Her gaze, however, suggests that maybe poor Gretchen should check herself. Or maybe be a bit more embarrassed thathermate hasn’t hunted so much as a squirrel in recent memory. I’m pretty sure I hear Johanna go on to mutter something likePacifists and vegans deserve to get eaten, just loud enough to make Gretchen’s chin wobble.
The rest of the day feels interminable. Inside me there’s a kind of ticking clock with every last part of me attuned to every single second between now and the coming sunset. It will happen just before 5:00 p.m. I willfeelwhen it sets—I don’t need a watch, I’m a freaking werewolf—but I feel as if I’m counting every second all the same.
Meanwhile, this is still the last official day of the gathering. I can’t pace around, counting down the hours, the way I’d like to do. I can’t indicate I’m overly concerned about what the night might bring. I watch the entrance to the cavern for a while at first, thinking I’ll be able to tell who the traitorous stalker is by who comes in after me, but I give up. There are more ways into the den than the entrance to the communal caverns, as I know very well. I have no way of telling who’s come in from where.
Besides, despite all the muttering and squabbling in the cavern, I have to act as if this is any normal solstice and everyone is getting along. People are watching me whether or not theyalsowant to kill me. I make a point of talking to the females in all the currently furious packs, acting as if I don’t notice the simmering tensions. I’m also taking advantage of my status here, because the packs I wander into have no choice but to talk to me. Politely.
Brawling with other males is one thing. Baring teeth at a king’s fated mate in his own den? That’s the kind of disrespect that leads to the sort of vicious pack justice that wolves swear by—when it’s not being visited upon us personally.
My brothers all congregate in our part of the cavern around midday and I take that as a small break from dispensing my razor-edged version of hospitality. Liam and Asher bring their mates with them, and that means it’s time for formal introductions all around.
Micah’s mate is Leah, a pretty brown wolf from crochety old Janus’s pack. When her eyes aren’t politely downcast, I think I see a little more fire in there, and that makes me happy. Asher’s mate is from the always problematic Deep South pack, and I can’t get a read on her at all. She’s unfailingly polite and makes the most of her gray-and-silver loveliness, but she’s clearly holding her cards close. I can’t really blame her.
“You can call me Magnolia,” she tells my mother and me, her drawl as exquisite as her manners.
When she moves on to the aunts, Johanna lifts a brow. “I wonder if Magnolia is actually her name,” she murmurs, for my ears only. “Or if she prefers to keep her real name to herself. If so, it really does beg the question—what else does she not intend to share?”
“You really do see plots within plots, don’t you?” I ask her.
“I certainly hope that you do, too,” my mother retorts. Sharply. “Or the first plot that comes along will be the end of you. I don’t think the pack can afford it.”
“The pack,” I tell her with a little more temper than I usually deliver in her presence, “will be fine. More than fine. No matter what I have to do to make sure of it.”
Johanna nods as if I didn’t take a tone with her at all. “I approve of this newfound sense of civic duty, daughter.”
“There’s nothing new about it.” I don’t modify my tone any when I say that. “If you can see everything, I wonder why you never saw that.”
When she only lifts a brow at me, it makes me wonder. Did she really never see it? Or has Johanna always believed that her role is to play the most vicious sort of devil’s advocate and critic to help me—to help all of us—stand strong in our positions?
I’m not sure I want that answer, either. It feels more complicated than I need in the middle of an already too-complicated day.
Liam’s new mate I already know. It’s Kendra McCaffrey—old, horrible McCaffrey’s youngest daughter. Also Deirdre’s youngest daughter. A sleek black wolf with Arctic eyes, who has always seemed clever enough to survive any male. Even a male like Liam.
Whether she canhandlehim or not remains to be seen.
Still, the thought of how furious her parents must be that Kendra has been claimed by a member of our pack makes me smile even more brightly than I might have otherwise.
“Welcome to the family,” I say, inclining my head, because I outrank everyone else—including my brothers—and the honor of welcoming new members into our family falls to me when we’re all being formal.
“It’s an honor and a privilege,” Kendra replies in the old language. She delivers a deep bow.
Her manners are glorious, as expected, but I think I see the kind of canniness in her gaze that reminds me exactly who her mother is. When she’s swept into a conversation with some of my aunts, I look up at Liam. “It’s just as likely that she’s a spy,” I say softly. “I’d be prepared for that.”
“I sure hope so,” says my brother, with a particularlyawaregleam in his gaze that I’m not sure I need to see from the closest thing I have to afather figure. “We’re going to have some fun, Kendra and me. Figuring out who reports to who and what they have to say will definitely be a part of it.”
The hours drag by, even with those unsolicited visuals.
I look around the cavern to see the newly mated females doing the same thing in all their new family groups. Doing their best to integrate themselves into their new packs smartly. Politely. In ways that will set up the life they’ll have to live with the strangers who claimed them and make it something they can tolerate. Hopefully evenlike.
This is how it’s always been done. Females are the threads that bind the whole,my grandmother used to say, usually when she was mad at me for my “selfishness.” Selfishness aside, she was right. Females hold the packs together with their bodies and the babies they produce. Conventional wolf wisdom holds that a male is less likely to go to war against an enemy pack if his daughter is one of them.
That sounds like a lot to ask of a daughter, I think—and not for the first time. It’s also one more thing I haven’t had to experience. All these newly mated female wolves will have to do that mending, that binding, whether they like the male who claimed them or not. Whether they like his family and his pack or not. Just as their aunts and their mothers, and mine, did before them.
They are swept into a new pack overnight, subject to new pack hierarchies and dynamics, and mated to a man it’s possible they neither like that much nor even know particularly well. No matter what they feel, they’re expected to get on with it. And they usually do, because the quickest way to rise in importance in the family and in the pack as a whole is to start producing the next generation.
Maybe it’s because I’m finally ready to be claimed myself that I’m paying closer attention to what all these women around me go through. Not what itmeansin the broader sense, but what it’slike. The bargains they must make. The relationships that they are expected to form, then support.
It seems brutal to me. Head off to a gathering, watch males fight for your favor, then accept the victor because that’s the done thing. Noone changes their mind when the fighting’s done. Females are raised to understand that their job is to bring wolves together, not tear them apart. We are all raised to believe it’s our sacred duty.
