by TJ Klune
I could feel them.
My pack.
The Omegas.
A violent thrum that made my head ache.
The Alphas were waiting for us at the top of a hill, surrounded by feral wolves who seemed to want to get as close to Ox as they could. They were whining and barking in low, coarse tones, their songs running through us like a storm.
Behind them were the bodies of more hunters, mouths agape, arms stiff and hands frozen above them, as if they were still trying to ward off wolves, even in death.
I felt no pity for them.
They had brought this on themselves.
Joe looked over all of us, asking a question without making a sound.
“She’s fine,” I said. “With Chris and Tanner. She’ll keep them safe. Elijah. She’s—we have to help them. Jessie. Rico. The town.”
The Alphas tilted their heads back and howled.
In the distance, we heard the sounds of gunfire.
SHE WAS waiting for us in front of the Lighthouse.
Her gun was in her hand, at her side.
She sat in the snow, cross-legged.
The bodies of six Omegas lay at her feet, all with smoking wounds, the silver burning its way through them.
She had pulled the wolf’s head back, letting it rest on her neck.
Her coat was open.
On her torso, attached to a thin Kevlar vest, were long glass cylinders. Eight of them in total. Each had two wires fixed to the top, green and red. The cylinders were packed full of silver ball bearings, just as Chris had said. Between her Kevlar and the cylinders were small bricks of what looked like black putty.
Behind her, the Lighthouse stood darkened.
Rico and Jessie must have heard her coming and turned out the lights. Hopefully they were keeping everyone down on the floor and quiet. I was about to look away when Rico peered out the window, eyes wide. He saw us approaching and disappeared. Christ, I needed to keep them safe.
Elijah slowly rose at our approach. The moon caused her shadow to stretch out grotesquely onto the Lighthouse.
She wasn’t scared.
Her hands did not shake.
She smiled.
She said, “Alphas. Monsters. Beasts. A blight on the skin of the world.” She spat onto the bodies of the Omegas at her feet. “Paul the Apostle gave warning. He pleaded with his elders to keep watch over the Lord’s blood-soaked flock. He told them that after his departure, fierce wolves would come among them, not sparing the flock. They did not care, these wolves, about righteousness. About piety. They were devoted only to the rage that called from the moon. And Peter—he knew this too. He told them of false prophets who would rise amongst the people.” She raised her voice. “Just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.” She looked at Ox. “You. You are the false prophet. The false teacher. The abomination. You, who found a way to become an Alpha even before you gave in to the sins of a wolf. Beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing. It will come to scatter the flock. But the Lord is my shepherd, and I shall not fear the wolf.”
“It’s over,” I said. “You’re outnumbered, Elijah. Your people are dead.”
Her smile widened. “A necessary sacrifice which proves everything I’ve said. Everything I’ve believed. This town has a curse upon it. The land has been poisoned. We came here once, hoping to cleanse the earth so that it could heal, free from the chains of the beast. My God walked with me that day, steadying my aim.” She tilted her head toward the sky. “Especially when it came to the smaller ones. The little wolves. They… tried to run from me. I was a shining light in the darkness, and they could not escape.”
“They were just kids,” I said hoarsely as the wolves growled around me, all of us blue and blue and blue.
“Little wolves grow into big wolves,” she said. “And big wolves know nothing but the taste for flesh and blood. They were already lost the moment they took a breath in this world. Either they must be put down, or their spirit broken until they become nothing but a pet.” She glanced at the timber wolf, who flinched and tried to crowd closer to Carter. “But even then they disappoint you.”
Mark took a step forward, growling dangerously.
Elijah didn’t recoil. If anything, that made her angry. “But we couldn’t take them all. I watched as my family fell around me. I saw their skin tear. I heard their screams. I was a child, but I saw it all from the trees.” A tear fell from her eye and onto the knotted tissue of the scar on her face. “My family. Aunts and uncles. Cousins. People who believed such as I did. The wolves didn’t know I was there. The blood was too thick in the air for them to notice me. My father, he… lost his way, after that. He didn’t understand why God had forsaken him. Why he had abandoned us when we needed him most. He couldn’t see what I could see. He didn’t know what I knew. We hadn’t been abandoned. We had been tested. It’s always been about the strength of faith. He is a just God, but he is a demanding God. He needs proof of our convictions. My father had lost sight of that. He spoke of walking away. Of just letting them go. And no matter what I said to him, no matter how much I begged and pleaded with him, he wouldn’t listen to reason. He had fallen from his faith.” She raised her gun and put the barrel to the side of her head. “I told him that I was sorry.” Her voice broke. “That I wished it didn’t have to end like this. But I couldn’t have his discord spread to the others. In the end, he, too, was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, trying to take down the flock one by one.” She put her finger on the trigger. “God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his son. On Moriah. To prove his faith. He took his son to the mountain, bound and gagged, and placed him atop the altar. And just as he was about to show God how much he loved him, an angel came, telling him that God knew just how much Abraham feared him now. A ram appeared, and Abraham was able to sacrifice that instead, and God was appeased.” She put the slightest amount of pressure on the trigger. “I knew that I was being tested, just as Abraham was. I knew what God was asking of me. Because I had faltered. In this place. I had failed. So I went to my father while he slept. And I put my gun to his head, and I put my finger on the trigger, and I waited for the angel to appear, I waited for a sign to tell me that I had proven myself, that I was who God wanted me to be.”
gordo gordo gordo
“Nothing came,” Elijah said. “And I did what I had to. I didn’t cry when I shot my father in the head. I didn’t—I felt peace. I knew that I had done the right thing. What had been asked of me. It was necessary. My father had failed. And I could not. It was… simple, in the end.” She lowered the gun back down to her side. “I buried him under an old oak tree. I carved his initials into the trunk. He would have been proud of me for that. My brother, Daniel, he—he didn’t see it that way. I buried him next to my father.”
“You won’t leave here,” I told her. “This is the end, Elijah.”
She nodded. “I know. I always knew that coming back would be the last thing I ever did. I prepared myself for that, even if I felt my skin crawl at being ordered by one such as Michelle Hughes. Standing in front of her and not filling her with silver was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And she thought we agreed for the sake of protecting the wolves from sickness. From infection. It was never about that. It was finally time to return to this place that had taken so much from me. It was about doing what I was born to do. What I was instructed by God to do.”
“I won’t let you hurt them. I’ll kill you before you can—”
She laughed. “I don’t fear death, Gordo. I will be rewarded after for all that I’ve done. A plague has fallen upon the beasts, and I will stop it before it spreads further. Calling the Omegas here was something I didn’t expect, but in the end, you have done the work for me. You have brought them all to this place, and I will smite every single
one of them. I stand before an Alpha of the Omegas and the boy who would be king. Their deaths will signal the beginning of the end of the wolves, and I—”
Pappas came then. He was quick. I hadn’t even heard him approach. He growled from on top of the Lighthouse, eyes violet and bright in the dark. He leapt from the roof directly toward her. He had the high ground, and I knew this was it. It was finally going to be over—
Except Elijah was an old hunter. Years and years of experience. She had killed dozens—maybe even hundreds—of wolves. She knew them. She knew how they moved. How they hunted.
Divide and conquer.
I had time to wonder if this had been her plan all along. This moment.
She spun on her feet, the skin of the dead wolf hanging off her back flaring around her, kicking up snow as she dropped to her heels. Pappas missed her by inches, crashing into the ground in front of her, sliding in the snow.
He had barely begun to push himself to his feet when Elijah raised her gun and pulled the trigger.
The crack of gunfire echoed in the forest around us. Philip Pappas’s head snapped to the side, an arc of blood in the air as he fell.
He was dead even before he hit the ground.
The wolves started to advance on her.
“Don’t,” she said coldly, but instead of pointing her gun at us, she raised her other hand. In it was a small black rectangular box, her thumb pressed against the top.
“Dead man’s switch,” she said. “Anything happens to me, seven pounds of C-4 explosive will send six hundred silver ball bearings at speeds greater than three hundred miles per hour. Nothing—not humans, not wolves—will survive the blast.”
Ox and Joe shifted almost immediately.
The Omegas whimpered around them.
Ox said, “You will not hurt them. The humans have done nothing wrong. You want the pack? Fine. You have us. But you can’t hurt innocent people. Your fight is not with them. It’s with us.”
Elijah’s eyes narrowed. “Innocent? What does a wolf know of innocence? They have sided with animals. They—”
“We didn’t give them a choice,” Joe said. “We held them captive. All they want is to be free. You’re right. They’re lost. They need to have someone to show them the way.”
She glared at him. “You lie.”
“You spoke of the failings of a father,” Ox said, taking a step toward her. “I know exactly what you meant. I, too, had a father who lost faith. In himself. In my mother. In me.”
Elijah took a step back. “Stop.”
“He told me that I would be nothing. That I was going to get shit all of my life.”
“You don’t know anything—”
“And I believed him. For the longest time, I believed him. Until I found myself a place in this world. We’re not that different. You had your clan. I have my pack. You’re not a wolf, but I know you have felt the bonds between your people. It’s—”
She shook her head furiously. “No. No, no, no—”
“And I’m sorry that it has come to this,” Ox said, taking another step. The raven was agitated. I didn’t know what it was going to do. “But you gave me no choice. I would do anything to keep my family safe. You forced my hand. All we wanted was to be left alone.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said. She brought the gun up and pointed it at Ox’s head.
“Ox,” Joe warned.
Mark bristled at my side.
“I know you’re scared,” Ox said quietly. “And I know you think you have no other choice, but you do. Would your God really ask you to do this? Would he really want you to hurt people who have done nothing?”
He stopped in front of her.
She pressed the barrel of the gun against his forehead.
“We’re not animals, Meredith,” he said quietly.
Her face scrunched up, and incredulously, I thought it had worked. That Ox, crazy, beautiful Ox, had somehow gotten through to her. That he would take the gun from her, that she would back down and this would all be over. Oh, I was going to kill her the moment she let her guard down, but the fact that an Alpha wolf had pierced through the broken fury of the hunter Elijah was nothing short of extraordinary.
And then she laughed.
A chill ran down my spine.
“That was good,” she said. “I’ll give you that. But it wasn’t good enough. Go to hell, Alpha.”
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
I was already moving, but it was too late. The hammer rose and then fell back with an audible snap.
There was the dry click of an empty gun.
“Well, shit,” Elijah said, and then she smashed the gun upside Ox’s skull.
His head jerked to the right.
The wolves howled.
She spun and ran toward the Lighthouse.
She was up the stairs right as I reached Ox.
She hit the door hard.
It splintered around her, and she fell inside the Lighthouse.
“Gordo,” Ox shouted, and the terror in his voice broke my heart. “No!”
I was at the bottom of the stairs when she lifted her head to look back at me. She raised the hand with the dead man’s switch.
“Please,” I breathed.
The raven flew.
She smiled.
And lifted her thumb.
She exploded in a bright flash of fire. I felt a wave of heat, but I was lost to the petals of roses, to the prick of thorns, to the furious storm of an unkindness of ravens. My mother had told me they didn’t love me, they needed me, they would use me, and that the magic in me was a lie.
She had been wrong.
My wolves loved me, and I loved them in return.
I was pack and pack and packpackpack—
BrotherLovePackFriendMateMateMate
A great wall of ice rose in front of us, even as Ox put his hand on my shoulder, as Mark pressed against my side. Through the thick blue sheen, fire roared as the Lighthouse blew apart. The ice began to crack as balls of silver smashed into it, boring through with such force that I thought they’d break out the other side and hurt my pack.
In my head, I heard them all—my pack, the Omegas—and they were pushing against me, pushing and giving me their strength.
And suddenly the roses began to bloom in the ice, the flowers thick and fibrous. The wall burst into vibrant life, as wild and fierce as my Alphas’ eyes. Ravens flew along the vines, grasping them in their talons and pulling them up higher, until the wall in front of us was completely filled with roses. The fire burned behind it, making the garden look as if it was alight.
A single silver ball bearing made its way through the ice. There was a small crack as it came out the other side. It fell into the snow at my feet even as debris from the Lighthouse rained down around us. Wolves climbed on top of me, pressing me down into the snow as they shielded me from flaming debris.
I could barely breathe.
Those people.
All those people.
Rico.
And Jessie.
And it’d been my fault. All my fault.
“No,” Ox whispered in my ear, “no, Gordo, it wasn’t,” and I realized I’d been saying that aloud. “Gordo, you saved us. You need to listen to me. I need you to listen to me.”
gordo gordo gordo
Mark grunted as a heavy piece of something hit his back, but he wouldn’t move. He wouldn’t leave me.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t—
The raven flew again.
The wolves were knocked off me with a furious burst of magic, Joe shouting in surprise, Mark snarling as he hit the ground. I pushed myself to my feet even before they could move. I pressed my hand against the rose ice wall, cursing in anger when I realized I didn’t have a fucking hand anymore, but it didn’t matter. The wall shattered, and I cried out as heavy chunks of ice filled with blooms landed on my head, my shoulders. I pushed through it, needing to get
to Jessie, needing to get to Rico. I remembered when Tanner had brought me a little sandwich while I was buried in grief at the loss of my mother at the hands of my father, and how he’d brought Rico a taquito, a motherfucking taquito, and Rico had told him that was racist, that was racist, and how dare he. I had brought them into this life I had tried so hard to keep them away from, because they were my normal, they were my safety. They were there when everyone had left me behind. And now look at them. Chris and Tanner had been hurt, they’d been tortured because of me, and now Rico was—oh Jesus, Rico was—
The Lighthouse had been leveled to its foundations. Wood burned, hissing when it hit the wet snow. The bar top was gone, and tiny bits of glass shone like stars in the firelight littering the floor.
Elijah was—not much of her remained. The wolf skin had been shredded, and the head was burning. Elijah herself had mostly been destroyed. One of her legs remained. Her arm. I thought I saw what was left of her gun, the iron blackened and smoking.
I stepped over her, choking on smoke, trying to push my way into the Lighthouse, needing to find them, needing to see for myself that they were gone because of me. They were gone, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Except…
There was nothing there.
Even through the smoke, even through the storm that raged in my head, there was nothing there.
Strong hands wrapped around me, pulling me away, away, away.
I fell down into the snow outside the Lighthouse. My eyes burned from the smoke. I coughed roughly, on my hand and knees, head bowed. I struggled to take a deep breath, but my lungs hurt.
Mark knelt before me, once again human. He took my face in his hands and lifted me toward him.
His eyes were violet, but his touch was soft and forgiving. The raven on his throat stood out bright in the moonlight.
“Gone,” he said through gritted teeth. “Already gone. Out. Escaped.”
I didn’t understand. I was exhausted. What remained of my strength was rapidly diminishing. I’d pushed too hard in the end. To save them. My pack.
Mark look frustrated, mouth a thin line, like he couldn’t find the right words.
My heart ached.