“I was asleep in my own bed when I was captured,” Forest told him. “I woke up with a bag over my face in the back of a van with a boot in my belly. Still don’t know how they managed that. And as far as the dosage... I haven’t thought about using Krav Maga in ages. It just didn’t occur to me to do anything that proactive.”
“Luckily for you, the beast draws on everything you’ve ever learned when your life is threatened. Unfortunately for us, you never learned to eliminate witnesses. I have to tell you...in spite of the fact that your attack most likely fueled their lust for extermination, I’m impressed at your skill. I don’t know many wolves who could have done what you did and gotten out alive. You’ll be quite the asset to our tribe, Forest.”
Again, Uriel assumed that Forest would stay with him and his. He’d extended the invitation once, but Forest hadn’t agreed, not really. It was more of an if we get out of here we’ll see kind of thing. Now they were out, Uriel didn’t bother to check. Maybe it was because of the pregnancy or maybe he was just that sure of himself, but either way, Forest was annoyed by the presumption.
“Uriel,” he asked, changing the subject, “why don’t you think that anyone else would help you?”
Uriel didn’t answer. The sun had set and the purples and blues of twilight had risen up to encompass the woods, shrouding the travelers in its cool embrace. Uriel slowed his pace and stopped, looking around.
“Bianca,” he called. “What do you think?”
“Looks like dinner,” she answered.
The two of them disappeared into the woods without another word. Jason went after them, leaving Gomer, Strella, and Forest alone in the unfamiliar woods. Strella made a fire with Gomer’s unnecessary, though enthusiastic, help. Forest shifted from one foot to the other and finally sat down, feeling useless and ill-equipped to deal with his newly nomadic life.
When Strella and Gomer returned from gathering fuel for the fire, they were holding hands and giving each other doe eyes. Forest barely noticed, but when he realized what was happening, he studied them contemplatively.
“Did you two know each other...before?” he asked.
“Nah,” Strella told him. “We didn’t even meet ‘till you guys busted us outta there. He’s from an eastern pack, and I’m from down south.”
“Wow...so werewolves are pretty much everywhere, huh?”
“Shifters,” she corrected. “And yeah, basically. Anywhere with wilderness.”
“So neither of you are from the Astris tribe?” Strella and Gomer shared a meaningful look. “I’ll take that as a no, thank God. If I’m going to go back with him, I’d like to know what I’m getting myself into.”
Strella shifted uncomfortably, and Gomer developed a sudden all-consuming interest in a beetle that was crawling by the fire. Strella finally sighed and turned her fiery gaze to meet Forest’s eyes.
“Astris is a cult,” she told him. “Wolf packs aren’t ever supposed to get that big. It’s unsustainable. Too many alphas, not enough room. So they set up these cult-level rules to control everything, and they’re constantly trying to expand, by force if necessary, spreading their religion around and converting people. You know how Uriel was talking about bringing family into the pack? That doesn’t happen literally anywhere else. There aren’t rules for that in any other tribe. You get turned, you’re dead to the outside world, family included. Period.
“Astris has been trying to take control of the world for centuries. Literal centuries. And if they can’t buy you off with promises of eternal life and eternal family, by god they’ll murder as many of your loved ones as it takes to convince you. Uriel was the ringleader. He started all this. I don’t think we’re going to find Astris, not in the southeast, not anywhere. I think when Uriel disappeared they took the opportunity to dissolve and free themselves from the curse of the cult.”
“Lies! Blasphemer!” A white streak split the air, blasting Strella to the ground. Fur flew as the two women fought, blood flying through the air to sizzle in the fire and splatter Forest’s cheek. Gomer shifted and jumped in, trying to separate the two, but he was flung away, singing his tail on the flame. Forest didn’t know what to do.
“Uriel!” he screamed.
Uriel strolled casually into the tiny clearing. He stared down at the battling women for a long moment, blinking and subtly amused.
“Enough!” he said finally.
Bianca detangled herself, stepping back and blowing hot air through her flared nostrils. Strella, bleeding and bruised, stood to her feet and crouched, preparing to attack.
“I said, enough,” Uriel repeated quietly.
Strella cursed in a language Forest didn’t recognize, and spat bloody saliva across Uriel’s face. Uriel, visibly and dramatically annoyed, wiped it off. Everyone froze. Forest was certain that Uriel would strike her. He drew his hand back to do just that. Strella didn’t even flinch, but Forest did. The movement caught Uriel’s attention. He lowered his hand, sinking to the ground to wipe the spittle and blood on the grass.
“Maybe it’s time you returned to your own pack,” he said icily.
“They’re gone,” she snapped. “All of them. Gone.”
“Come with me to mine, then,” Gomer murmured.
She spun on him. “You think you still have one? How long have you been inside, Gomer? Four months? Five? I’ve been in for one month. One. Month. And my family is already gone.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Gomer asked.
“Because unlike you traditionalist freaks, my family kept up with the times. I have a phone. Implanted in my ear. Animus’ people never found it, and I heard it, Gomer, I heard everything.”
Her sharp tone was wavering, dissolving into heart-wrenching sobs.
“They were looking for me, calling me, but those bastards... They did something, and I could—I couldn’t talk. Then nothing, for two weeks there was nothing, and I thought they’d found the phone. I thought they’d taken it out, but then...all at once...a week ago...the screams started. Night after night, calling me, begging me for help. My mother, my brothers, crying out for me while guns fired in the background. They’re gone. They’re all gone. The only tribe big enough to hold them off would have been Astris, but be honest, Uriel. Do you think they would have stayed together without you there to threaten them?”
“They weren’t threats!” Uriel snarled. “They were laws. Rule, order, laws!”
“Laws,” Strella scoffed. “Tell me, what law did Sarah break?”
Uriel frowned. The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t find the context for it.
“You don’t even remember her, do you?” Strella accused. “She came to us, Uriel. Eighty years ago, she came to us; bald, burnt, her claws filed down to stubs, begging us to take her in. Just what law did she break?”
Uriel couldn’t remember. He remembered the punishment, but God help him, he couldn’t remember the crime. It came back to him in pieces. An angry, rebellious female. The moment when he decided her punishment. The terror in her eyes. He remembered feeling...bored. He glanced around at the wolves in the group. Gomer wouldn’t meet his eye, and Strella wouldn’t break her gaze. Bianca stood, ready to strike her down at his command. Forest...he almost couldn’t bear to look. Forest stared, his jaw agape, as tears streamed down his dirty face.
“I can’t remember,” Uriel said quietly.
Chapter Eighteen
Jason had been watching from the shadows. “So it’s true, then,” he said, stepping forward into the ring of uncomfortable silence. “You are the tyrant that everyone claimed you were. I didn’t believe it, honestly. You seemed like a pretty cool dude.”
“It was a long time ago,” Uriel said lamely.
“Eighty years? I’ve had food in my fridge longer than that,” Jason scoffed.
“Dude. Grody.”
“Shut up, Gomer. Eighty years is nothing, Uriel. You destroyed countless lives and you rule from a throne of terror. If you want this little band to stick together an
d save your tribe, you’d better start coming up with reasons why.”
“If we split up, we’ll be easier to kill,” Uriel said.
“If we split away from you, you will be easier to kill and we will still have strength in numbers. Try again.”
“I am the only alpha you have,” Uriel said, more confidently this time.
“Betas run packs all the time, and I’m a damn good beta. Try again.”
“Forest is carrying my child. He has to stay with me, and he hasn’t done anything to warrant your retribution.”
“Forest?” Jason asked. “Do you want to stay with Uriel, after everything you just learned about him?”
“He must,” Uriel argued, visibly confused. “He bears my child.”
“Yeah, and I’m the bastard son of a drunken sheep farmer. Seed doesn’t forge an unbreakable bond, Uriel.”
Jason turned to Forest, inviting him to speak. Forest didn’t know what to say. Uriel was terrifying. Just as terrifying as Animus, maybe more. But he was right. Forest was carrying his baby. Didn’t he owe it to him to give him a chance, for that reason alone? But the image of a she-wolf, singed bald and declawed wouldn’t stop materializing in his mind’s eye. He shuddered.
“I want to talk to Uriel in private, please,” he said quietly, voicing the words before they had properly formed in his mind.
“Alright. We’ll be here if you need help,” Jason told him.
Forest nodded his thanks as he rose to his feet and turned to disappear into the inky depths of the trees. Uriel hesitated before following, and for a moment, Forest wondered if he would even come at all. A fallen tree dripping with moss made an inviting seat, and Forest felt like some kind of wood nymph as he climbed atop it in the bright moonlight and sat, cross-legged, waiting for Uriel.
Uriel didn’t look frightening from this perspective. Just a man, naked and ashamed, glistening in the moonlight. He stood for a moment, staring at the ground, before climbing up the tree to sit beside Forest. He looked tired. Every movement showed his age, the weight of the responsibility he carried within him. They sat in silence, neither willing to break the illusion of peace.
“Tell me about your life,” Forest finally said. “There’s so little to know about mine.”
Uriel pushed a hand through his short, black hair, ruffling it just enough to reveal the spreading spots of grey around his temples.
“I always had a reason,” he said. “Every life I took, every punishment I dealt...it was never without merit. It was never...” He wanted to say it was never for pleasure, but that wasn’t strictly true. It was never solely for pleasure. He’d been truthful when he said that he always had a reason, but he had taken pleasure in exacting justice. He took a breath and began again.
“I took the throne at the age of thirteen. No more than a child. A brutal, vicious war broke out between the shifters and the humans. Our packs went in confidently; we had been battling the humans off and on since before I was born. But something was different this time. The humans had a secret weapon...a bomb, so brutal and efficient that it not only wiped out the wolves, but the humans as well, and every living thing for fifty miles around.”
“We—the children—had been stashed in caves far from the battleground. I was the eldest, the only one in all of the five packs who had successfully completed a shift. The children of the other packs were frightened and alone, but desperately proud. I called a summit meeting, and the children refused to join under me as a single pack. So, instead, we formed the Astris tribe. I made the rules and taught the alpha children how to govern, though I barely knew myself.
“Within two years, rumors of the child tribe had spread, and well-meaning packs roamed through our territory, ostensibly to help us. But we had grown so feral, so tight-knit and wary, that none ever made it past our borders. Those we couldn’t scare off, we killed. We refused to allow any outsiders authority over our packs, and we refused to lose our family names. As I said...we were proud. More than that, though, we were wounded. The loss of our parents, our structure, everything we could rely on...it broke us. Anything we didn’t decide for ourselves was perceived as an immediate threat to our existence and promptly destroyed.
“As we matured, so did our methods of government. We were still fiercely tribal, fiercely protective of our space, but we began to learn new ways of dealing with dissent and intruders. We discovered that the more we killed, the more we were targeted, so we learned the art of deception and camouflage. We decided to let the human world forget us, and to do that, we needed to disappear. So we did. We retreated deep into the woods, far beyond human civilization. At least it was at the time. The humans have continued to expand, as we shirk ever farther into the shrinking wilderness.
“Our particular methods were challenged one day, when a soft-spoken scout—my Michael—stumbled upon a father and his two young children, out for a weekend camping trip. The father drew a gun on Michael. Now keep in mind...we knew nothing of human society apart from the utter destruction that only a few of us had been old enough to witness. So when the man pulled a gun, Michael responded as if he were holding a bomb. He shifted and struck, killing the man where he stood.
“The children didn’t cry. They didn’t scream. They only stared at Michael, reflecting the numb shell-shock that had written the story of our lives up until that point. Michael couldn’t leave them there at the mercy of the elements. He brought them to us. We, a tribe of children, couldn’t turn them away. Not now when they were orphaned and helpless. But we couldn’t keep humans as pets, either. We didn’t have the resources we would need to properly care for humans as they aged and died. So we turned them, and we taught them, and we accepted them into our tribe with open arms.
“The girl cried herself to sleep every night. We figured it was the trauma from everything she’d been through, and we comforted her as best we could. One day, she finally tells us that she has a mother, and she misses her, and now she can never see her again because of what she is. It broke our hearts. Each and every one of us had lost our mothers. Some of us only infants at the time of the bomb. Suddenly, we had our first grown-up mission: we were going to find the girl’s mother, bring her to us, and turn her.
“The girl wanted to be the one to do it. So we taught her as we searched for her mother, advanced her development so she could do what she wanted to. We found the mother a few years later. She’d been coming back to her husband’s campsite every year on the anniversary of his death, desperate for closure about her children. We captured her, striking her unconscious. We let her daughter turn her.
“When she woke up we explained everything. We expected her to freak out, panic, attack, you know, any normal response. Instead, she hugged her children. She looked us over, saw how young we were, how unsure, how feral and uncivilized we’d become since losing our parents. She took pity on us. She began to care for us, replacing the mothers we’d lost. We fell in love with her, and for a moment, we were almost unified as a single pack under her firm, gentle guidance.
“She never usurped my authority. I remained as I always was, leader of the tribe. She taught me about government, establishing a system of justice that went beyond eye for an eye, with subtleties and ultimate goals. She taught me how to care for my people, rather than just commanding them. We grew. We developed. For a hundred years we lived in peace, prospering under her guidance, free to live and love. I loved Michael, and he loved me in return.
“Then the humans came again. With bombs and big guns and great tanks and smoke that burned. We fought, cutting their numbers by half when someone pointed out that they weren’t there to kill us, but to capture us. The mother begged us not to take any more lives, but to simply disable them and let them go home to their children. She was the mother. We did as she asked. The shift from kill to disable confused my men, and a few of the enemy soldiers were turned. The others retreated. We didn’t know what to do with the soldiers, so we kept them.
“We should have killed them. Michael sugges
ted that we interrogate them, figure out who they were and what they wanted from us. They told us. Their government wanted to use us, to turn us into super soldiers to win the war for their side. We told them that we fight for no human, and they just laughed. They said, ‘you will.’ I still remember the looks on their faces, like they’d already won and were just waiting for their accolades. We chained them up until we could decide on the best way to deal with them. Some wanted to kill them so they wouldn’t give the humans information that could end our existence. Some wanted to try to rehabilitate them, turn them into members of the tribe. Every opinion in-between. The summit meeting lasted for days, and we were deadlocked. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for their fate.
“Until...one small, empathetic girl heard them moaning. She talked to them. They sobbed, telling her they missed their kids, their families. She told them that they could bring their families here if they promised to be good. They promised. Lies, of course. As soon as she set them free they disappeared into the forest. A fight broke out among the leaders, each blaming the others for the girl’s mistake, and I among the loudest.
“It turned physical. We fell back into our old habits, our feral, primal selves. The mother...she stepped into the fray. Just right in the middle of everything. She whistled. She shouted. I saw her. I ran to back her up, but I was attacked even as I moved. I watched in slow motion as she was torn to pieces by her adopted children.
“I blacked out, then. When I returned to myself, I had killed a member of my own pack, and three others from other packs. I threw their bodies into the mess of teeth and claws, bowling wolves over under the weight of their brothers. Silence fell. In the sudden quiet, someone finally noticed the mother. They screamed. They wept. It was chaos again, but a chaos of mourning.
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