by Christa Wick
I had a feeling her cocky but deserved request would smash the rules of both cultures if granted. Women had power within the packs and prides, but never leadership roles. It was like those dreadful questions human male politicians asked about whether the nation could withstand having a president with PMS in charge of nuclear weapons. And from the little I'd seen of motorcycle clubs in the real world, women were only back-of-the-bike bitches, not even members, let alone officers.
Different species, same fact -- men are mostly assholes.
"You're right," Taron agreed, surprising us both.
"And buy me a really bitching bike," she added, quick to capitalize on his response.
"That I absolutely will do if your idea works," he smiled, a little more of the tension he had carried with him since Braeden's arrival outside the cabin melting away. "But it's up to you to convince your overprotective big brother that you can ride."
"Seriously?" she asked, mouth agape. "You'll buy me a bike? You realize I'm talking about a motorcycle, right? And not some scale model."
"Right," he nodded. "Bike's yours if your plan works."
"Then let's get our asses moving! We've got a movie trailer to make and Braeden's got to hit the truck stop and the electronics store. And I've got a fucking script to write and only a few hours to do it!"
"Yo, Bro!" she yelled, leading us toward the tunnel that would take us back to the clubhouse. "Get your ass over here, we're leaving. Chop chop!"
We paused at the tunnel, waiting for Braeden to catch up and lead the way while Taron guarded the rear. Clover kept up a constant stream of chatter until we reached the underground waterfalls with the chem lights still lit.
Directly in front of me, Clover stopped to appreciate the surreal beauty. "Damn, I love it when it's lit up like this."
I had to pull up quickly to avoid running into her, my feet suddenly skittering over the slick, rocky ground like I was trying to walk on marbles. I was going down, nothing to hold onto to stop my fall.
Taron wrapped his arms around me, strained for a second to keep both of us from ending up on our backs, then pulled me up straight.
I brushed at his hands, tried to get them off me as heat raced through my body. It didn't matter that he had only reacted on instinct in stopping my fall, I wanted him, my body needed him, and that need flared at contact.
At least it did for me.
Even if he was too tactful to tell me he was no longer interested in a relationship and had instead come to view me as a danger to his pack, his actions over the last twenty-four hours, especially since the morning, provided all the objective evidence I needed.
"Go on ahead," Taron ordered the wolf siblings. "We'll catch up in a few seconds when we've got our feet under us."
I expected at least a slight objection from Clover, but her eyes lit up and she grinned. She threw me a sly wink then saluted Taron.
"Lay on, MacDuff," she said, taking hold of Braeden's arm and ushering him away from us.
"You're really going to be insufferable if we survive, aren't you?" he asked, his voice loaded with affection.
"Yeah," she shot back. "People will start thinking we're twins."
Watching them go, a light film of tears coated my eyes. I had never had anything like their relationship with Eric, but for a few years with Selisma, she had been practically attached to my hip.
I wiped at my eyes before turning to Taron. His reason for sending them on ahead was obviously bullshit. He had something to say that he didn't want them to hear.
"I didn't get a chance to ask what you thought of the match your father plans."
The question came out so emotionless a computer could have been reading it for him. It didn't deserve an answer. He didn't deserve an answer.
"It may provide an opportunity for you to change the pack from the inside out," he went on in the same deadpan voice. "Not that it helps today, but it's something you should think about."
"I already have," I answered, stepping away from him to follow after Clover's disappearing light.
Truthfully, I hadn't contemplated life as Jonah's mate. Taron hadn't met my brother, hadn't tasted the palpable hate rolling off him whenever he was around me. Eric would do everything he could to make sure the pair bonding with Jonah never happened. Hell, he had no love for Selisma, either, and had likely made plans to ensure there would be no uniting of the two packs, leaving him to play alpha once our father died even though he wasn't born with the strain.
My stupid brother thought that all the drugs he pumped into his body -- the steroids and the amped up marijuana, the PCP -- could make up for that fact that he couldn't hold the alpha state -- that point when a shifter was more powerful than man or beast and the body was a twisting conglomeration of both creatures.
Or maybe he thought something in the drugs would finally help him maintain the state, to mimic at least one of the special gifts that came with the alpha strain.
"And?" Taron prompted, catching up to me and snagging my elbow so I had to stop.
"And it's none of your business what my future away from Night Falls is," I bit out, angry at the way my body kept responding to his touch and how quickly things had changed between us.
All that time in the alcove with all that hate swimming around me, all the threats. He'd stayed away, left it to others to disagree that I should be dismembered.
"Let go," I growled. "And try to use your fucking head. The part I'm going to play in Clover's plan? You really think Marcus is going to want me paired with his son after that?"
I didn't wait for him to answer. I twisted my arm out of his hard grip and rushed through the tunnel as quickly as I could to catch up with Clover and Braeden without landing on my ass or sounding like I was fleeing the man who'd just spent the last six days gloriously fucking my brains out.
********************
Time blurred as we got to work on Clover's plan. She dragged me into the private room where Church was normally held and pulled a laptop out of her bag.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she started streaming out ideas.
"I was thinking the trailer could be something similar to the River Tam sessions."
She looked up when I didn't respond, saw my blank expression and shook her head. "You know Firefly...Serenity?"
"I wasn't allowed much outside influence, just print materials," I explained, squirming in my seat. "Didn't have my own television or computer, and someone always had to supervise me when I was on the computer -- which usually meant I couldn't use the computer."
I had already told Clover a little about how painful and restricted my childhood was, but she really didn't have any idea about the full scope.
"We are so having a Firefly marathon when this is all said and done," she promised, opening up her browser window and navigating to YouTube. "Joss Whedon is a god."
The video that came up showed a man dying in the dark, sitting at a table, a light on the other side so that he was little more than a silhouette. It reminded me of interrogation scenes in the cop movies my dad liked to watched. Then a young woman appeared onscreen, maybe late teens, with crazy hair and crazier eyes, her bloody hand pressed to the screen as she whispered in a trembling voice.
I can see you...
The video switched to the same young woman sitting on the other side of the table, her victim still alive. I knew by the session numbers, this was the beginning of their exchange and it was months before the killing.
"I'm just talking atmosphere, for the most part," Clover said. "She's way too demure here. You're gonna be the defiant, bad ass alpha bitch I know you are."
She overestimated me. I was a ball of hurt inside for a very non-alpha bitch reason -- Taron didn't like me. I might have well have been locked in a pink princess bedroom crying because some boy hadn't asked me to the prom.
"It's going to be as if you're being interrogated after all the threats against us have been carried out," she went on before adding, "unsuccessfully. And how we
exposed our world to the humans -- the interrogator will be portrayed as human."
She had switched from YouTube to her writing program and was typing three times as fast as she was talking as her fingers raced to get the idea down and flush it all out.
"You don't happen to have any email addresses of the Illinois pack members?" Taron asked as he brought in the video camera and tripod Clover had ordered him to fetch from the storage closet.
I shook my head.
"I do know my brother's Facebook password," I admitted. "He had to write it down because he gets too high sometimes to remember. He's got a lot of the Illinois shifters on his page."
"But you don't know his email?" Clover asked.
Again, all I could do was shake my head.
"We might be able to get on his account with his phone number. Do you know it?"
"Yes!" I almost leapt across the table and hugged her for finding some way I could help.
"This is going to be epic," she smiled, lost in the machinations of her plan and forgetting, if only for the moment, about the lives she was trying to save. "Everyone in Illinois who sees it on your brother's timeline will recognize you and know some kind of major shit is going down. The longer version will only go to the Illinois pack leaders who are here. That will detail all the shit they don't want their people to know they are doing and how we plan to protect ourselves with the body cameras and full public exposure across the Internet if anyone is attacked."
"Whew!" she said, eyes glazing for a second. "I'm gonna need a lot of Red Bull. You, boss bear, bring me a cold one!"
She clapped her hands at Taron. He looked at her like she had lost her mind, but he left and returned less than a minute later with a Red Bull from the kitchen refrigerator, a growl on his lips as he placed it on the table.
"Who do you want me to grab to play the interrogator?" he asked.
"You're gonna do it," she answered without looking at him.
I mashed my lips together, silently hoping he was going to shoot her idea down.
Gaze lifting from the screen, she looked at him and then at me. "There's something weird going on between you two that wasn't there a few days ago. Something adversarial. If you don't want to work it out before the Pack Apocalypse of the Century, I'm gonna use the hell out of that shit to add authenticity to the trailer."
Seeing the pride beaming across her face, I squashed the urge to reach across the table and throttle her.
"I miss anything?" Braeden asked, coming into the room with a box full of newly purchased Go Pro body cameras that he had sourced from the truck stop, the electronics store and the outdoors outfitters that sold them for the trail and river rapids enthusiasts that flocked to the nearby national park.
"Yeah," Taron said, turning to leave the room with a snarl on his lips. "Your little sister turns into a potty mouth when she thinks she's in charge."
********************
Early the next morning, before the sun was even up, the trailer hit Eric's Facebook page, Clover locking him out of his account by changing the log-in credentials.
At the same time, Ned Crocker was knocking on my father's cabin door with a DVD that Braeden had delivered to the hotel with a three-word note written in my hand.
Watch me, Dad.
After that, we sweated through six brutal hours of waiting for my dad and the shifters he had brought with them to make their next move.
Well, everyone but Clover sweated through them. She spent her time reading us comments on the trailer video she had posted far and wide, "keywording the hell out of it" -- whatever that meant -- to draw the widest possible human audience before the six p.m. deadline my father had set for my being handed over to the pack.
Scary as shit -- one YouTuber commented.
I'd tap that bitch -- boasted another.
Is this real? It looks so real. I can't see where it's CG. Fuck I'm scared! -- another said.
But it was the responses on my brother's timeline and the early direct messages to him on Facebook that drew our attention.
Can a wolf and a cat really mate?
My dad said they couldn't?
Shit, did Onyx really run away? Can't tell since they barely let her out of the house.
Stop commenting on here -- we have to take it offline!
Are they really going to slaughter a whole pack? Even the kids?
Maybe just smoke 'em -- get it, smoke a pack?
Please stop commenting! Eric has humans on his timeline!
Haha! Eric, I always knew you were a dawg, but wolf, damn! Greatest prank ever!
And on they went.
"Gotta love the ones who scream for everybody to 'please stop commenting.' There's a formula from some university showing how much pleas like that actually increase comments," Clover chuckled just as Taron's cell phone alerted on an incoming call.
Seeing the Illinois number on the screen, he flashed it at me.
"My dad," I offered.
He accepted the call, put the phone up to his ear and walked out of the room.
"You're not going to follow after him?" Clover whispered. "It is your dad he's talking to."
I shrugged. It really wasn't any of my business. Both men were going to reach some agreement, part of it would deal with me. But that was their agreement, not mine.
"They're ready to negotiate a different deal," Taron said, returning to the room a few minutes later. "In person, same time, same location."
I nodded, already mentally distancing myself from everyone in the room.
At six, a little before sunset, I would be at Taron's cabin to meet my maker.
I just wondered how literal the experience would be.
********************
Per the preliminary negotiations over the phone, my father arrived with only eleven other men, Marcus and my brother among them. Taron had an equal number, excluding the wild card for both sides.
Me.
Whereas my father's men came packed in four cars, Taron's were already spread around the perimeter of the clearing, some with their bikes nearby. All of them carried both cameras broadcasting to a private server and an assortment of weapons.
With only my claws and fangs to protect me, I felt naked as I watched the sedans pull into the clearing. They came in slow, assessing the likely positions of Taron's crew and parking the first, second and fourth car in a protective semi-circle into which the third sedan drove.
A driver stayed in each car, an assault rifle pointed out his window at the tree line. The rest of the men, except for the third car, got out and pointed their rifles at me and Taron. Only then did my father exit his sedan with Eric and Marcus following him out.
Between my father and Marcus, I wondered who was in charge. It didn't matter that Marcus had exited behind my family. He was still the one with a larger pack and the greatest authority among the wolves in Champaign. My father and brother could have been the last two bodyguards in a protective formation.
So I waited to see which one of them would speak first.
"You fucking hacked my account, bitch!"
Great! Apparently my drugged up brother was in charge -- and daddy had given him an assault rifle.
"Better shove him back in the cage," Taron growled, "before I feed you his heart."
"Ruben will be leaving with his son -- and daughter -- intact."
I glanced from Marcus, who had just spoken, to my father, his stony facade making it clear to me that he was no longer in charge of this operation despite having the most men in Night Falls under his command.
"You can't really think Jonah and I can play house after the trailer's release?"
"Of course not," Marcus answered, brushing aside the idea of me and his son pair bonded with a casual wave of his hand. "The video showed me you're too much wolf for Jonah."
I wanted to make some snarky remark about someone finally coming to their fucking senses, but there was a glitter in Marcus's gaze that traveled through me like a cold blast.
; Marcus moved past my dad and brother to stand within arm's reach of me and Taron. Hearing the brush of boots of gravel, I glanced to my side and saw that Taron had moved a little closer to my side.
I told myself it didn't mean anything. He just wanted to protect his extra bargaining chip as long as he could.
"On the other hand," Marcus said, his lecherous smile giving away his intent before he finished talking. "I have more than enough years left to raise another son -- your son, Onyx."
Bile rushed up to scrape at the back of my tongue. I wanted to puke all over his polished Oxford's but managed to hold it in.
His gaze shifted from me to Taron. "I'm re-extending our original offer, with a few minor changes. Onyx comes back with us, you pull the video from the Internet, and your people can go back to their pathetic lives without looking over their shoulders for death squads."
Taron shrugged and nodded at his cabin. "I don't have a connection, don't know much about computers or the Internet, but my expert tells me once it's out there, it's out there. Some of your own pack members probably downloaded a copy and could repost at any time."
"As for the she-wolf, she's not mine to trade," Taron added after a few seconds of me holding my breath. "Our pack has an open arm's policy."
The fuck they did, I thought, fresh anger boiling inside me, its heat unfocused because I had so many people to be pissed at, including the big bear still offering me sanctuary.
"Ruben..." Marcus said, calling my father to his side like a lap dog. "Show your daughter how invested you are in her return."
My dad turned away, opened the front door to his sedan and leaned in as Theo, his second in command, twisted behind the wheel to face him. I heard a sharp pop and then red splattered against the front window on the driver's side.
My dad shut the door and faced me, blood splatter from his dead friend dotting the white dress shirt under his jacket.
"Your father and I agree," Marcus said, his gaze sweeping over his men and the men standing at the tree line. "That there are only two lives on this whole damn mountainside that matter. So you're going to get your ass in the vehicle, go back to Champaign and help me convince my pack and the others that everything they think they saw and were told was a hoax."