by Mark Henwick
“Can I ask, Alpha, what the problem is with other Were? I mean, those who aren’t wolves?” I tried for humble, and I think it almost amused Felix. He didn’t bite my head off, anyway.
“Other Were...” Felix stared into his mug. “I guess other Were don’t like the pack dynamics. They feel it’s claustrophobic. But we don’t have a problem with them, they just don’t mix with us. They keep to their own kind. Skinwalkers, now, they don’t belong anywhere. They can’t be trusted. They don’t mix with their own, and they don’t mix with us, unless they want to use us as cover.”
“Like Noble.” I wasn’t sure that was fair on skinwalkers, to use Noble as an example, but I could see how the Denver pack would have him in mind.
“Like him. I’m not saying Gray’s that bad, but if he really is part of your House and that makes him part of your pack, well, we have a problem.”
Felix paused. I waited him out. I was getting a feel for the way he built a case, and I was sure there was more where this had come from. I was right.
“That’s before we get to the part where Evans started spouting off about the stink of Basilikos all over Gray.”
Shit. Just what Naryn had warned me about.
I forced my attention back to the here and now. Felix could tell that I knew about the Basilikos smell. His eyes narrowed.
“I’ll explain,” I said, “but first, I have a question. There were three of the Boneheads. Wasn’t Evans one of the ones I saw crawling off? What happened to the big gangly guy?”
“I killed him.”
Felix’s face was empty of emotion, but I could feel anger and sorrow behind that mask.
“His name was Peter Young, and he was the only one I thought was worth spit in that group. But Evans had him wound up till he couldn’t think straight. He refused to back down. Refused to back down from me! In the end, all I could do was make an example of him.”
Felix put the mug down and walked over to his sideboard. He poured bourbon into a couple of tumblers and brought them back.
Not my drink and too early in the day, but I wasn’t going to refuse the alpha.
“The other two?”
“I’ve exiled them. There’s shame in that. In some ways exile is worse than fighting your own alpha. Silas and Ursula will tell the pack what’s happened, and the best I can hope for is the shock will bring them all back into line for a while.”
“Where will they go? The exiles.” I was stalling and he knew it, but he answered me.
“If they had a lick of sense, they’d head for Cimarron or Glen Canyon. Sound alphas that might take them in. But Evans will head south and end up with Ute Mountain or Gold Hill.”
Both those names were just across the border into New Mexico, which pricked my interest.
“What’s wrong with those packs?”
“New Mexico outcasts,” he said. “When I say outcasts, it means the psycho head cases running the main New Mexico packs don’t want them, and that tells me they’re seriously bad. If they were in Colorado, I’d have to deal with them.”
He meant kill them, as a pack would do with a rogue on its territory. He didn’t seem to hold the rest of the New Mexico packs in much higher regard.
“New Mexico Were are a problem?”
He just nodded.
“Altau have a couple of messages for you,” I said. “One about New Mexico: Iversen has been seen heading down there.”
He nodded again. He’d been expecting that.
“Naryn also wants me to say that Altau can’t spare the resources for a fight against the Confederation at the moment. He advises to make a deal with them and then use Altau as a balance to keep them in line.”
Felix snorted.
He wasn’t going to be distracted anymore. “What I expected,” he said. “Now, about that Basilikos marque.”
I sipped the bourbon. The whiskey was hot orange in color, but underneath the bite, the taste was almost sweet, with caramel and toffee. And the smell: a little like new leather. Maybe I should be more adventurous in my liquors now that my senses had been sharpened.
“So. Basilikos,” I said. “We’d never have found out where Matlal were holding their toru without inside information.”
Felix would know all about Bow Creek—some of the pack were out there now getting rid of the evidence.
“Gray found one of the Matlal willing to help. It turns out she’s not Basilikos.”
Felix frowned. “Then what the hell is she?”
“A former spy for the Carpathians.”
I’d managed to shock him. There wasn’t going to be a better time. I bowed my head in sort-of wolf submission.
“The price for her help was accepting her into House Farrell.”
He sighed and closed his eyes, leaning his head back on his seat.
The situation wasn’t getting any better. I thought I’d better go for broke.
“I’m in trouble,” I said, and he grunted without humor. I let it all blurt out. “I haven’t had time to learn everything about the Were and Athanate. That means I have to rely on my instincts. They’re normally good, but not for paranormal stuff. Even if they were, I’m not sure there are any right instincts for what I am. When I go to my wolf, and Alex is there, everything’s under control, but that’s not helping my Athanate. The wolf and the Athanate are fighting each other. That sends the Athanate too close to rogue. Skylur’s not around, and the one person left who I think can really help me is Diana, but she’s gone missing down in New Mexico. I need to go find her, but Naryn told me not to go and sent me to you instead to control me through the wolf. I can’t do that. I need you to cover for me while I get Diana back from New Mexico—”
“No!” His head snapped back upright, and all that carefully-packed-away dominance came leaping out. I was suddenly down on the floor, on my knees and shaking like an aspen leaf.
“No, no, no!”
He stood up abruptly to pace, and the den seemed to shrink even more around me. All I could see were his boots in front of me. I couldn’t raise my head, physically couldn’t raise it. My whole claustrophobic world had narrowed down even further: two steps to the left, two steps to the right. Sealed pinewood floor. Plain brown boots. I realized, belatedly, that my reaction up at the cemetery hadn’t just been because Felix had let his dominance out in full force. Alex and me submitting to him in the barn hadn’t been just an act. Handing over dominance was a real, physical process, the same for the Were and the Athanate. I’d handed my puppet strings to Felix and he was jerking them now.
Dammit, I hadn’t signed up for this.
The anger helped clear my mind. I could lift my head.
I ignored the trembling, the feeling in my throat that I wanted to whine, the stomach-turning desire to do anything to stop him from being angry with me.
I got one foot underneath me and started to rise, wobbling with effort.
Hands gripped my arms and lifted me. I panicked. But all he did was place me back in my chair, gently as a precious vase. The feeling of being crushed loosened a little.
Alex had told me how some alphas behaved—the sexual domination over all the female wolves that they enjoyed. He’d said Felix was different.
Is he?
“I apologize.” His voice was even gruffer than usual. “You caught me off guard there.”
His hand tilted my chin up, making me look at him again.
My eyes didn’t burn out.
He looked even more tired—as tired as I felt. The dominance wasn’t entirely gone, but it wasn’t suffocating like it had been.
“It’s not just you and your damned knot of problems. It’s that arrogant, scheming bastard at Haven. I know all about Naryn from when he was Diakon before. I can smell his devious hands all over this.”
“I…” my voice wouldn’t cooperate. Felix picked my tumbler up off the floor and refilled it, giving me time to gather myself again.
“He knows you’ll try and work around his orders. So he’s using me to reinforce
them. He’s right; the bastard knows there’s no way I can let you go to New Mexico. The packs there are not welcoming. You’d be dead in a day, if the Basilikos didn’t get you first.”
He took a swallow of his bourbon before continuing, his voice bitter.
“On top of that, he’s offloaded the problem he can’t deal with. He has no idea what to do about your crusis, so he throws the problem at me. If I succeed in keeping you sane, he’ll say it was his idea. If I fail, well, what can you expect from an animal.”
Anger let the dominance seep out again. I stiffened. I would not cringe.
“I won’t try and avoid the responsibility for you, but I’m not going to have you sitting at Coykuti. That’s only going to cause resentment in the pack. I need something for you to do.”
He went back to pacing, a subliminal growl making the air throb in the den.
“You’re looking to prove that the Adepts have some kind of ritual that would help a Were change. Noble certainly found some rituals that affected the way he changed.” When he said that name, the anger in his voice was like blades running down my flesh.
“Go to the Adepts. You have better contacts with them than any of the pack or Altau. Find out what you can about rituals.” He paused, brooding. “You know Olivia’s likely to be next?”
I nodded. The grip on my tumbler helped hide the tremors in my hand, and I raised it for a sip, concentrating on the fiery taste and not how Felix’s eyes seemed to stab into my head.
“If you can do something for her…” he murmured, looking away thoughtfully. “If you can, that might change the balance. It might. You’d still need to get rid of Gray and this Basilikos-Carpathian spy.”
“I can’t.” The demon in my throat slipped that out while I was distracted. I tried to explain. “I can’t send them away without cause. Athanate law. I’ve accepted them into my House.”
“Renounce the Athanate—”
“I can’t do that any more than you can decide not to be Were.”
“Maybe leaving Denver is the only way, then.”
His power built up again and flowed over me. I could barely keep my head up. It was a victory to stay sitting in the chair.
“I can’t abandon Olivia either,” I said, forcing each word out. “Or Alex.”
“Or Ursula?”
“No,” I whispered.
“I can understand Alexander, of course,” he said. There was pain in his words. I wanted to make that pain stop. I wanted to say that I would turn Ursula away, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I bit my cheek to stop myself from speaking and tasted blood in my mouth.
“I can understand Olivia, if indeed you can offer her something I cannot. Because of Olivia, Ricky is torn. I can understand that, too. But Ursula? She’s doing what I tell her, but I can feel her drifting away, more and more every day.” He spoke quietly, almost softly. “What have you done? How have you seduced her away from me?”
I was panting with effort, sweat beading on my brow. There’d been no words, but I had promised Ursula. A promise that I wouldn’t break.
“I. Won’t. Say.”
It was painful. Painful to remain sitting, painful not to tell him, painful not to throw myself at his feet and ask forgiveness.
The old-fashioned telephone on his desk rang.
For a second he let it ring. I knew the exact moment his attention turned away from me; the gorilla got off my chest.
“What?” he snarled.
He hadn’t been expecting a call, clearly.
“I’ll be outside,” I said, my voice wavering.
I staggered on legs that felt like I’d run a marathon. At the door, I managed to glance back. His brow was furrowed and his fist gripped the phone tightly. He ignored me and I slipped out.
Chapter 15
I didn’t want to eavesdrop on his call. It was polite for me to take myself out of the room.
I could tell myself those lies all afternoon.
The fight had gone out of me.
I made it to the porch and collapsed on the steps like a broken doll.
I was so tired. Not just from struggling with Felix’s dominance, or the constant stress of keeping my Were and Athanate under control. I couldn’t sleep without my personal nightmares exploding out of my head, and hadn’t been able to do better than doze for a week now. I was working purely by being hyped up, and when the adrenaline ran out, so did all my strength.
I’d fought against becoming Athanate before I’d met the Altau. But difficult though that meeting with Skylur had been, it’d given me a glimpse of hope and purpose to my life. The physical advantages, the heightened senses, the sheer possibilities had swept doubts away, even when everything had become so much harder and darker.
And now I was doubting my decision again.
Every turn seemed like a trap, every decision wrong, and more than wrong. Every decision had the potential for fatal consequences, not just for me, but for all those I cared about as well.
Skylur out of contact. Diana missing. Naryn unheeding. Bian mistaken about Jaworski. Things going on that I had no knowledge of, which affected what decisions I could make.
And hanging over all of it, the lowering clouds of Emergence. The whole world could get torn apart in a struggle between paranormals and humanity, Athanate and Were, Basilikos and Panethus, if a single misstep was made.
I was nothing. I had no great power to influence the way Emergence went in any positive direction. Unfortunately, I could sure turn it negative.
I was just a pawn between Skylur and Felix, both so much more powerful than I that I could barely hold myself together in their presence unless they were being kind to me.
Skylur wasn’t around. So the siren call in my head was to go back inside and throw myself at Felix’s feet. Beg for his dominance, beg him on my knees, let his dominance roll over me and take all those decisions away. Give him all my problems and I would be free. And a slave too, of course.
A slave. But if I couldn’t make a decision, then I couldn’t make a wrong decision, could I?
Something whispered in my ear that complete surrender would also be the safe route to take against going rogue. I frowned. Was that right? Struggling to be me was the weakness that the disease of insanity would exploit?
If it was, then mindless obedience would be better than rogue, wouldn’t it?
I wrapped my arms around my knees and dropped my head onto them, a fog of despair welling up inside me.
It’d been a long time since I’d felt this kind of bleakness.
Ops 4-10 had taught me to trust my training and my instincts when there wasn’t time to think my way around a problem. Top had taught me one more important guide I could use: my sense of morals.
But I didn’t have the information and the clear brain I needed to think my way around paranormal problems. Not all the instincts that the army had taught me were the right instincts to deal with Athanate, Were and Adept. And as for my moral compass—well, things seemed right to me now that wouldn’t have back then. How could I trust myself?
Skylur and Naryn thought Diana might still be on a mission.
My instincts said she wasn’t, and Bian agreed with me.
What was I basing it on? That she’d seemed reluctant to go? That I felt she’d be in touch as soon as she could? If not with me, then with Bian. But how could I trust my instincts after knowing her such a short time?
I couldn’t change my mind about Naryn. He was wrong about Diana. I didn’t care that he and Skylur had worked together for hundreds of years. He was a good Diakon, but that didn’t mean he was a good leader.
In the meantime, Felix didn’t want me to go, but he wasn’t my immediate alpha. Could I argue that? Were didn’t like those sort of quibbles.
If I went and brought Diana back, it would be worth it. I’d handle all the fallout.
If I was wrong or I failed in any way, I would make things worse. Hundreds of things could go wrong. Bian would be in more trouble. I might sabotage Diana’s
effort to get Romero back into the Panethus camp. Or New Mexico was full of hostile Were and Basilikos Athanate and I could start an all-out war, causing the discovery of the paranormal and the resultant apocalypse.
I couldn’t move in any direction. It was like being hog-tied.
A familiar engine noise caught my attention and I looked up. David wasn’t here, and there was no sign of the pink Merc, Ursula’s van, or Evans’ truck. The whole ranch felt empty again. Duane and Martha were probably busy with the dead man up on the hill.
I wondered idly if they’d bury him where he fell, or take his body down to the fertilizer factories they ran for just that purpose.
A vehicle came into sight. The engine I’d heard belonged to the Hill Bitch, the monstrous Jeep I’d borrowed from Altau, and Tullah drove it right up to the porch.
She opened the door and leaped out.
What’s the rush? No point in any of it.
She hadn’t gotten that message. “Come on,” she said. She grabbed me by the arm and hauled me to my feet.
“What?”
“No time,” she snapped and started to pull me to the car.
Her eyes were red. She’d been crying.
Problems with her boyfriend, Matt?
More shit I can’t deal with.
I loathed myself as soon as I thought that.
I pulled back and pointed vaguely at the ranch. “Felix,” I said. I couldn’t seem to string a sentence together. Everything was catching up to me, and I couldn’t think. How could I handle everything coming at me, if I couldn’t think? In Ops training, we’d learned techniques for coping with compromised cognitive abilities from torture, sleep deprivation or drugs. Somehow, none of those techniques were working for me.
“Felix is being handled,” Tullah said. “Come on.”
The car door was open and she was pushing me into the passenger seat.
“Got to talk to Felix,” I insisted. “He wants me to go talk to Mary. Rituals. I should be in New Mexico, but I can’t go. Everyone says so.”