Alpha: An Urban Fantasy Novel (War of the Alphas Book 3)

by SM Reine

  Yosef gave a high-pitched laugh that sounded like a yip. “They’re less numerous, but not weaker.”

  He was too mouthy, and testing the boundaries of Stark’s dominance. It annoyed Deirdre enough to take action without needing to be told. She seized the werewolf by the collar. “Is that what you think?”

  Her fist flamed.

  He yelped and leaped out of her grasp. Her fire blew more powerfully than she’d intended—Yosef’s whole jacket caught. He flung it to the floor and stomped on it.

  Deirdre kept her face calm, pretending she’d intended to set him on fire.

  Her stomach churned with unease.

  Stark didn’t smile, but she could see the approval in his eyes. The room was so quiet. “Shifters are the most powerful of the gaean factions. The sidhe are nothing against us. If you thought that the unseelie queen could kill me—and if you think a favor from her is better than having my approval—then you should tell me now.”

  Threat lingered in the silence after his sentence.

  Yosef didn’t rise to take the bait. He sealed his mouth and stood back, rubbing his neck where Deirdre had scorched him.

  When nobody spoke, Stark went on.

  “Some of you are sheltering survivors from the asylum. I owe you for that. You’re forgiven for turning away when I tried to contact you. The rest…” Stark’s narrowed eyes skimmed over the crowd. “Gregorio, you didn’t take any of the asylum shifters.”

  “I had to think of my people first,” he said.

  Stark’s gun was aimed in a heartbeat.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  The sour stink of silver whipped through the air. The sound of his gun was so loud in the enclosed space that Deirdre couldn’t help but flinch.

  Gregorio tried to run, to his credit. His reflexes were amazing.

  But not amazing enough.

  He dropped with a hole in his chest the size of Deirdre’s fist.

  Stark aimed at Gregorio’s Beta. “Handel?”

  “Everyone here is my people,” Handel said. There was only the slightest quaver in his voice. “I think of everyone first.”

  “Congratulations,” Stark said. “You’re now in charge of the Whitewater Pack.” He set his gun on the table in front of him. “By now, you’ve all heard of the election that Rylie Gresham is conducting.”

  “What’s the word on that?” Yosef asked, surprisingly calm. “We’ve seen the news about the election. Everyone’s talking about it. Except you—you’ve been real quiet about the whole thing.”

  Stark surveyed his allies coolly. “What do you think of the situation?” He pointed to Gianna. “Tell me your thoughts.”

  Gianna looked understandably nervous, considering that she was being addressed by a man who had just shot an ally to make a point.

  “It seems like a diversion to me. In my opinion.” Her words were stilted. She kept her eyes fixed to Stark’s feet as she spoke, as though afraid to show even the slightest hint of defiance. Everything in her posture screamed submission. “The government is up to something. I wouldn’t be surprised if the OPA is just trying to get us to collect in public places so we can be killed more easily.”

  “That’s stupid,” Deirdre started to say, but a look from Stark stopped her.

  She shut her mouth.

  “We are beasts of the forest and mountain and desert,” Stark said. “We aren’t ruled by votes or electoral colleges or politicians. We’re ruled by instincts and our individual packs. That’s the way it’s meant to be. We won’t settle for less.”

  The shifters in the back of the room stirred, making sounds of assent.

  Deirdre clenched her jaw, forcing herself to remain silent.

  “By participating in this system they’ve set up, I’d be giving complicit approval to a perverse bureaucracy.” He slammed his fists on the table. “We won’t settle for that!”

  The sounds of assent were becoming cheers.

  Stark was amazing to watch. He was pure, unbridled confidence, raw and magnetizing.

  He lowered his voice, forcing the others to quiet down to hear him.

  “If Rylie Gresham puts a puppet in her place as Alpha, I’ll kill that Alpha, too.”

  The pack erupted into cheers.

  Fists thrust into the air. People howled.

  This was what rebellion looked like, roaring and angry and thirsty for blood. And only Deirdre remained silent.

  XIII

  Deirdre’s quiet dissent didn’t go unnoticed. She should have known it wouldn’t.

  Stark made her leave the basement by telling her that he wanted help opening the lethe storage closet. But he jumped her the instant she stepped into the hallway, out of sight from the larger group.

  He slammed her into the wall. His elbow dug into her throat. His knee pressed into her thigh.

  At this point, she wasn’t surprised. Deirdre wasn’t even sure she was afraid.

  “Whose side are you on, Tombs?” he asked.

  Tombs. He’d gone into the Middle Worlds to save her, kissed her senseless, and kept her as Beta despite her betrayal. Yet still she was only Tombs to him.

  “I’m on my side,” she said. “I’ve always been on my side.”

  The door opened. Lucifer stepped into the hallway.

  Stark released Deirdre.

  “I thought you might like help opening the storage closet,” the vampire said. He smoothed his hands over his hair as he strolled toward them, slicking his dark locks back.

  “You don’t trust me to give you a fair share?” Stark asked.

  “I would never dream of mistrusting you, Everton,” Lucifer said.

  “How could you? I mean, he’s such a friendly guy,” Deirdre said, rubbing her sore throat.

  Stark shot a look at her. “Don’t push it, Tombs.”

  “Don’t push me,” she said. “And don’t forget which one of us can incinerate people with a touch, huh? Let’s go find this storage closet.”

  She strode up the hallway, leaving the men behind her.

  Deirdre’s hearing seemed to be improving now that she’d shapeshifted once. At any other time, she didn’t think she would have heard Lucifer whispering to Stark. “Are you sure you can handle this bird you’ve hatched?”

  “Not at all,” Stark said. He sounded kind of pleased.

  The promise in his voice made chills ripple down her spine.

  Chadwick’s storage closet wasn’t a closet so much as a vault, reinforced with magic and steel in much the same way that the cell upstairs was. Deirdre hung back, letting Stark inspect the runes that protected the drugs within.

  Stark took a few minutes to read the runes that bordered the door, smashed his fist through two of them, and then forced the lock open easily.

  “I’ll look for other traps,” Lucifer said.

  The vampire vanished inside.

  “How do you always know how to do that?” Deirdre asked, hanging beside Stark. “You did the same thing at the detention center when we freed Vidya, and you knew how to use Brother Marshall’s staff thing, and…how?”

  “Rhiannon was a witch before Genesis,” Stark said. “She taught me a lot.”

  “You can’t cast magic, can you? How much could she really teach you?”

  “I know enough to deconstruct it. You don’t need to know the full language of runes to figure spells out. Witches are showy. They want to demonstrate their skill. They’ll always put the most complicated elements of the spell front and center, and complication signifies importance. It gets easy the more often you break their spells down.”

  Lucifer poked his head out the door. “You guys should see this.”

  “Is it a trap?” Deirdre asked.

  “That would depend upon how strong your willpower is.”

  She stepped inside. The storage closet was much deeper than Deirdre would have guessed from the outside—a long, lightless hall of shelves that glowed a dim shade of blue.

  She’d never seen so much lethe in her life. She’d
never seen even a thousandth of that much lethe before.

  There had to be millions of cubes weighing down those shelves, nestled in foam egg crates. It must have been enough lethe to drug every shifter in the country.

  Deirdre hadn’t realized that she was aching for a hit until she saw all those dimly glowing cubes. She hadn’t taken anything in far too long. Her whole body longed for that lethe, for the buzz of having it injected into her veins, for the euphoria that would follow.

  It was a trap all right.

  Stark elbowed past her to head into the rear of the room. She probably should have helped him carry the drugs out, but all she could do was stare, slack-jawed. “Where did all of this come from?”

  Lucifer tossed a cube in the air and caught it. “Genesis left some weird things behind, like hospitals filled with rare prescription drugs, libraries with too many books, and military depots with more guns than should have been produced. Little centralized pockets of supplies, sort of. As though someone had prepared stockpiles.”

  “I know.” Deirdre had been stuck in one of those well-stocked hospitals, like many new gaean children had been.

  “There were also stockpiles of lethe in some areas. Why?” He spread his hands wide in a questioning gesture. “Nobody knows.”

  “I’m sure it was to make certain a new generation of children could get as high as the ones before Genesis did,” she said. “Blessed be the dead gods, for they were so damn thoughtful.”

  “You’re funny. I like you,” Lucifer said. “Let’s be friends.”

  “Let’s not. You’re a friend of Stark’s.”

  He nudged her playfully. His hands were so cold. “That appears to be something else we have in common, doesn’t it?”

  Stark returned with a large crate of lethe cradled in his arms. He shoved it at Lucifer. “Take it and leave.”

  “This isn’t half,” Lucifer said.

  “You’re not getting half. I said I’d give you a quarter.”

  “This isn’t a quarter, either.”

  “Do you think you’re going to carry that much lethe out of here tonight? Right now?”

  “Personally? No. But I do have some of my murder here, if you’ll drop the wards and allow them inside.”

  “Is that what they’re called?” Deirdre asked. “A group of vampires is a murder, like crows? I’ve never heard that before.”

  “I’m hoping it will catch on.” Lucifer turned to Stark. “We’ve got practices surrounding this, though. Breaking bread and whatnot. My people won’t want to take this and run, and I don’t think yours will, either. We’re allies now. Friends! We need to celebrate in the manner our culture has deemed appropriate.”

  “Fine.” Stark dismissed the vampire with a wave of his hand. “Take however much you think they can take into the lobby. An entire pallet, if you want. And this.” He tossed a large glass bulb to Deirdre.

  Her hands shot out on instinct and closed around the glass tubing.

  It looked like a weird bong.

  “Are we going to do some hookah?” she asked, turning it around to look at the light through the blue glass.

  “It’s for lethe,” Lucifer said. “For doing it socially.”

  Deirdre had never taken lethe with anyone but Stark. She’d assumed that everyone just did it the way they did—with needles or intake bracelets.

  Once she knew what it was for, she figured out where the lethe would go, and where the heating element belonged. It wasn’t exactly a complicated mechanism. Drugs were drugs, and there were only so many ways to ingest.

  “Is this the time?” Deirdre hissed to Stark as he hefted a box under one arm. “You never allowed drugs at the asylum.”

  “We didn’t have vampires at the asylum,” he said. “They have a different culture surrounding the spoils of war.”

  “Their breed can’t have a culture. They didn’t exist ten years ago.”

  “You’d be amazed,” Stark said.

  “No, I wouldn’t. Because vampires don’t have any kind of social structure, unlike the sidhe and the shifters. It hasn’t happened, and I’d know if it had, because I used to live with a vampire.”

  “We will do this,” Stark said. “And you will participate, and you will pretend to enjoy yourself, because this is the kind of thing we need to do to keep the vampires on our side. It won’t be enough to be Alpha of the shifters alone. We’ll need all the gaeans on our side when I take control.”

  “The election and the oath would take care of that,” Deirdre said.

  He just handed her another glass bulb and headed to the lobby, where more vampires were entering to mingle with the shifters. Between the boarded windows and gloomy lighting, the high-rise was rapidly starting to resemble the asylum—not exactly Deirdre’s idea of a cozy place to live.

  Lucifer snagged one of the pipes out of her hand and took it to a coffee table between a pair of leather couches.

  Deirdre hung back as they began breaking open cubes of lethe.

  She was hungering for a dose. Or six.

  And she wasn’t the only one.

  She’d never seen so many vampires in one place before. Deirdre had always perceived them as solitary creatures. Jolene hadn’t hung out with other vampires.

  But Lucifer had almost ten vampires with him. Those were just the ones in the building, too.

  They were organizing.

  “You won’t make me light this alone, will you?” Lucifer asked Deirdre, shooting a smile at her.

  She glanced at Stark. He gestured to the couch. “Celebrate the alliance.” That was an order, and not a happy one. He seemed about as happy to be there as she was.

  Deirdre sat across from Lucifer. Geoff joined them. So did Ember, one of the shifters they’d liberated from the safe house. It didn’t escape her attention that the men sat beside her, not the vampire. It was a quiet show of solidarity.

  “Cheers,” Ember said.

  He took the lighter from Lucifer, flicked it to life, held the flame under the bulb of the pipe.

  It heated. Smoke filled the air.

  Deirdre inhaled as Stark left the room.

  It was hard to relax into a social setting when so many people had fangs and bloodless flesh. Someone found the receiver for Chadwick Hawfinch’s audio system and played music, while Gianna started dancing in the corner, but it still didn’t feel like a party to Deirdre.

  She was too aware of the people waiting for her upstairs. Rylie and Marion and the secretary of the Office of gods-damned Preternatural Affairs.

  They were celebrating their alliance while holding on to some of the most powerful politicians in the preternatural world.

  The other shifters seemed immune to Deirdre’s tense mood. They joined Gianna in dancing. They talked with the vampires, relaxing into their company, increasingly friendly as more lethe was passed throughout the room.

  But the vampires didn’t exactly seem happy, either. They were more self-contained than the shifters. Wary.

  The odor of burning lethe was acidic.

  Deirdre was transported back to the Summer Court and their party drenched in heady seelie magic, as warm as pomegranates rotting in sunlight and dry grass swaying in the breeze and the sweat-kissed skin of young men.

  The seelie’s perverse hedonism had still been less perverse than what the vampires and shifters did. They screwed each other in the shadows of the lobby, but there was no joy to it. The vampires weren’t inhaling the lethe’s gases because it felt good, and their eyes didn’t glaze from orgiastic bliss. When they took another hit, it was done with fear, as though struggling to push away the horrors of reality rather than embracing the sweet rapture of life.

  The vampires were starving. Low on resources. In need of blood.

  Lucifer had brought some of the horse blood up to get dispensed by the Behexed, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

  Deirdre couldn’t hang out in the haze of smoke. She couldn’t watch people destroying themselves in pursuit of escap
ism, and she couldn’t escape from the knowledge of the people they had left upstairs.

  The gases were getting to her. The walls were distorting as they always did. Faint colors rimmed her vision.

  She needed to leave.

  “Have you seen Stark?” she asked Ember, who cradled a pipe between his forefinger and thumb.

  Smoke plumed from his nostrils when he exhaled. “He went to the basement, last I saw.” Ember gave a small chuckle, eyes sliding shut. “I get it now. I get everything.”

  “What are you talking about?” Geoff had slumped against the other werewolf’s shoulder.

  “The lethe. It feels so much better with it than without it.” He offered the pipe to Deirdre. It was huge in her vision, swollen, thrashing like a viper just barely contained in his grip.

  She shook her head, stood, backed away.

  Lucifer watched her, crimson eyes tracking her motion across the lobby. Gianna was still dancing. Her arms swayed, trees in the wind, hips rolling and cheeks flushed.

  The elevator doors slid shut on Deirdre, blocking out the music. The smoke was trapped inside with her.

  She dropped to the basement.

  At first, Deirdre thought the sound of pounding was in her head—just the amplified sound of her beating heart and the rush of blood through her veins. But when the hallway slipped past her and she reached the stables in the basement, she saw that someone had opened all the stalls to let the horses out.

  The pounding was hooves.

  A ramp at the end of the stalls led to a loading bay door on the ground level. A truck had been backed up to that door.

  Two men helped the sickly horses into the truck bed. One was a stranger in a polo shirt and ball cap, guiding the horses by the bridle. The other was Everton Stark, who supervised from a distance. His mere presence was enough to herd the horses toward the trailer.

  Deirdre had come downstairs intending to confront him, but the sight of Stark herding the horses was confusing enough that all words vanished from her mind.

  It only took a few moments to get the rest of the horses into the trailer. They must have been working the entire time that Deirdre had been upstairs with the vampires. Stark talked quietly with the man in the polo shirt for a few minutes as Deirdre watched in stunned silence, trying to decide if the lethe could have given her the most vivid hallucination of her life.