Reflected

by Rhiannon Held

  She listened with half her attention to the soft noises of stalking and pursuit that reached her now and then, waiting for the louder burst of activity that would mean the prey was caught and everyone was circling back to divide it with both their alphas.

  Instead, a different sound assaulted her ears. Silver knew the particular note of it, though she couldn’t quite touch the knowledge. It meant someone was calling out for her mate. Tom pulled away from her, eager. Silver sighed. “I’m sure he’s heard it himself, but yes. Go get him. At a moderate pace.”

  Silver stayed with the strident noise, until the pack trotted out of the trees, Tom curving around to join the general group on the opposite side from Felicia. Dare carried a raccoon in his mouth, and he dropped it at her feet. Silver bent, smoothed an unmatted section of its ring-circled tail, then straightened again. That’s all she wanted of it when she was held to this form. Dare tore off a mouthful and then left the kill to John and the rest of the pack as he came to see who was calling.

  The noise finally ceased as Dare switched wild self for tame, but he picked it up anyway, absently wiping blood from the corner of his mouth with the side of his thumb. As he had perhaps predicted, the noise began again. Someone was very determined to speak to him.

  “Alaska,” Dare greeted, and his scent grew surprised. Silver had a sense of the other side of the conversation, but it made her head hurt to listen to people who weren’t there. Dare could tell her about it afterward.

  Frustration flooded Dare’s scent, and his wild self laid its ears flat. He nodded once. “Yes, all right. I’ll come and help. No strings attached.” He snorted. “Yeah, well, next time don’t let it get this far—or happen in the first place.” He didn’t bother with a good-bye.

  Silver slipped to his side, eyebrows raised in question. He gave her a thin smile. “We should discuss this at home. Get Susan in on it. John!” He raised his voice and the beta trotted over and began his shift as Dare spoke to the rest of the pack. “We’ve got to go back early and take care of something, but the rest of you can stay and run. Oh, and Tom. You should come with us.” He said it lightly, as if it was another excuse to keep Tom from exertion, but Silver flicked him a sideways glance. She guessed he actually wanted Tom for something. Interesting.

  The rest of the pack drifted back into the trees, hiding their curiosity better than Felicia, who lingered, perhaps hoping for an invitation of her own. Dare ignored her, and she finally slipped off with the rest.

  When they arrived home, Susan met them at the door with Edmond at her heels, worry clear. “You’re back early. What happened?”

  John kissed her forehead, hand on the side of her neck to reassure, though he knew no more about this business than Silver did, yet. “Dare got a call from Alaska.”

  Susan pulled back to look at them all properly. “Why would any Were be calling during a full moon? I’d have thought they’d be too anxious to be on four feet to bother with long conversations.”

  “For Alaska, I suppose the full’s the only time his pack would be in human long enough for any kind of conversation.” John shrugged, then settled a comfortable arm across his wife’s back. “They do everything backwards like that.”

  Tom laughed and slipped over to prop up a wall at the back, to listen but not join the decision making.

  Dare drew a deep breath and grimaced. Down to business. Silver slipped her hand around his, and he nodded in thanks before he explained. “One of the Alaska pack fathered a child with a human, but they were too busy running around in wolf in the wilderness to even realize it. So now he’s a year old, and they need someone who can act like a normal human to sweet-talk the mother out of custody. They’re worried enough they’re willing to accept my word we won’t try to pull the pack under Roanoke’s authority.” The irony in his tone matched Silver’s own at that thought: as if they wanted to have to deal with all the stubbornly independent troublemakers rather than letting them sort themselves out and band together out of the way.

  “Is that all they want him to do? Just talk?” Death sat down and flicked an ear.

  Silver suspected a similar thought must have occurred to everyone, because wild selves’ ears swiveled to Susan, even though she hadn’t said anything yet. They should have known better. Silver knew Susan was too practical to object based on her own emotions toward her husband and child.

  Edmond was holding on to Susan’s leg, confused, and she petted his head. “If everyone’s expecting that I’m going to demand you let her in on the secret, I’m not stupid. It depends on the person.” She flicked a quick smile over at her husband. “No killing, though.” She held up a hand that she wasn’t done when Dare raised his eyebrows at her. “With modern methods for investigating murders, you’d create more problems than you’d solve. Lady above, give me some credit.”

  Dare nodded once, conditionally accepting a beta’s advice. “Too bad,” Death murmured. Silver gritted her teeth, certain his next dart would strike straight at the core of what was currently making her stomach twist into knots. She would never have cubs, not with the poison in her blood, and this man did not care enough about his to even know he existed.

  “Some prey is too easy,” Death said and stood again, drawing a wisp of shadow with him. “And you haven’t figured out the good part yet.”

  “Actually getting out to meet the pack will probably mean a lot of travel in wolf,” Dare said, tone too careful. Silver shoved away thoughts of cubs to look up at him. Lady damn it, he was right. Unfair once more, but better she support the inevitable in front of others, even others as sympathetic as those gathered here, rather than railing against it. It would turn out the same in the end, but one path would leave her with more authority.

  “I’ll stay here,” she said, even voiced. “Watch over things at home.” Dare kissed the top of her head. In his scent and in the grip of his hand on her neck, she felt a promise that there would be time for her to rail against the unfairness in private before he left. Thank the Lady for understanding mates.

  “And I have a job for you,” Dare told Tom, who had been looking decidedly confused as to why he was here. “Help Silver with anything she needs. I know you have your day job, but—”

  “I can help cover those times,” Susan spoke up. “I mean, I know it’s a status thing, to have a low-ranked assistant rather than needing a high-ranked Were to do everything for you, but—”

  Silver cut Susan off with a growl and crossed her arms, using her good to hold the bad up. “I don’t need that much help. It will be fine.” She’d have protested the need for an assistant at all, but that was another of the inevitabilities she’d decided not to fight. They seemed to be piling up tonight.

  “As a human, you’ve never quite been in the hierarchy anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it,” Dare said with a shrug.

  John coughed. “We could make Felicia earn her keep. She doesn’t have a job.”

  “Alternately, we could put two badgers in a sack and shake them up.” Death dropped his jaw in a canine grin. “One would be in no danger of boredom with that either.”

  Silver gave a little hiccup from swallowing her laugh. It was rude, but she wanted to be helped by Felicia about as much as she wanted to be in the bag with Death’s badgers.

  Dare snorted. “Silver’s going to have to deal with her enough as it is.”

  Silver set her hand on her mate’s elbow. “And you’ll have Alaska to deal with. You should have another with you, for safety and for status.” She looked at her cousin. “Don’t you know some of the Alaskans, from your time as alpha?”

  John shrugged. “For a given value of ‘know.’ I’ve had drinks with a couple. They come down here to stock up on gear sometimes.” He edged closer to his wife, scent turning uneasy. “But we can’t both go. That would leave you without muscle.”

  Susan punched him in the arm. “Except for all the other pack fighters, dumbass. Besides, do you really think Silver and I can’t take care of ourselves?”

  S
ilver laughed at Susan’s reaction, but her cousin did have a partial point. She and Susan could take care of themselves, but visible muscle made things simpler sometimes. “We’ll get Pierce to rearrange his time working so he can glower in the background for any official meetings. With him and the others, we will be fine.” Dare hadn’t voiced his thoughts on the subject, but his muscles relaxed under her fingertips at that.

  Tom bounced on his toes. “And I’ll help!” Silver had to smile, because Tom certainly had the enthusiasm and protective instinct, but not the strength and experience. There was no need to make him feel bad about it, though. He had his value as her assistant.

  “Everyone can help.” Dare smiled at Tom too, then tipped his head meaningfully away. The young man scooped up Edmond and took himself off deeper into the den.

  When he was gone, Dare allowed himself a frown, and concern crept into the undertones of his scent. “It’s not a physical attack that I’m worried about, anyway. There’s going to be no real way to hide from all the sub-packs the fact that I’m going to be out of communication range for an extended period. I know the older, more traditional sub-alphas still listen to me better than you, Silver. You might want to keep in regular contact with them, remind them that you’re watching.”

  “Watching like a hawk.” Silver grimaced. She’d definitely do it, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed dealing with those yapping purse dogs. “I’m sure they’d love the opportunity to extend their own sub-territory boundaries.”

  Dare chuckled. “Like you won’t notice because it’s far away. Exactly.” His laugh slipped back into a frown. “And then there’s my daughter. If I’d known I was going to get called away, I never would have confronted her and flushed that prey so early.” He hesitated, scent twisting with the sour taint of old emotional wounds. “Do you think she really would go back to Spain…?”

  Silver clasped her mate’s hand, firmly. “No. She made her choice to stay with you. Right now, she’s a child looking for her adult place in the pack. She’s being a little sulky, that’s all.”

  Dare jerked a nod and then his attention sharpened, apparently with a new thought. “Speaking of Spain—you’ll probably want keep track of any new Were who show up in outlying packs while we’re away. My absence would make an excellent opportunity for Madrid to slip someone in to gather information.”

  John raised his eyebrows. “It’s been three years, Dare. That’s an awfully long time for him to be plotting revenge for you humiliating him, without doing anything about it.”

  Silver rather agreed with her cousin about the length of time, but she also trusted Dare’s judgment, so she stayed silent, searching her mate’s face for hints of his reasons.

  Dare shook his head. “Madrid plays a long game. He gathers information for years before acting on it. I’d estimate he’s due to try for a better source by now. I’d recognize any of his pack he tried to send, so while I’m away would be a perfect time.” He dropped her hand and paced a few steps.

  “Wouldn’t Felicia recognize someone he sent too?” Silver cupped the side of Dare’s jaw, stilling him from further pacing. It would be good to be on their guard, but she thought Dare perhaps underestimated the effect of distance. She had no doubt Madrid would carry a grudge against Dare until Death took his voice, but Madrid was very far away. Revenge at such a distance took more energy than most people had. “I’ll ask her about any strangers. Promise.” She pressed her thumb to her forehead, sealing the promise in the Lady’s name.

  “Fair enough.” Dare kissed her forehead where she had touched it. “I promise not to worry about it, then. Much.” They both laughed and Dare took both of her hands. His squeeze, though it looked equal, felt uneven to her, conveyed in a muffled fashion by her bad hand. “Don’t feel like you have to enforce anything with Felicia until I get back.”

  Silver squeezed back, one-handed. The situation couldn’t be clearer: this was her time to learn to deal with Felicia properly. “We’re alphas of all of Roanoke. I can handle one sulky cub. If she doesn’t choose to go roaming, Susan can help me judge her progress.”

  “Thank you.” Dare gave her a wan smile. “If you can think of some time-consuming task to give her as well, don’t hesitate. When I was that age, half the restlessness came from not having something to focus my energy on.”

  “I can think of plenty of ways to provide her that,” Death said in the voice of a past enemy, the one Susan had killed for them. Silver took his point. Lady ensure that circumstances wouldn’t step in to provide excitement once more.

  * * *

  After the hunt, Felicia went straight back to her room, absently picking pine needles out of the ends of her curls. She wanted to know what was going on, but she wasn’t going to seek out her father and ask him.

  She stopped with her hand on the knob, sniffing. Everyone’s scent was all over the pack house, but her father’s had just reached her more strongly. Lady, was he waiting for her? Lovely. She jerked the door open a little harder than necessary.

  Her father sat at her desk, working on a laptop. She thought it was hers for a moment, since she’d left it there, but a quick scan found it closed and sitting neatly on a flat spot in the piled blankets on her bed.

  He tapped a last few keys and looked up. “John and I have to take care of some things up in Alaska. Our flight leaves pretty early tomorrow morning.”

  Felicia shucked off her shirt and dumped it beside the door. Scent marking her space like that was a little rude when someone was in it, but she hadn’t invited him in. She left her jeans beside the bed before removing the laptop and forming the blankets into a nest. She’d sleep in wolf tonight, she decided. “So this is when you tell me to listen to Silver?”

  “If I have to tell you to listen to your alpha, you have deeper problems,” her father said. He closed his laptop and stood. “Just don’t”—he sighed—“poke at her because you’re angry at me, all right?”

  “I’m not angry at you.” Felicia jerked one blanket off the bed entirely. She actually was a little. He’d smell that. But it wasn’t him so much as being European and not having a pack company job to look forward to and not really knowing what she was doing, searching for a job. And now Tom was talking about friends, and that was her father’s fault. “I don’t have any problems with Silver.”

  “Good.” Her father paused at the door, maybe thinking about saying something else, but he left it at that.

  Felicia bit her lip. She couldn’t let him go with that kind of good-bye. She threw her arms around him for a quick hug. “Watch out for helicopters. They said on TV they hunt wolves that way up there.”

  Her father petted her hair. “I will.”

  6

  Over the next week, Silver didn’t know if Felicia was being particularly effective in her efforts, but she certainly worked hard at something Silver didn’t understand. Susan pronounced herself satisfied with the girl, even impressed with her intensity, so Silver put off their talk. Cowardly, she supposed, but as long as the girl was working on something, why push her harder?

  A distraction arrived at the end of the week, in any case. Portland spoke with Silver over a distance to warn her that she wished to meet with a Roanoke but didn’t mention the reason. Silver didn’t press her, but the omission made her all the more curious when she opened the door to the den that morning and invited Portland and her beta in. Pierce stood just inside, watching. He didn’t have John’s build to hulk even with his wild self dominant, but he watched with an intensity that the visitors couldn’t miss, ears tight on them.

  “Roanoke,” Portland said, and they embraced on the doorstep. Two less familiar alphas might have shaken hands to test each other’s grip, but this was an even deeper offering and testing of trust. Portland was a short woman, black of hair and dusky of skin, and her wild self had a hint of reddish sand mixed among the gray. Silver paid close attention to that wild self to find what Portland was hiding in her tame self’s body language, because she was hiding something.
That was clear enough.

  “My beta, Craig.” Portland motioned the man forward. He was square jawed and stubborn looking, tame and wild self alike.

  “And you without any hackles to raise,” Death said. He came to sniff the newcomers as Silver’s wild self should have, had she still been alive.

  Silver drew a deep, calming breath. Death wasn’t wrong. She did not like Portland’s beta at all. She had to dig mental fingertips into the name to avoid losing it in a rush of anger. Before Dare had bled the worst of the silver from her veins, this man—Craig—had been in favor of killing her. Her own memories of that time were too jumbled to remember that, but Dare had let it slip once to explain his avoidance of the man.

  But as Roanoke, she had to set that aside. She had only words to hold against this man, not actions. Not even words she’d heard herself. So she would be polite but wary.

  Death’s attention lingered on Portland’s wild self, which surprised Silver. She would have expected him to nip and harass Craig’s. Death held his nose close to Portland’s flank for several moments, then sneezed and wandered off. When he opened his mouth, his voice was a wail of a newborn, slicing right through defenses to the pure emotion beneath. Protect. Protect the cub.

  Silver closed her eyes. That child was dead. She’d heard Death use that voice once before. One of Portland’s, lost during shifting. She opened them again and gestured to dismiss Pierce. This was definitely private business, and he knew to wait within easy distance, should she need him. When he was gone, she spoke. “You can’t be very far along. I can hardly smell it.”