Tarnished

by Rhiannon Held

  A few people murmured, but Denver seized the opportunity to jump in precedence and stood. It was hard to pick out words with so many overlapping comments, but Silver gathered the sense that people thought her cousin was stupid for having missed his moment. Now he’d have to wait until last. Silver let her held breath trickle out. Good.

  “I stand for Sacramento.” The new Sacramento stood a few moments longer than the other Western alphas had, giving people time to murmur about the new alpha being a woman. Not loudly; that gossip had carried around like a dry wind over a desert already, Silver guessed. Portland, who had stood already, cleared her throat, not quite a growl. The murmurs subsided. Sacramento nodded once in thanks to Portland and sat.

  Dare squeezed her hand. Their turn. Silver drew a deep breath. She rose with him. “We stand for Seattle,” they said, overlapping. What had been listening silence became stunned, and every pair of wild-self ears in the room focused on the two of them. This time, the voices were loud, like a slap of sand against the face, carried on the dry gossip wind.

  Silver didn’t allow herself to wince. For all they might be scandalized, no one else had any say in this. Dare might have his reputation and she might have her appearance of weakness, but she knew now that Were would follow her, trust her, when she proved her strength, same as anyone else. She could stand tall and unafraid, knowing that.

  “This was not a dishonorable challenge.” Silver’s cousin repeated it, louder, when no one listened. He started to stand to draw people’s attention, but he was beta, and that wasn’t right. He subsided when he remembered. “Dare has always had honor in his dealings with me, and I abdicated to him.”

  Silence settled, like wind suddenly falling away so you staggered in the direction it had come from. Abdications happened, but not often. By the time an alpha was old or tired, usually one of his pack had already sensed that his voice no longer rang with authority, and challenged him.

  Silver let the silence stretch a little longer, listening and smelling with every breath to judge Dare’s breaking point. When frustration overcame his good sense, he might snap at them. She stepped in before he could. “Are we going to stare at each other all day, or are we going to get on with dinner? Lady knows he’s nice to look at, but I’m hungry.”

  Dare choked at the inappropriate joke, but that was a trick she’d stolen from Death, and it worked as well as she’d hoped. The laugh was low, under people’s breaths, but the moment ended. Everyone broke into talk at once.

  “Silver! Dare!” The urgent whisper behind her made her turn. Tom must have been there for some time. Silver had been too focused on the alphas to notice him. Dare gave a look that said clearly “You or me?” Silver kissed his hand before dropping it and turning back to talk to the young man. She’d shaken things up, better Dare be the one to now begin the process of quieter politicking.

  Tom pulled her back as far as he could. There was really no way to avoid being overheard without going outside, but there was always some privacy in the fact that people often didn’t bother to listen.

  Dare nodded to her once before turning back to the gathering. At least the worst part of the evening was over for now, and they could eat dinner in peace.

  * * *

  Andrew didn’t spend too much time wondering what Tom wanted. Something Susan-related, perhaps, but with all the Were except the teens in the main hall at the moment, Andrew doubted she could have put herself in the way of serious harm. He could only chase one rabbit at a time, and he trusted Silver to handle it.

  “Before we eat, I have a point of business, if no one objects.” Rory stood and rapped a knuckle on the table for attention. Andrew had worked with the man long enough to see that he was practically vibrating with excitement under his calm act. What now? What was he up to?

  Whatever it was, Andrew didn’t intend to let him put his plan into effect unopposed. Convocation tradition said no business on the first day, just prayers, introductions, and dinner. Anyone else, Andrew wouldn’t have objected, but Rory was probably trying to assert control of the whole meeting from the beginning. He stood.

  Silver gasped, left Tom, and crossed to clutch at his shoulder. “Dare!” Andrew lost the thread of what he’d been about to say. What had made Silver smell so fearful?

  Rory didn’t delay in seizing the opportunity Andrew’s distraction had given him. “Everyone agrees, then? Good. There’s someone else who needs an introduction. I know there’s been bad blood in the past, but when I received a request to host a delegation for the Convocation, in the interests of developing a closer relationship among all our packs, I judged that it was worth changing the way things have always been done.”

  The front door opened with the bang of a visitor who wanted every eye to be on his entrance. His wife’s younger brother Arturo entered first and Andrew felt like he was suddenly drowning. How could the Madrid pack be here? It was like a nightmare, too nearly his deepest, blackest fear to be real. It was impossible. They shouldn’t be here. Each breath was an effort to fight it past the constriction in his chest. The Madrid pack. Here.

  But he couldn’t break down, or run, or launch himself at the man. Andrew fought his face into impassivity, though he knew he probably stank of fear and rage. He had to hang on to control. Someone who wanted to be Roanoke didn’t have the luxury of giving in to his emotions in public. Andrew took a metaphorical white-knuckled grip on his emotions and started cataloging the little details of Arturo’s appearance to distract himself.

  Arturo had grown into himself a little since Andrew had seen him last, cut his hair shorter to tame the curls and trimmed his beard down to black lines along his jaw. That jaw was clenched in an expression that was much more familiar: aggression hiding discomfort. He still lacked some indefinable measure of confidence.

  Since Arturo had entered first, that meant whoever followed would be the high-ranked one. When North Americans even bothered with precedence, they put the highest-ranked first. In Europe, the highest-ranked always entered last, as if sending their vassals to scurry forward and prepare the way for them.

  Raul followed. He must have moved up in the ranks of the pack, if Madrid was sending him out on errands like this. Andrew clenched his teeth on curses. He remembered Raul well, for all the man liked to fade into the background. Raul waited and listened. When he’d been quiet for so long everyone had let something slip around him from pure inattention, he struck. One key piece of information in the right ear, and suddenly everything was going Raul’s way. Andrew had learned that the only way to deal with him was to be just as quiet in return, so he had nothing on you. And that was hard, because he played a long, long game.

  Andrew tried to catalog appearance details again, to hold down the stomach-churning thought: what key piece of information did Raul have now? Raul still carried an air of cockiness that combined with his impeccably styled hair, manicured nails, and defined muscles to suggest he had stepped out of the bullfighting ring for a night of wooing the ladies.

  “Who are they?” John asked beside Andrew’s ear.

  Andrew started violently. He hadn’t heard John move to stand behind him in the beta’s position of support. Silver pressed herself against his other side. This must be what she’d tried to warn him about. How had Tom known? On the heels of that thought came another: few others in the room knew who these people were. Maybe if he acted quickly, he could get this under control. He needed to do something at least before Raul locked his jaw with teeth too deep in flesh to tear out.

  “Raul, go home and tell Madrid,” Andrew said, raising his voice to carry, “that we have no need for Europeans here.”

  The room exploded, alphas and betas all coming to their feet, anger at Rory congealing in the air. Andrew concentrated on taking deep breaths and holding up his neutral mask.

  “He is Madrid, Dare,” Arturo said with a smirk. “He takes the idea of ties with North America seriously enough that he has come himself.”

  “Or the idea of a takeover,”
Andrew countered over the roar of everyone’s voices, raising the noise to a new pitch. This was bad, very bad. He’d had no idea Raul had challenged since he left Spain. He’d always figured the man was dangerous, but now it seemed he had the position to back it up.

  Raul said nothing through it all. He waited impassively for the storm to pass, arms crossed. Dammit, what did it take to shake the man? Was that confidence that the rest of his metaphorical pack was even now circling around to box in the prey? Arturo glanced back and then smirked anew at Andrew. There was something else they were hiding. Andrew knew it.

  Maybe somewhere in there, he really had forgotten to breathe, because Andrew’s whole world stopped dead. Only he existed, him and the young woman who walked through the door. She looked about fifteen years old, wearing too much makeup, with her black hair left loose to tumble in waves over her shoulders. He didn’t recognize her at first—maybe he didn’t want to recognize her—but he knew. He knew.

  He pulled away from Silver and took a stumbling step forward. At first, she didn’t look at all like her mother. This girl’s face was harder, wilder, sharper. She was much taller than her mother had been, height in her legs, like Andrew’s own mother. But he could see Isabel’s bones in her face, the line from deep brown eyes to the corner of her jaw to the curve of her chin.

  “Felicia.” The word came out mangled and husky. Andrew had to try twice to make it audible even to himself over the pounding of his own heart. “Felicia.”

  He ran. Arturo and Raul stepped out of the way and part of Andrew screamed that that wasn’t right, after all the effort they’d put into keeping her from him. But that wasn’t loud enough to be heard over his heart either. Felicia. She’d grown into a beautiful young woman, healthy and confident.

  He reached her, she looked in his eyes, and she snarled. Short, but with so much contempt in the sound. Andrew tried not to hear it, tried not to have it be true. Contempt? He’d known they’d probably turned her against him. He’d known it, and seeing it in her face was still like a physical blow. All the times he’d imagined her grown, it had been smiling, as she smiled as a child. That smiling toddler was gone forever, as gone as Isabel. At least when he’d lost her, it had been an honest pain that faded as time passed. Straightforward. Having lost the child but not the person—that was a silver knife to the gut, twisted.

  “Felicia—” He tried again, but this time she cut him off.

  “You.” Her lip lifted in another snarl, but she didn’t give it voice this time. “It’s good to finally meet you again, Father. Maybe you can explain to me why you were so cowardly as to stand back and let my mother die when you could have saved her. But you couldn’t risk your precious skin, could you?”

  Andrew stared at her for several seconds, trying to understand what she’d just said. Let Isabel die? He still had nightmares about the first sight he’d had of the house, pounding down the streets so hard he couldn’t draw in enough air, following the smoke. Every breath had been filled with the smell of that fire, burning too far advanced, he’d known it. But still he ran and found the house with ravenous orange licking from every window, every door, devouring the beams around where the roof had collapsed.

  He’d still have gone in. He remembered the moment with crystal clarity, seeing the house and knowing no one could be alive. But werewolves could heal, couldn’t they? He had to go in and try.

  Felicia had been sobbing wildly in his arms for the whole run. She hadn’t understood what was going on, but she knew it was more frightening than anything she’d ever encountered before. At that moment, the moment when he’d looked at the house and made that calculation, she screamed with absolute terror. It reached Andrew. He held her against him and breathed in the scent of her hair, the scent of her, and he didn’t go. He stayed as the second floor collapsed down and the firefighters arrived. He held his daughter as she screamed and screamed. His tears were silent.

  “There was nothing anyone could have done,” Andrew said. “We got there too late.” He searched her face for some hint she was listening, but found only righteous anger.

  Arturo murmured something to Raul. Andrew caught enough of the end to realize that it was a translation of his words. “You were the first on the scene, Dare,” Raul replied in Spanish. He smoothed and flipped Andrew’s name with Spanish vowels. Andrew understood, his former fluency seeping to the surface, but emotion blocked out his ability to find words to answer.

  Arturo joined in, a beat late, first with a translation of Raul for the audience, then words of his own. “How do we know you’re not lying, to try to save your honor?” Andrew would have laughed, if his grip on control hadn’t been so tenuous. Raul should have known better than to rely on Arturo for his little act. The man couldn’t hide his true emotions to save his life. Arturo knew he was lying.

  Andrew imagined shouting at them both, shouting that they’d raised his daughter on lies, even though he’d known that before. That had been different. Having her right in front of him, hearing the lies from her own mouth, was different. He imagined backhanding the smug look right off Arturo’s face.

  In the new, his wolf form should have felt miles away, but it seemed close enough to touch now. So easy, to shift and tear Raul into bleeding shreds. Not kill him. Just teach him to regret what he’d done.

  But he couldn’t. This was about more than him and Raul and Felicia. Whatever Rory’s plan was in inviting these snakes into the Convocation, Andrew needed to thwart it. “Been losing your memory, Raul? Last time I saw you, you understood English perfectly well.” The words came out flat, but better that than snarled.

  Raul spread his hands, the picture of reasonability and confusion, exactly as if he hadn’t understood. It came to Andrew in a flash: who knew what pieces of information people might drop around him if they thought he couldn’t understand. Lady damn him, Andrew refused to let him play his games, play them on Andrew’s people, but he couldn’t attack Raul to prevent it.

  “Fuck you,” Andrew said in Spanish. He remembered that much. But he needed to keep control, and it was slipping away from him each moment Raul stood watching him impassively as Felicia’s snarl echoed in his ears. Raul needed to feel pain.

  Silver’s fingers closed on his wrist. “Andrew Dare,” she said. “Everyone is watching. Your daughter is watching.”

  Andrew swallowed. She was right. He couldn’t throw away the challenge he’d worked so hard for, and he couldn’t become the fireside-tale monster they’d made of him to her. If he couldn’t keep control, he had to leave. He turned and fled, seeing nothing but the big double door out to the porchlight-stained darkness outside.

  23

  Silver let Dare go. She wanted to follow so badly, but she could hardly see the world at the moment. She couldn’t move through what she couldn’t see. She had needed that name, needed her mate’s name to truly reach him. But that name was tangled up in the memories it hurt to remember, the memories it drove her mad to remember. Pull on the name and the rest dragged behind. She pulled, she let go, and hid. The rest didn’t overwhelm her, but they did hurt.

  “Patience,” Death said, in her mother’s voice, dimly remembered from when she was a cub. “He could not hold to show his strength. Make a virtue of a necessity, and hold yourself.”

  So she held until the world seeped back in, and then she put her hand on the shoulder of the young man who had tried to warn them and let him lead her back to her cousin. She sat and let the words around her—accusations, speculations, insults, support—slide over her skin and away like harmless rain.

  With Dare’s world at a greater distance, she saw wild selves in greater focus, so she concentrated on reading their enemies’ secrets in theirs. The alpha’s wild self held too still and was light in patches to suit a forest’s shadows. In a pack hunt, Silver suspected he would claim the kill by darting out for the last bite when the others had already chased it far and worn it down. The beta’s dove-gray wild self kept too much behind the tame’s legs for Silve
r to believe anything the tame’s stance said about his confidence.

  Dare’s daughter’s wild self pressed against the tame’s legs, but bared its teeth defiantly. It was dark, darker than most other wild selves in the room, black with hints of russet underfur. It seemed fitting to Silver, considering how the course of the girl’s life had been changed in flames, that her fur should look so burnt. She seemed to lose some of her confidence as the passion of her anger at Dare waned with his departure. She backed to her uncle’s side and he slung a comforting arm around her shoulders.

  The voice of Dare’s old, wise ally cut through the voices when the rain of words had lost its initial force and settled into a pattern that seemed likely to hold for hours unless interrupted. “Perhaps we should officially adjourn for the night, so we may eat dinner and think developments over in peace.”

  Silver groped for his name, any name besides Dare’s, as others filed out before her. The alpha who had replaced the one her cousin’s human killed paused and gave her a thin-lipped smile of sympathy as she passed. In the stress of the moment, her wild self walked shoulder to shoulder with that of her beta. So not beta, but mate? Or perhaps both? That was a very difficult balance of dominance to hold. Silver chose to think about that rather than anything else, until her cousin tugged her up.

  Once they were outside, on the path to the temporary den, Silver let herself run. Each jarring step traveled as pain up her shoulder, but the sensation grounded her. The night air was sharp with the chill, the way it had been sharp with sunlight before.

  Inside, she found Dare curled up as much as a tame self could, on the ground beside the bed. The salt smell of tears draped him, though she couldn’t see his face. There was hardly room for her in the small space he’d tucked himself, clinging to the false security of a tight den. But Silver joined him anyway, and he moved to let her in.