The caves roll out in all directions, covering miles beneath the lush Oregon wilderness, but the main cavern is where we come together.This is wherebloodwerewolves operate our tight community and raise our families, exactly the way we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.
Wolves live a long time. And they don’t like change.
I keep finding this out the hard way.
Inside the main cavern I see the very young, the very old, and the very, very pregnant sitting on the many couches and lying on the floor. In case I’m tempted to think it’s only the more active members of the pack who resent me, the moment I step inside and everyone scents my presence, I can hear a little more of that quiet growling.
Notloudgrowling. Nothingaggressive. No one would actuallycome for me. No one would dare mess with something that’s Ty’s. They’re just sending a message, like their version of an artistically eviscerated skunk.
I was born the long-awaited mate to the king himself, because that’s how it goes in werewolf packs. Every king gets a fated mate. If he doesn’t, he’s not a real king, though there’s usually a century or so of leeway on that. If she dies, he sometimes gets another. If you believe the myths, it’s the moon who makes these decisions as it suits her, letting the males fight to the death for their position and then presenting winners with a worthy female to stand by their side, produce their young, and keep the den in line while the males are away.
They knew I was coming before I arrived. They could scent me on the wind.
But then they gotme.
Expectations are a bitch.
I nod at the old ones, because it’s never a weakness to show respect, especially if they’re already not pleased with me. I smile at the little cubs who are tumbling around, switching in and out of their forms as they go, roughhousing it up with abandon. And I nod my head at the pregnant females—trying to make it clear that not wanting to becomejust like themdoesn’t mean that I think I’mbetterthan them, just different.
I can see they don’t believe it.
I greet them all, but I don’t stop. I keep going and I climb the stairs that wind around the cavern walls and lead to a door near the top. This, too, would be easier on four legs, but I can’t risk it. Two months ago I came much too close to losing my head on a different mountain, Ty and me in wolf form and that moon madness gripping me hard—
Luckily, that night there was that terrible, bloody ritual, horrible death goddess minions to fight, and the new local oracle—my friend and landlord Winter Bishop—to try to save. Enough distractions that I didn’t forget myself.
Better to stay in skin tonight.
I push my way through the door. It opens onto the top of the hill, where we gather for the moon every month. The moon that makes us and marks us. The moon that guides us and watches us.
The moon who does with us as she will.
It’s loud out here, and for a moment I stand near the jagged rocks that hide this upper entrance to the caves below. My pack is spread out all over the hilltop, basking in the moonlight and the cool night air. There’s a part of me that loves this place and these people. Exactly as it is right now. The laughter. The carousing. Thepackof it all.
This is where I grew up. This is where I played as a cub. These caves are where I slowly came to understand that Ty Ceridwen, so golden and powerful, and nothing short ofastonishingeven to a child, was mine.
These are my people, rough and wild.
Before the Reveal, Ty and his lieutenants—some of those being my brothers and cousins, and no, they don’t support me, because loyalty to Ty and to pack comes first—hid in plain sight out there in the human world. They were outlaw bikers, causing a commotion wherever they went. They fought. They did their share of carousing. They involved themselves in all manner of things, most of it what humans considershady.
Then again, it was only ever the human biker gangs who got caught and thrown in prisons.
Wolves have bigger teeth.
Out in the human world, they all looked like big, powerful men with tattoos and bad attitudes, alarmingly afraid of nothing at all. They liked loud Harleys, easy sex, and the ability to do whatever the hell they wanted, whenever the hell they wanted to do it.
They still do.
Back then they also ran protection for various not-exactly-legal industries all up and down the West Coast, from the ocean to the Rockies. Now it doesn’t matter much what’s legal, because there’s no one around to do anything about it. After the Reveal, while many other creatures were enjoying the all-you-can-eat buffet that was suddenly on hand everywhere, the wolves were thinking ahead.
Or Ty was. He wasn’t thinking about stuffing his face like everyone else. He was thinking about supply chains.
He’s the reason there’s food in the valley, along with most other conveniences that not only humans rely on. Him and the relationship he built with a few manky creek-side mages out in Eagle Point. He’s also why other pockets of wolves across the continent are similarly positioned to weather whatever storms might come in their areas, though he couldn’t do that himself. He could only share what he’d done out here with the rest of the packs.
North America is divided into pack territories. It’s only in the past fifty years or so that these packs have stopped trying to murder each other and have maintained a peace treaty. This isn’t just so that wolves can trot around, howling at the moon without having to fight over where they’re doing it. It’s also because werewolves like power. Money before the Reveal, control after, and more of both if we’re not at war with ourselves.
No one’s better at this than Ty, but that’s another point of contention between us.
I step out from the protection of the rocks before everyone catches my scent and starts some new narrative about howMaddox Hemming can’t even come to the full moon gathering on time and then tries to hidewhen she does. I move across the hilltop, the moonlight like a spotlight. I walk like I crave the shine.
