I’ll do anything I have to.” That came out in an emphatic burst and then John was silent a moment, perhaps thinking of how to support it with something concrete. “For an alpha’s death, we’ll have to take the matter before the Convocation of North American alphas. It’s in a couple weeks. That’s why Dare showed up in the first place. I know it doesn’t—” he hesitated, “sound good, but being human might help you. They’ll be more likely to believe you were simply a mother defending her young.”

  Susan pressed her lips together hard, and tried to look at that from a Were perspective. What wasn’t John saying? “Humans don’t put animals on trial when they kill someone, we put them down.” She could feel shaking beginning in her muscles, trying to take her over. John and Dare and Silver, they wouldn’t let anyone put her down, she reminded herself. She wouldn’t let anyone put her down, even if she had to pick up a gun again.

  “We don’t see you like that!” Beyond the denial, John seemed to be having trouble finding words. Susan suspected that meant a lot of Were saw her exactly like that. “It’s more complicated than that. But even if it had been a Were. If Silver had been the one to pull the trigger, that still wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d be…”

  “Killed,” Susan filled in, since John apparently was too cowardly to say it. Someone had to.

  “If it comes to that, I’ll say I did it, and that my pack’s just trying to push responsibility onto the human to save me. I told you, I’ll do anything necessary. But I don’t think it will come to that. I’ve given it a lot of thought.” John let her go and turned so he sat sideways, facing her. “I have an idea for something I can do to at least help this.”

  Susan listened to John’s plan, and nodded slowly at the end. She’d been wrong. He did have something more to offer than just platitudes.

  17

  When they left John and Susan, Silver passed the nursery and gestured Andrew downstairs. Edmond squirmed and Andrew adjusted his grip. He assumed she wanted to take the baby downstairs with them so she could hold
him. It seemed like a reasonable idea to him. He’d seen the longing way she looked at all of the children.

  Many of the pack had called in sick today, so there were several of them clustered around the TV in the living room for the communal experience of mocking a team of humans trying to complete challenges together in the jungle.

  Andrew sat beside Silver after settling Edmond on her lap. Andrew had the side of the couch, with two teen Were beyond Silver, one cross-legged and the other straddling the couch arm. Pierce joined them, folding to the floor in front of Silver’s feet. His hair was still a little damp from the shower and free of product for once. He offered Silver a brush hopefully. Before Andrew quite knew what had happened, Edmond ended up back on his lap so Silver could brush.

  Pierce had apparently grabbed one of the brushes used on wolf forms by mistake, so every so often she stopped to pluck out a light-colored hair from among the dark. Pierce didn’t seem to mind, since it extended the brushing process. It was harder to make a massage out of it like you could for a wolf form, since there was less to brush.

  Edmond remarked “Woof!” to no one in particular and tried to climb up on the arm of the couch. Andrew prevented him from getting all the way up, but helped him stand on his thighs. Edmond looked around the whole room with interest from this new angle. Andrew remembered this stage with his daughter, the calm before the storm of her getting into absolutely everything she could reach as she cruised around the house.

  Andrew’s throat constricted at the thought of his daughter, but Edmond was clinging to his thumb with one tiny hand, and he couldn’t just dump him off his lap. He took a deep breath to clear the constriction and reminded himself how different Edmond smelled.

  John entered, Susan lagging a little behind as he increased the length of his stride. He smelled like he wanted to get something over with. Andrew winced internally. Here he was playing with the man’s son while Silver brushed his beta.