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BlizzardFall.
Over and over, name after name, page after page. Interspersed with the occasionalSilverPaworFrostFur. Males, females, children.
I’d seen Volumes like it before, but it wasn’t ever easy. There were a few names, but that was the most chilling fact of all. Killing pups not old enough to have acquired war-form was a war crime. But that meant, more often than not, leaving the orphans to fend for themselves. Their fates would likely never be known, but could easily be guessed.
The name I was looking for was towards the end of the list.Birk Mellahon. He had died August 8ththe year before I’d been born, his name mixed with twenty-two other BlizzardFall names that had died on the same day. There were no comments as to how any of them had died. Again: easy to guess.
I flipped backwards. He’d been twenty-six when he’d died, and had made Alpha of BlizzardFall via True Challenge three years earlier, de-throning the existing Alpha. True Challenge meant it had been a bloody fight to the death, and despite what many people might think, they had always been very rare.
It was a desperate measure for a pack that had been unable to get help from other packs for Fifth Law violations. Historically, if wolves werethatdesperate to escape a pack situation, they simply left the pack, agreeing to re-form somewhere else.
Alphas who put that particular bloody crown on their brows had a dark and awful prestige that marked them forever.
Jerron had been two years old during the war, tack on nine months’ gestation, and about four months before Jerron’s conception, Birk put a very bloody crown on his head. My parents’ mating had been registered six weeks after Birk's ruthless rise to power.
It only gave me more questions, and a cold chill in my blood that my biological father had been a “cruor Alpha.” But it explained a lot of other things. Like why nobody had ever questioned the accusations of guns and silver. Or why the war had been so brutal and total.
A check of the matching Collection had nothing in it except Birk's birth registration and the statement of his rise to Alpha by True Challenge, which included the bloody paw print of the previous Alpha and Luna as proof. There was otherwise no trace of my biological father, or any other records. My father—Rodero—had probably tossed all of it onto the burn pile.
Before I put it all away, I checked the Volume for Sterling’s record. Would have been a hoot if he hadn’t been there, but he was: formally recorded. And where his father’s name should have been, there was only a note to request official Archival access.
“Not even in the Collection,” I said dryly, glancing at the big book to my left. Nope, they had put all that dirty laundryrightin the Archives. Ultra super top secret that garbage was.
My biological father had been the most bloody and feared and filthy Alpha of his generation. My adoptive father had been a Machiavellian autocrat. So what did that make me since I was inclined to keep covering it all up?
“Thanks, Dads,” I muttered under my breath.
I put my phone flat on the table and spread out the copies I’d made of my mother’s drawings. No point in ruining the originals.
I separated out all the drawings of the necklace. In her dreams, the necklace appeared on a pedestal or pillar, like a museum exhibit, but in a dark, creepy museum with lots of skulls looking at it. Inmydreams, the necklace was always held in a war-form claw. In both, we weren’t able to get to it. She’d been compelled to gaze at it while assaulted by a terrible need to grab it (but knowing she couldn’t), while I was being forced to choose between the necklace and a puppy.
Her first mention of it was she hadn’t dreamed of it for years and she had been startled and terrified that the dreams had started again. There was a chilling lilt to her words. She didn’t disclose when the dreams had started or when they’d stopped.
There were dreams of when she’d seen Sterling…she described Manhattan (I wassureshe’d never been) with eerie accuracy, right down to the rancid boiled peanut smell and the dangerous rogue wolves that menaced her as she walked through dark, twisting alleys with chess pieces in her pocket. She never saw Sterling in human form, just in lupine or war-form. But she referred to him aswolf-of-silver, and that when he’d shaken his pelt, silver coins had fallen from it. He’d always moved effortlessly through the city, jumping over cracks filled with old blood and “liquid menace” that had sometimes bubbled.
That soundedsuspiciouslylike my dream where Sterling had been the scales.
There were other dreams that had taken place in Alaska, Montana, small random towns, but most dreams happened in some kind of marshy, fetid low-land withlotsof bugs. Huge bugs. Small bugs. Tiny bugs. So many bugs. And hot. So hot and stuffy it was hard to breathe. She’d always tried to run across the muck, desperate to get away from the bugs and creepy-crawlies in the water, and get to… whatever it had been she’d been chasing.
I cut out the drawings, scribbled the date on them, and arranged the pieces on the drafting table.
My phone chirped.
I dropped the scissors.
Sterling
I’m bored. Amuse me.
Winter [Sterling]
What’s on fire that you’re texting me?
Sterling
This IS where I could give you a cheesy line about my heart.
Winter
