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What the ever-loving FUCK, Mom?
“Are you thinking about it?” he asked.
What elsewasthere to think about? My mind was empty and blank at the same time. Had yanked open a closet only to find a single coat hanger and nothing else. “You were there.”
“Who are you angry with?”
“Mymother!” I snapped. “She dropped this bombshell and theonlything she clarified is I’m not a product of rape. Thanks, Mom, leave outeverythingelse.”
He slowly lowered himself to sit next to me. His thigh brushed mine as the mattress edge dipped. “Like what?”
“Are you serious, Searle? Or is that a rhetorical question? Tell me that’s a rhetorical question and you aren’t that politically dense. Because if you’re that politically dense, don’teverlecture me on anything politicaleveragain.”
“I mean, perhaps she didn’t know what else to say beyond the simple facts.”
“Oh, no, no, no, no. Not my mother. She was a Chronicler’s mate. She knew what a Chronicler would want to include. She took the real story to the grave, and the scraps she leftdo not matter because everyone is dead.”
Even I was dead. Technically.
I bounced the back of my skull against the mattress. “Not that I guess it matters. Mom was abducted or ran away. The SilverPaw failed to protect her or their Luna abandoned them. BlizzardFall refused to give her back. War resulted. The SilverPaw and FrostFur hid their shame. One way or the other, the SilverPaw Luna is restored. My father accepts her pregnancy to hide his humiliation and the butchery. Or maybe he did it because hereallydidn’t believe in making pups bear the sins of their parents like he always claimed. Or maybe he did it to protect Jerron. Or all of those things. But none of it matters, becauseeveryone involved is dead. Even me.”
Searle’s eyes shone golden amber as the sunlight from the window struck his irises. “And, to prove I have some political cunning, any such revelation would only harm both her children by shattering their pack. Your mother also made it clear in the card she gave you that she did not know if you would have found your wolf-of-silver before you found the boxes. Meaning, not only did she have relative certainty your brother would still be in SilverPaw, but that she had good reason to suspect you may be as well.”
Searle had been paying attention. My skin prickled with the ghost of a shift that the MoonDark had crushed, leaving a painful ache in my bones. What had Mom expected me to do? Lead a coup and take control of SilverPaw? Not a chance. The elder SilverPaw had been complicit, if not vaguely aware that the BlizzardFall had never committed a single war crime. This wasn’t somesmallprivate family matter.
It explained why my father had moved SilverPaw to Montana after generations in Alaska. Move the pack away from the carcass. FrostFur and SilverPaw had gone their separate ways. It had prevented the two packs from discussing things amongst themselves. It had isolated the packs from any sort of easy, casual communication. It had relocated my mother due to her trauma, or because the last surviving BlizzardFall saw her as their Luna and a SilverPaw captive.
“You really didn’t have any idea.”
“No.” My parents had shared a life, a pack, and a bed—in the literal and Biblical sense—for over ten years. That was a long time for my Mom to be nurturing a knot of hatred and a well of unspeakable grief. Had she hated Birk like Cerys despised Malte? Was Iexactlythe same as Sterling, just in the more boobs and less brawn size?
By the standards of werewolves, Dad had been pretty magnanimous in his “don’t blame pups for their stars” view, so adopting me as his own was an extension of that. But it wasn’t because he’d had any sort of squishy feelings in his chest. It was practical: werewolves needed the genetic base. Werewolves needed to find rare bloodlines that had been lost and bring them back into the books.
Maybe I had been nothing more than a genetic reservoir. An egg reserve of a unique, lost pedigree.
Searle slowly placed his left palm over my kneecap. “Do you know who this Birk was?”
Snapped right back to the present. “No idea. My father kept me away from the current Volume and Collection because they involved recent history. But I think FrostFur thinks I know, or know at least part of it. I can’t say if Jerron knew any of it. Doesn’t matter, I guess, he’s dead. But that explains why Daniel let him go to FrostFur at all. Daniel was afraid that I’d found out and was sniffing around something I shouldn’t be.”
A murmur of agreement.
“I’m sure Daniel would only have a suspicion I’m not Rodero’s biological daughter, if Daniel even suspected that much.” I added. “Dad would not have trustedanyonewith that. But Daniel had to have known my mother wasn’t actually Rodero’s mate. That had to have been somewhat… known. Or strongly suspected.”
“And when you did not hit your milestones, the SilverPaw elite believed it was because you were born under unlucky stars.”
I stared down at the carpet under my legs. “It’s not even that they exterminated BlizzardFall that’s the violation of law. It’s that theylied about it. The cover up is a thousand times worse than the crime.”
Searle kept his palm on my kneecap. “The only thing I can think that this revelation would accomplish would be to plunge us into civil war.”
“Worse,” I said softly. “It would discredit my father, and his population research would be dismissed and shoved aside. The lines between packs would harden as everyone picked a side and then harden again as packs fell in disgrace. Right now it’s delicate and careful, but doable, to make politically challenging matings, but a civil war would…
“It would become impossible,” Searle filled in the blank for me. “For at least several generations.”
A vast chasm of emptiness spread throughout all of me. It pushed out the rage, it pushed out the indignant anger, and the plate-throwinghow dare you, Mom!, and the questions and the grief and even my anguish. I stood in the middle of that flat, empty plane, cracks in every direction, while half-seeing Sterling as scales of flesh and the Mother-Wolf with the blurred facelooming, staring down at me,waiting.
“This is how we die,” I whispered. “Those scrolls are how we all die.”
My mother had decided to burn down the world.
