by Lynn Red
The entire crowd, some forty-odd wolves, all surged forward when Dane showed what he’d been lugging behind his motorcycle. In one disturbing, horrific, singular moment, two of his goons went to the back of his bike, and uncovered the trailer. Inside, in chains, screeching, writhing and yelping, was Jake.
Silence overtook the crowd. Utter, stultifying, complete silence.
With each heave of his body, every pained screech, Jake’s cries echoed through the entire crowd.
“Oh!” Dane said, in his standard, mocking voice. “Do you not like to see your weak little baby-man leader in this sort of position? Good,” he hissed. “Because if you think he could have gotten me into that cage?” He paused for a melodramatic laugh. “Oh no, baby, not for a second. But you know what he did?”
“Let him go!” Greta screamed. “He lost the challenge and he’s out of the pack, what more do you want?”
I realized she was setting up the stage for the drama that was about to unfold. In a strange, almost distant way, this all did seem like a stage show – like a long awaited production that had finally come alive. Tension in the crowd was palpable. Even though I hadn’t been around long, I’d been to enough family dinners to know that there wasn’t a single, unified opinion on... well, anything.
On the one hand, most everyone liked the calm and the peace, but on the other? Even if they didn’t like him, a lot of the wolves liked the idea of no more hiding, no more shadows. But this display seemed to bother even the most stalwart of the wolves.
“You want me to let him go, old woman?” Dane hissed at his stepmother. “Then you leave too. Everyone leaves. Out with the weak, old, thin blood. In with the new, with the strong!”
Someone in the crowd cheered, and then another voice joined in.
“This pitiful excuse for a wolf couldn’t even take a mate! How the hell do you expect him to lead the pack during this dangerous time? We’re being hunted! Humans know about us, they want us dead!”
Is that true? I wondered. I certainly didn’t know you existed.
“And you want this infant to lead you?” Dane was stalking back and forth, whipping himself, and a few of his followers, into a wild frenzy. “Bring him to me! Let’s get this marking, and this execution, over with. I’m already tired of this game.”
Like a tired pharaoh, Dane stalked over to the dais set up at the front of the gathering space, the place we were supposed to mark each other formally. Instead, he grabbed an enormous glass of wine, kicked over the podium behind which an officiant would stand, and replaced it with a folding chair, where he sat like a slightly inebriated, sloppily dressed king.
One of his legs splayed out in front of him, and his hair was tossed wildly around his head from the speaking he’d done. “Bring my brother to me!” he demanded. One of his goons obliged, and Jake kicked at him as the bald headed, sweaty, warthog of a wolf dragged him out of the cage.
He turned those silvery eyes on me for just a moment, before letting his head droop on his shoulders. “Delilah...” I heard him moan, “it has to work, or I’m a dead man.”
Norton, his rough handling escort, grunted a laugh and dragged Jake directly through the middle of the parting crowd. No one said much of anything, except for Greta. “Quit blaming your brother for what your father and I chose!” she cried. “Leave him alone and take me, if you have to brutalize someone!” The pain in her voice broke my heart, but Jake’s words were fresh in my mind.
It has to work, he said. Or I’m a dead man.
But I was frozen. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. An icy fist of dread had closed on my throat and constricted me like a lupine anaconda. Dane watched my squirming, looking on as I suffered for Jake. He narrowed his eyes, almost to say I told you so, in that mocking voice he used so often with me and with everyone else.
“I don’t think so,” Dane said. “To replace the alpha, he’s got to die. You know the rules. Vita, get over here! Bring me more wine.”
In all my years, for all my life, I’d never been commanded like that. It flared every single liberated nerve in my body, but I knew that if I acted out, it’d just be worse.
“Now!” he shouted, startling me so that I jolted a little where I was standing.
My feet felt like they were moving forward without my input. I’d had my share of these weird out of body experiences in the past few days that I’d mostly attributed to, you know, a total lack of appropriate sleep, to abject terror, and to my mate being beheaded in front of me if a whacked-out plan failed. But now I knew they were caused by whatever influence Dane was exerting over me coming into conflict with my own will. It was like the two different minds were fighting one another, and my skull was the battleground.
“Oof!” Jake hit the ground, knees first, and then flopped gracelessly onto his face. Dane just started cackling like he’d seen the funniest thing in the world play out in front of him.
“Get up, brother!” he said. “There’s no reason to be all sad and sour. Come on, so what, you lost a challenge, are completely emasculated, and are about to have your head cut off in public? What’s it matter now? Have a little fun, why don’t you? Mate!” he was calling to me, because I had, apparently, lost every shred of humanity. “I said now!”
I grabbed the closest bottle, sloshing a little of the red liquid out onto my hand in anger. The sour smell of the wine hit my stomach a little funny. The next thing I remember, my knee was hitting the ground, and Greta was on one of my elbows, holding me up. Two others, who I vaguely recognized from family dinner with the wolves, were on the other. My stomach churned, my head swam, and all the while, Dane was sitting on his makeshift throne shouting about human weakness.
Right, because now is definitely the perfect time to go on a rant about what makes wolves better than people. Even though you’re marrying one!
“Why?!” I stood up, knees shaking, barely able to keep myself on my feet, and shouted. “Why are you doing all of this?”
The whole crowd – Dane’s goons included – went dead silent.
I looked around at a whole bunch of concerned faces, some of them a little hairy from the booze loosening them up. Dane’s eyes burned holes in my chest. He tipped his glass back and drank the last of what he already had.
“Why... why are you torturing your brother? Why are you punishing him for something someone else did? And why me? What did I ever do?”
Dane’s normal, arrogant chuckle grew more boisterous, louder than it was before. “Why?” he asked, twisting his words into a mockery of my voice. “Because I am the alpha! Because... I can.”
With that, he grabbed Jake by the hair, dragged him off the ground and held him aloft. The chains around his wrists were biting deep into the flesh, but he wasn’t screaming anymore. Either he’d gone numb or he was too dejected to bother.
“If she won’t bring me what I want, grab her. If these two won’t have any fun,” he turned to his little group of cronies, “then we’ll have it with them.”
Someone pushed Greta off my elbow. His face wasn’t familiar, but his sour breath and sneer almost matched Dane’s for looking repulsive. I took a swing at him with the bottle, but he just laughed as it bounced off his chest. “That’s enough, little girl,” he said, wrenching my arm and tearing the sleeve of the gown I’d been given. “You’ll learn at some point that you can’t fight the alpha without paying the price.”
“Oh, I’ve paid plenty,” I said, snapping at him as he grabbed my hair. “You dirty son of a bitch!”
My comment made the round-faced wolf smile as sweat ran down the sides of his pale moon face. He dragged me urgently enough that I had to kick my feet to keep off the ground, but eventually even that was no good. I slipped once, then again, and before I knew it, my kicking was just making tracks in the gravel driveway down which he pulled me.
At the end of the path was the big dais – a raised platform with fluffy white curtains installed on either side. Alongside the podium where the speaker was supposed to read the markin
g vows, where Dane now sat in his folding throne, there were rope circles where each person was supposed to stand.
But now, this solemn, honestly beautiful set-up was ugly and horrifying. And that’s to say nothing of the mess Dane had made of Jake, who was currently trying to claw his way up his brother’s legs to stand, or at least sit. And still, Dane was just laughing, smiling away. He hurled the wine glass he held at me. It exploded on the stones, shards of crystal flying everywhere.
Greta let out a squealing sound that complimented the grunt Jake made when Dane planted a boot in his ribs.
“Mate!” he shouted. “On your way up here, grab my bag off the table there. That’ll be great, thanks.”
The bald-headed wolf yanked me toward the indicated table, grunting an order that didn’t need words. I grabbed both the bottle, and the bag, which clanked with the sound of metal against metal as I scooped it up. “What is this?” I asked.
“I didn’t say ask questions,” Dane snarled. “I said bring it to me.”
Every word he spoke was punctuated with a slam of his fist on his thigh. As Jake almost got to his feet, Dane kicked him down again. He landed with a hard thump and another groan of pain as he grabbed his ribs.
“Stop, Dane,” I heard him groan. “Just kill me. Get it over with. Leave her alone, leave her friends alone and take the pack. They had nothing to do with any of this.”
“I could,” Dane said, sticking out his bottom lip and nodding. “But then I’d be going back on my word. And lying? That’s no trait for an alpha, is it?”
Lying maybe not, I thought. But cleverness? Yeah, being clever is definitely a leader thing. Oh my God I hope this works. I wasn’t so sure. In fact I was almost completely sure we’d both end up dead one way or the other. I was going to watch my boyfriend get his head chopped off and then I’d be married to a psycho.
Great. This is exactly the way I thought my February would go. Oh wait, no, I thought I’d be paying bills, making some dumb dog statues, and complaining about my shitty old tools over too many beers on Friday nights. Oh, and don't forget the bad dates. God what I wouldn’t give for a shitty date right about now.
One more kick to Jake’s ribs sent him sprawling to the wooden floor. I felt a rush of anger, a pulse of hate, and thought for a split second about lunging at Dane and swinging whatever I had straight at his head.
As I approached the dais, Jake rolled his head toward me, and for just a moment – a split second of a shred of an instant – his steel-colored eyes sparkled, and he flashed me the tiniest smile. Oh my God, he’s been planning all this? It didn’t immediately stop the horror, or the fear, but knowing that he wasn’t out of control? Even with the very obvious problems, it gave me some hope that maybe...
“Get up here!”
I shrugged off my escort with a rough twist of my arm and shot him a nasty glare. In one hand I had the wine, in the other the heavy leather sack with the clanking metal. Whatever was about to happen, I was just glad it was almost over.
Dane stood, and my stomach lurched violently. The blood streaming down Jake’s face hit me in a way that blood on someone’s lip never had. It was like perfection had been beaten, like kindness had been punished just for being kind.
“Give me the bag, mate!” Dane roared. “Give me that bottle!”
Jake tapped his fingernail on the dais so quietly that only I heard. I shot a quick glance in his direction to see him curling his finger against the floor. Dane was busy roaring about how much of a stupid baby I was being, his goons were busy laughing and everyone else was busy being stunned.
In the middle of another of Dane’s torrents of verbal bile, Jake tapped again. “Throw it here,” he whispered. “Quick.”
I’m gonna need this, I thought, lifting the bottle of wine to my lips for a long pull. As I started to drink, Dane roared his approval. “Finally, someone wants to have some fun! Maybe I didn’t pick the wrong mate after all!”
I swallowed two mouthfuls, then three, and went for four before the sour taste of pinot noir got to be too much. I choked it down anyway, closing my eyes as the alcohol’s warmth spread to my toes.
“Yes!” Dane crowed. “Yes, yes! Now hand me that bag and let’s have a damn party!”
“No,” I whispered. “Not this time.”
-20-
“Ain’t no party like a werewolf party.”
-Delilah
“You idiot! You’ve done it now!”
Dane spat with rage, but that’s all it was. An impotent sputter of squawking anger with no force behind it. Before the bag hit the ground, Jake snatched it, and tore it open. I didn’t see exactly what he had grabbed from within, but whatever it was gleamed in the dying sun’s light.
I’d never seen anything, or anyone, move as fast as Jake did in the next second, and from the way he just dumbly stood there and took the cut in his chest, neither had Dane.
A collective gasp entered the chests of the pack’s wolves as the smug alpha-to-be looked down at his chest, flattened his palm against it, and watched as red slowly seeped out of a wound, soaking his shirt.
“This is good leather,” he growled at his brother. “I’m going to have to oil this when I’m done.”
Jake wasn’t much for one liners, but the grin he cracked was just as good. He took another swing, but this time Dane was ready. He lifted a hand and deflected the blow, then slammed the palm of his hand square into Jake’s face. Jake yowled in pain, but it seemed like it was more for a distraction than because he was hurt.
The momentary look of satisfaction on his brother’s face was replaced a split-second later with a look of surprise as the knife – which looked like something a Klingon would use – took a long trip down Dane’s left biceps.
“What is this supposed to prove?” Dane howled, deflecting another blow and lifting a knee into Jake’s stomach. “You can fight?”
He grunted as a fist met his solar plexus. He twisted in pain when Jake clapped him on the side of the head with an elbow, and then finally managed to get away in the second before a haymaker took off his head.
“I don’t think I need to prove that,” Jake said, easily knocking a wild swipe aside and countering with another elbow to the jaw. “All I gotta do is keep you busy long enough for her to show off that statue. What the fuck were you thinking?”
Dane roared fiercely, throwing back his head. His teeth grew into yellow daggers, and a moment later, he hunched down and let the wolf take him. He lunged and locked his jaws onto Jake’s arm. With Jake thrashing around trying to free himself, I took another long pull off the bottle and hurled it at the black figure locked on my fiancé’s arm. The bottle didn’t hit hard, but it was enough of a blow to dislodge him and give Jake a second to do his own wolfy shifting.
Both of them dove, meeting in the middle. At first they clamped down on one another’s jaws, but Jake was able to twist his neck and leverage it enough to get on top of his brother, then take a hunk out of his foreleg.
Retreating for a second to hold his wound, Dane screamed, “Do something!” to his little gang before Jake was on him again. I twisted around to see what the five idiots were doing, and smiled when I saw Greta with a shotgun. Where it had come from, I’ve got no idea, but a girl’s gotta have her secrets, right?
“Don’t you even think about it, you mongrel pups,” she snarled. Leveling the barrel at one of them, then the next, she seemed to have them under control. One of them tried to go for her, but a shotgun blast into the air stopped him in his tracks. “Next one gets it in the stomach,” she said.
I want to be her when I grow up, I thought for the second time. There I was, caught between a she-wolf matriarch brandishing a shotgun, and two brothers ripping each other apart – at least partially over me – and all I could do was stare and hope.
Teeth gnashing turned to another flurry of savage attacks quickly turned into clawing. Again, Jake came out on top, clamping his jaws around his brother’s furry neck. This time though, Dane managed to
dig a hind claw into Jake’s chest and give him a nasty wound. Jake didn’t seem to notice though, he just clamped down harder, fighting to keep his brother on the ground.
“Statue!” he hissed in that tight, painful-sound wolf voice. “Show... them the statue!”
A grotesque laugh from Dane’s belly preceded him twisting out from under Jake and giving him a rake with his claws.
A yelp of pain from Jake got me moving a little faster. The statue wasn’t far – I’d had Doug place it next to the dais, but every step I took felt like I was dragging my feet through quicksand. My nerves were shot, and between Jake fighting his brother, and Greta with the shotgun, I figured that at any second, my head could pretty much explode from the strangeness of it all.
But then, the damndest thing happened.
Jake took a swing at Dane, and connected clean. His brother staggered, and... the pack started cheering. Cheering! For Jake! It was like this whole awful ordeal had turned into a professional wrestling match. At first the yells of support were sparse, only coming from a few, but with every blow he landed, every chomp of his jaws, they got louder, until the roar was just enveloping.
I neared the statue and realized that, for the first time, I felt confident. I felt like there was a solid chance of us both escaping this thing with our heads cleanly still atop our necks. Suddenly, I understood why athletes got all worked up when they had the crowd behind them. It was energizing, it was incredible.
As soon as he figured out what was happening, Dane looked in my direction and started in again. “Yes! Mate, show them their new leader! Show the pack their new alpha in all his glory!”
Which was a little amusing since he had a black eye, and his fur was matted down pretty good with blood, but it was almost like Dane hadn’t wrapped his head around what, exactly was going on.
Jake grabbed him around the throat with his massive jaws, a deathgrip that could have crushed the throat on just about anyone else. With his brother’s neck in his mouth, Jake looked in my direction. I felt all of the emotion, all the squiggling and tingling and excitement, and I felt it hit me all at once. One of Dane’s goon wolves went for me, but I scarcely noticed his hand on my back before a decisive blast put him on the ground.