AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But the truth was harsh. It wouldn’t be an easy thing to hear.
“There will be more worries up ahead,” Xander told them. “There will be things to fear, things weshouldfear. And we do have enemies. Plenty of them. Strong ones. If we fight them, I can’t even promise you that we’ll win.”
“Bad start, bad start,” Kingston groaned beneath his breath.
“Jesus Christ,” Dylan hissed next to me, “He’s not addressing his troops. He’s giving a fucking eulogy!”
“Be quiet and let him work,” I hissed back at them. “He’ll bring it back around.”
“He’d better,” Kingston grunted.
Dylan shot him a tense look. “If he doesn’t, the pack will walk.”
I scanned the crowd. No one was headed for the exits yet.
He had time.
“For most of my time as your alpha, we’ve been a pack at peace. That’s what we’ve been for decades. If I had my way, we’d stay at peace for centuries yet to come,” Xander said, his voice louder now, deep and clear. “But for the last year, we’ve also been a pack in crisis. We’ve been attacked. We’ve been stolen from. We’ve been threatened, mistreated, abused, and still, we’ve banded together. We’ve fought hard to keep our peace.”
He paused. The pack was silent again. Within that silence, his next words rang out like a gunshot.
“We can’t afford that anymore.”
In the crowd, I watched faces pale. Bodies squirmed with discomfort. Someone—I couldn’t tell who—swore audibly in a whisper heard by a hundred ears.
“I don’t want a war,” Xander went on, keeping their attention focused on him. “I’ve got no hunger for it. There are people here among you tonight who’ve experienced it firsthand, and they’ll tell you exactly what I’m telling you now: there’s no glory in war, and very little justice. Nothing to love and a hell of a lot to despise. But sometimes we don’t get to decide whether or not a battle is coming. We only get to decide if we run, or roll over, or if we stand and fight back.
“Somewhere out there tonight, Quincy Houghton is hard at work. He’s building an army. Filling his ranks with feral wolves. Some of them are the cruelest, vilest of our kind. Murderers. Rapists. Terrorists who want nothing more than to destroy everything they touch.”
The murmur in the crowd was sharper this time, more anxious. Feral wolves were dangerous in their own right. Feral wolves who had been capable of such terrible things, even before they completely lost their ability to control their darkest urges—Xander hadn’t been lying. There was plenty about that to fear.
“Some of them are only teenagers,” Xander added, his lips curling with disgust. “Some are just kids. He’s gathering up the desperate, the forgotten, the alone—those who have lost their way, and those who have nowhere else to go. He’s forcing them to abandon their humanity and become the same kind of monster that he is. He’s asking them to kill for him. To die for him. I don’t know much, but I know that asking a child to lay down their life at your say-so—that’s evil.”
“Damn right it is,” Kingston whispered.
“I don’t roll over for evil men.” Xander’s green eyes shone bright. “I don’t run from them. When they arrive, I intend to fight. Stand with me or don’t. I won’t ask you to kill for me. I won’t ask you to die for me. What I will ask you is this: do you want to live in a world ruled by the actions of evil men?”
“Hell no!” Kingston was the first to shout it, a fierce battle cry. It was met with a quiet rumble of agreement.
In that moment, I knew Xander had them.
“Do you want to raise your cubs in a world controlled by the madness of evil men?” Xander asked next, his voice rising an octave.
“Hell no!” came the response—not just from Kingston this time, but from Dylan and dozens of others in the crowd as well.
“When evil men come to our town, when they knock on our door, do we run and hide?” Xander shouted.
“Hell no!”
“Do you we let them in to take whatever they want from us?”
“Hell no!”
“Or do we—” Xander paused for a split second, grimacing. “Pull up our big boy panties and kick some feral ass?”
“Holy shit,” Kingston breathed as a fearsome cheer rose up from the crowd. His fist beat victoriously against the armrest of his wheelchair. “He said it. He said my line!”
Xander didn’t wait for the cheer to die off before he spoke again.
