Which didn’t explain why I said this next. Or maybe it did.
“Raoul? This is probably a crazy thing to ask, but…”
He brushed my hair back. I couldn’t help leaning into the touch. “What?”
“Did you mean to start something, here?” I swallowed. “Or was this a goodbye before the world goes to hell?”
It was quiet. Neither of us moved. Then he sighed and said, “I guess we’ll find out soon.”
He kissed me on the forehead, and silently walked away.
*
The challenge began when dusk fell on the night of the new moon.
We were called together by a silent signal, and everyone but Ilsa and the Elder began gathering around the emptied bonfire pit. Someone had already cleaned it out and raked it flat until all that was left was fine, moon-gray ash, inside which Pandora and Raoul were scraping the boundaries of a circle with two long, straight branches. They moved with perfectly mirrored footsteps, watching each other warily all the while, until they’d both finished their crescents at the point where the other began. With the fighting circle completed, we all stood there nervously and waited.
The first time I’d been here for a new moon, it had been a celebration. This time, everyone was silent, even when Ayu came to meet us with a handful of torches. Everyone somberly took one up. It felt like some ancient pagan ceremony come to life. Lighting the torches turned out to be Brandon’s job, executed in unromantic fashion with a pocket lighter. Once Raoul’s torch caught, he tapped it to mine, and around the circle we went.
Some circle it was, really. We had to do a lot of walking to fill in the gaps. I couldn’t help but imagine how the pack would have looked with all its members. With the flickering torches hollowing out faces and leaving strange shadows, the remaining few of us looked halfway gone already.
Unsettled, I tried to make myself stand still until something happened, but I was anxiously massaging my hip and twitching one foot when the contenders finally showed up.
Ilsa came from the west, dressed in, well, not very much, as it turned out. I guess it made sense, but that sheer white slip made her look even more ghostlike than the rest of us, with her blonde hair billowing loose in the wind. Then the Elder approached from the opposite side. He was fully dressed, but barefoot. I swallowed hard. Wherever he’d gotten his renewed strength from was beyond me. He was still moving too slowly, but his footsteps didn’t look weak. They only seemed deliberate, like he was pacing forward with purpose. Edging back into the hunt.
I just couldn’t imagine he had it in him to win against her.
Raoul, I said unhappily. He didn’t look at me. He only waited until the two approached the circle. He and Pandora were standing at opposite poles, still holding the sticks they’d used to draw the circle. Raoul thumped his into the ground, just once. In eerie sync with Pandora, he took up the words of the ritual.
Ilsa looked the tiniest bit sad. I had the feeling that Pandora’s job should have been Kane’s instead—her real second, lost to her now.
“Raise the charges,” they called together.
The Elder took one step forward, crossing the line. He looked so frail, but when he spoke, his voice was clear.
“I claim that Ilsa has been harming us all. She has drugged us without our knowing. Poisoned me. Coerced us, lied and given us no real choice. And we have lost people to executions that, under better leadership, would not have been necessary.”
Brandon’s shoulders drew in and his face went hard. Ilsa didn’t acknowledge him as she stepped forward.
“And I claim,” she said, calmly pointing one long finger, “that this man has held us back, and has avoided looking for true solutions while claiming we’re simply being weak. I was forced into trickery just to keep us all healthy and safe, and he left us to rot by clinging to past, irrelevant ideals.”
Her face was a study in haughty indignation. The Elder didn’t react at all. My reaction was probably a lot easier to read, because it was pure dismay. Were we really just going to watch them do this? How could we just stand here?
Yet stand there we did, listening to Raoul speak the next line on his own. His eyes were downcast, and the words chilled me.
“Challenge has been called. Do either of you back down from these declarations?”
Neither did. Raoul looked at his father, and I could tell he was pausing too long, hoping for some sort of acknowledgment. The Elder didn’t turn.
It was Pandora who unhappily finished the speech. “Then on the count of ten, face each other in your true forms and begin.”
She thumped her branch down, making the torch in her other hand shiver. One.
Ilsa smiled, slowly, strangely, and shed her dress. While we quietly counted on—three, four—she knelt down and took a shuddering breath. Of course it took her only moments. The transformation looked horribly difficult, and my back twinged in empathy. She bore it with only a single, indeterminate noise, sounding as satisfied as she did pained. When she’d reached that awful in-between shape that looked like neither woman nor wolf but simply monster, she craned her distended neck to face the Elder.
He hadn’t so much as moved.
“Seven,” we all murmured, but the sound was growing ragged. The Elder listened dispassionately, holding his battered body still. Ilsa twitched and growled.
“Eight,” we said. All but Raoul. He fell out of step and said, “Father…”
Finally, the Elder turned to face him. “Your true form,” he told Raoul—nine—“is entirely a matter of choice.”
Then it came.
Ten, Ilsa’s voice snarled in our heads.
She sprang forward, her powerful legs propelling her across the circle and at the Elder. She was still some strange kind of hybrid when she moved, too long and gangly, fighting to become what she wanted, but when she struck, it was a wolf that took him down. The Elder didn’t make a sound, but I saw his eyes when he fell—huge and burning and wide, wide open.
And he smiled.
It made her waver. His hand rose up to seize her neck, so strongly that she choked, even while his blood poured out of the wounds she’d already made. The smell, too strong for any of us to miss, was unavoidably wrong. The poisons in his system had tainted his blood, and it proved his point in a way the challenge alone couldn’t have. This was what Ilsa had done.
I saw Pandora’s eyes widen, stricken. Ayu looked wretched. Brandon was like a statue of himself, completely frozen, and Raoul looked like his own torch had taken him whole. Through the flames dancing before him, I couldn’t see his face at all.
I don’t know where the Elder got the strength, but he pushed up so hard that to my shock, he threw Ilsa back like a ragdoll and vaulted after her, changing in one swift motion—one instant man, the other, wolf. There was almost no transition. He simply was.
I’ve never seen a werewolf who looked like that. He would have been huge, if he weren’t still so thin, with his ribs showing beneath the fur, and his coloring was so shockingly dark he was like a black hole in the landscape. Only his eyes burned out of that void, still afire.
For a second, Ilsa actually looked afraid. Then the Elder moved toward her, and she saw what we all did: his limbs, still wounded, were bleeding freely. The look that passed through her eyes was sheer malice.
She feinted forward, then made a sharp, sudden dart in another direction. When she bit his already wounded shoulder, he howled out in pain and rage. Then the fight truly began.
They were both struggling, either against their wounds or the hole in the sky that was the new moon. It made it harder for both of them to stay wolf. I could see blood on Ilsa’s fur and in the scuffed pawprints the Elder left behind, and the smell was everywhere. My knees were shaking so badly that I would have toppled if Raoul hadn’t caught me, and even he was no comfort at all.
Then the Elder, crouched low like he was faltering at last, gathered his strength again and barreled into Ilsa. It knocked her off balance. When he clawed her side
in the fall, she started to lose her grip on her form.
I was terrified. The Elder was so badly wounded, and Ilsa was fighting herself now, struggling to stay in wolf form. Her limbs were beginning to stretch again, her body elongating, and that gash in her side made her scream as her body tried to pull in two different directions at once. When her head fell back, her face looked mostly human, and so pale it was as though all the blood had already drained away.
The Elder stood over her, panting. I saw his own blood drip down to stain her skin. One drop landed on her mouth. I don’t know what she saw in that moment, but she howled. Then he pulled himself through an agonizing twist and crouched above her in human form again. The blood still ran down his face, making tear-like tracks from his eyes.
“This is my choice,” he said through a tightened throat, the growl of the wolf backing up every word. “And they will never be yours.”
I thought he had her…but maybe those last words, true or not, were a mistake.
Ilsa met his eyes, reached up one hand, and screamed in defiance as she slashed claw-tipped fingers across his throat.
They both collapsed in human form, Ilsa face-down and shuddering, the Elder staring with dead eyes at the hidden moon. We all stood frozen around them for what felt like forever, unable to make a sound.
The next several minutes blurred into confusion.
It was Brandon who finally broke free and ran toward Ilsa, teeth bared. Ayu had to wrestle him down. Pandora, swaying like she was about to collapse, stood over Brandon and Ayu’s fallen torches, either waiting for them to go out or for the flames to swallow her whole.
Raoul turned from it all and started gathering up branches.
He started with the ones he and Pandora had used to draw the fighting circle, and laid them out in the center. Then he added more, from a pile on the far side of the circle I’d apparently ignored until now. I guess they’d known it would have to end in fire. I wanted to help, but I couldn’t move. I was torn between watching Raoul, the Elder, and Ilsa, still prone and barely breathing to prove she was still with us. No one had touched her yet.
I could hear something unsettling and totally foreign, unidentifiable until I turned my head a few degrees more: it was Ayu, still holding Brandon in place, but not looking at him. She was crying.
By the time I got to Raoul’s side, he was already lifting his father’s body—it took no effort at all—and placing it on the makeshift pyre. It really shouldn’t have worked. The wood was damp, there wasn’t enough tinder, there wasn’t anything but a few torches and a man who already looked as if he’d been dead for years. But when Raoul gestured to me, silently pleading, I put my torch to it, and it caught. Pandora staggered up to do the same. Before long, even though there was plenty of light, I couldn’t see straight. My eyesight was blurred with tears.
That was why I missed what started all the shouting.
Raoul had been right about something. Rituals were what kept this pack civilized, kept some sort of order. Now the ritual was over. I couldn’t hear what Raoul was thinking, but I could feel it the instant his cold shell cracked. He was going for Ilsa.
“Raoul,” I gasped. “Wait—”
He didn’t say anything. He walked past Brandon and Ayu, reached down, and roughly heaved Ilsa into his arms. She made a pained noise, but couldn’t fight him back. I lurched forward and grabbed his shoulder. “What are you doing with her?”
When he spun to face me, I didn’t recognize him.
“We don’t need her,” Raoul said. “You’ve guessed where she gets the medicines. We can go ourselves. We should have already. We don’t need—”
I think I surprised everyone, me included, when I slapped him clear across the face.
“I have watched enough people get killed and I am not going to watch you be responsible for another one,” I shouted, over the dull roar of the fire. The smell was stinging my nose and making my head swim. “So help me, I will call challenge against you if you do one single thing to this woman tonight.”
He looked stricken. I guess he literally was, after all. And the noise Ilsa made when he gripped her tighter bothered him too. He hesitated. It was Ayu who leaped up to howl at me, “Are you crazy?”
“You slaughtered a man already!” I screamed back. “You may act like my friend when it suits you, but how can I trust your judgment?”
“We can’t trust her! And she’s going to wake up soon—”
“She doesn’t have to.”
The interruption was muffled and pained, but something sounded creepily certain about it. It was Brandon. Blood and ash stuck to him, smudged across his face, and made him look like something wild and uncontrolled and terrible. Which I suppose was absolutely true.
Especially since he fixed his gaze on Raoul and growled, “Drop her.”
Raoul did.
Ilsa fell to Raoul’s feet with a heavy thud. Ayu staggered back, while Pandora went stark white. Raoul, struck dumb by Brandon’s command, could only stare at what he’d done, with his hands still grasping at empty air.
And Brandon, damn him, started to laugh.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In the aftermath of that whole disaster, I ended up with a lot of time to think about this alpha business. About command and control, who can do it and why. I suspected it came down to one simple thing: embracing your inner selfish bastard.
You didn’t even have to be a werewolf to pull it off, really. I’d watched regular people with enough charisma manage all sorts of manipulative crap. Lacey could walk all over you with a smile on her face, and you’d smile right back. Even Ilsa had that, although she didn’t inspire smiling very often.
Brandon, though…
The Elder must have gotten to him. When he said you could have superiority if you ever believed it, I guess Brandon took it to heart. He’d figured out how to command, and in those first, critical seconds, none of us could say no. He took the opportunity between his teeth, dragged Ilsa to her bed and forced us all to stand to attention while he held court.
Ilsa was waking up, but she couldn’t do much yet. The new moon not only make it harder to change, but it repressed the rest of the werewolf traits, too, and slowed down healing. She was terribly vulnerable. She seemed to know it, too. She squeezed her eyes shut right after opening them again, like if she didn’t have to see us, we couldn’t see her, either. Unfortunately for all of us, that didn’t work.
Brandon bent over her. “Hello,” he said, with a smile that showed too many teeth. “All hail the victor.”
He didn’t mean her.
“What are…” she began. He shook his head and put a finger to her lips.
“You’ve talked enough. My turn.”
Pandora protested, but he only whirled towards her and growled, “Shut up.” She did, unable to stop herself, her eyes ablaze with loathing. Suddenly I understood the other reason she’d sided more with Ilsa than the Elder. Ilsa, at least, couldn’t force her like this.
Ayu put a hand to Pandora’s shoulder, but Pan shook her off. I didn’t think it was possible for Ayu to look that hurt. Raoul stood in the far corner, arms folded, staring at nothing. I was apparently the only one left who was free to say anything, at least until Brandon had reason to target me. Unwilling to give up the advantage just yet, I held my tongue.
“Now. Ilsa,” Brandon said. “We’ve all heard your…testimony…and witnessed your strength, against a frail old man that you’d nearly poisoned to death first. Very impressive.”
She grimaced, but didn’t speak.
“So as much as I’d like to call formal challenge against you, I think it’s only fair to give you a handicap first, too. Seem about right?”
Ilsa glared. “You won’t get away with this.”
“Oh, I think I will.” He picked something up off the floor. “You know, when you had me locked up, you stuck me underground and left me to try to fight my way out. Compared to that…well, you’ve got windows here. Air. A comfy bed. I’m being ni
ce. But you’re not going to change on me again.”
He fixed the thing he was holding around her neck. It was a collar. Not a leash, not tied to anything, just a collar. It was thick leather, and actually locked shut.
“Try to transform,” Brandon said offhandedly, “and that collar will choke you. So don’t get any ideas.”
She reached up. I couldn’t tell if it was in protest, plea, or if she intended to hit him. He had better mobility, though, and evaded her.
“Oh. Before I forget…” He pulled something out of his pocket. It was a small orange bottle. Raoul and I exchanged a look of horror, because we both recognized it. It was the other bottle the Elder saw under Ilsa’s bed, the one that had been missing when I’d gone looking for it. Brandon had found it first.
“Taste of your own medicine,” Brandon said. Before I could stop him, he tipped out a pill and readied to push it into Ilsa’s mouth.
Raoul, as it turned out, was faster than I.
He knocked the bottle out of Brandon’s hand. It skittered across the floor, spraying its contents around the room. Brandon growled and struck back. It gave him just enough space to get his bearings again, and he quickly commanded, “Don’t touch me again.”
Raoul strained forward, looking like he was fighting against invisible hands. Eventually he slumped back.
“That the best you can do?” Brandon spat. “No wonder Kane beat you. Pathetic. Or maybe he really did just scramble your brain after years of ordering you around.” He gave a nasty smile. “Might be worth remembering.”
I finally stepped up, leaving Pan and Ayu at Ilsa’s side. “Commands don’t last forever, you know. You can’t just trap us all for good.”
“Worth an experiment, though, right?”
“You are insane.”
“Maybe. But I’m not the one defending her.”
He pointed at Ilsa, who looked ashen. I swallowed and asked, “What are you going to do to her?”
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