“I think you’re going easy on me.”
“A little, but less and less every day. You forget how damn old I am. You’re already in better shape for this fight than I am. There was a time, though—” He sighed, wistful. “There was a time when I would have already tried to mop the floor with that asshole ... if Ruth would have let me, which she wouldn’t have. Alphas never want to put the pack at risk.”
Case had noticed that, but he thought there had to be a difference between not putting the pack at unnecessary risk and not letting the people in it make any real choices of their own. Especially when that kind of over-protectiveness tended to backfire. If Mountainview fell into Reeve’s hands because he and Lydia couldn’t save it on their own, everybody in town would pay the price.
“Do people herewantto fight Reeve?” he said cautiously.
Horace sighed again. “It’s complicated. We don’t have a lot of fighters, period. I’m one of the last of them, and most of the tougher kids I’ve mentored over the years have either moved away or become acupuncturists who couldn’t bite through tissue paper. But maybe,maybewe could have all teamed up and fought him off when he first showed up. There would have been losses, because he’s a mean son-of-a-bitch, but we might have been able to do it. But Ruth and Lydia didn’t want the pack to take that chance, even if Lydia was out there with us. And now it’s too late—if he comes back at all, it’ll be for the alpha challenge, and then wecan’tinterfere. All the shifter laws forbid it.”
That was a lot for Case to take in. It didn’t change anything now, not according to what Horace said, but it made him feel surer than ever that the pack needed andwanteda different kind of leadership than it had been getting. Maybe everyone here had gotten used to not being able to act on their own behalf, but that didn’t mean they liked it. Not deep down.
He knew he needed to bring that up with Lydia at some point, but it was hard to find the time. After wolf practice with Horace, he went back to the house andalphapractice with Lydia ... which turned out to mean listening to a father and son bicker with each other.
He knew by now that alphas helped settle pack disputes. But did this really count?
“It’s the fifth time in two weeks,” Dan Graves said. He was seething so much that his face had turned a disturbing tomato color, and sweat was popping out all over his brow. Just yesterday, he had been Case’s relaxed, genial instructor in lunging attacks in wolf form, but now he was a dad, not a teacher. “The fifth time! In a fortnight!”
Sixteen-year-old Sean Graves blinked. “Wait, Fortnite?”
“Different Fortnite,” Case said.
“He means two weeks,” Lydia said to Sean.
“Jesus. Then just say that, Dad.”
“I did say that! I was repeating myself for f—flipping emphasis! And maybe if you spent less time playing games online withGod knows whoand more time studying for the PSATs, you wouldn’t need our alpha—oneof our alphas—sorry, alphas-in-waiting—to give you vocab lessons!”
Sean gave Case and Lydia an exaggerated “can you see how uncool my dad is?” look that was both obnoxious and sort of flattering. Case guessed at least the kid had classified them as marginally cooler than the dad who scolded him about insufficient PSAT study time.
Actually, that was too low a bar. He couldn’t be proud of that. And maybe Seandidneed to study for the PSATs, for all Case knew.
It took another ten minutes of irritated father-son sniping to work out that Dan Graves wasn’t here to complain about his son not doing his due diligence when it came to trying to getinto college. Even that would have been a stretch as far as pack business was concerned—or so Case would have thought—but that wasn’t it.
“Wait,” Lydia said, seizing on a pause in the Graves’ mutual eye-rolling. “Whatwas the fifth time in two weeks, exactly?”
“He fills the dishwasher up and then doesn’t run it,” Dan said.
“God, Dad, all you have to do is put the dish soap in and then—”
“Exactly!”
“—turn it on! It’s not a big deal!”
“If it’s not a big deal, then why don’t you do it?”
“Why can’t you thank me for loading it in the first place?” Sean said. “None of my friends load the dishwasher!”
“Oh, well, if none of your friends jumped off a bridge—” Dan stopped himself with a wince. “That wasn’t going to make any sense,” he said to Lydia and Case. “I swear I’m not trying to sound like a generic TV dad—or, you know,mydad. I’ve been like this since he hit his teens. It’s every day with this sh—crap.”
“You can say ‘shit,’ Dad,” Sean said wearily. “I’m not a kid. I say it.”
“And I don’t care what you say on your own time, but I don’t want to curse around you, and I don’t want you to curse around me.”
That seemed like a reasonable enough boundary, but again, Case had no idea why Dan and Sean were having this conversationin front of him and Lydia. Let alone why they had left the dishwasher currently in dispute behind todeliberatelyhave this conversation in someone else’s house. He and Lydia didn’t even have any kids. They didn’t have any special insight into this. What were they supposed to add?
Maybe he was being ungenerous. He had never really been part of a community before, but it was normal for people to wanttheir friends to weigh in on their little problems and disputes, right? Most of his adult friendships had been casual, easily drifting to the occasional email or Instagram comment once he had moved on to the next town, but it wasn’t like he’d never hung out with anyone before. Friends and even acquaintances complained to each other. It was how life worked, and having someone to vent to was important.
Except Dan and Lydia didn’t seem to be that close, and it wasn’t like he was dumping all this on her just because she was there. He’d made a special trip for it, and he’d even hauled his non-dishwasher-running son along with him. And not even so he could complain, but so Lydia could intervene and tell them how to handle a routine family squabble.
