by TJ Klune
He smiled quietly. “You got me. But then, I’m your tether. I don’t want you to—how did you put it? Degrade.”
“Kiddo, I’ll kick your wolfy ass into next week, so help me god. Mark my words.”
He laughed. It was a good sound. A strong sound. Warmth bloomed in my chest at pleasing my Alpha again, and I ignored it.
He waved me on. “You were saying?”
“Those Omegas. The ones before. They aren’t the same. They weren’t as far gone. The longer a wolf doesn’t have a tether, the more feral they’ll be. It’s not a quick process, Ox. And it’s not easy. Losing your mind never is.”
“Do you remember her? The barefooted woman. Marie.”
Oh, I did. She’d been beautiful, except for the crazy in her eyes. She’d been before Richard. A precursor. “She was on her way. Not as bad as the others, but she would have gotten there. They all do. In the end.”
He watched me close. “You’ve seen it. Before.”
I nodded.
“Who?”
“I didn’t know his name. My father wouldn’t tell me. He came to stay with us. His pack had been wiped out. Hunters. I was just a kid. Abel tried to help him. Tried to help him find a new tether, something to latch on to. But it didn’t work. He was lost in his grief. His Alpha was dead. His mate was dead. His pack had been destroyed. He had nothing left.” I looked down at the scar in the desktop. “Nothing worked. It was—he was slowly losing his mind. Have you ever seen that up close, Ox? It starts in the eyes. They grow… vacant. More and more vacant. Like a light is fading. You can see they understand what’s happening to them. There’s a knowledge there. An understanding. But they can’t do anything to stop it. Eventually he lost himself to his wolf. He was completely feral.”
“What happened to him?”
“The only thing that could be done.”
“He was put down.”
I shrugged. “Abel did it. Said it was the least he could do. My father made me watch.”
“Jesus.”
That didn’t even begin to cover it. “It was necessary. To see what needed to be done. It was a mercy, in the end.” I thought of the wolf in the alley of a forgotten Montana town, silver through the head.
“You were just a kid.”
“So were you with all the shit you went through. And look at you now.”
He wasn’t amused by that. “The others, then.”
The ones who had found their way to Green Creek. “What about them?”
“We gave them to the gruff man.”
“Philip Pappas.”
“And he took them East. To Maine. To her.”
“They’re better equipped to deal with Omegas.” I didn’t know how much I actually believed that.
But Ox let it go. “And if they couldn’t be saved? If they couldn’t find their tether?”
I stared at him, unblinking. “You know what happened then.”
He banged his fist on the desk. He was still a man, but barely. Ox was always in control and rarely lost himself to anger. Zen Wolf. “I didn’t want to send them to their deaths.”
I shook my head. “Sometimes there’s no other choice, Ox. A feral wolf is dangerous to everyone. Wolves. Witches. Humans. Can you imagine what would happen if a feral wolf found its way into a town? If that woman upstairs gave in to her wolf and trotted into Green Creek? How many people would die before she could be stopped? And if you had the chance to do something about it, and then didn’t, those deaths would be on you. Could you live with yourself knowing you could have ended it before it began?”
He looked away, jaw tensed. He was angry. I didn’t know at who.
“My father told me once that sometimes, for the good of many, you have to sacrifice the few.”
“Your father is a bastard.”
I laughed. “You’re not going to get any argument from me there.”
“But then so was mine.”
“Cut from a different cloth, but the end result was the same. Yours used fists. Mine used words.”
“And mine is nothing but dust and bones,” Ox said. “Even then, he still haunted me for a long time, saying I was gonna get shit all my life.”
“I’m glad he’s dead,” I said, uncaring how it sounded. “He didn’t deserve you. Or Maggie.”
“No. He didn’t. And Mom and me didn’t deserve what he did to us. But he’s gone, and his ghost is fading.”
“That’s—”
“But what about you?”
I took a step back. “What about me?”
He spread his fingers out across the desktop. “Your father. He’s bone and flesh. Magic, still. Again. Somehow.”
“I haven’t heard from him. I don’t know where he is.” The office felt smaller. Like the walls were closing in.
Ox’s eyes widened slightly. “I know that. That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then maybe get to your fucking point, Ox.”
“How did you manage? Before me.”
“Fuck you,” I said hoarsely.
“You said I was your tether.”
“You are.”
“And you said that there hadn’t been one for a long time before me.”
“Ox. Don’t.”
“How did you keep your mind?” he asked gently. “How did you keep yourself from giving in to your animal?”
A wooden raven, but he didn’t fucking need to know that. No one did. It was mine. It was for me. I survived when everyone else had left me behind, and no one could take that from me. Not even Ox. He didn’t need to know there’d been days I’d held on to it so tightly, it’d cut into my flesh, blood dripping down my arms. “Do you trust me?” I asked him through gritted teeth.
“Yes,” he said in that calm voice that was driving me up the fucking wall. “Almost more than anyone.”
“Then you need to trust me when I say to back off. That’s not open for discussion.”
He watched me.
I struggled not to fidget.
Eventually he nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
He shrugged. “Okay. Mark thinks Michelle knows more than what she’s saying.”
I struggled to keep up with the conversational whiplash. “I don’t—I thought that much was obvious. She’s playing games. It’s political. She still doesn’t know what to make of you. She doesn’t like what she doesn’t understand.”
“Does anybody?”
“I don’t understand you, but I like you just fine.”
“She wants Joe.”
And that didn’t sit right. “What did she say after you kicked us out of here?”
“Same old, same old. That she’s supposed to be temporary. That Joe needs to assume his rightful place. That the wolves are getting restless. They need him, she says. Everyone needs him to be who he’s supposed to be.”
“And Joe?”
Ox grinned, and I was reminded of the first time I’d met him when his daddy had brought him to the garage and I’d bent down to eye level, asking him if he’d wanted a pop from the machine. The smile he gave then was almost the same as the one now. He was pleased. “Appealed to her ego. Told her he thought she was doing a fine job and that he’d step in when he thought it was time.”
“And that worked?”
“Alphas need constant validation, apparently. Though she didn’t need much convincing.”
“Yeah. I can see that. You’re all a bunch of needy bitches.”
“Fuck off, Gordo.”
“You’re doing a good job, though.”
“Thank you. It’s nice of you to—oh, you asshole.”
I laughed at him. It felt good. It usually did when he was near. Joe might have been the Alpha I turned to, but Ox was the tether that kept me whole.
“She’s sending him again,” Ox said finally.
“Pappas.”
“For the girl.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
He was looking at me, but he wasn’t seeing me. “Is it? Because I wonder.”
“Ask him, then. When he gets here.”
“He’ll tell me what he thinks I want to hear. What Michelle will tell him to say.”
I smiled. “Then find a way to make him break.”
good idea/tick tick tick
THE GIRL said “Alpha” and “please” and held out her hands.
She grew agitated at the sight of me.
Other times she cried, arms wrapped around herself, rocking back and forth.
Elizabeth looked pained, brushing her hands through the girl’s hair. She would whisper little things and sing songs that caused my heart to ache.
Joe told the humans to stay away from her. He didn’t want to take the chance of the Omega lashing out.
No one argued. She made them uneasy, the way her empty eyes stared straight ahead, only coming to life when Joe or Ox came in the room.
Ox tried to bring her back. Pull her away from the madness. For a brief moment, I thought it worked.
His eyes bled, a low rumble in his throat.
Her eyes cleared, and she blinked slow and sure like the fog was burning away and she—
Her eyes turned violet. She cowered away from him, backing herself into a corner, even as she reached toward him, claws sliding out from the tips of her fingers, oily and black.
“Alpha,” she babbled. “Alpha, Alpha, Alpha.”
I DIDN’T stay at the house most nights. I had my own little home. My own space. It’d once been Marty’s, and then Marty and me. Now it was just mine. It wasn’t anything grand, but I’d missed it almost as much as I’d missed Ox when we’d been gone. The first time I’d stepped inside after returning to Green Creek, my knees had felt weak and I’d slumped against the door.
It was in a quiet neighborhood at the end of a street, set farther back than the other houses. It was made of brick, so the wolves could huff and puff all they wanted. A maple tree grew in the front yard with as many leaves on the ground as were in its limbs. Bright flowers bloomed in the spring, golds and blues and reds and pinks. A small deck attached to the back, big enough for a chair or two. Some nights I’d sit there, feet propped up on the railing, a cold beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other as the sun set.
There were two bedrooms. One had always been mine. The other was Marty’s, now an office. There was a kitchen with old appliances and a bathroom with a medicine cabinet made of wood. The floor was carpeted, and it needed to be replaced soon, some of the edges frayed and worn.
The roof was new. Ox and the guys had helped.
The Bennett house belonged to the pack. But this house was mine.
Sometimes when I came home, I’d put the keys in the bowl on the kitchen counter and I’d stand there, listening as the house creaked and settled around me. I’d remember Marty moving in the kitchen, telling me that all a man needed was a few ingredients and he’d have a feast. More often than not it was a TV dinner nuked in the microwave. He’d been married once, he’d told me, but it hadn’t stuck. “We both wanted different things,” he’d said.
“Like what?”
“She wanted me to sell the garage. I wanted her to fuck off.”
He laughed every time he said it. It would always devolve into a smoker’s cough, wet and sticky, his face red as he slapped his knee.
He wasn’t magic.
He wasn’t a wolf.
He wasn’t pack.
He was a human man who smoked too much and cursed with every other word.
His death had hurt.
I thought I’d seen Mark at the funeral, standing at the fringes of the surprisingly sizable crowd. But when I’d pushed my way through the well-wishers, he was gone, if he’d been there at all. I’d told myself I was projecting.
After all, the wolves were gone.
A FEW days after the Omega came from the trees, I opened the door to my little house. My neck was stiff and my shoulders ached. It’d been a long day, and I wasn’t as young as I’d once been. The work took a toll on my body. I had a bottle of old pain pills in the drawer of the nightstand next to my bed, but they always made me feel muddled and slow. They were probably expired anyway.
A TV dinner in the freezer called my name. Spicy enchiladas that gave me heartburn. A can of beer left from the twelve-pack. A cigarette to finish it all off. A meal fit for a king. A perfect way to spend a Friday night.
It would have been, anyway, had there not been a knock at the door even before I could make my way down the hall toward the bedroom.
I thought about ignoring it.
Then, through the door, “Don’t even think about it, Gordo.”
I groaned.
I knew that voice. I heard that voice every day.
I’d just said goodbye to that voice a couple of hours before.
I opened the door.
Rico, Chris, and Tanner stood on my front porch.
They’d obviously gone home and cleaned up. Showers and a change of clothes. Rico wore jeans and a shirt that proclaimed him to be a LOVE MACHINE under long-sleeved flannel. Chris had on his old leather jacket that had once belonged to his father. Tanner was wearing a collared button-down shirt untucked over khakis.
And they were all watching me expectantly.
I said, “No, absolutely not,” and tried to slam the door in their faces.
Before I could, they pushed their way inside.
I thought about splitting open the floor beneath their feet and burying them underneath my house.
I didn’t, because it would make a mess I’d have to clean up later.
And also because there’d be questions.
“We’re going out,” Rico announced grandly, as if he were the answer to all my problems.
“Good for you,” I snapped. “Have fun. Now leave. And where the hell do you think you two are going?”
Chris and Tanner were walking down the hall toward the bedrooms. “Don’t worry about us,” Chris called over his shoulder. “Just stand there and continue looking angry.”
“Robbie was right,” Tanner told him. “I never really noticed the murder eyebrows before. Now I can’t stop thinking about them.”
“You better not touch anything!” I shouted after them.
“Yeah, they’re going to touch a lot of things,” Rico told me, patting me on the shoulder as he passed me by on the way to the kitchen. I could do nothing but follow him, muttering death threats under my breath. He opened the fridge, frowning down at the contents. Which, admittedly, wasn’t much.
“I haven’t been to the store in a while,” I muttered.
“This is sad,” he said. “This makes me sad.”
“Well, you could leave. Then you wouldn’t be sad anymore.”
He reached into the fridge and snagged my last beer. He closed the door and popped the top of the can. “No. Couldn’t even do that. Because I’d be thinking about you here and I would still be sad.” He took a long sip.
I stared at him.
He belched.
I stared some more.
He grinned.
I absolutely did not have to hold myself back from punching him in the face. “Why are you here, Rico?”
“Oh! That. Right. I’m glad you asked.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I.”
“No, probably not. Well, at least not at first. But then you will love it.”
“We’re going out,” Chris said, coming into the kitchen.
“And you’re going with us,” Tanner said, right behind him.
“It’s been too long since it’s been just us,” Rico said, and drank more of my beer. “Everything has been all wolves and pack and scary shit coming out of the trees wanting to eat me. And don’t even get me started about the Alphas working our asses into the ground.”
“Why do we have to run?” Chris asked, head tilted back toward the ceiling. “For miles, even. I mean, I get the whole running away from monsters thing, but I already know how to do that.” He patted his trim stomach. “Do you think I asked for this? Maybe I wanted a beer gut.
”
“And don’t forget the other wolves,” Tanner said, arms folded across his chest. “They’re just as bad. They don’t even get sweaty. And they have fangs. And claws. And can jump really high.”
“It’s completely unfair,” Rico agreed. “Which is why we’re not inviting any of them, and we’re going out to drink too much tonight for our ages, and we’ll wake up tomorrow regretting everything.”
No. Absolutely not. “The shop—”
“Ox and Robbie are opening tomorrow,” Tanner said easily.
“I’ve got invoices to—”
“Jessie said she’d handle them,” Chris said. “I invited her to go along with us, but she said, and I quote, ‘I would rather watch my ex-boyfriend and his werewolf mate have sex.’” He frowned. “I think she actually meant that too.”
“I don’t like any of you enough to—”
“You’re full of shit,” Rico said. “Pendejo.”
I groaned. “Can’t I just have one night to myself?”
“No,” they all said.
“Tanner and I put clothes out on your bed,” Chris said. “Go change.”
“Because you can’t be trusted to dress yourself,” Tanner agreed.
“Fuck you.”
“Maybe if Bambi is willing to share,” Rico said, grinning lecherously at me. “Get your ass in gear, Livingstone. Time waits for no man.”
GREEN CREEK had two bars. The Lighthouse was the one everyone went to on Friday nights. Mack’s was the one most people tried to avoid, given that the glasses were dirty and Mack was more than likely to spit in your drink and spout obscenely racist rhetoric while watching the old television mounted on the wall perpetually showing old episodes of Perry Mason.
We went to the Lighthouse.
There was no lighthouse in Green Creek. We weren’t anywhere near the ocean. It was just one of those things that nobody questioned.
The parking lot was full when we pulled up in Tanner’s truck. Loud honky-tonk poured out from the open doorway, along with bright bursts of laughter. People stood outside in groups, smoke curling heavy up toward the night sky.
“Crowded tonight,” Chris said.
“We could just go home,” I pointed out.