by Zoe Winters
“S-sir?”
“WHAT?”
Rafe cringed again, and something in Noah just wanted to kill the weak fucker, but then, he’d been the only one who’d stayed behind. Why punish that?
“I tried to tell them to wait and ask, but they were afraid you’d say no. Shira meant a lot to the pack. She kept us together and out of trouble for a long time.”
“If they liked her so much, why did they all so quickly jump to follow me?”
“No one else in this group is much of a leader. And we need a strong leader to survive out here.”
If only they knew how long he’d been kept in that cell. They wouldn’t be turning to him to save them all. There was only so far brute strength could take him. And the half-faded, barely there memories of how his dad ran things weren’t going to help him now, anyway. His dad had run an established pack for decades. This wasn’t the same situation at all. He had no idea how to gain their trust and respect.
One or the other would have been easier, but to put the fear of God in them while also gaining their trust and loyalty wasn’t the most realistic task he’d ever been assigned.
Sydney squeezed his hand. And that was yet another issue. If he came off weak, someone might try to hurt her, even with his mark.
Wolves began running in through the revolving doors and shifting back to their human forms. Noah let go of Sydney’s hand and crossed his arms over his chest. He let out a low growl.
“Who is responsible for this?”
The pack members looked at the ground.
“Should I just start killing until one of you talks?”
Sydney let out a shocked gasp. Noah rounded on her and glared. He wished he could make her understand, but she had to stand with him now. Thankfully she closed her mouth and masked whatever emotions she was working through. He couldn’t reassure her. Every eye was on him, determining if he was fit to lead, determining if they could trust him. He wondered if this rebellion wasn’t a test, rather than an actual rebellion. After all, what were their other options right now?
If he and Sydney just left them, what would they do? There was no one else to lead. The pack would fall apart and they’d fall prey to the vampires lurking in the area. Possibly some of them would be taken by the magic users into the city. If they scattered and tried to get farther from the city, they’d just run into unfamiliar territory. They wouldn’t survive without each other and an alpha. Of course it was a test.
“Rafe, shut that shit off.” Noah pointed up at the speakers still pounding out the metal.
The wolf that had stayed behind scrambled to obey the order.
“WHO is responsible?” His voice echoed off the walls.
He didn’t have to bluff. If these wolves were going to pose a threat or problem for him or Sydney, he had no qualms about taking them out. And judging from the fear in the room, they wouldn’t be able to organize well enough to overtake him. They’d hesitate. And that would be enough. From the looks on their faces, they all knew he wasn’t just putting on a show.
One of the wolves stepped out of the pack.
“It was me. Shira was my sister.”
Noah shouldn’t have been surprised that it was a female wolf. Between his mother and Shira, it wasn’t as if the idea was all that shocking. But from what he’d gleaned, statistically male wolves tended to be stronger, and they also tended to cause more trouble.
“Livia!” one of the other wolves snapped.
“He’d kill me when he found out, anyway. Isn’t it better to keep the rest of you safe?”
Traditionally when a new alpha came in, they didn’t just take out the former alpha, but any close blood relations that might cause problems in the new structure. Given what she’d already done, it wasn’t crazy for her to think she was about to die. But if he killed her, he’d look like a monster. He might have their fear, but he’d never gain their trust.
“Come here.”
She stepped away from the group and approached him. Noah allowed himself to shift just enough for his claws to come out. The room went absolutely silent. Even Sydney didn’t make a sound. Livia squeezed her eyes shut and cringed. Instead of slitting her throat like another alpha would have, his claws sliced through her shoulder, leaving a trail of blood and torn flesh behind.
Noah watched as the blood slowed, but she didn’t heal. His suspicions about this pack were right. Acting collectively as a pack, they were fine, but none of them alone or even in small groups could challenge him. Livia wouldn’t heal properly until she’d had something to eat. Even then, it might take a day or two.
“You will never defy me like that again. Is that understood?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“I would have let you bury her if you’d asked.”
Noah turned back to the group and gestured to his mate. “If any of you don’t know, I’m Noah. Sydney and I are your new alphas. You are not lone wolves. You don’t take a piss without one of us knowing about it from now on. Are we clear?”
All throughout the large lobby, werewolves dropped to one knee and bared their throats. Except a small cluster at the back. He wasn’t surprised he didn’t have one hundred percent support. Especially after marking a vampire. Noah wasn’t sure if the group had noticed the mark Sydney had left on him, but it was none of their business.
“No,” one of the wolves in the back said, still standing, his arms crossed over his chest. “I’m not answering to a vampire. I’ve had to do a lot of things in my life for survival, but that’s not going to be one of them.”
Before Noah could say anything else, Sydney had blurred across the floor and shoved the wolf back hard. He landed with a loud crack as his tailbone hit the ground.
“Yes. You will,” she said, growling for emphasis.
Noah couldn’t be prouder. She understood things. But then, she’d been raised by the vampire king who, from the stories that had circulated in the exercise yard over the years, still made quite an impression on people. She was her father’s daughter, and she knew the game they had to play now.
The small cluster of hold outs dropped to one knee and bared their throats. Slowly the male who had spoken up joined them.
“Any further questions?” Noah asked as Sydney calmly made her way back to his side. He nodded his approval at her.
When no one made a sound he asked, “Did you hunt without me?”
Heads shook quickly.
“Good. Let’s go. Livia, stay here. We’ll bring you something back.”
She nodded.
The rest shifted to wolf form, and Noah led them out into the night.
***
Sydney watched her mate lead the pack outside. It was just her and Shira’s sister now. The girl was scared of her. She couldn’t have been much more than nineteen. Still, it was surreal to Sydney that anyone should be scared of her. She’d always been the weak one that had to fear everybody else. The only reason she hadn’t spent a lot of her life huddled in a corner was because her father had made it abundantly clear that if any harm came to her they would suffer a slow and painful death. And he’d acted on the threat more than once when she’d gotten minor injuries over the years.
A large animal pelt lay on the floor in front of a few chairs. Sydney picked it up and wrapped it around Livia. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Where do you keep your first aid?” She was sure her blood would heal others now, but she wouldn’t cross her mate or undermine him when he was trying to solidify his alpha status with the pack.
The girl relaxed a fraction and led Sydney to a small room off to the side. Sydney cleaned the girl’s wounds and bandaged her up, trying not to be squeamish about the fact that her mate had just done that.
“He could have killed me. It would have been completely normal,” Livia said.
Sydney was rusty on how packs functioned, but deep down she knew that was right. Especially with this girl being Shira’s sister. As brutal as it looked, that had been mercy. And from the expressions she’d seen on the faces
of the pack, they had all read the signal loud and clear. Noah wasn’t going to be pushed around, but he’d give them a chance to follow him.
“When you guys were being shown to your room last night, I told Shira she shouldn’t have brought you here, but she wouldn’t listen. She said Noah was too strong. She thought if she’d challenged him in the desert that he would have taken her out and taken the pack then and there. She said he hadn’t marked you, and she was going to try to get him to mark her instead to get rid of you.”
Sydney’s hand went to her throat to touch the vicious-looking mark Noah had left there. “She wouldn’t have had a chance. I’ve known Noah since we were children. We’ve always been destined for one another.”
Sydney knew Shira couldn’t have competed with a true mate no matter what her strategy was. Shira must not have believed it was true. It wasn’t hard to see why. With Noah being strong enough to lead a pack, the idea that his true mate would be some weak little barely-a-vampire would be laughable to almost anyone. It had seemed unlikely even to Sydney until she’d felt the first effects of his blood.
Chapter Eight
Noah shifted back to his human form as he reached the shelter of the train station lobby. He’d have to maintain these displays of power for a while to remind them. He didn’t want to have to do something truly vicious to keep himself and Sydney safe. He liked the pack and felt bad he’d taken their leader from them.
The pack had accepted him as their new leader so quickly, it reminded Noah what a fraud he was. Another wolf wouldn’t have been so surprised. He kept looking for duplicity but couldn’t find it in anyone.
He didn’t understand packs, not really. He’d lived isolated, watching other wolves through glass, having brief conversations or mostly overhearing brief conversations among others in the exercise yard. There had been nothing of substance. No cohesion. No hierarchy.
There had been times when a wolf had tried to form a mini-pack during recreation hours in the yard, but the guards would quickly shut it down, isolating the would-be leader from others immediately with no hope of ever rejoining the group. It was a warning to the others about organizing. Most of them went mad with no interaction with others. Even the smallest interaction was better than nothing.
Noah might have been one of those would-be pseudo-alphas driven mad by total isolation, if not for the fact that he’d been taken so young. As a child, he couldn’t lead anything, so he’d stayed out of everybody’s way and observed the structure of how everyone had fit together at the facility. It had an organization to it, but it wasn’t the same as how a pack worked. Not exactly.
Now he found himself surrounded by pack, wolves he had thought would be more a means to an end to safely get him to his family, but who now might become a second family. They’d bonded out in the desert. It felt natural and right. Running free and hunting was exhilarating. He’d barely been able to contain his excitement. All the new and exciting smells. The hunt, the kill. How had he survived at all without any of that?
Maybe it was unfair to judge them for submitting to his leadership so easily when he found just being with them out there in the wildness had melted much of his anti-social wall. He’d still need a lot of space and time to himself away from others, but they didn’t make him uncomfortable like they had the first night.
One of the other wolves struggled just outside the door to reclaim his form. It was a wolf named Milo. Out in the desert, Noah had thought Milo might make a good second-in-command for the pack. His instincts were proving right on that score.
“Noah?” the wolf hesitated, testing the appropriateness of first names. But if Noah wanted this pack to trust him, he couldn’t run things like an army all the time. There was a time for titles and a time for names.
“Yeah?”
“I thought you might want to see the transportation we’re using when we leave.” Milo tossed some sweatpants to him, and he put them on.
Noah followed him to the back of the train station. Behind two sets of tracks and one ancient train were several dozen motorcycles. He watched as Milo straddled one and cranked it up.
“Want to go for a ride?” The beta tossed him some keys. “That’s Shira’s bike.”
It looked much the same as the others. They were all black and silver.
“Sure.” He wasn’t at all sure. “I’ve never ridden one before, though.”
Milo goggled. “How is that possible?”
Time for a half-truth. “My pack growing up had access to some demon dimensional portals and we otherwise lived in a small area. We didn’t use cars or trucks much, either.” All of this was true. He was just conveniently leaving out the part about how he hadn’t been properly socialized with others past the age of eight.
“It’s pretty simple. Let me show you.”
Noah was glad Milo was being cool about it. After everything else that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, being introduced to something new wasn’t the highest crime in the world. But then he had second thoughts.
“Let’s wait and do this tomorrow night after we hunt.”
“Sure.” He didn’t ask why, and Noah wouldn’t have told him, anyway. It was a sign that Milo accepted him as the new alpha, that he didn’t pry or push for information not offered freely.
Noah had felt comfortable leaving one relatively weak female wolf alone with Sydney, especially after his mate had made a show of strength earlier, but he wasn’t sure about leaving her alone with an entire pack.
As they made their way back to the front of the building, Noah turned to Milo. “I’ve been meaning to ask… are there no pups in this pack?” It had seemed odd to Noah when he’d seen all the wolves together the first time, but an opportunity to ask about it hadn’t come up.
Milo’s face went dark. “It’s too dangerous. Livia is from the last generation of pups that were allowed. Shira was quite a bit older than her. Their parents died trying to protect her younger brother from some vampires. The boy died as well. Soon after that was when Shira took over and banned reproduction.”
“Forever?” There wouldn’t be any kids in his and Sydney’s future. Sydney herself was an anomaly, but she was still a vampire, and female vampires couldn’t have children. But he hadn’t expected to lead a pup-free pack.
“Just until things got safer. But they never did. Now I think most everybody’s okay with it. I mean, we do a lot of drinking and cavorting without clothing. Our den hasn’t been child friendly since Shira’s sister came of age. I don’t know if we could all comfortably adjust, so I’m not sure it’ll be an issue.”
“And what if there’s an accident?” Noah pressed. Therian breeds in general were less fertile than humans, due to their much longer lifespans, and werewolves were more in tune with the times they were able to reproduce and the times they weren’t, but accidents still weren’t unheard of.
“Shira had a recipe for an herbal concoction to take care of it. It’s only happened a couple of times, and the wolves involved were in agreement. The other option is to leave the pack. It’s too dangerous for pups here. It’s dangerous enough for the adults.”
Noah nodded. He didn’t disagree. The world wasn’t the world he’d heard stories about as a pup. Resources were too scarce. And just the thought of another pup like him being taken captive by the human world and used for blood magic filled him with rage. It was bad enough to steal away the life of an adult who’d had a chance to live some of it, but there were parts of his life he would never have or get back, things that would always make him other from the rest of them who had normal childhood memories.
“Noah?”
He stopped and turned back to Milo.
“We all loved and respected Shira, but they’re following you and acting like nothing happened because they need you. And we all saw it go down. She initiated the attack, and that was stupid. She let us down. It’s not that the world is moving on and we don’t care she’s gone. It’s that the rest of us are going to die if we don’t work as a un
it. We’ve seen a lot of tragedy, and we just want to survive it. If you can help us do that, you’ll never have to worry about not counting on us.”
Noah wasn’t sure about all that, but the one thing he was sure about was that his new beta was sincere. There was no artifice there, no grand agenda. If he’d gotten one good thing genetically from his dad, it had been his instincts about people.
Noah clapped Milo on the shoulder. “I know. I was suspicious of intentions until I ran with them. For what it’s worth, I didn’t want it to go down like that, but she was going to kill me. I couldn’t leave Sydney behind. What would have happened to her left alone with you guys?”
The beta didn’t respond because they both knew. The pack would have ripped her to shreds and danced in the blood. That’s if they didn’t whore her around the group first. Relations with vampires was tense enough. They wouldn’t have cared that Sydney wasn’t their enemy, that she couldn’t have hurt a fly last night. Now? The outcome of a confrontation with her was debatable.
Noah strode into the lobby to find the metal screaming out of the sound system again. The pack was more relaxed than they’d been since he was first introduced to them. A couple of wolves cuddled on one sofa in their wolf forms. Others ran around in human form.
All the clothes were in piles on the floor, and most appeared too lazy to sort through them to find their own. Noah’s original pack wasn’t as uptight about nudity as humans could be, but this pack took it to a whole other level.
Shouting rose from the bar. Noah rushed in to find a crowd around Sydney. He tensed, ready to rip heads off bodies.
“There is no way,” one of the guys said.
Sydney laughed. “Oh yes there is.”
As Noah moved closer, he could see five shots of the home brew whiskey lined up on the bar in front of his mate. Noah wasn’t going to spoil it for her by giving away the fact that vampires metabolized alcohol faster than humans or even most therians. Strangely, drugs and alcohol affected them more strongly when it came through drunk or drugged human blood. Straight alcohol posed less of an issue. Being as close as his pack had been to Anthony and his vampires had given them a clearer picture into things than these wolves had been afforded.