The resigned shrug barely lifted his shoulders. “Does it matter, Noah? We both know what you have to do.”
“Yes, it does matter!” Noah snapped. “Maybe you think you know what I have to do, but nothing’s set in stone.”
“Isn’t it?” Todd held Noah’s gaze. “It ought to be.”
“Damn it, Todd! Give me a reason! Your life is on the line, here.”
“Because something had to change!” Todd lunged forward as he spoke, but the enforcers caught him and held him back. “Can’t you see that? I betrayed the pack. I helped people hurt your mate. And you are giving me chances to talk myself out of it!”
Noah blinked. “What?”
“God, don’t you remember how it used to be? We were fighters. Hunts weren’t chasing rabbits around the mountain. They were through the city, finding the fangs and tearing their throats out.”
“I remember being afraid to walk down to the store after dark, Todd. Or dreading invitations to school football games, because I had to choose. Did I miss out on a date, or did I take the chance that a gang of biters would jump me on the way home? Have you forgotten that?” Noah canted his head.
“No. I haven’t forgotten it. We spent all our time afraid of the dark. I was afraid for myself, afraid for you... I was always afraid.” Todd caught Noah’s gaze and held it. Deep down, he could see that fear remained. “Until Peter started a war. Then I wasn’t afraid anymore.”
The statement caught Noah off guard. Whatever words he’d expected to speak died on his lips as he tried to make sense of them. But they woke Peter out of his quiet misery.
“We were all afraid, then,” he said. “That’s the price of a war.”
Todd shook his head. “No. I knew my role. I knew you had a plan, and you’d fight to the death to keep us safe. We were wolves. We were taking back our territory. For that, I was willing to fight every night. I knew there’d be a day when I didn’t have to anymore.”
“And there was,” Peter said. “I was clear about my goals. Peace was what I wanted all along.”
“Then why did you stop?” Todd cried. “Why did you let the biters stay? You said we had peace, but they were still there, still drinking blood from the people in Tacoma every night.”
Peter gusted a deep, tired sigh. “Because peace isn’t just for us. It’s for everyone. If the biters could live by the rules, there was no reason they couldn’t have a place.”
“There was every reason. Because the fangs were never going to settle for peace. No more than we should have.” Todd closed his eyes. “You called for a truce, and every time the biters acted up, you waved us off. No more fighting. We had to trust that the leader of the leeches would take care of problems. We had to go back to being afraid, with our hands tied, wondering when they’d pick us off. Unless we fought again. Regina understood that. No one knew why you couldn’t.”
It hurt. Noah could see it in Peter’s eyes as the former alpha fell silent.
Noah took up the conversation again. “Regina was working with the biters, Todd. The people you were afraid of.”
“She was working with the ones who were going to win. They’d defied Pirelli, evaded every attempt to stop them. It was only a matter of time before they took over Tacoma. The pack wasn’t going to drive them out. So at least I could be on the winning side.” Todd opened his eyes again so he could meet Noah’s gaze. “Regina said they were making a new order. One where we’d know where we stood. I wanted us to be safe, Noah. You’ve always been like a brother to me.”
Noah’s gut felt like he’d downed a gallon of cold lead. “And my mate?”
“They didn’t care about her. Not until she screwed up Kiplinger’s plan and wouldn’t let it go.” Todd deflated again. “They didn’t tell me everything. Just that she’d be part of the first wave of new wolves. And that meant she’d be safe, too. Then it all spun out of control. I’m sorry, Noah. I didn’t know how to stop it.”
Noah looked away to find Kayla watching him. He expected to find anger in her gaze, the simmering rage he’d seen when she looked at DJ Specter, or the Bristol twins, or Regina herself. Instead, he found complicated layers of sadness, pain, and pity for the man they’d both called friend.
He’d wronged them both, but Kayla had borne the worst of it. Noah raised an eyebrow, then cast a glance toward Todd.
Kayla drew in a deep breath and held it for a long moment. Then she released it again with a shake of her head. Noah’s heart swelled as he brushed the pad of his thumb over her lips. Days ago, she would have ripped Todd to shreds with her own hands. Tonight, she remembered the worth of mercy.
Mercy. Not forgiveness. I don’t think she’ll ever be able to offer him that. Noah turned his eyes back to Todd’s familiar face. I know I won’t.
“By all rights, I should kill you,” he said to the man who had been his best friend. “You helped the enemy. Because of this, two pack members, Kayla Schinn and Derek Anderson, were caused harm that we can’t undo.”
Someone gasped. They hadn’t known about Derek.
“Because of you, our apartment was burned down by vampires, and by the shadow wolves you helped to create. You wanted a war, Todd, and you ought to be its first casualty. Instead, I’m going to give you a chance at life.”
Todd blinked. “What? Why would you do that? It makes you look weak, Noah. You know that.”
“Because we’ve lost enough. One more death won’t change the past. But one life could change the future.” Noah took a deep breath. “I’m not going to let you commit suicide by alpha. Now’s your chance to grow a pair and make up for what you’ve done. You’ll tell us everything you know. Every piece of the ritual, what you heard, what you saw. Who else is involved. Arm us with information, and you’ll earn exile. But decide now.”
He didn’t know why Todd made his choice, whether out of the vestiges of friendship or a renewed instinct for survival. Once, Noah never would have questioned, but that trust had withered on the vine. “I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
Deliberately, Noah reached forward with a furred hand. He dragged his claws over Todd’s face, leaving four ragged gashes from his forehead to the opposite side of his jaw. The enforcers held him still as he cried out, writhed, then drooped into their grasp. Even in wolf form, the mark of the exile would show, and once they saw it, no pack would accept him, no werewolf would help him. Now, he was truly alone.
“Tie him to a tree. We’ll come back for him when our run is over. I need to ask him more questions than I have time for right now.” Noah turned his attention to those gathered, the sad, uncertain faces who looked to him for hope. That was all he had to give them. They didn’t know what threatened them, and he wished he could keep it that way.
Overhead, the silver moon lit the sky. It called to him, as it called to them all. In its glow, he lost his worry for the future. It comforted the sadness of the past. The wolf inside didn’t know regret. It only knew that it wanted to run, to chase, and feel the moonlight on its fur.
He looked to Kayla. “Run with me,” he told her, and her answering smile recalled a night one year ago when two wolves, one white, one gray, raced through the trees, happy, in love, and free.
Power waited inside him. He tapped it, and around him forms shifted, once human, now lupine, always children of the night. Howls rose in the air, full-throated, lusty bays that filled the woods and startled sleepy birds from their chosen perches. The moon reached its zenith.
Together, they ran.
Thirteen
“It’s safe to say my last fatherly chat didn’t help anything. Let’s see if we can’t make this one work out better.”
Kayla chuckled as she and Peter walked up the trail near the pack’s preferred meeting spot. Above them, the first stars winked into the deepening blue as the day’s last light faded away, though a brightening on the eastern horizon threatened to drive those stars back into the arms of the night. The full moon would reign tonight, and she did not easily share the sky with lesser lights.
When Peter had asked her to take a walk before the pack meeting, her stomach had dropped. A year hadn’t given her enough time to forget the last time she had walked away from the place she intended to marry Noah. To do so again seemed like taunting fate and insulting its mother. Until Peter had assured her they would stay within line of sight if she wanted, or certainly within earshot, and he would tell Cameron where they intended to go so the enforcer could find them. All Peter wanted was a moment of quiet conversation.
“It wasn’t your fault last time, Peter. It was Regina. Noah really appreciated his talk with you before everything that happened.” In the month since she’d beaten Regina to death for her betrayal, Kayla had come to the start of a tentative peace with the former alpha’s involvement, or lack thereof.
Peter hadn’t. She wondered if he ever would. “It was my fault, at least in part. I made more than my share of mistakes with Regina. And with everything else, but especially with myself.”
Kayla glanced sideways at him. “How do you mean?”
Peter took a deep breath, held it for a heartbeat, then let it out again. “When I decided to clean up the supernatural side of Tacoma’s streets, I had a lover. You may not have met her, with your times away. Her name was Laura, and she was one of the fiercest, most compassionate people I have ever met.”
The darkness hid much of his face from her, but it couldn’t hide the ache in his voice, or the regret. He had loved her then. Part of him, Kayla thought, always would. “I remember her from when I first lived here. She was kind to me. You two dated?”
“After you’d gone to college. I’d lurked around at the edge of her orbit for years, working up the courage to ask her out. When I did, I was sure she’d turn me down.” He huffed a wry breath. “Instead, she asked what had taken me so long. When she kissed me on her doorstep after our first date, I thought I could fly.”
Kayla smiled into the gloom at the thought. The Peter she’d known had never struck her as a man who would swoon after a first kiss. But then, maybe I don’t know him very well at all. “Sounds like that date went well.”
“It did. Everything went well. Until it didn’t, naturally. In those days, it was hard for anyone not a human to go out at night unaccosted. Two werewolves? It was only a matter of time.”
The pit of her stomach dropped. “She wasn’t killed, was she?”
“No. We were attacked one night. Laura took down two vampires by herself, while I dealt with the other two. But that was when I knew. The status quo couldn’t continue. Someone had to fight for Tacoma, and I was the only one I trusted to do it.”
“What did Laura think of that?”
“She agreed. Packmates got hurt every week. So I took the pack and started a war. There were losses, and I regret all of them. Including my relationship with Laura.”
Kayla walked on as silence descended between them. More words waited for Peter to let them out. She could feel the weight of unspoken history and pain lurking beneath the quiet.
After a few moments, he continued. “She’d agreed with the idea of cleaning up the city, but the reality was more than she could take. Too much violence, too much blood, and all of it on my hands. War changes a man, even one on the homefront. I’d spilled blood. Ordered blood spilled. She’d heard me do it. And I wasn’t the Peter who’d taken her on a picnic anymore. I was Peter the killer, whose hands were covered in blood.”
Tightness cinched around Kayla’s chest. Peter the killer, whose hands were covered in blood. It sounded to her like Kayla, the shadow wolf, whose hands dripped blood and who couldn’t guarantee she wouldn’t spill more. She recognized the tension and self-loathing in Peter’s voice because she’d heard it in her own. “You did what you had to do.”
“I did. But that never makes it easier, does it.” Peter looked over at her. Moonlight reflected in his eyes. “We both know that.”
Kayla nodded once.
“She called me all the names I’d called myself in my mind. Warmonger. Murderer. Said I disgusted her. I tried to tell her I disgusted myself all too many nights, but she didn’t understand. To her, the answer was ‘stop doing it’ but I knew that would make it worse. You can’t start a fight and expect it to finish itself.”
“No. The violence would have gotten worse.” Even Kayla knew that. She’d never considered herself a tactician, but she knew a half-fought battle would degenerate.
Peter inclined his head toward her. “I told her that during our last argument. It got heated. So I asked if we could take a night to cool down. Come back to it fresh. She said that was fine, but I wasn’t welcome to sleep in our bed until we’d worked it out. I went to a friend’s house to crash on the couch. There was no discussion the next night. When I came back, she’d packed her things. I found her key and a note on the table.”
That hurt, even in sympathy. Kayla drew in a sharp breath. It didn’t take much to envision how she might have felt had she returned after the fight with Regina to discover Noah had disappeared. Nor did she need to stretch her imagination to feel the same bleak despair he must have, one that began with the tiny thought that he’d brought it on himself. “Shit.”
“That’s what I felt like, yeah.” He sighed. “There I was, in a half-fought battle with the city in chaos, and the person I’d leaned on was gone without a goodbye. I was indignant. Angry. Right up until the moment I realized, she left that way because she was afraid of me. Peter the Killer scared her. And that was when I made my first mistake. It was so easy to do. I decided that Laura must have been right. I’d made myself a monster, one not deserving of her love or her support. So I isolated myself.”
She tried to glance off, but didn’t do so in time. He caught her gaze and held it so she couldn’t look away. “You had your reasons,” she tried to say.
“There’s always reasons, Kayla. Reasons are cheap and easy to come by. Good reasons are rarer and harder to find. I pushed everyone away. Made the hard choices myself, so the blood stayed on my hands. Bad enough that my pack had to follow my orders. At least, if they did it at my request, they had the comfort of knowing someone they trusted had made the call. Told them it was right. I pulled away so the burden was mine, and no one could say I’d made them carry it.”
I don’t want you involved in this. Go home. Forget you saw me. It’ll be better for you that way. Kayla’s words in the alley behind the dance club echoed through her mind. She’d tried to send Noah away and protect him from the blood, the guilt she’d bring down on him if he stayed with her. She’d had her reasons, too. Without Noah, would I have stopped Regina? Or Miles and Mason? Maybe I would have. But who would I have been when I’d finished?
Peter continued as the thoughts stewed in her mind. “That was how I ended up with Regina. All that isolation, the weight of doing it all myself, left me vulnerable to what she offered me. She was sweet. Kind. Said all the right words about how commendable my goal was. We could bring a new, wonderful era to Tacoma together. Even Seattle would envy us. And I didn’t hear her grab for power. All I heard was that she didn’t think I was a monster, and I didn’t have to be alone.”
“Peter—”
He held up a hand. “The point of this long, sad story isn’t how Regina twisted me around inside until I couldn’t untie the knots she left in my heart. It’s that I’d tied the first of those knots myself. Hating yourself for what you’ve done, or for what has happened to you, doesn’t leave you open to those who would love you instead.”
She looked down at her feet as she walked over the trail. “I might have figured that out. Noah had to fight to get through to me.”
Beside her, Peter stopped walking. One hand caught hers, then the other folded around it. She glanced up, startled at the contact, to find his soulful eyes meeting hers. “Of course he did. He loves you. Kayla, hate is all-consuming. It eats everything it touches, including love. All it leaves in its wake is ashes. Don’t hold onto it.”
Words soured on her tongue until she spit them out. “But what if you a
ren’t worth loving? What if what has happened is so terrible, so dark, that all you have left is ashes?”
“Listen to me.” Even though he’d lost his position as leader, his voice still held a note of command that demanded her attention. “There is always a piece of you that is worth the beauty of another person’s love. You may not be able to see it, but no one is a very good judge of their own worth. Love, and be loved, no matter what you feel has darkened you. Trust the ones who love you to see what you can’t.”
Moonlight swam as tears welled up in her eyes. Peter had cut straight to the heart of the matter, then pierced it with a keen understanding that Kayla knew had cost him too much. “It’s hard to trust anyone now.”
“And most of all, yourself.” Peter squeezed her hand between his. “But don’t you think Noah has earned the chance? He loves you. Even after he’s seen you at your worst, he still wants to marry you. He’s never going to leave you, not after everything you’ve gone through. To me, the question isn’t if you can stand by him in return. It’s if you’ll allow him to stand by you at all. If you’ll let him love you, come Hell or high water.”
A knot of emotion swelled in her throat. “I want to. More than anything, I want to. It’s just... I know it’s not going to get better from here. Not for a while.”
“No. It’s not. And it’s going to be too easy to pull away.” Even as he spoke the words, he pulled her to him to wrap his arms around her. “I think all the other shadow wolves will try to. Derek Anderson still hasn’t come back to the pack, even though I’ve tried to reach out to him. All the rest of them have disappeared with Kiplinger. You, my friend, have the chance to do better.”
She buried her face in his shoulder, willing to hide in the temporary shelter he offered. “I’m always going to worry that I’ll hurt Noah. Or all my other friends. How can I not bring them down?”
A comforting hand stroked over her back. “Because they’ll bring you up instead. It’s their decision to make. It’s not fair to take their choice away.”
Taint of Shadow Page 15