“Absolutely.” I kissed him. “But now it’s time to be among my guests as the Anax. Are you with me for that?”
“Absolutely.” He grinned. “It’slunchtime. Let’s go.”
Chapter Ten
Beingthe Anax meant I could sit at the dining room table with Kyle to eat lunch instead of finding other seating or standing up like a lot of the guests did. That meant I wasn’t circulating through the crowds, which bothered me more than a little because I didn’t know what I might miss. On the other hand, it also meant I was easier for people to find, which had its pluses and minuses.
One of the first pluses was when Justin Ruel joined us. He was more relaxed than I’d seen him in a while, and the first thing he did was take out his phone and show us pictures of baby Chal, named for Chal Torres.
“He’s adorable,” I said in response to the pictures. I didn’t know a whole lot about babies, but a one-year-old with his mother’s reddish-brown hair and Justin’s brown eyes, and dimples surrounding his few-toothed grin, looked pretty adorable to me.
“And trouble.” Justin chuckled. “Walking already. Getting into everything. He’s definitely keeping Tareth and me on our toes, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
“I’m happy for you, old friend.” Tareth had gotten pregnant shortly after the two of them met. I wasn’t fully clear on the timeline, but I was pretty sure the pregnancy happened beforeJustin even told Tareth that he was a werewolf. Chal Torres’s death not long afterward had cast a pall on their relationship. Tareth hadn’t told Justin about the pregnancy until a few months later, just before Christmas, and they’d celebrated the holiday with their wedding. A whirlwind that probably wouldn’t have worked out for most humans, but for a werewolf and a human brought together by fate on a soul level, it seemed to be going pretty well.
“Thanks.” He turned the phone over. “I’m happy for you guys, too. Any chance the two of you are going to add to the junior ranks of the packs?”
“Not a chance in hell,” Kyle said.
His tone was joking. He grinned. But I heard the bitterness underlying the words, and I didn’t know how to react. We’d talked a couple of times about having kids. Either through adoption or with a surrogate. Kyle had said he wouldn’t even mind if I hooked up with a human woman and got her pregnant the old-fashioned way. I didn’t want to go that route, and, as I’d pointed out to Kyle, having a child around a bunch of werewolves wasn’t exactly safe for the kid. Boston North managed it with Michael Damone because the pack was small and Trey’s partner Jeremiah, who was human, took care of Michael around full moon nights. Justin and Tareth managed it by simply keeping Tareth and baby Chal away from the pack most of the time.
Kyle agreed that a child—especially our child, given all the shit that had happened over the past couple of years—probably wouldn’t be safe. He’d stopped talking about it, and satisfied himself with hanging out with Michael Damone. But I knew he resented not being able to parent a child with me, and this pretty much proved it.
That was a problem for another time, though. I smiled at Justin. “Anything’s possible, I guess. Who would have thought you would find out your true mate was a human?”
“Or that yours would be a man.” He smiled back and looked at Kyle. “You’ve been good for him. I hope you know that. Tobias has always been a little too serious. You’ve made sure that sometimes he isn’t.”
“Wiseass are us,” Kyle said.
“That isn’t what I mean.” Justin rolled his eyes. “You give him a reason to be happy, Kyle.”
“Yeah.” Kyle’s expression finally relaxed. “He gives me a reason to be happy, too.”
Justin stood. “I need to check with Merrill about a couple of things. And with Hiram Cunningham. I want to find out how Connor is doing up there in the great Downeast.”
“Yeah.” I would need to talk to Hiram too. The Alpha of Easternmost Pack had taken Connor MacKinnon as one of his wolves after I fired Connor as my guard. I’d hated to do it, but after Connor had betrayed me to Garrett Lawson, sparking Garrett’s challenge for my rank, I could no longer trust him.
“If you find Hiram during this break, please let him know I’d like to speak with him,” I said. “I’ll probably be right where I am. Otherwise, I’ll find him later. It isn’t urgent. I want to check in with all of the newer alphas.”
“Done,” Justin said. He waited a second, until I gave him a short nod, then walked away through the crowd.
“You’re checking in with all the newer alphas?” Kyle picked up one of his pitas, which was filled with something I couldn’t identify, and took a bite.
“Just thought of it,” I admitted. “But I should. I want to make sure they’re all doing okay. I’ve put them in touch with each other, but I should be more proactive about staying in touch with them. Hiram’s only had his rank a year. Hell, it hasn’t even been two years since Justin became Alpha. And Devin Chambers of Erie Pack.” Devin had taken over that pack during the same gathering where we lost Chal Torres. “Now that I think about it, I’d say at this point we have at least a couple dozen alphas who’ve held the rank for two years or less. They supposedly get guidance and support from the alphas whose territories are nearby, but…”
I trailed off. In the absence of anything immediate to think about, my brain was churning out ideas, and they actually made sense. When a new Alpha was instated, the alphas of theneighboring packs were asked to pledge their support. Most of them followed through, though there were occasional personality conflicts that kept the alphas from being willing to communicate with each other.
Aside from that, some alphas had held their rank for decades. Some, for even a century or more. They might not remember what it was like to be new in the rank, and so much had changed in our world and in the world as a whole that those who did remember were operating on assumptions and recollections that were far out of date.
“We use video calls a lot.” I was talking mostly to myself, but since Kyle was there, I could bounce the ideas off him too. “When Chal Torres was killed, even Hezekiah used video conferencing to join our regional gathering to extend his condolences.” Though since it had turned out that Saul Hughes had been acting under Hezekiah’s orders and possibly control when he ordered Zane’s human employee to fire silver bullets during our hunt, I doubted Hezekiah had felt any sympathy or grief whatsoever.
“Come back, Tobias,” Kyle said softly. “Yeah, the asswipe despot dude used video conferencing to pretend to be sad during that gathering.”
“Yeah.” I took a deep breath. Hezekiah was dead. I could still be furious with him for all the harm he had caused, but he was dead. “I use video conferencing to meet with the arkhons and sometimes the alphas. We aren’t using it to its full benefit.”
“What are you plotting?” He sounded amused. “A support group for new alphas?”
“Why not?” My thoughts hadn’t gotten quite that far, but that was where they’d been heading. “We could use the video conferencing program that exists or even create our own. Virtual gathering rooms.” I liked the sound of that. “A virtual support group for newer alphas. A meeting place forallalphas. One for the arkhons. And even for other werewolves. Community groups of some kind.”
