Bite Back Box Set 2

by Mark Henwick

  It felt explosive. Not the halfies so much. They were more distracted, more inward focused, as you’d have expected. But their companions pressed against other pack members, full of doubt, wondering if it was all a con. Anger simmered in the night.

  Only another half-hour.

  Beneath that, even without the surface tension, the cacophony of Calls from so many different packs was like nails on a blackboard. It did nothing to help me find that centered zone of confidence about tonight’s ritual.

  And I wasn’t sure that zone existed.

  “Distract me, Yelena.”

  Without turning, I sensed her fangs manifest inches from my throat, and I managed a breathy laugh as my whole body turned into one aching need.

  “Yes, that’d work,” I said hoarsely. “Might freak the halfies out, though.”

  It wasn’t just Yelena. Or Skylur’s directives about my House. Over the last week I’d sensed my Athanate’s growing impatience. I was House Farrell. I needed to be all that implied. I needed to exchange Blood with my House. I needed to get back to Manassah with David and Pia and Yelena for a little bite-fest. Skylur’s restated bans explicitly made my House off-limits to other Athanate, but he’d removed the in-House restrictions.

  “We’ll have to sometime, Boss. Soon.” She put the fangs away, but I knew her need was as great as mine.

  It wasn’t just the Athanate imperative to share Blood with your House.

  Other Athanate sensed her marque and thought that we were already sharing Blood, because her marque was identical to mine. It was our secret, hidden from everyone around us: older Carpathian Athanate could mimic a marque. With a few years’ training, I might be able to change my marque as well. For all the other Athanate groups, this was a nightmare. The marque was one of the foundations of Athanate society. It made distinctions between Houses; it gave definition and identity to Houses. Knowing that we could fake it would make us abominations in the sight of everyone except the Carpathians, and I had no wish to become a refugee in eastern Europe at the moment.

  It didn’t help that, for a majority of Athanate, I was probably still regarded as an abomination anyway, because I was a hybrid.

  I’d held off biting Yelena because I didn’t want to play favorites between the Athanate members of my House in terms of Blood. Or knowledge. Tonight, I’d tell David and Pia about the effects of being Carpathian. We’d all bite each other. My heart leaped at the thought.

  And I’d have to confirm my choice of Diakon.

  “We will. Tonight,” I promised, feeling another tick of anticipation. “So long as you don’t insist I have to go to bed to get my beauty sleep instead.”

  She chuckled. “Good. So, how do you want me to distract you?”

  “Tell me what you were talking about with Vera last night.”

  “She is interested in Carpathian beliefs.”

  “Good is God?”

  Yelena snorted. “You were still awake, then. She…what is the word…condenses? She condenses thousands of years of thought into a phrase. It’s not one we use, but it comes close to Carpathian philosophy.”

  “You mean Carpathian religion?”

  “We don’t like the word religion.” She shifted slightly. “It tastes of politics and human structures.”

  “So, what do you say instead?”

  “Faith is close. Meaning the act of belief, not another word for religion. Vera says what I mean is the exercise of faith.”

  “So the exercise of faith is God?”

  “No.” She shifted again, probably struggling to communicate something that was difficult to say, even in Athanate. “The power of believing, the strength of it, that’s maybe a part of God. Not what you believe exactly, but how strongly you believe it.”

  “But if what you believe in isn’t important, you could have faith in anything. Even Basilikos.”

  “That’s where Vera says God is good. And you understand what’s good through the use of eukori. If we share eukori, I cannot lie to you, I cannot…ah…avoid knowing what would be good for both of us. Eukori between two, we call the Lesser Communion.”

  “Still doesn’t mean that what two people think is good, is really good.”

  “Yes. But a House that shares eukori knows what is good for the House. And a community will know what is good for the community. That eukori we call Greater Communion.”

  “So if everyone…”

  She laughed. “And here in five minutes we reach the question that the Carpathians debate for centuries. If the whole world shares eukori, are we God, do we know the mind of God, or do we know only what we can know of the mind of God?”

  “God!” Well, I’d asked for distraction. “So tonight, when we use eukori to try and focus the ritual, that’s to know a little of the mind of God?”

  “You get above yourself, we say. Think of it more like prayer.”

  A batch of new halfies emerged from the dark tree line and made their way forward cautiously.

  “That looks like the last of them arriving,” Yelena said. “We should go down.”

  “Yeah,” I said with reluctance. “You know, I’m not ready for this. I have no idea what will happen. I lack faith in myself, if you want to put it like that.”

  “You did well last time.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, but I was crazy then.”

  What if craziness was essential? The Adepts told me that belief enabled use of the energy. The energy didn’t care about good and evil, crazy and sane. I only had to look at psychopaths like Noble to see that. What if I’d believed I could change halfies at the last ritual because I was already tipping over into insanity?

  What if a community of Carpathians shared eukori in their Greater Communion? What if what they defined as good was what everyone else knew was evil?

  Enough! Stop this!

  Focus.

  We walked down. The crowd parted, maintaining the zone around me. Eyes looked up and down, never holding mine. Eyes full of curiosity, fear and a desperate hunger.

  The newcomers passed through the welcoming committee and a few were able to pick at the food.

  Then Felix turned and caught my eye. We nodded at each other.

  Time to roll.

  We’d spoken before and he’d accepted how I wanted to try running this ritual. He and the Denver pack began to separate the companions from the halfies. Even after all the preparatory work that Felix had done, it was difficult. The companions had been entrusted with the halfies by their packs. Were instinct made them want to stay, but my instinct told me they were part of the problem. Their doubt was part of what held the halfies back. I needed them away from us.

  As the Denver pack worked on that, I went around and greeted each of the halfies, trying to look and feel confident when I wasn’t.

  Yelena was like a shadow at my back, feeding her eukori through me, allowing me to gauge the state of each halfy.

  With each of them, I shook their hands or hugged them, whatever they seemed comfortable with. I met every pair of eyes, and the half-believing hope in every one of them added a stone to the pile I carried.

  There were all kinds—a cross section of races and sizes, mainly young: most between eighteen and twenty-five. Only about a third of them were female.

  They were scared. More scared than I was. It hung like a mist that trailed around their necks—so insubstantial, and yet so strong, and so heavy.

  The crowd churned.

  Pack. Think of them as a pack.

  The wolf in me wanted them as pack. I had to push that back down. Felix had enough problems without me being accused of stealing werewolves from other packs.

  As those around her pulled back slightly, a girl stumbled to the front. Young, maybe twenty. Short. Frail. The stress had pushed her to the critical state. As parts of her body strained toward wolf and failed, it hurt. She was scratching herself, drawing blood, falling.

  My nose twitched.

  Pasadena!

  I was amazed she’d been let out. But
then, maybe it was a callous test on the part of the LA Were, to let a female halfy go and test whether this ritual was safe.

  “Hold her up,” I said.

  The halfies on either side took her arms.

  I licked the gash on her forehead. I felt the bitter flavor of aniatropics flood my mouth. A trembling eagerness in my jaw.

  I had to distract myself from that. Biting wouldn’t go down well tonight.

  She needed something. Something visual.

  I ran a thumb across the blood and saliva, smeared it across my eyelids and the bridge of my nose, a bar of red, dark and glistening. Copied that on hers. Blinked at the mark across our faces which felt right. Felt part of the ritual, part of this place.

  “There,” I said softly. “See? Sisters. What’s your name?”

  “Paige,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “Walk with me, Paige.”

  Something seemed to catch in the air, like a flame in tinder, spreading out from us. The halfies sighed.

  The girl gritted her teeth and staggered behind me, steadying herself with a hand against me. Trusting me.

  And as the last of the Denver pack and the companions disappeared back into the tree line, I made my way to the final halfy, hunched over and head-down at the end of the group.

  And smelled the guilt coming off him. Now, that was a different emotion.

  The guy was a hand-span shorter than me. His unkempt hair looked as if it might be blond or light brown. He looked about twenty. His body had a solidity to it, a tension. It reminded me of someone.

  I’d frozen, partway into giving him a hug, and he sensed it. I drank in his scent, tilted my head for a better look at him.

  “You okay?”

  He ducked his head and muttered something.

  I lifted his chin.

  Once he realized he’d gotten my full attention and I wasn’t going away, he stood straighter. A feeling of resignation replaced the guilt. But this guy could meet my eyes, where most of the halfies couldn’t.

  “Where you from?” I asked.

  “Vegas.” His voice was quiet, the word bitten off as if he wouldn’t say one more thing than he had to.

  I looked him up and down. His clothes looked as if he’d climbed Falcon’s Bluff from the steep side. Given his emotions, that was probably exactly what had happened. I had a gatecrasher.

  And I knew who he reminded me of.

  “You’re in the right place by complete accident, you know,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Why’d you climb up?”

  “I’m a halfy.”

  “No, I mean everyone else came in the front door. Why’d you come in the back?”

  His shoulders wanted to slump, but he wouldn’t let them. Our conversation was private, but his eyes took in Yelena at my shoulder and fear edged everything else out.

  “No pack.”

  “Ah. So, no invite from Felix. What’s your name?”

  “Lynch.”

  “Well, Lynch, thing is, you’re no half-wolf.”

  He frowned.

  The poor guy looked so confused, I had to take pity on him. Didn’t stop me from laughing.

  “We need to find Nick,” I said over my shoulder. “We have another oddball here.”

  “I’m right here,” Nick said from behind me.

  Damn, he’d crept up on me.

  I turned.

  The bonfires had been lit. The glow shone on half of Nick’s face, leaving the other half in darkness. The single lit eye gleamed. Nick reached across me and pulled Lynch closer. His nostrils flared and his face rippled. I saw a glimpse of cat’s eye. His skin seemed to go tawny, but maybe that was a trick of the light.

  His laugh rumbled deep in his chest.

  “Yes, you better stay close to me, little cat,” he said.

  As he led the dazed were-cougar halfy away, he growled, “Thanks, Boss.”

  What was he thanking me for? Not throwing Lynch’s skinny ass back down the hill? He thought I’d consider that?

  And since when had he called me Boss?

  Maybe Nick had decided he was in. When I’d asked him a month ago, he had been unsure whether he fit into Pack Deauville and House Farrell. Boss sounded like he’d made a commitment.

  More seriously, I had to find out more about Lynch. For him not to know what bit him and to have been abandoned to find his own way sounded like a rogue was operating there. Rita might have some advice, since it seemed she’d had a similar start. Maybe that was the were-cougar way, but if it was, I didn’t like it.

  Meanwhile, I had a ritual to attempt.

  I felt a chill in my belly.

  I’d been in the same state last time. Before the ritual in Carson Park, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do and whether I could do it. It was all supposed to be a scam to delay Amaral, until Olivia had suddenly gotten close to the critical point.

  This time I had a large group of halfies, and it wasn’t like Olivia, who had blindly trusted me. Her last hope before she died. This group—pack—were strangers who’d never met me before tonight, who were all scared, and who were all at different stages.

  What of the ritual only worked for someone who was at the critical point?

  Even if it worked for them, would I have to keep repeating the ritual for the others?

  No time to think about things like that.

  “Make a ring around me. Stand closer,” I said, raising my voice and stealing the Belles’ joke. “I don’t bite. Much.”

  That got some snickering at the back from my team.

  Yelena’s eukori still flowed through me, connecting me to everyone here. There was a solid core of belief—Ursula and Olivia, Nick and Yelena, Ben and the mix of Cimarron, Denver and Cheyenne cubs that had helped me at the last ritual. It was like a beacon in the cold night, beating back the fear, doubt and despair that churned in the halfies.

  I was missing someone: Martha. Not her belief, not her passion, but her quietness and spirituality in the heart of the storm. How much did I need that? Was she the rock that had anchored the ritual?

  I didn’t know, but I guessed I was about to find out.

  The halfies shuffled. Heads kept ducking. Eyes refused to meet mine. Their breath came hard, with a harmonic to it almost like whining. Pack signals that meant help me.

  They didn’t believe in themselves. Their packs didn’t believe in them.

  Behind me, my adopted halfy Paige was keeping herself upright by holding on to me, pressing her face against me, wolf-like. She was probably smearing blood on my shirt, but I’d take that. She believed. Something had passed between us.

  I guessed I needed to channel some Top first, before we got to the ritual. Master Sergeant Gabriel Luther Wells had taken a group of us, half-trained, self-doubting soldiers and transformed us. And he’d started with a speech about believing in ourselves.

  “I can’t change you,” I said. “And I can’t make you change.”

  Heads came up. Fear blooming in the night. That wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

  “It’s not me. It’s not my voice. It’s not this rocky hill.”

  I walked the little circle they’d left me, around and around. I pulled the necklace clear so they could see it, focus on it.

  “It’s not the necklace either.”

  A sigh passed through them.

  “Your ability to change comes from inside you. Everything you can achieve comes from inside you. All we’re doing tonight is helping you find that ability. And the first step on that path is to put aside your doubts and fears.”

  Better.

  It hadn’t magically dispelled their fears, but they were listening, they were focusing. The discordant Call lost a little of its screechiness.

  “Everyone is here to help. That includes each of you, and the person standing next to you. All helping each other,” I said, meeting eyes here and there in the crowd. “Take a moment. Look at the people around you.”

  Heads swiveled and a there were e
ven a few tentative smiles.

  “The people around you are your buddies. They are as important to you as you are to them. Because if you stumble, they will lift you back up; and if they stumble, you will lift them back up.”

  Firelight gleamed in eyes. I had their attention now.

  “Ask their names. Tell them you will lift them back to their feet, as you would for any of your pack. Swear it. Because tonight we are one pack.”

  Whoops. My mouth was dragging me right off the reservation here.

  But damn, if it wasn’t working. The Call didn’t exactly get mellow and harmonic, but the background of tension between packs just went away, as they all self-consciously muttered to each other.

  So much for prepping them.

  Now to remember how I’d done it. Remember how it felt.

  Yeah. How it felt on the brink of going rogue.

  That sounded so like Tara snarking in my mind.

  I could have used some of her snark now. Where was she?

  I have to do this.

  I tried to concentrate.

  Think about achievable goals.

  If I could just reach a dozen of them. A dozen saved. Maybe I could try again tomorrow.

  I opened myself, feeling for the energy.

  But there was no magic. No sensation of sand or flames slipping through me that I knew from Tullah’s lessons on channeling the energy.

  What had Tara said?

  We’re not the flame. We’re the wick.

  Did that mean I didn’t need to feel the energy to use it?

  The necklace under my fingers. Was I sensing the patterns written in it, or was it just the memory of the sensations?

  Did I need the energy? Did I need the necklace?

  The exchanging of names had died down.

  Out of time.

  “Dance, Skinwalker,” I said.

  Nick shed his clothes. Without a moment’s hesitation, Yelena joined him. It rippled through my team. The halfies began undressing uncertainly. One or two, now that we were moving, seemed to lose coordination. Through Yelena’s eukori, I could feel the rising panic as some of those who were furthest gone slipped closer to critical.

  “Help your buddies,” I said quietly.

  The bonfires seemed to suck my words from me and cast them like smoke through the ranks.