I do the only thing I can. The thing I must do. I shift. Then I throw back my head and I howl down the goddamn mountain.
I start howling out our version of a 911 call and I don’t stop.
Everyone comes running. The pack pours out of the woods and the hills. Winter and Ariel and a set of vampires I assume must have been on watch appear. Briar stumbles out from inside her cottage, wearing what looks like pajamas—but still with that beanie.
Even Savi appears, bathed in her usual golden light, though she frowns when she sees the piles of guts and gore in the trees. Not because it’s nauseating, I think, though it certainly is. She almost looks as if the way Connor arranged the bodies means something to her.
I can’t concentrate on that.
The fight doesn’t stop just because there are spectators. The only thing that stops is my howl, now that everyone is here. Now that everyone can see what’s happening and who the traitor is.
The wolves can scent it. The vampires too—they certainly know their blood.
Everyone else can draw reasonable conclusions about why Ty would be fighting his VP within five feet of my cottage with an abattoir at the ready.
Connor keeps coming at Ty. Ty swats him back again and again. Then, as the fight goes on, Ty lets the other wolf get close. Yet every time it looks as if Connor’s about to sink his teeth in deep, Ty somehow rolls away.
This happens again and again, until it becomes clear to me—and possibly everyone else watching—that Ty is actually toying with his former VP.
Batting him around like a toy, exhausting him, making him work harder than Ty has to in order to keep him at bay.
Ty isn’t exactlyresting, but he’s making it clear that he’s not fighting at full capacity, either—and he’s a lot younger and stronger than Connor, which would be an advantage even if he wasn’t a better fighter.
Which he is.
I remember him telling me that he could take down all the kings, too. He really, truly is more powerful than any werewolf in memory—and I don’t think it’s occurred to Connor that he’s giving everyone gathered here a demonstration ofexactlywhy Ty is the first and only high king of the werewolves.
Thanks, asshole,I think.
Connor keeps coming for Ty, like he’s not tracking the fact that Ty’s toying with him. He attacks again and again, and it starts to seem as if he’s not feeling the swipe of Ty’s claws, or the size of his teeth.
“Why?” Ty demands. “Why would you do this? And how long have you been working against me?”
Once he says that, things begin to come together in my head. The uptick in bullshit along our delivery routes that I knew about but attributed to chance and asshole, shit-stirring, lower-dwelling members of the Kind. Routes that we kept switching, that no one outside the pack could know. It grew in intensity until right before Halloween, then stopped for a while, before returning—until I started telling only the men who were making the deliveries which routes to take, right before they left.
Something I didn’t do during wolf week, because I was busy. And that’s why the bullshit was rising again.
I’m glad I didn’t tell Ty any of this earlier. Because fuck Connor. There’s no way I could have avoided what he did. There was no way I could have figured it out from looking in my notes, either. Connor is the VP of the pack. The wolves I told to tell no one wouldn’t have thought that applied to Connor. Ever.
I think about how Connor heard me talk about disruptions in church that day. He knew that we were onto him—but by then he’d also gotten on the Vinca train. Whoever got to him after Halloween turned his existing grudges into a little holy war of carcasses and intimidation instead of messing around with our shipments up and down the West Coast.
But it started a long time before then. I know the inciting incident as well as I know my own name.
“It started not long after I came home from New York,” I call out. “If I had to guess, right about the time you sanctioned me working in the office instead of submitting to my fate like a good little wolfgirl.”
There’s a lot of grumbling at that, I hear. From wolves who probably felt the same way back then, if we’re being honest. But everything’s different now.
Besides, no one else took to a little bit of bloody stalking and fell in with a death goddess. The grumbles of moral superiority aren’t entirely unearned.
Connor is crouched low, facing Ty, his tail moving back and forth in warning. He hears me, though. I know this when he bares his teeth in my direction.
“Fucking cunt,” he growls, which is hard to say in the old language, but he makes it happen. That takes commitment. “Filled with demands and no sense of duty. Making a mockery of this pack.”
“Great, so you hate me,” I say, as if he bores me. “Join the club.”
In truth, I’m surprised at how much that actually gets to me. He was always kind. Tough and rough around the edges like most of our males, but supportive where it counted. I knew that a lot of members of the pack weren’t exactly thrilled with my decisions over the years, obviously. They let me know it all the time. My own mother was one of them.
But to go to these lengths? And let me trust him all along? That hurts.
