by TJ Klune
I could feel the others. My pack. Their joy. Their confusion. Their sadness. Their anger.
I couldn’t feel Carter and Kelly like I used to. I didn’t feel tied to Gordo like I had once been. Even if he hadn’t been pack for most of the time I’d known about wolves, there’d always been something there between us, especially after he’d gifted me the work shirts when I’d turned fifteen.
Joe, though.
I could feel him.
Because he was an Alpha. More than I ever was.
This place, this territory, was rightfully his.
And since (if if if) he was back, it should be his again.
I should have felt relieved at that.
That the responsibility wasn’t mine alone to bear anymore.
And I did. Mostly.
But there was a part of me that said mine, mine, mine.
That this place, these houses, these people were mine.
I banged my head against the door, trying to clear my thoughts.
The shadows stretched farther.
And that’s when he approached.
Even before I heard him, I felt him.
I didn’t focus on the bond, the thread. I didn’t want to see how tattered it was between us, if it was even there at all. Something once growing stronger every day now in shreds.
I tried to keep my breaths even. My heart calm.
I tried to make him go away without even saying a word.
My breaths were short. My heart was stumbling.
He didn’t go away.
He didn’t speak, but he didn’t go away.
The porch creaked as he slowly climbed the steps.
His hands were on the porch rail, fingers dragging along the chipped paint.
He reached the top step and stood there for a beat.
He took in a great breath and let it out slowly.
Taking in the scent of the territory.
Of this house.
Of me.
I wondered if he could tell that I hadn’t spent more than a few hours here since he’d left.
I wondered if he could still smell the blood of my mother.
He didn’t speak.
He took another step forward. And another. And another, until he was standing in front of the door.
He didn’t knock.
He didn’t touch the doorknob.
Instead, the door jerked slightly as he turned and leaned against it, sliding down like I’d done.
He sat on the other side, our backs separated by three inches of oak.
It wasn’t very long before our breaths and hearts were in sync with each other.
I tried to fight it. To stop it.
It didn’t work.
I hated the peace I felt. The relief, the goddamned green relief that bowled over me, as if I ever really stood a chance against it. I held on to my anger as hard as I could.
He stayed until I fell asleep.
I WOKE as morning sunlight filtered in through the windows.
I was warm and had a crick in my neck.
I opened my eyes.
I was still sitting against the door. My back hurt.
Two wolves rested their heads on my thighs. They both opened their eyes as I did, as if they’d been waiting for me to wake.
A third wolf lay curled against my side, feet twitching as he dreamed.
Elizabeth. Mark.
Robbie.
The others were there.
Jessie was snoring softly, her arms wrapped around one of my legs.
Tanner, Rico, and Chris were sprawled out around me, each with a hand touching me somehow. My foot. My hand. My stomach.
No one else.
Joe wasn’t against the door.
I hadn’t heard him leave.
I didn’t hear the others come in.
Mark had closed his eyes again, breathing deep and slow.
Elizabeth still watched me.
I ran my fingers over her ears.
She flicked them at me, huffing quietly.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said quietly, so as to not wake the others.
She blinked.
“I’m angry. And I don’t know how to let that go.”
She sneezed.
“Gross,” I said.
She nosed against my hand.
“Needy,” I said, rubbing the skin between her eyes.
She snorted.
“You’re here,” I said. “With me.”
She looked at me as if wondering how I could say something like that while sounding stupidly shocked. And she probably was. I’d had years to get used to the facial expressions of wolves.
“You should be with them.”
She bit my hand gently between her teeth, shaking her head back and forth.
All I got from her was PackSonLove.
I knew what she was doing. She, and the others, were showing where their loyalties lay. It made things better. And that much worse.
I didn’t want this. This divide. And as long as I felt this way, as long as I let my anger spiral out of control, my pack would suffer for it. Thomas had taught me that the pack was an extension of the Alpha, and that whatever he felt, they did too. More so when it came to a particularly strong emotion.
All I felt now were strong emotions.
She closed her eyes again and sighed, resting her head on my leg.
Soon, she slept again.
I didn’t move for a long time, surrounded by my pack.
like a wolf/they bled here
“LOOKS GOOD,” Gordo said, standing in the doorway to the office.
I froze because I hadn’t heard him approaching. It’d been three days since they’d come back, and I had done my damnedest to avoid, avoid, avoid, at least until I could sort out my own head. I stayed in the old house, Joe and the others stayed in the main house. Elizabeth and Mark went between, but when night fell, we stayed in our separate houses.
I didn’t know what was going to happen at the full moon, which was only a few days away.
Hopefully, I’d have made a decision on how to proceed by then.
Or gotten my head out of my ass.
Same difference.
Robbie had called back East to let Alpha Hughes know Joe and the others had returned. She had questions that needed to be answered, but Robbie couldn’t. He hadn’t really spoken with Joe, aside from their initial confrontation outside the house on the first day. He spent most of his time at home with me in the old house. The rest of the pack came and went, as they normally did. They felt the pull toward me, but not as strong as the wolves. While it was common for the human members to be gone all at the same time, I usually had a wolf or two with me.
But I hadn’t spoken with them, hadn’t even really seen them aside from a glimpse or two. There was a moment when I was coming back from the garage that I came face to face with Carter near the old house, and all I could think about beyond his rough exterior was the way he’d laughed after Joe had found out Carter had kissed me first. The way they’d run through the forest. The way Kelly had called me Dad in that wry tone of his.
Everything had seemed so simple then.
Carter had opened his mouth to say something, but I’d just nodded and sidestepped around him. I thought he was going to reach out and stop me, but he didn’t, though I could feel him staring after me as I went inside and closed the door behind me.
I didn’t see Joe, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t watching.
I didn’t ask Elizabeth or Mark about them. They didn’t volunteer anything.
But if they weren’t in the old house, I knew where they were.
“Looks good,” Gordo said, and I froze over the expense invoices I’d been staring at for the last hour.
I looked up at him slowly, a weird déjà vu washing over me to see him standing there, like he was coming in to check on me to see how my homework was going. He wouldn’t let me out on the garage floor unless I could list off seven facts about fucking Stonewall Jackson, and it’s not that har
d, Ox, you can do this, come on.
Except this Gordo wasn’t that Gordo. This Gordo was harder than the other Gordo had ever been. There were lines around his eyes, more pronounced than before. He was thirty-eight years old now. The last three years hadn’t been kind, though he was bigger than he’d been before. I didn’t know if it had to do with the pack he was in, or if they’d done nothing but work out the entire time they were gone.
It was his eyes, though, that threw me the most. They’d always been vibrant. Bright. Quick to flash in anger, quick to light up when he was happy.
Now they were dull and flat, slightly sunken. This was a Gordo who’d lived hard the past three years. I didn’t want to know the things he’d seen. The things he’d done.
This new image of him wasn’t helped with what he wore. He wasn’t in his usual shop gear, no work shirt with his name stitched on the breast, no navy Dickies. He wore jeans and a tank top stretched tight across his chest. A beat-up brown leather jacket, the collar curved up around his neck.
“Yeah,” I said, because I didn’t know how else to start. “We’ve done all right.”
The no thanks to you was left unsaid, but he heard it. Even if I hadn’t meant for it to be out there like that.
He nodded, running a hand up the frame of the door, fingers picking at a little sliver of paint. “Better than that, I expect.”
“We haven’t gone under, if that’s what you were worried about.”
“No. Didn’t think you would.” He cracked a smile that I didn’t return. “Never worried about that, kiddo.”
I looked back down at the invoices, unsure of what to say next.
He sighed and moved into the office, dragging his hands along everything he could reach. I recognized it as the habit of a wolf when they wanted to get their scent on something or someone. The Bennetts had done it when they’d come into my house the first time, sprawling over and touching everything they could. Joe especially. When he’d gone to my room. When he’d seen the stone wolf, sitting on my—
No. I wasn’t—
“You act like them,” I said rather than follow that train of thought. “Like a wolf. Move like them too.”
He arched an eyebrow at me. “Pot, kettle.”
“That wasn’t an accusation.”
“I didn’t say it was one.”
“I don’t….”
He waited.
I couldn’t say that, because I did. If anything, I was more wolf than he was, even though he’d been immersed in it more, especially over the last three years. He’d been entrenched and I’d… well. “I did what I had to.”
“And you won’t hear anyone say otherwise.”
This was surreal. I wondered if it was the same for him. “They’ve told you. What we’ve been through.”
He paused, fingers barely touching the photo on top of the filing cabinet. It was old. Me and Gordo. Tanner, Chris, and Rico. My sixteenth birthday, when I’d been given some keys for the shop. The day I’d met the Bennetts. I didn’t remember who’d taken the picture, probably someone in for an oil change, but Gordo’s arm was around my shoulders as I grinned at the camera. Rico stood on his other side, and Tanner and Chris were next to me. Gordo had a cigarette behind his ear.
He let his finger rest against the glass of the picture frame, tracing the faces of everyone in the photo aside from himself.
“Some,” he said. “They were vague. Purposefully. It wasn’t their place. It needs to come from their Alpha. Much like we haven’t said much to them. Or you. Because it needs to come from Joe.”
“Why hasn’t he said anything?” I would have thought he would have at least spoken to Elizabeth. To Mark. To at least update them as to what had happened. I’d been too wrapped up in my own self-pity to approach him. It wasn’t fair, but I needed to be selfish for my own sanity.
Gordo snorted. “Ox, that was the first time we’d heard him speak in almost a year, barring the few words he said to that idiot David King to get him here. Which, I assume he came.”
Gooseflesh prickled along my arms.
Not yet.
“What the hell,” I whispered.
Gordo shrugged as he pulled out the chair on the other side of the desk and sat down. He sighed and rubbed a hand over the stubble on his head. It rasped under his fingers. “He just stopped, Ox. Carter and Kelly said it was like he was after… well. After Richard Collins. And before you.”
“But. How—he is the Alpha. How the hell did he—oh Jesus. He didn’t even need to talk, did he? The bonds. The pack bonds between all of you.”
Gordo sighed. “Yeah. It was… intense. Feeling them the way we did. It was like that when I was—after my father, I guess. I was twelve when I was made the witch of the Bennett pack. It wasn’t like it is now. Or has been for the last few years. Everything is more… I don’t know. Just more.”
“So he stopped talking,” I said flatly.
“Mostly. If he ever did speak, it was one word or two. Nothing more than a grunt, really.”
“And you all just allowed it.”
“We didn’t allow anything, Ox. It’s just how it was. You think you could make a grieving Alpha do anything? Go ahead. Be my guest.”
“Really,” I snapped. “Because I wouldn’t know anything about being a grieving Alpha.”
That stopped him cold. Whatever anger had been building in him died, and he just looked tired. And older than I’d ever seen him look before.
“Ox,” he said quietly.
“And not to mention, you left your goddamn mate here—”
His face grew stony. “You leave him out of this.”
“At least you’re acknowledging it now.”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Does he know that?”
“Ox.”
“Three questions.”
He blinked. “What?”
“I am going to ask you three questions.”
“Leave Mark out of this.”
“Not about Mark. About everything else.”
“Ox, I told you. It needs to come from—”
“Gordo.”
“Fine.” He sounded slightly irritated. It reminded me of the Gordo I used to know. “Three questions. And I get to ask the same of you.”
My skin itched. “Fine. I’ll go first.”
He nodded. For some reason, the tattoos on his arms flared.
“Why did you ditch the phones?” I asked.
Gordo stared at me. He obviously hadn’t expected that.
I waited.
“Joe thought it’d be easier,” he said slowly. “He thought if we cut ties, we could focus on what we needed to. That being reminded of home, of all of you, made things harder.”
“And you all went along with it.”
“Was that a question?”
“Statement.”
“We went along with it. Because he was right. Because of what we had to do. Because every time he picked up that phone, every time we saw a message from you, it became that much harder to not turn around and come right back. We had a job to do, Ox. And we couldn’t do it with being reminded of home.”
“So instead of letting us know you were okay, that you were alive, you decided—excuse me, Joe decided—you’d all be better off keeping us in the dark.”
Gordo winced. “Joe said Mark and his mother would know. That they’d still feel—”
I slammed my fist down on the desk. “I didn’t,” I snarled at him. “I didn’t feel a goddamn thing. And don’t you tell me I had them to know, because it wasn’t the same.”
“You think we wanted this?” he snapped back. “Any of this? Do you think we asked to be put in this position?”
“Was that your question?” I said, throwing his own words back at him.
The ghost of a smile, long since deceased. “Why did you tell them?”
Rico. Tanner. Chris. Jessie.
“Because they needed to know,” I said. “Because they didn’t understand why you’d
left them. Because whether you knew it or not, they were your pack too. They needed to understand that they weren’t alone, even if you were already gone.”
He closed his eyes.
“Why did you come back?” I asked.
“David King.”
I frowned. “What about him?”
“What was left of him was found in Idaho.”
“What was left,” I repeated.
“Pieces, Ox,” Gordo said, opening his eyes. “He was found in pieces outside Cottonwood. In a shitty Motel 6. His head was placed in the middle of the bed.”
“When?”
“A few weeks back.”
“Richard.”
“Probably. There was a message written on the wall in his blood. I saw the photos. Four words. Yet another fallen king. Joe. Well. Joe lost it. Just a bit. It had been a long time in coming. There were deaths in Washington. Nevada. California.”
“All around Oregon,” I muttered.
Gordo nodded. “David was the last. It was like Richard was taunting us. Joe. He—we headed home. After that. We needed to make sure—” He shook his head. “You need to talk to Joe. He’d tell you that—just talk to him. My turn. When did you become an Alpha?”
Not how, but when, like he knew that it was only a matter of time. “Omegas came,” I said.
“The wards.”
“Jessie was outside them. She smelled like us. Like me. They took her. Tanner, Chris, and Rico were already part of us by then. We went to the Omegas. We fought. They lost. The others, they looked to me. And since there was no one else here to lead them, I did what I had to do.”
“You always did,” he said.
“I’m not a wolf.”
“No,” he said. “But you’re something. Last question.”
So many things I needed to ask. About the last three years. About where we stood now. About the state of his mind. If he was the same Gordo he used to be. If that Gordo was dead and buried. If we could ever be what we were to each other.
But there was only one question, really.
“Am I still your tether?”
His eyes widened.
His hands shook.
His bottom lip trembled.
He took a great shuddering breath.
When he spoke, his voice was cracked and wet.
He said, “Yeah, Ox. Yeah. Of course. You always have been. Even when things got dark, even when we were hundreds of miles from home sleeping on the side of the road, yeah. Even when I was tired and didn’t think I could take another step. Even when I found places in my magic I didn’t think were possible. Yeah. You were. You are. I thought of you because you’re my home. You’re my pack too, okay? I don’t care if you’re an Alpha. I don’t care if you’re my Alpha. You’re my pack too.”