Silver backhanded her. The force made Felicia stagger into the wall behind her, and the cat springboarded off her chest, knocking her farther off-balance. She caught herself on the wall and pressed a hand against her cheek, tears springing up purely from the pain, though that was fading quickly enough.
“Leave this den. You may remain in the territory until your father has had a chance to speak to you about your actions, as I’m sure he will. Yes, and I’m perfectly aware of your opinion.” Silver snapped the last to the air at her side and stalked out, leaving Felicia staring in her wake. Where … where could she even go? She’d known this was a possibility, but she supposed she’d never really believed Silver would go that far. Felicia hadn’t even considered what she would do if it Silver kicked her out. The tears from the blow stung her eyes.
She should get her stuff, Felicia told herself sternly, after several more moments of blank staring. Everything in a pack house had an audience, and she couldn’t just stand here. Telling herself that this couldn’t be happening wouldn’t make that true. She pushed off the wall and made it as far as her room, where she shut the door too hard.
She folded to the floor beside her bed and dropped her head against the side. The wood inside the box spring pressed uncomfortably into her forehead. Lady, what had she done? She didn’t want to be kicked out. She’d meant to piss Silver off, not enrage her. Obviously she’d chosen the wrong thing to say for that.
Or maybe she’d accomplished exactly what she needed to. Silver wouldn’t follow her anywhere now. Enrique’s plan was down and bleeding out. Felicia wished it felt more like a success.
Felicia looked around her room from the floor, trying to see the familiar clutter properly. What should she even take? When she’d walked away from the Madrid pack, she’d done it with nothing but what she was wearing. Reminded, she pushed herself to her feet and got Blanca from where she was flopped on the windowsill, watching the sky or possibly checking the upper frame for mildew. She stuffed her at the bottom of her school backpack and added her laptop and some clothes.
And what else? Felicia’s mind felt too foggy to think. She sat down on the bed. Someone knocked on her door and she jumped and clutched her bag. Didn’t she get time to pack? “Yes?” It came out wavering and she cursed herself.
Tom entered, the cat slung casually with its belly along one arm. It looked ridiculously comfortable. “I found her hiding under the couch.” He closed the door carefully behind himself.
“Thanks.” Felicia looked at the pack in her arms so he couldn’t read her face. “I’ll take it back to the shelter when I go.”
“I don’t know. She’s kind of cute.” Tom ruffled the cat’s ears more successfully this time and it rumbled a quiet purr for a few seconds. “You could take her with you where you’re going.” He set the cat on the floor, and it started sniffing along the carpet like it hadn’t covered every square inch when it first arrived. He sat down on the bed beside her. “If you have somewhere to go.”
Felicia tightened her arms over her pack and didn’t answer. It struck her like a first shift—inevitable and unavoidable, but shocking as your whole perspective changed—that she wanted to confide everything to Tom more than anyone. Not just to play chase with him, but pour out her problems and have him listen and nod seriously and then make some dorky joke to cheer her up. She could never remember feeling that way about someone before.
If she told him, would he believe her? She wanted to think that he would, but what about the way she’d danced with Enrique in front of him? Would he decide that she was so into Enrique that she’d chosen to work with him without being blackmailed? Could she make him understand how a shared childhood was so strong, it had made her willfully blind to who Enrique the adult really was until it was too late?
Tom put a hand on her back. “What’s wrong, Felicia? None of this is like you at all, and it all started when that cat of a roamer got here.”
Felicia swallowed against moisture from tears at the back of her throat. “No, it didn’t. It started when you got hurt, and I realized I need to grow up.”
She forced herself to move away from him and stand. She didn’t usually mind how small her room was, because that meant she got it to herself, but with Tom right there when she wanted to throw herself on him, and the cat getting underfoot, she wished now that it was bigger than a closet. “Maybe this will be good for me, getting out on my own. Roaming, like you said I should do.”
“I didn’t mean you should get yourself kicked out of the house to do it.” Tom’s humor came out a little twisted.
Felicia stopped by her desk and surveyed her collection of DVDs stuffed among the books. She didn’t need any of them, but she picked up Sense and Sensibility anyway out of pure nostalgia. How humans managed rank in historical stories always interested her, and this particular one had a Spanish subtitle track she’d turned on whenever she was tired or homesick when she’d first come to stay with her father. She stuffed it into her backpack.
“You’ll want to raid the pantry too,” Tom said from the bed. He tapped his toe, and the cat lashed its tail and launched itself in for the kill. “Even if you’re eating crap from fast-food places all the time, your money disappears like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Good idea.” Felicia looked around. Even if she’d forgotten something, she needed to go now, or she’d blurt something out or start crying. But there was still the cat. She grabbed it, but it squirmed right out of her hands again.
Tom scooped up the cat and it relaxed for him. He lowered it into its box so quickly it didn’t have time to brace its legs before he closed the lid. It thrashed around angrily inside, though. “Here.” It took Felicia a moment to stop focusing on the box and worrying about an escape to notice that the cat wasn’t what he was offering. He extended his hand, a key on the palm. “Take my truck. You can sleep in the back, with the canopy it’s pretty comfortable. Just remember to move it frequently.”
“Tom, no.” Felicia shoved his hand back. He moved with the push easily enough but held his hand right back out again. So like Tom.
“I’m not sure the direction you’re choosing to ‘grow up’ is the right one, but that’s not for me to say. Just figure yourself out, and we’ll be here when you’re done, okay?” He put the key into her unresisting hand and let himself out, leaving with her an unexpected gift, a box full of yowling cat, and the heavy weight of guilt.
15
“Ask her father for help, she says. When I’d just finished hiding her troublemaking from him.” Silver reached the bed and turned. Not nearly enough space in this room to pace. She was keeping her voice down to avoid sharing her rage with the pack, but she had plenty of intensity to shove into the tone. Death watched her, his expression mocking as he listened. She knew she should shut up, her justifications were just amusing him more, but it was all too much at the moment.
“I told you I thought she was smart, but where is that intelligence now? How does she go from tactfully stopping a fight to picking one for no reason? I told her father I’d deal with her, but how am I supposed to deal with that?” Silver pointed out into the den. Death didn’t answer. “She covers her scent, she brings prey home and sets it loose, she all but snarls in the face of her alpha!”
Death finally moved to prowl around her, closer and closer. “And she taunts you with your weaknesses. Why are we backsliding, hm? You know your weaknesses, you’d found a peace with them, a confidence that did not need the approval of whining children.”
Silver released a breath, and with it the intensity of her rage fled. “Go away,” she muttered to Death, for all the good it would do. His words were like tendrils of smoke filling her that she couldn’t unbreathe. She had found peace with the fact that she didn’t see the way the others do. But this time, Felicia had said it. Why was that different? Why did that cut her so deeply?
“She’s not your daughter, Silver. You didn’t bear her, you didn’t raise her.” Death used Silver’s mother’s vo
ice this time, but subtly wrong.
There was a test there. Death wanted her to find something, not take his words at face value. Silver narrowed her eyes at him, as if she could see wisps of remembered words. “My mother never sounded like that. She…” It came to Silver in a rush. “She spoke with love. Not—” Silver had to search for the right word. “Calculation. ‘What have I done to earn the right to call her daughter?’ is the wrong question. Love is offered, not earned.”
Death flicked his ears once. “When an offer is not accepted, that does not make it worthless, ash in the wind.” His usual voice now, soft.
“But it does lend her words an unintended weight.” Silver scraped her hair out of her face. Breaths came more easily as the tightest squeeze of her emotions eased. She examined her actions. She’d gone too far, Felicia’s words coming when she was still raw after hiding her lack of progress from Dare. She could not let disrespect to her position as an alpha go unanswered, but neither was it right to punish any young person too harshly for ill-considered words.
So now she needed to fix it. Silver turned from Death to the door and gathered herself, tucking her bad hand into her pocket and arranging her expression into something an alpha would wear. “I need to work this through with someone more helpful than you listening, I think.” She knew how to be an alpha to adults well enough, but an alpha also left much of the day-to-day disciplining of cubs to their parents. She could use the perspective of someone with cubs of his own.
She went in search of Tom to help her bring Boston within range of her voice, but she ran into Pierce first. He dipped his head in greeting, one carefully casual lock of hair escaping down over his forehead. He clearly wanted something, so Silver stopped and nodded back in acknowledgment.
“Do you want us to make sure that Felicia can’t sneak back in? With the young ones, half the time they get hungry and try to get in just long enough to raid for some food…” Pierce’s tone was perfectly respectful, but Silver could guess by the way he phrased the question how he hoped she’d respond.
“Definitely not.” Silver grimaced. “I’ll be trying to … repair matters with her directly, but until then there’s no reason to put any particular strength of enforcement behind my orders.” She watched his face for his reaction, and when he relaxed she did the same.
Pierce had been beta to John as alpha, years ago, so he should understand the problems of leadership more than some. On impulse, Silver confided in him. “I do know that I overreacted.”
Pierce offered her a sympathetic shrug. “We all have our sore spots. Don’t forget, we’ve all lived with Felicia these past years too. She never does anything by halves. Besides, better the alpha concern herself with petitions than sulking teens.”
“Yes.” Silver pulled her thoughts away from Felicia. She’d tried to keep the business with Portland away from her pack’s attention, but of course by now they’d probably heard the whole story from every other sub-pack Craig had spread it to. “Dealing with that petition will probably be a matter of keeping order while everyone calms down, at this point.”
“That’s optimistic,” Death said and slipped past both of their feet. Apparently the quiet business of reassuring her home pack was too boring for him. No less important for Silver to do, however.
Pierce rubbed his upper arm, gaze going abstracted. “I can understand the emotional reactions, but it still shouldn’t have come to a petition in the first place. It should have stayed between the parents.”
Silver pictured Portland and Craig, the entangling scraps of their former intimacy littering the space between them. Perhaps it was no wonder their problems had exploded outward to all the sub-packs. “If only they’d agreed.”
“If you trust your alpha enough to follow her, you should trust her enough to take her word that she has her emotions under control.” Pierce snorted, perhaps at the situation, perhaps at himself. “Anyway, I’m keeping you. I’ll pass the word to the others about Felicia.”
Silver didn’t voice her thank-you for his support, but when Pierce turned away, she stepped over and squeezed the back of his neck. He paused, smelling reassured, until she took her hand away, then continued on his way.
After finding Tom and gaining her distant connection to Boston, Silver let herself out of the den. The trees and bushes surrounding it were too polite by half, but it gave her a better chance of privacy. The sun was low, but the warmth of the day lingered in the air. Death was waiting for her.
“Roanoke Silver?” Where Dare’s voice had been shredded by the distance, Boston’s came as warm as if she was standing beside him. She could imagine his gentle look of surprise and then a pleased smile, wrinkles at the corners of his eyes creasing the delicious brown of his skin. He’d been Dare’s alpha, when Dare was a young man, and he’d often offered the wisdom of his century of life to both of them. Even more important to her current situation, he had children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren aplenty.
“Boston.” Having gotten this far, Silver abruptly found herself without the right words. “I need—” She hesitated, fearing to sound weak, but her voice knew better than her mind that she didn’t need to fear that with Boston. “A new perspective. This isn’t something I’ve ever dealt with before and I’m reacting too emotionally—”
“Breathe,” Boston said on the note of a laugh, and only then did Silver realize how fast she’d been speaking. “Does this concern the matter of our pregnant sub-alpha?”
“No.” Silver corrected her own answer a moment later. “Only because of what it made me realize. It’s Felicia.” Silver briefly sketched out how Felicia had been acting lately—the scent, the cat, and then her insults. Those, Silver didn’t trust herself to summarize without worsening them, so she repeated them as best she could remember.
“Ah, well. I suppose Dare’s daughter wouldn’t hit her roaming period quietly.” Boston chuckled. “Dare arrived in my pack at the end of his, but we’d all heard about his departure from his birth pack. Heavy objects thrown at several heads, if I recall correctly.”
Silver couldn’t help but laugh. Dare had mentioned before how much of a “little shit” he’d been when young, but he’d never volunteered details. She sobered quickly. “It’s something to do with that roamer, I know it.” She wanted to scrape the ever-escaping wisps of hair out of her face, but her hand was full. “But I can’t get her to tell me what, and it’s no good asking the same question over and over when she’s decided not to answer.”
Boston made a sympathetic noise. “So what did you do, when she said those things?”
“I threw her out of the house.” Silver winced. “Too much, I know. But she was deeply disrespectful to her alpha. That could get an adult thrown out of her pack entirely.”
Boston sighed, making the sound a commiseration. “That’s one of the difficult parts of parenting. Deciding what punishment will teach them, not what they might ‘deserve’ or might make you feel better.”
“If I’m a parent,” Silver said. She paced a step in one direction, then another.
“Do you want to be?”
“Yes.” Silver said it softly, like maybe the breeze could carry it up into the sky as a kind of prayer to the Lady. “Portland has made me realize … well. Yes.” She gritted her teeth. “But what’s done is done. Now I have to figure out what to do next. Removing the punishment entirely would show too much weakness. But if I could soften it … perhaps to what a young Were on the edge of roaming would normally expect.” She laughed raggedly. “If I had enough experience with roamers to know what that was.”
“Grounding, perhaps,” Boston said on a low rumble. “After a night on her own, you could offer to let her return to grounding instead. It is more … a child’s punishment, I suppose you could say. Taking away a child’s access to things she enjoys. Less serious than threatening an adult’s relationship with her pack. She was childish, the punishment can remind her of that. But do what you feel is best.” He paused a beat and then cleared his t
hroat. “While I have you, Roanoke, I thought perhaps we could discuss some of the things people have been saying in my presence about the Portland situation.”
“Good idea.” Silver folded to sit cross-legged on the ground. Death settled himself beside her and she spared her good hand briefly to set the bad on his back. When she flexed her fingers, they scritched into his fur. Best to be comfortable since they’d likely be there for a while.
* * *
For the first few blocks driving away from the pack house, Felicia concentrated on getting all the mirrors adjusted right, but after that her thoughts chased their own tails. If her father had been there, would he have supported Silver, or stopped her from kicking Felicia out? If she’d been similarly disrespectful to him, she didn’t think he’d have kicked her out. When she first moved back from Spain, they’d tangled plenty of times, resulting in various punishments, but nothing like this.
Maybe that was because he was her father, though. Felicia stomped on the accelerator and the pickup’s engine reluctantly growled up to enough speed to beat a yellow light. Maybe if Silver had been her mother, she would have done something different.
Of course, Silver was Lady-damned close to being her stepmother. Whatever she’d said to Tom, so long ago it seemed now, Felicia had to admit that to herself. But a stepmother was still different from a mother unless Silver tried to act that way. She’d always left Felicia to her father when Felicia got in trouble, until now.
And Felicia had no idea if she even wanted Silver to try to act like a mother. Felicia couldn’t—she didn’t know—the more she tried to grapple with the idea, the more it slipped from her grip. She’d lost her real mother so long ago, and she remembered so little—how did she know that Blanca had lost her mother’s scent, rather than Felicia forgetting what that scent was?—that it wasn’t like Silver would crowd out the memories of her. But even if she didn’t remember her, Felicia knew she’d had a mother, a mother who loved her, and she didn’t want Silver changing that. And why did she need someone in the role of mother, anyway? She was practically an adult herself.
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