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“George couldn’t get off work,” Adam told the room. George was a police officer with the Pasco PD—it got him out of a lot of meetings. “He’ll be here tonight and I’ll update him.”
Warren glanced at a couple of wolves and they got up, freeing the seats next to Aiden—who rolled his eyes at us.
“I don’t need a protection detail,” said Aiden, pulling his blanket closer around himself. “I don’t think there’s anyone here who wants to kill me.” He didn’t speak particularly loudly, but everyone in the room heard him just fine.
Jesse rolled her eyes back at him. She was better at it. “Just me,” she said in syrupy tones. She continued with sisterly affection as she sat down, “Stupidhead—we have to sit next to you. How else am I going to pass notes back and forth? And why are you wrapped in a blanket?”
“Shh,” said Aiden. “I’ll tell you later.”
Adam had leaned back against the table, legs crossed at the ankles and arms folded. “Anytime you are ready,” he said with faux patience.
“Sure, Dad,” Jesse told him, as Warren and I took our seats and the rest of the pack quieted down. “Go right ahead.”
He grinned at her cheeky response, showing a dimple. Properly, I suppose, he should have enforced discipline. But our pack was very stable at the moment, forced there by the gigantic task of keeping the peace in our territory.
Since I’d made us responsible for the safety of the citizens of the Tri-Cities area, and the fae had taken it a step further and signed a treaty that established the Tri-Cities as a neutral place, we’d been kept hopping, what with minor actors coming in to test our mettle and major offenses like the latest one with the zombies. We were too busy to stoop to squabbles—as a result, our pack was a tightly knit bunch.
I glanced at Auriele and amended my thought. As long as Christy quit sticking her fingers into our business, we were a tightly knit bunch. Today there was a thread of tension in the room that hadn’t been there a few weeks ago—or that I hadn’t noticed a few weeks ago.
Adam took a breath and looked around the room. “I didn’t ask you all here on a whim,” he said. “Yesterday brought us some problems.”
He explained yesterday in a concise and cogent manner—beginning with Underhill’s addition to the landscaping of the backyard, through Anna’s and Dennis’s deaths, and ending with the final act of the jackrabbit hunt that left us with the realization that we had an unknown but magically capable foe, probably an escapee from Underhill.
I noted that he left out my vampire stalker. I wasn’t sure why. I hoped that he wasn’t trying to spare me any attacks by Auriele, who had become very quick to point her finger at me since Christy had resunk her claws into the pack. I didn’t need him to protect me from Auriele; she didn’t worry me. Made me sad, yes; worried, no.
Of course, he’d left out the werewolves, too, so maybe he was just working his way down the list of our new and newly active opponents, one at a time.
“Aiden has some insight as to what we might be facing,” Adam said. “Since our adversary and the door to Underhill appeared on the same evening, we are making a guarded assumption that one has to do with the other. Aiden?”
Aiden stood up and gave the same précis he’d given Adam and me last night.
Darryl stood up when Aiden finished. Adam nodded.
“What makes you certain that Mercy’s jackrabbit and your … smoke demon are the same creature?” Darryl asked. “I’m not doubting you. Just asking for clarification.”
“Her wound smoked,” Aiden said. “I don’t know of any other creature that leaves smoking wounds with only a bite. Not in Underhill, at least.”
Darryl sat down and Honey stood up.
“Are you certain it is something that escaped from Underhill?” Honey asked. “There are a lot of magically gifted others who are not werewolf, vampire, or fae. Could one of them have been attracted by all of the notice being paid to us? Maybe its appearance at the same time as the new door is just a coincidence.”
Downstairs, the doorbell rang.
Jesse said, “Since I’m only here for curiosity’s sake, I’ll go get it.”
“Wait.” Adam held up a hand.
I gave voice to his thought. “It’s five thirty in the morning and someone is ringing the doorbell?”
“Warren,” Adam said. “Would you go down with Mercy and see who it is?”
By traditional accounting, Warren was third in the pack, after Adam and Darryl. As Adam’s mate, I shared his rank—because women didn’t get their own rank—traditionally speaking, anyway.
Our pack had started to … broaden our reality a bit. Pack members could still easily rattle off the ranking of wolves according to tradition—but they treated Honey as if she were ranked in the pack just below Warren, instead of the bottom-of-the-pack ranking where an unmated female would normally be accounted.
Honey blamed me for this—and she might have been right. Sometimes she chafed at it, but more and more she owned that rank. Auriele, as Darryl’s wife, outranked everyone except for Adam, me, and Darryl in that order. But the pack had started treating her as if she were right behind Honey. And it felt like a promotion—even though technically she had dropped in rank.
Adam told me that he was just holding his breath and hoping that it continued. Werewolves are volatile creatures. It is hard for the human to hold the wolf in check—and when it didn’t work … Well, there was only one thing to be done with an out-of-control werewolf. And now that the wolves were outed to the human world, there were no second chances.
Anything that could be done to strengthen the ties that bound the pack together also helped everyone manage better. Adam maintained that by actually paying attention to the real order of dominance, our pack members were better adjusted and not nearly so likely to go off on another member of the pack because their wolf was confused about who was actually dominant.
To that end we all pretended that we didn’t see what was really going on, and only occasionally did it pop up in conversations. We weren’t ignoring it—but we were pretending that nothing had changed.
The Marrok’s son Charles, who treated his own wolf spirit as if it were another sentient being who shared his skin, once told me that wolves were straightforward creatures on the whole, and that most of the mess that was werewolf culture had been brought about by the human halves of the werewolves. I was beginning to see what he meant.
We also pretended—Adam, Darryl, Warren, and I—that Warren was not more dominant than Darryl. Warren was gay—and a lot of our werewolves had grown up in eras in which that was something not tolerated. The survival rate for gay or lesbian werewolves was far lower than for straight werewolves—which wasn’t anything to brag about, either. Warren was the only gay werewolf I knew. The bigoted members of our pack had been bludgeoned (literally and figuratively) into first tolerating Warren and then appreciating him. But none of us was sure if that would hold should Warren become Adam’s second—who would be counted upon to lead the pack should something happen to Adam.
All of that meant that Adam had just picked out the most dangerous werewolf in the pack besides himself to escort me downstairs. Maybe it was only because Warren had been sitting next to me, but I doubted it.
