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Prologue
The sleuth gathered around the ceremonial circle, and Arthur felt sick.
Nothing had been done to prepare the grove for use, not in the way his father had taught him: the bears had not processed from the four quarters as was required; there were neither torches to lead their way nor bonfire to anchor the sacred space. They had hardly known to gather as the clan’s connection was so weak: their Alpha had rushed out of his study, and they had responded to the faint call through the foundering connection. They gathered in darkness as the moon waned; the stink of fear emanated from those present as their Alpha was challenged for dominion over the Osborn sleuth.
His father’s sleuth. His father, the Alpha who battled for his life, for their lives, for Arthur’s life and his right to this clan. He who was the heir presumptive but unable to Change.
He was six years old. His Shift would not come upon him for another year.
The snarls erupting from the challenger were unlike anything Arthur ever heard. He had grown up in peace and near isolation, his family’s daily existence following the age-old ways of their kind: the children stayed with the mothers, and the fathers wandered, challenging each other to build greater numbers of offspring and expand their power…and yet what use was power when the fathers never stayed for long in the homes they built, if they wandered far and wide and were rarely there to play with their cubs? Mummy once tried to explain that the dukedom of Osborn was amongst the most fortunate of sleuths, as they had a fine, big home and were strong in number, but it mattered little if Papa was forced to roam now and then to keep up appearances. Mum said he would prefer to be with them, but Arthur wasn’t convinced this was so.
Would the usurper have hesitated to call for a challenge if the clan’s Beta was here? It was the Beta’s duty to act as the voice of reason, but Papa’s Second was off chasing a mating partner of his own. Arthur knew what mating was, even if the grown-ups didn’t know he did. He knew his parents werevera amorum; that meant they were fated mates, they were special, but it didn’t matter in the fight against this horrible Shifter who came from abroad and saw what his father built and wanted it for his own.
Arthur wanted to toss his accounts, to hide behind his mum’s skirts and cry. But his mother was dead and his father was weak because his heart was in pieces and Arthur was too young to come to his aid.
The bears circled and snapped at each other for ages.Maybe nothing will happen after all, Arthur thought, as one bear leaped forward and the other retreated, back and forth, back and forth. Maybe when one of them got tired, he who was vanquished would bare his throat in obeisance, in surrender, and it would be done. Nobody would die, not even the horrible Shifter.
On some silent signal known only to them, the combatants rose on their hind legs and crashed together with a sound like thunder, the very earth shaking from the impact. They wrestled as Arthur and his little brother Garben sometimes did when they played at being their bear selves, but they never hurt each other, not the way these grown males were. This would not end without blood spilled on the ground.
Arthur looked around the circle. The females were large enough and strong enough to defend them, to support their Alpha, but if they intervened they would shame him. This seemed stupid to Arthur, whose father rolled out of the way of the challenger’s claws at the very last moment. The males of their number in their prime were not present; ranging as far and wide as they did, and as weak as thesentiowas, they would never have been alerted in time to come to their Alpha’s aid. There were only two elder males among them, who were ancient and nearly toothless and, if their daily complaints were anything to go by, would welcome their release to Valhalla.
The females formed a closed rank on the edge of the circle to protect their young. Arthur, his brother, and one of their sleuth-mates, little Charlotte, were concealed as best as could be in their human skins; the few children who could Change were not allowed to do so. Even if they were of an age to Shift on their own, a child’s essential self, their bear Shape, could be held back by their mum. It was a gift from the goddess, a way to keep the young safe.
Safety in the sleuth had been on a razor’s edge since Arthur’s mum’s death and his father’s decline. Papa refused to mate again, refused to dishonor hisvera amorisby taking up with any of the willing females. He vowed to fuel thesentiowith the memory of their fierce love, but his grief was more powerful than his resolve and greater than his once-great strength. Day by day the connection between every member of the sleuth weakened in concert with their Alpha’s vigor.
The combatants dropped down onto their fours. When a bear bunched on his back feet and pushed, it leant even more force to his shoulder to help him strike down his foe; he could then use his front claws to rake at the soft underbelly and position his fangs for the killing strike. Each bear sought to use the strength of the other against his adversary, looking for an opening, a weakness, a drop in the defense, and it came.
His father stumbled. Arthur could see the exhaustion in his eyes, even after so short an engagement; he fell on his belly and was too slow, too slow. The usurper opened his jaws, clamped his teeth on the back of Papa’s neck, and shook and bit and clawed. The sound of the crack of bone, the snap of neck reverberated throughout the grove. Arthur heard Charlotte’s gasp and Ben’s whimper, and he grabbed them by the arm and pulled them away from the edge of the circle as the usurper rose on his back legs and roared, demanding obeisance, demanding honor be shown to him for his triumph.
It was a hollow victory. In the instant of killing the Alpha, Hallbjorn might command the sleuth through brute force, but he did not command its essence: thesentiosnuffed out like a candle in the wind. Unable to challenge in turn but refusing to expose their necks to the usurper, the sleuth scattered, the four paths leading out of the circle dividing their escape. The females grabbed the youngest by the scruffs of their necks; older children were chivvied onto the backs of the adults to hold on for their lives as they fled into the night.
The usurper thrashed about on his hind legs, roaring with rage; Charlotte clung to Ben, both pale and frightened and weeping; Arthur hid his face in the fur of the female on whose back he rode.
In the myths of every species, the Alpha child of a wronged father swore revenge and wreaked it at the appropriate time to take his rightful place.
Arthur made an entirely different vow.
One
Wolves. So bloody dramatic.
Arthur Humphries, Duke of Osborn, leaned against a silk-covered wall in the Viscount Montague’s ballroom. He was present under extreme duress, thanks to a strongly worded missive from his cousin, and now the evening wanted only this: an eruption of romance from Alfred, Duke of Lowell. Rumors had reached even him, in his ambulatory rustication, of His Grace’s abduction of the Honorable Felicity Templeton. Those who knew that Lowell was aversipellis, a Shapeshifter, realized the duke had finally found his fated mate and reeled with the news she washomo plenus—a human. The majority of society were appalled that the peer had run off with an utter nobody rather than snatching up a diamond of the first water or, at the very least, a female of better breeding than Baron Templeton’s only offspring.
When he heard of the scandal surrounding the freshly dubbed “Fallen Felicity,” Arthur had dismissed it as fourth-hand tittle-tattle with no truth in it. On the contrary: it appeared to be much ado about something, and the drama would play out before the entire world.
The lady’s entrance had been sensational enough, with her arrival so late as to challenge fashionability; added to that, her presence devolved into a confrontation with an uncle regarding a dispute about a will. Arthur rubbed his shoulder against the wall as Alfred blathered on about legacies and titles and Odin knew what, but he had to admit to admiration for Lowell’s control. Here, in a mansion full of humans, a wolf dared to show his temper and managed to hold his essential self at bay. Nary a claw edged his fingertips; not a sight of his scruff threatened to unfurl.
Miss Templeton turned to face her uncle and the onlookers; in so doing she gave the duke her back.She must know what he is and yet she shows no fear, Arthur thought. Brave little human. Standing up to loathsome relations as well as holding her own with a powerful Shapeshifter? She would make a fine Alpha female, human or not.
Upon a further outbreak of choler over some title or other, the King’s guard entered without fanfare and laid hands on the lady’s uncle; a smattering of applause accompanied the snarling and shouting of the man as he was forcibly escorted out.
That was that, then. Thrilling in its way, Arthur supposed, and rather more gripping than the current bill at Covent Garden.The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Greenhad nothing on the Alpha Duke of Lowell Hall. Nevertheless, Arthur could not comprehend why George had demanded his attendance when the prince himself was nowhere to be seen. Had the Regent appeared at what even Arthur knew was a middling ball, it would set an alarming precedent.
Arthur’s presence was sensational in its own right, enough to send the matchmaking mamas into the boughs. No duke of the realm was safe from those trading on the Marriage Mart, not even when the holder of such an august title was as large and rough around the edges as himself. His attire was not in the first stare, as his love of tailors was nonexistent; he could not say how old his coat was nor his trousers, only that they had taken as many a turn around a ballroom as he.Turnwas overstating the matter: more like held up as many a wall.
A mama determined upon a coronet for her offspring would discount his costume as a rectifiable deficiency, but only the hardiest of matchmakers would overlook his idiosyncratic coiffure. His hair was styled after Brummell’s Brutus but was infinitely richer in density and perfectly complemented his meticulously tended sideburns. A dollop ofpomade de nerole—its bitter orange scent a familiar comfort—kept his unruly curls in control.
It was a pity a beard was so far out of fashion that even Arthur was clean-shaven, and yet he often toyed with the idea of cultivating the appearance of a Hussar. Had he been a second son—and a human, Freya forbid—he would have leapt at a commission, at the chance to live off the King’s shilling, released from the albatross of his title, a woman in every port…no, that was the Navy. The Navy then, sailing the high seas, at the mercy of the elements, free of the land and his ties to it, of the responsibilities that loomed in his consciousness, that he denied, even though doing so left him so, so—
