When I get to the old mine, I nod at the sentries. Today they’re a little too busy to give me a hard time. It’s almost disappointing. I adjust my bag and walk into the den’s dark entry, but I don’t go into the grand cavern. I can hear things happening in there, but I take one of the other tunnels that bypasses the cavern and goes deep into the cave system instead.
The tunnel that the men take when they come back to the den and don’t want to deal with their mates and their children. The tunnel the men use when they’re in the mood to party with thebittenin their private rooms as well as up on top of the hill and would rather not explain themselves to anyone.
The tunnel that takes me all the way back to Ty’s rooms without parading the fact that I have another place to live in front of assholes like McCaffrey. As I walk down the tunnel, I do my best not to dwell on the unsavory reality that all the males in the pack have their private spaces back here too, some in addition to a space in the family caves. All the males keep their family lives and what they call theirbrotherhoodseparate. They act like the outlaw bikers they still are, and the expectation is that their women will suck it up. The end.
There’s no bargaining. This is how it is.
It’s only weird to them when I want to do my own thing too.
I make my way through the tunnels undetected and deposit my bag in Ty’s den. And since I’m here, alone, I take the opportunity to take a few breaths in to make sure that murderous rage is still ebbing away. I feel the way his scent wraps all around me. The way it calms me down and sinks into my bones like warmth.
I breathe him in deep.
Only then do I think,I’m ready.
Or as ready as I’ll ever be to face all these wolves with their traditional pack expectations, so I put on my fated mate face and get to work.
9.
Cold Moon, waning crescent
Wolves keep showing up all week. All of them eager to prove that they’ll do exactly what they want, when they want to do it. And more, that they won’t be told otherwise by anyone. Especially not by an upstart young king like Ty.
Typical wolf bullshit, in other words.
Still, there’s something about wolves simply beingeverywherein the valley. Assholes aside, I can’t help but love it. Wolves howling in the hills. Wolves on two feet, prowling around Jacksonville to poke around in the boutiques, drink coffee, and watch the humans a little too closely.
“This is a safe zone,” I tell a cluster of three young wolves from Saskatchewan when they look a little too narrow-eyed and hunt-ready. “You can’t eat them.”
“We don’t have that shit in Canada,” one of them says with a laugh. “We claimed the provinces long ago.”
“You’re not in the provinces,” I remind him. “If you want to snack on humans, go into Medford and see what you can find. But I warn you, there are a lot of vampires over there, and they don’t take kindly to poaching.”
They wander off. Whether to troll the streets of Medford for humans foolish enough to go there, I can’t say.
I already knew that things were different here in the Rogue Valley. That was very clear even five years ago, when we were all still in hiding, and all the other pack leaders seemedastonishedby the way that Ty managed things. Now it’s even more clear. Not all of the female wolves are as busy putting on performances as Deirdre, so they’re the ones who tell me that while some of the packs live in places where they interact with other Kind clans and with humans the way we do, most of them don’t.
Most of them, these females whisper to me in one way or another, are jealous of what appears to be the abundance out west.
“Abundance doesn’t fall from the trees like fruit,” I tell them all. With a laugh, because I have to seem easy.Jealousyof our abundance can easily turn to a run at Ty for having it and hoarding it. “It has to be planned, carried out, and executed perfectly. Ty’s been doing this for decades.”
One of the older queens, Mariella, was like a mentor to me five years ago. Meaning she protected me from Deirdre. This week we go and have coffee in a corner of the coffeehouse in Jacksonville, and she tells me all the rumblings that people think she’s too submissive and well behaved to repeat to anyone else. Especially me.
“Everyone thinks that there must be some magic involved in how Ty was able to transition so quickly once the Reveal hit. Other packs foundered.” Her king heads up the Texas pack, and he’s significantly less excitable than some I could mention. It’s clear she doesn’t mean him. “There are some bad feelings too. Some think that if there was magic, why didn’t Ty share it with everyone else?”
“This is so funny,” I say mildly. “Because I remember Ty attempting to share some of the ways that he was running protection up and down the interstate here in advance of the Reveal, and no one wanted to listen to him then. That’s my memory of the last gathering. Why would he think anything changed?”
Mariella nods. “A lot of the packs got a little too excited three years ago when the Reveal changed everything,” she says, with an eye roll. “There was no forward thinking, but a lot of time to turn regret intoa grudge. They also don’t like to collaborate. I don’t think McCaffrey is likely to mention this, but word is, they have a significant wraith problem in New England.”
I shudder. Wraiths are kind of like banshees in that they seem insubstantial and can float around where you least expect them. Only instead of sticking to their own melodrama, they take it out on everything and everyone around them. They also don’t work well with others.
They prefer to feed on them.
“People are hungry,” Mariella tells me, her gaze serious over her coffee mug. “And instead of looking to themselves and the situations they could have handled better, they’re looking to see what others have. Things they think they should be given.”
Every night, after we all sit around the fires, tell stories, and talk like one big, happy family, I relate these things to Ty. We lie together in that big bed of his, tucked away in the farthest reaches of the den. Usually we release a little tension first. Sometimes we take a break in the middle. We always indulge ourselves after, too.
Because nothing is a better counterpoint to endless politics than the way we fuck, so blisteringly hot that we can’t think about anything or anyone else until we’re done.
