Ravening Hood

by Kendrai Meeks

  Tobias shook his head. “Later. Geri, help Amy. We need to get a move on; if Serhan refuses to shelter us, we only have a few more hours of sunlight to find somewhere else.”

  When Tobias and I visited the Pera Pack before, I remembered that it seemed to take forever to descend, the whole time thinking I was about to trip over the edge of an abyss in the dark and fall to my death. This trip felt longer. Maybe the fact I could see this time tricked my brain into perceiving time through a strainer.

  “Shouldn’t we be there by—”

  “Shhh!” Tobias whipped around, a finger pressed over his lips. Why he thought keeping quiet would help, I wasn’t sure. A werewolf’s sense of hearing put a huey’s to shame, and even I had been able to hear the footfalls ahead of us. If I could hear them, they had no doubt heard us for much longer. The pack knew that someone was approaching; the question was only why they hadn’t confronted us already.

  And then I realized why: because a hood walked among us.

  No sooner had the truth dawned on me than fur and fury flew before my eyes.

  Serhan’s wolf cleared Tobias easily, the alpha’s ability impressive even more so due to the fact that he made the leap both over a really tall man, up stairs. Within moments, the rest of the pack were upon us. Snarls, yips, growls. Posturing, I hoped. Years of training overrode logic, and before I could ridicule my own response, I had the handle of my blade pressed into my palm.

  To my surprise, the alpha left Markus be. I, however, was on my back before I could mount a counterattack. A maw dripping with saliva opened, sending hot breath smelling of carrion wafting over my face. Somehow, I’d managed to take the blow unharmed, though a wolf of Serhan’s size could break every bone in a huey. His back paws anchored on the ground, while his front paws pinned my shoulders. My blade wasn’t silver, but it could still give a werewolf a wound that would take weeks to heal. The task wasn’t beyond me, not even in this diminished, relinquished body. But as Serhan’s pack looked on from the edges of the fracas, I knew that offing their alpha would be pushing down one domino in a line I’d need to topple to survive.

  “Please.” Gritted teeth deformed the word. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I’ll protect my own.”

  The alpha barked, a mocking sound approaching laughter. His maw jerked to the right, alerting me to the state of the faceoff: Markus laid under a pure white wolf, while Amy, looking as scared as I’ve ever seen her, had her back against the wall and a small brown wolf inches from her upheld hands. My cousin retained his dagger, but the member of the pack holding him had his wrist clamped in his jaw, blood trickling down. The pain must have been immense, but Markus’s discipline kept him contained. A pack would swarm wounded prey.

  Tobias remained in his mortal form, the lone member of our party unmolested. Part of me wished he’d take on his wolf and kick Serhan’s ass; the other half of me swelled with pride when instead of lash out, he attempted to negotiate.

  “Alpha, hear us out.” Tobias sunk to his knees as his chin tucked into his chest. “I beg you.”

  The wolf lording over me turned; the dagger in my hand lowered slightly. A series of yips and low growls built a wall of language I barely understood but in which Tobias was fluent.

  “I give my word, they mean you no harm,” Tobias responded, chancing to bring his head up just enough for his eyes to catch mine. “Geri, please?”

  Metal on stone sent a dull ping echoing through the air. Moments later, Markus’s blade joined mine on the floor, though I couldn’t say if he’d dropped it on purpose or lost the ability to hold it against the pain.

  Either because wolfspeak wasn’t as universal as I thought, or because he wanted me to taste the bile in his words, Serhan took on his mortal form, paws becoming hands, long fingers hooking over my collarbones.

  “I told you never to bring this hood here!” the alpha belted out. A moment of confusion passed before I realized that, in fact, I hadn’t been in this exact part of the underground before. The reason it seemed to be taking longer than last time wasn’t my imagination; at some point, Tobias redirected us. “And now, you bring not only one, but two, and a huey too? I could have your scruff for this.”

  Even knowing I lived at his pleasure, I couldn’t tamp down the ire that rose in my gut. “Hurt a single hair of his hide and I will divest yours of every strand, one at a time, with excruciating and deliberate slowness.”

  The alpha sparred me one disgusted glance before lashing at Tobias. “You said she wasn’t your consort. You said her feelings were for your alpha. And now, this? Explain.”

  Did he care so little for his pack that he wouldn’t rip apart anyone who tried to harm one of them? Would he expect me to do any less? Of course I’d defend, avenge, and revenge Tobias, just like he’d do for me. Just like he was doing for Kara. Because that’s what you did for someone you loved; you protected them no matter what.

  For someone you loved...

  Truth fell upon me like light through a door opening to a dark room, illuminating a path to escape my own haze of confusion. No sooner had I admitted it to myself, then Tobias spoke it aloud.

  “She’s in love with me.”

  Markus squealed out a laugh, but Amy grinned, like the rest of the world had finally woken up to what had been obvious to her all along.

  Serhan pushed himself off of me. Clearly, a woman in love wasn’t a threat. He rounded on Tobias. “And you? Do you love this wolf killer? Have you betrayed your own kind?”

  “No. My moon eclipsed with the passing of my Kara. I will forever be her true mate.”

  Even though I knew Tobias’s words weren’t meant to cause pain, his response cut through my soul. No time to adjust, however. Revealed and reviled from one more to the next, he sped to clarify.

  “But she is a warrior, and a friend, and my alpha considers her pack. Geri isn’t like other hoods; she cares for wolves. She’s lost her clan, her birthright, and almost her life, all to help me avenge my kin and my mate.”

  A roar leapt from Serhan’s throat, bouncing off the walls of the subterranean cavern. “A hood, a member of the pack? Ridiculous!”

  “It’s true,” Tobias insisted, and even from my position on the ground, I could see his fists roll and tighten. He didn’t jive with being called a liar. “I swear on the mercy of your maw and my throat in kind.”

  Both Markus and I gasped, though in my periphery vision Amy’s head quirked to the side. Inside a pack, a wolf’s life was always at the leisure of his alpha, though rare were the occasions where something so heinous caused one to lose it. It was a far worse fate to be disowned, to be sent into the world a loner, destined to go mad. Outside a pack, however, a wolf had few options to represent his loyalty. In offering his throat to the Pera Pack’s alpha’s maw, Tobias had offered his life in place of his honor should Serhan call for it, and Cody wouldn’t have a leg to stand on for recompense. Tobias had potentially laid his life down... for me.

  Not for you, stupid hood, a voice inside me mocked. He just finished saying he doesn’t love you, that he could never love you. He needs you to get to the Ravens. He needs you and Markus to lead him. Without you, he will never have his revenge.

  At last, the alpha’s demeanor shifted. Cocking a hip, amusement pulled up the corner of Serhan’s mouth. “Never did I expect to see the day a wolf would offer up his throat to protect a hood.”

  Tobias nodded. “You and me both.”

  The alpha let out a single laugh as he moseyed over to where Markus remained pinned. The heel of Serhan’s foot balanced on Markus’s injured forearm, making my cousin wince. “And what of you, boy? Do you have any wolf who would risk his neck for you?”

  Markus’s red hood shimmered before dissolving into mist. Perhaps he thought he’d be less of a threat without his cloak on display. “My orders are only to protect Geri. If you’re not a threat to her, then I’m not a threat to you.”

  With a jerk of the alpha’s head, the wolf atop Markus took his leave, letting my cousin s
it up and tend to his wound.

  “I’m not going to hurt anyone either.” My former roomie blew a stray hair from her eyes. “And I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to wolves transforming into naked man on a whim. Just FYI.”

  Serhan looked to Tobias for clarity, but the English wolf just shook his head, as if to say, hueys are just like that.

  “Very well then, Tobias,” the alpha resumed. “What is it you want?”

  “Shelter.” His throat bobbed as he swallowed down his nerves. “Only for a few nights, until we can plan our next move. Weapons, if you have any.”

  Serhan rubbed his chin as two of his pack in their mortal forms arrived to offer him a pair of pants. “Weapons? Depends on what you seek.” A pointed look at Markus also spoke to me. There’d be no silver among any pack-provided weapon, that was for sure. “As for shelter, you must tell me from what, or is it, from who?”

  “The Ravens,” Tobias replied. “They’re after us. All of us.”

  “Not me really,” Amy piped up.

  Tobias’s eyes shifted for just a moment before focusing back on the alpha. “Except for her.”

  The alpha eyed a place on the floor, nudging it with his bare feet. “You are a very curious wolf, Tobias Somfield. Loved by a hood whom you do not spurn, but defend. Traveling the world, away from your pack, in one of the largest cities of the world. Hiding from vampires. What is it that drives you? What is that causes you to act out against your wolf?”

  “The Ravens killed my mate.” His lips quivered, even as he struggled to hold back a tear. “They killed my Kara, as well as my brother and my father. They denied me my pack. They denied me my legacy.”

  “Denied you your pack?” I couldn’t stop the question from forming on my lips.

  Tobias could have ignored me, but he didn’t. He fixed on me, his conflicted gaze almost an apology. “I wasn’t disowned from my pack because I challenged the alpha. I was forced from my pack because I was the alpha, and another challenged me. I lost.”

  Amy beamed, blind to the fact that in our world, what Tobias just admitted could get him killed. Not by a hood, though that would have certainly happened if he had gone moon mad. By any other wolf. Weeding out of the weak and the wretched, I remembered Cody explaining to me once when I asked him of the old-world practice. An alpha can mess up, he can screw up pretty damned bad. But if he gets to the point where his pack rejects him, there is no place for him in this world.

  I held Tobias’s gaze only a moment longer before turning on Serhan, awaiting his reaction. To my surprise, the Pera Pack’s alpha grinned and put a hand on my wolf’s shoulder.

  “You are like us now,” he said. “Hayalet kurtları, ghost wolves.”

  Tobias’s eyes widened. “You are...”

  “The cast offs of a long-forgotten alpha,” Serhan interrupted. “This is why we hide from other supernaturals. If another pack or a hood learned of us, as the descendant of a ghost wolf, that knowledge could be deadly.”

  Markus’s hand messaged his wounds. As he worked his hand around it, the glint of metal caught the dim light in the chamber. Silver; he dressed his wounds with his own weapon. It would heal him faster, as it would with any hood, but it would also make his blood temporarily toxic to any wolf. I had to wonder which he had intended.

  “The black hoods control this region,” my cousin said, stepping forward. He might have been the most reasonable member of my mother’s clan, but he was still a righteous hood, a fact reinforced by his next words. “They know nothing of you. If you shelter us and help us get what we need, I swear that that will stay the same.”

  Serhan allowed an amused grin to plaster over his face. “And the world as I know it remains unchanged.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I’m guessing there were parts of that that I didn’t understand. Ouch, shit.”

  I grabbed Amy just in time to keep her from falling. Or, really, from falling again.

  “Jesus, watch where you’re stepping.”

  “Sorry, it’s just so goddamned dark down here. How are you not falling down like I am?”

  With three blinks, I tested out the landscape. If anything, the environment had brightened, almost as if we had reached the edge of a sphere of light. A few more steps confirmed it, as the mouth of the path in front of us, sloping upward, appeared like a halo.

  “Your eyes just suck.” I ignored the laugh she made under her breath. “Honestly, I think there’s some of that I don’t understand either.”

  Like why the pack’s stall in the Grand Bazaar displayed a Writ of Authority, like they expected a hood to show up at any moment for inspection. Or why Tobias kept the fact that he was a toppled alpha from me.

  Or how he knew I was in love with him even before I did, and why fate kept giving my heart away to wolves I would never be with.

  Tobias walked at the head of the procession like an honored diplomat. Markus, Amy, and I trailed several yards back, surrounded by werewolves of both forms, like the spoils of war to be paraded for Caesar. When we finally arrived at the end of the tunnel after an hour’s slow walk, I could have sworn we’d covered miles. We could have been anywhere under the city now, even on the other side of the Bosporus. The door ahead looked modern, a precursor to the shocking sight beyond it.

  “You seem surprised, hood.”

  Serhan leaned casually against a refrigerator, nursing a bottle of yellow soda. I looked back over my shoulder and discovered the door connecting to the tunnels had been disguised as a pantry in an otherwise mundane kitchen. Other wolves passed further into the house without regard to my wide-eyed amazement. Windows on either side of the room let me know that the sun outside had begun to set.

  “It’s a house,” I said, sounding as simple as I did dumb.

  “You didn’t think we lived in the underground, did you?” The alpha sneered. “Surely you didn’t think we’d bring strangers into our packlands on a first visit.”

  It was a clever subterfuge, and even though the sting of their lack of trust shouldn’t have surprised or offended me, I found it still did. “I’m not exactly up on the habits of urban wolves, so forgive the gap in my judgement.”

  Before Serhan could snap back at me, I felt heat at my back.

  “We need to talk.”

  Tobias’s hand wrapped around my arm, just above the elbow, as he led me out of the kitchen, through a hall, and into a bathroom. The space was hardly large enough for him alone, let alone the both of us. Werewolves had a superb sense of hearing in their animal forms, but it wasn’t much hindered in their huey form. When Tobias reached behind me to open the water faucet to its full capacity, what could follow but something he wouldn’t want anyone else to hear?

  “What’s our next move?”

  Planning? He brought me in here to talk about... planning? Fine. I could do the emotionless soldier thing. Hell, I excelled at it.

  “We send Markus out to do recon,” I said. “The Ravens only know there’s another red hood in town, but they don’t know which one or what he looks like. He can sniff around without attracting attention. Once we know what the fallout from last night is...”

  “I’m not talking about that.” With a touch far more delicate than I realized was possible, the werewolf fingered a lock of my hair that had fallen from the braid in the tussle with the pack, sweeping it aside. “I’m sorry I had to say that you loved me. I needed Serhan and his pack to think there was some deep-seeded reason you were helping me. No wolf would believe a hood would help a wolf avenge a mate simply because she thought it was the right thing to do.”

  Disappointment burned in my cheeks. Tobias had lied. Or, at least, he’d thought he’d been lying. “You were on the spot. It was the first thing you came up with. I can play along with it. Don’t worry. I’ll try not to make it too awkward. But what about what you said?” I asked, thinking back to his words in the underground. “Was is it a lie, you being an alpha?”

  His bottom jaw worked before he answered. “It shou
ldn’t be a surprise; you already figured out it was in my bloodline.”

  “Why didn’t you just rekindle?”

  “What, you mean start a new pack?” The werewolf’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “A wolf creates a new pack from a place of strength, not by the consequence of his weakness. Besides, it takes a strong wolf to survive that process. My brother and father had disappeared, and I already knew my father was dead. I wasn’t in the place to handle that kind of emotional challenge at the time. The only thing I was doing was trying to free Kara before I went moon mad.”

  My chin dipped. “I know how you felt. I didn’t want to be a hood at all after Cody...”

  The memories tugged in my veins, and the familiar ache resurfaced. For the first time in two years, however, the pain was just an echo. For the first time, the reverberation of it didn’t box me in. And knowing that, I could finally let it out.

  “Between my mother’s demand that I be what she wanted, and Cody’s expectation that I be the opposite, I realized I didn’t want to be either of those things. Now, I’m not, and I can’t believe how much that loss means to me. Not to mention it set off this whole trail of events that’s led to us being on the run, separated from Inga and Igor, and Caleb getting caught by the Ravens. If I’d just said yes when Cody asked me, or been the obedient daughter my mother wanted, we’d never be here.”

  “But then you never would have come to Chicago. I’d be dead along with Kara. Plus, you just wouldn’t be my Geri.” Chills dashed up my spin as his fingers laced through my hair. “We’re going to get him out, I promise. Him, and all the slayers who want to escape.”

  “All the slayers who want to escape?” My weight shifted as Tobias dropped his hand. “You think there’s some that don’t?”

  “You still think they’re all pretending to like their situation,” he said. “But is it really such a stretch of the imagination to suppose some of them do? You fell in love with a wolf. Why would a slayer deciding to be part of a vampire’s harem be so different?”

  Confusion clouded my thoughts. “But we’re still going to kill them, right? The Ravens?”