Wolves love to pile together, but I could barely stand being crammed between two youngsters in the backseat of the pack's car. Now I regretted the pure cowardice that had made me choose to ride with the yahoos instead of with the adults. Not that I would have been any better off struggling to avoid Chase's eyes and trying to keep my distance from our alpha, but at least the young werewolves' high spirits wouldn't be clawing down my spine and assaulting my eyes and nose.
"I call shotgun on the way back," Blaze hooted as we approached the end of our trip. The yahoos were so confident of our success that they were bickering over who would have to ride on someone's lap once Keith joined their ranks. I didn't bother telling the young werewolves that there would be one fewer person in the car on the return trip—if we were lucky, Keith could have my seat. Instead, I just tuned the young wolves out, a relatively easy task since they'd given up on dragging me into their conversation hours ago.
I hadn't been back to Haven in ten years, but the turnoff from the highway looked just the same. No sign, just "Private Drive" discretely labeled on a county road marker. I could remember walking out to the highway with Brooke, cranking our arms at passing truck drivers and laughing uproariously as their air horns belted out a deep bellow that became lower-pitched as it receded into the distance. The memory gave me a bit more sympathy for the innocent banter of the yahoos, although it didn't make their antics any easier to bear.
As we turned down the private drive and slowed to a crawl, more memories rushed in, almost overwhelming me. I'd forgotten how much I loved following the creek below the main village, splashing through the water with bare feet and baiting crawdads with bits of their siblings' flesh. It was too cold now for creek-walking, but I expected to see more people out and about, until I realized that my old neighbors would all be under lockdown, anticipating our arrival. Sure enough, we didn't see a single person as we passed rustic farmhouses. Until we reached the village green, that is, where every male over the age of fifteen waited to greet us.
The car in front of us ground to a halt and Chase, Wolfie, Oscar, Quetzalli, and Galena emerged, their doors banging loudly behind them. We'd left Berndt and his family, plus Tia, back at the compound to hold down the fort, and I was glad that they, at least, would be spared the sordid show about to be put on for my father's benefit. Even though I knew I'd never be able to return to Wolfie's pack after today, I cringed at the idea of the nine pack mates now present watching my betrayal.
Wade was the oldest and quietest of the yahoos, and he waited beside my door after the others bounded up to encircle their alpha. "Are you okay?" he asked me, offering a hand to help me out of the car. I wanted to tell him that I wasn't ancient enough to need assistance just yet, but I
felt
as
old as the hills, and I ended up stumbling over my own feet, grabbing the young man's arm after all.
Wolfie should have had all of his attention riveted on my father's pack, but he glanced back the instant my skin touched Wade's, then he cocked his head to one side. The packless ache in my stomach nearly tore me in half as I realized that Wolfie wouldn't be enfolding me in his alpha protection after today. I shot him a shaky smile, meant to reassure him, but probably just making the alpha think I was carsick.
My father never made anything easy, so I wasn't surprised to look out over the Haven males lounging around the green and to notice that both the Chief and my nephew were absent. Rather than becoming impatient, as I'm sure my father had planned, Wolfie simply pulled a trio of juggling balls out of his pocket and began showing off a skill I hadn't even realized he possessed. The colored orbs whirred through the air, bouncing off Wolfie's knee and dipping behind his back, and I soon noticed a couple of werewolf children peering out the windows of a nearby house, attracted by the spectacle.
The yahoos followed their alpha's lead and started turning cartwheels on the lawn...very badly. Blaze and Fen knew what they were doing, but Glen and Wade seemed to simply be tossing themselves from their hands onto their backsides, then laughing uproariously. Despite Haven's iron discipline, it didn't take long for a few of my father's younger enforcers to try to show our yahoos up, and I had a feeling we would have all been sitting down to a cordial dinner within the hour if my father hadn't interrupted.
"Has the circus come to town?" Chief Wilder asked coldly from the steps of his house at the edge of the green, and every Haven youth immediately drooped his head in embarrassed submission. Our yahoos took a little longer to turn off their playfulness—in fact, I was sure I noticed Wolfie hold his hand to one side to encourage them to keep turning cartwheels for several seconds after my father appeared. It occurred to me that Wolfie had planned this whole charade, and the packless ache inside me grew stronger when I realized I'd been left out of the strategizing. Not that I had been around the compound much in recent days to give the pack a chance to include me.
"I could say something about the clown now being here," Wolfie drawled, "but that would just be rude." The younger alpha smiled slightly, my father's brow lowered, and we all knew who had won round one.
With the ease of a well-oiled team, Chase stepped in to smooth over Wolfie's insult. "We've brought the cash, as requested, and would like to see Keith to make sure he's okay," the beta interjected quietly, his eyes not quite meeting Chief Wilder's. I couldn't tell whether Chase really was cowed by my father's dominance, or whether he and Wolfie were simply playing good cop, bad cop, with Chase's submission part of his role. Either way, the beta's lack of eye contact brought a bit of humor back into my father's face, although his words were no more welcoming.
"Well now," Chief Wilder began, matching Wolfie's drawl—a speech pattern neither partook of in their normal lives, but which they seemed to think added a bit of dramatic tension to this exchange. "I've been thinking about that and I'm not so sure I want to part with young Keith. After all, blood can't be bought. But if you just want to
see
him...."
My father waved a hand back at the house and we watched in silence as Keith was frog-marched out the door and down the steps toward us. My nephew tried to smile when he saw our pack arrayed behind Wolfie and Chase, but I could tell he'd been crying, and his feigned bravery just made the boy seem younger. The tension on our side of the standoff ratcheted up a couple of notches, and Fen laid a calming hand on Blaze's shoulder as the yahoo took an involuntary step toward his friend.
"Thank you," Chase said carefully, turning away from Keith to keep his attention trained on Chief Wilder. "We're glad to see he's in good health...."
"But not very well trained," Chief Wilder spoke over our beta. "Spare the rod and spoil the child, I always say," he continued. "But we'll take care of that for you. Don't worry yourselves over the matter."
Before I realized what was happening, Milo struck Keith with an open-handed slap across the boy's cheek and, in nearly the same instant, Wolfie exploded into canine form, pieces of fabric fluttering off in all directions. It took the combined efforts of Chase and Oscar to restrain their alpha from leaping for the other pack leader's throat.
That was my cue.
***
"Is that really what you want, to start over and train a cowardly adolescent?" I asked, walking from the back of Wolfie's pack up past our restrained alpha and across the invisible line that separated us from the Haven werewolves. I stopped mere inches away from my father, and looked him directly in the eye. "I don't doubt you can break Keith, but what use is an heir with no balls?" I continued, ignoring the wounded look that flashed across my nephew's face.
My father gazed down at me and smiled, the mirth flowing from his face to energize his entire body. I knew I was walking directly into his hands—this is what the wily old alpha had been angling for from the very first day he startled me on the trail—but the way I saw it, there was no solution other than to give Chief Wilder what he wanted. My father craved an heir that he could train up from the cradle the way he'd raised Ethan, and unless he was willing to look beyond his own progeny, my potential sons were the only choice he had. My nephew was far too old to be turned into the cut-throat alpha my father wanted—Keith had been a red herring all along.
"What are you suggesting?" the Chief drew me out, his words as sweet as honey, tantalizing me with that parental acceptance I'd always yearned for. I shivered, glad I'd already made this decision for the right reasons, not for the sake of a blessing that would never come.
"I'm suggesting that you turn Keith back over to this pack of misfits where he belongs and let me come home to live in your house and give you a real grandson," I answered. Behind me, I could hear Wolfie shifting back to human form so he could speak to me, and I took a deep breath before firing the final arrow home. "I'm sick of living among halfies and humans," I said, my words pointed toward my father, but aimed at Wolfie. "I want a real werewolf mate, not a bloodling."
I didn't look back, just trusted Chase to do as we'd agreed and to keep Wolfie from challenging the older alpha. I could hear a strangled moan, muffled by werewolf hands, as Wolfie fought to speak, but I stood firm, filling my head with images of the yahoos and Keith joking around in the compound's living area.
This is the only way
, I thought toward Wolfie, and my focus was so firmly behind me that it took me a moment to realize that my father was laughing.
"Bravo!" he proclaimed loudly, clapping one huge hand onto my shoulder so heavily that I staggered back a step. "Very commendable, very nice. But," he added, lowering his voice and letting the alpha dominance creep into his tone, "what's to keep me from hanging onto young Keith just in case you don't make a good mother?"
Silence hung across the green as werewolves on both sides held their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. "I guess that's just a gamble you'll have to take," I said quietly, "if you want my willing cooperation." There it was, my counter-bluff. I was sure...well, almost sure...that my father had set up this whole painful charade to win me back over to the Haven way of life. I had realized one dark night while waiting for this endless week to be over that my father had to know that I was the only one of his children who had inherited his cold-blooded control. I was the one who had left home, severing all ties, not even writing back to the family the way Brooke had. I was the one who had found a way to squash my wolf, consequences be damned. Of all of his children, I was the one most like my father, and Chief Wilder would want that wolfishness passed on to his heir.
Or so I hoped. Because if my father didn't care about my willing cooperation and chose to keep Keith as a backup, I had no plan C. This was it—my entire hand played in one fell swoop.
There was a scuffle behind me as Wolfie broke free of his pack mates and called toward my back. "Terra, you don't have to do this!" he promised, true warmth in his voice despite the disdain with which I'd spoken of his pack. My father raised his brows, and I knew this was my final test, the Chief's way of determining whether I truly was as cold-hearted as I was pretending to be. So, even though I couldn't bear to see his face, I turned to face the wolf I loved as I threw the bitterest words I could muster back at him.
"You're just a bloodling, Wolfie. I deserve a man as well as a wolf."
It all happened so fast, I could barely take in the scene. With an anguished howl, Wolfie retreated back into his preferred canine form, the yahoos piled on top of their alpha to hold him in place, and Chase yanked a slip-knot-looped rope around his friend's neck. Unlike the piddly collar Wolfie had been wearing when I first met him, this was a real restraint, but the alpha still lunged against the rope repeatedly, snarling as he tried to break free. My heart felt like it was bound to break in half when Wolfie finally collapsed into a panting heap on the ground, his eyes still trained on me and my father. It was unclear whether the young alpha had been trying to tear out my father's throat...or my own.
In the ensuing silence, Chief Wilder's booming laughter rolled out across the green, and I struggled not to let tears come into my eyes. Wolfie's reaction had been even worse than I'd imagined, and I ached to think of the sores he must have rubbed around his neck. Even worse would be the intra-pack strife when Chase finally let his friend free back in their compound, and I regretted that there hadn't been some way to achieve the same goal without enlisting the beta's aid.
True to form, my father proceeded to make matters worse. "Such a bloodling," he mused, taking in Wolfie's battered pack as the yahoos hefted their leader back to his feet and began tugging him toward one of their cars. The only thing that lightened my heart was realizing that Keith had been set loose during the scuffle and had joined Wolfie's entourage, hovering behind Galena's shoulder. No matter what my friend thought of me now, I knew she'd look after my young nephew.
"I was a bloodling too, you know," Chief Wilder continued, and Wolfie's pack paused in their retreat, their attention drawn back to the older pack leader. For the first time since collapsing at the end of a leash, the younger alpha seemed to take note of his surroundings as well, and his ears and nose swiveled toward my father. I could see the human wheels beginning to turn in his head as Wolfie and I both wondered whether my father's words had any purpose other than spite.
"If you live long enough," my father continued, looking straight at Wolfie, "you'll get over it."
Whether the Chief meant Wolfie's attachment to me or his bloodling nature was unclear, but my father had clearly tired of the show. At a signal from their pack leader, my cousins closed in behind me as Chief Wilder turned away from Wolfie and led us all back to his home.
I was being nudged away from the only pack I had ever truly felt a part of, and I wanted to sink into the same silent grief that had so clearly enveloped Wolfie. But instead, I glanced back over my shoulder at the last moment, catching Chase's eye as the beta finished herding the pack back into their two cars. The beta's face was no less cold now than it had been over the preceding days, but Wolfie's friend did nod once in acknowledgement. Yes, Chase was saying, he would keep his pack leader confined until he was able to talk sense into the wolf. My betrayal wouldn't be in vain.
***
"I hope you're comfortable up here," my stepmother Cricket said as she bustled around the attic room that Brooke and I had slept in as children. The slanting roof that had felt playfully intriguing when I was younger now seemed to confine me in a cage very much like the imaginary one I'd pushed my wolf into weeks ago, back when my darker half and I were still on speaking terms. That thought, along with the bleakness of my future made me bark out a laugh in response to Cricket's words—comfort was the furthest thing from my mind right now.
Rather than taking offense, Cricket paused in her puttering and sank down onto the edge of the bed beside me. "You know we're all so glad you're home," she said softly, gazing into my eyes as if begging me to understand, although she didn't reach out to touch me. My stepmother was stick-thin and had always seemed to lack the maternal nature of my own mother, but Cricket wasn't cold-hearted like the Chief, so I tried to at least be polite to her. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to muster any social graces now.
"Don't take this personally, Cricket," I replied, "but moving back to Haven has always been my worst nightmare." Taking a deep breath and moving beyond my own woes, I looked at my stepmother consideringly. "I'm actually surprised you're still here given the...um...problems with Ethan."
Now Cricket did pat my hand, but it was an uncomfortable movement, similar to the way a dog owner would try to stroke a cat and muddle it all up. It occurred to me to wonder how such a fragile woman had kept her half-human background a secret all these years, and whether she could possibly handle my father's anger now. If I didn't miss my guess, Chief Wilder would have been beside himself when he realized his prized son couldn't shift, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find Cricket still recovering from broken bones. But, no, my stepmother seemed as whole and healthy as she'd ever been.
"He knew about me all along, dear," Cricket told me quietly, and it took a minute for me to parse her words and to realize she was talking about my father, not about Ethan. "We considered it a fair gamble...." Her eyes became distant for a moment, and I actually
could
imagine my father marrying a halfie, even understanding that there was a 50% chance any son he sired would be human. Maybe it was my father's bloodling nature—another surprise to me today—that made him equally willing to entrust his future to luck as to skill. Yet another puzzle for me to work through when my mind was less clogged with grief.
"I'm just glad you're okay," I told my stepmother quietly after a minute, because that much, at least, was true. Now didn't seem like the appropriate time to ask where Ethan had been sent off to in disgrace and how my father could have kept his bloodling past so well hidden, although these puzzles were threatening to pull me out of the wallowing I so badly craved. Nothing like concern about others to ruin a bout of self pity.
"Well," Cricket answered, jumping back to her feet and plumping up pillows that didn't need plumping. "I should get back to work on dinner. Call me if you need anything." Even as she spoke the words, my stepmother was moving toward the door, and I knew I should have offered to join her downstairs to help out with the task. But I couldn't quite make my legs move. I would have to take my place within the stifling women's realm of Haven eventually, but Cricket seemed to understand that I needed this one day to mourn the outside world, and I appreciated her quiet support.
I had already started to drift back into my grief when my stepmother turned back from the open doorway to face me. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "I forgot to ask if you read the letter from your sister that I put in your file?"
That
woke me up, and my hand closed involuntarily around the unopened envelope I'd been carrying around in my pocket all day. When I first saw Brooke's letter, I'd been afraid to read it, knowing the presence of my sister's missive was part of my father's intricate plan to wind me up in his web of intrigue. Later, I'd gotten sidetracked by the joy of mingling with Wolfie's pack and had forgotten all about the note. But when I left Dale's house this morning, I'd reached out and put the envelope in my pocket, meaning to throw it back in Chief Wilder's face unopened. Now, discovering that the letter had been placed in the file by my stepmother was just...confusing.
But before I could answer Cricket, another familiar voice drifted toward us from the stairway. "Don't worry, I'll show myself up," the female werewolf called as her head crested the opening into the attic. Quetzalli hefted a duffel bag up behind her, nodded at my stepmother, then said to me, "Looks like we're roomies."
***
To be honest, I hadn't really expected to see any member of Wolfie's pack again. But if anyone
was
going to show up, Quetzalli wouldn't have been the werewolf I'd thought most likely, nor would she have been the one I'd prefer. I could imagine Oscar being left behind as a sort of honor guard if Chase had felt some misplaced duty toward a woman who was once nearly a pack member, and I would have liked to imagine that Galena was enough of my friend that she might have chosen to help me through the weeks to come. Even one of the yahoos would have been preferred over Quetzalli, who was the rougher and more masculine side of her and Galena's partnership. While some of the other pack members might have glossed over my harsh words that afternoon, Quetzalli was bound to have taken offense, and she wouldn't hesitate to let me know it.
From the look in her eyes after my stepmother pattered away down the stairs, Quetzalli wasn't any more pleased to be here than I was to see her. "Not my idea," she muttered as she carried her duffel over to the spare bed under the window. Her tone said
Case closed
, but I couldn't let it go at that.
"Okaaay," I answered, drawing out the word, then settled on simply asking her flat-out. "Whose idea was it then?"
Quetzalli rolled her eyes at me before turning away to begin unpacking her possessions. She'd clearly known she was staying before leaving the pack's compound because the werewolf had filled her bag with underwear, a change of clothes, and toiletries. Which meant Chase must have talked to her since he was the only one who had known about my plan before the fact.
Or so I'd thought. "Wolfie, who else?" Quetzalli answered, her back still to me. "Although why he would bother worrying about you is beyond me."
Quetzalli's revelation silenced me for at least fifteen minutes, which might have been her intention. During that time, my mind raced over the events of the last twenty-four hours, honing in on Wolfie's visit the night before and on his subtle attempts to drag me back into pack life. Yes, it was no stretch to imagine that Chase might have told his friend about my planned betrayal—I'd always known that was a possibility, even though I'd hoped I was convincing enough to prompt Chase to keep my secret. And, although it was harder to believe, I
could
also see Wolfie deciding that the decision was mine to make, then squelching his own feelings in order to let me follow my chosen path. Despite being a bloodling, Wolfie was nothing like the domineering males I'd known in the past, and he probably guessed that if he had forbidden me to trade myself for Keith, I would have just sneaked away in the night and carried out my plan without the pack for backup.
But if the bloodling had the willpower to restrain himself from forcing me to stay home the way any other alpha would have, why didn't he also have the willpower not to attempt attacking Chief Wilder? It didn't seem possible that Wolfie's uncontrollable shifts and his lunges against the rope leash had been an act this afternoon, although that was the obvious conclusion. Perhaps the young alpha really was that skilled of an actor?
But if Wolfie's behavior had all been a farce, played out for my father's benefit, what was the purpose of the subterfuge? While I would have loved to think that Wolfie was simply buying time so he could come up with a longer-term solution to our problem, I wasn't so sure that Wolfie could still want me back after my inflammatory words. But, Quetzalli's presence suggested that the young alpha wasn't done with me just yet, which sent a tiny surge of hope flickering through my deadened soul.
The only clue I had to begin deciphering the puzzle was Quetzalli herself, so despite her angry silence, I attempted to draw the werewolf back into conversation. "How long are you staying?" I asked, breaking the extended silence at last.
Ever since joining me in the attic room, Quetzalli had seemed completely in control of her wolf, so I was surprised when I felt the first hint of a change in the air. The woman spun back around to face me, fur already beginning to elongate across her body. "I don't know that yet," she ground out between her teeth, face flushed with anger. "Look, I really don't want to talk to you right now," she continued, the words mangled as the shift overtook her. "But do bring me up some meat from dinner." Then a large, surly wolf was lying on the spare bed.
Great. Life in Haven had turned out to be even worse than I'd originally imagined.