Chapter 26 - Marcus
MARCUS
Marcus looked out the window of the private jet, a frown etched across his brow as he stared at the sunrise. He was going back home, but doing so without his new mates felt like an admission of failure.
The alpha of the largest pack on the continent, and yet not a single one of his mates acknowledged him as their undisputed leader.
It was incomprehensible and deeply embarrassing.
“Your mother wants to know if you’d like to join her for dinner on Wednesday night at the Governor’s Ball,” Bruce said, seated across from him, looking at his iPad. “And Odin wants to schedule a meeting. He’s at the compound this week.”
“He is?” Marcus asked, confused. Odin was the second most dominant alpha in the pack and leader of his own district within Marcus’s territory. He usually went home a few days after the full moon whenever he came up to visit, and that had been a week ago.
“He’s been courting Anastacia.”
Marcus considered it and nodded to himself. That made sense. Anastacia was exactly the kind of strong-willed and no-nonsense woman that Odin would go for.
“Do you know what he wants to talk about?”
Some pack alphas required their pack members to get permission to mate, but that was not the case in Marcus’s pack – at least during the years when he or his father had been in charge.
“I think he wants to hand over the reins to his district and move up north.”
“Anastacia doesn’t want to move to Calgary?”
Bruce chuckled. “Nope.”
“Set up a meeting, but let him know that I’ll approve his request. We’ll settle who the next district alpha in Calgary will be during the full moon. Have Peter start making the preparations.”
“And your mother?”
Marcus shook his head. “Let her know that I’m busy. I’ll see her on the full moon.”
“Are you guys still fighting?” William piped up from the end of the aisle, crouched down in front of the fridge and getting himself a soda.
“We were never fighting,” Marcus said, not in the mood to discuss it. “We’re just both busy people.”
William gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Sure.”
Marcus turned to Bruce. “Tell her that William will be happy to join her.”
“What? No!” William cried, taking his seat. “I don’t want to. It’s so stuffy and insufferable.”
“Will do,” Bruce said. William made a disgruntled noise and threw his head back, pouting at the ceiling.
“And what about your…” Bruce trailed off, looking at the twin bites that were visible on Marcus’s throat. The mating bites had scarred over, and while they would heal completely within a few months, for now they were as good as a neon sign declaring that Marcus had found his mates.
“We’ll wait until Harland’s claim on his territory has been finalized, and then we’ll file it as an alliance,” Marcus declared. He’d given it a great deal of thought. “Max will stay in Harland’s pack, and Warren will be registered with ours.”
“Did you ask Warren if that’s what he wants?” William piped up. “He seems pretty opinionated.”
“It’s just administrative,” Marcus said. “And being registered with our pack gives him far more protection.”
“Then why not claim Max as ours, too?”
“He was in Harland’s pack, first. It would be rude.”
What Marcus didn’t say was that as long as Harland was Max’s official alpha, Marcus could direct all questions about Max’s behavior to him.
“Sure,” William said, seeing right through him.
“Speaking of Max,” Bruce said, ignoring the bickering as he always did, “we’ve located the name of his birth mother: Ashlynne Zimmermann.
She was human, living in Florida at the time of his birth, with no known ties to any werewolf pack or independent alpha that we could find.
She died in labor and Max was transferred to child protective services and adopted a few months later.
We’re still trying to track her movements, but we have no record of her outside of Florida in the year before Max was born. ”
That was weird. Florida was completely off limits – something lived there that killed any werewolf that tried to enter, and no attempt had been made to challenge whatever it was in at least a hundred years.
Ashlynne must have left the state at some point in the year before Max’s birth, or there was no way for Max to be a werewolf.
Even without the Florida component, the whole thing was strange. Werewolves didn’t do casual relationships with humans. Werewolves as a rule avoided humans unless they were drawn to them as mates, and those relationships were usually on the obsessive end of the spectrum.
The only way a werewolf child would be abandoned to the human world was if the werewolf parent was dead, or if they didn’t know that they had a child in the first place.
“Maybe she was running away?” William suggested, echoing what Marcus was thinking. “If I were human and I wanted to get away from a werewolf, that’s where I’d go. Finding out that she was pregnant could have been the catalyst for her escape.”
That could be. Not all humans reacted positively to a werewolf wanting to claim them as their mate. There were a disturbing number of cases throughout history of humans forced into unhappy relationships by delusional werewolves who believed that things had to work out because they were mates.
A feeling of shame welled in Marcus’s gut. He wanted to think that he wouldn’t ever have kidnapped Warren and tried to force a relationship, but he knew himself well enough to know that without his father’s example of how wrong that could go, he might have gone down that path.
“If she was claimed as a mate, it was never registered,” Bruce said.
“And we’ve got a pretty accurate trail of her movements from her debit card usage.
She lived in Orlando for five years before Max was born, and the longest gap in her debit card usage in that timeframe is seven days.
There are no transactions outside the state since she moved there from Alabama. ”
“Okay, that’s bizarre,” William said.
“Could it be a mix-up?” Marcus asked. “Did someone switch a human baby with Max?”
“That would still put a werewolf infant in a Florida hospital.” Bruce scrolled on his iPad. “We’ve located Max’s biological grandmother. I’ll have a DNA sample taken so that we can make sure that Ashlynne was, in fact, his mother.”
Marcus had no idea how Bruce would accomplish that, but he had no doubt that within a few days he’d have the result sitting on his iPad.
“Keep digging, but don’t inform the council until we know more.”
Bruce nodded.
“Your brother and his mates are coming up for the next full moon,” Bruce said, moving on. “They want to stay in the cabin out by the lake. Should I tell them yes?”
“Of course.”
Steve never stayed in the main house anymore, and Marcus didn’t blame him. He still woke up in a cold sweat some nights thinking about what his father had done.
He was terrified he’d end up going down the same dark path of insanity.
His father had been a reasonable man, once. Beloved by his pack. A good husband and father. He’d been in control of himself and his darker urges, right up until he hadn’t.
Marcus knew that he had it in him to go just as bad.
“Stop it,” William chastised, throwing a protein bar at his head. Marcus caught it before it made impact. “Don’t brood. You’re nothing like him.”
William knew him too well.
Bruce squirmed, the topic of John and his rule always making him uncomfortable. Bruce had been devoted to Marcus’s father up until the very end, and as far as the pack was concerned, his death was an accident.
Marcus’s refusal to properly honor him cast a huge pall on the beginning of his reign.
Cain, Bruce and everyone in the inner circle were smart enough that they’d figured out pretty quickly that something had gone down and that the accident story was a cover-up, but they didn’t know what the cover-up was for.
The leading theory, according to William, was that their mother had snapped and killed him. She hadn’t been back at the compound since it happened, and whenever people cautiously prodded her for information, she looked at them coldly and told them that things worked out for the best.
“You have a message from the council,” Bruce announced, looking relieved to be able to change the subject. “They just got Alpha Hill’s notice that he’s claiming the city of Spellerview and the surrounding land as his territory. They want your input.”
William chuckled. “More like they want you to deal with him.”
“Let them know that we’re recognizing his claim.” Marcus smirked, imagining the chaos that his support of a vampire claiming territory as a werewolf would cause. “But hold off on announcing the alliance. Let’s give them a moment to get used to the idea of a vampire alpha.”
“Yes, alpha.”
Bruce looked like he also found the idea of a vampire alpha disturbing, but he couldn’t exactly say anything when Marcus had taken that vampire as his mate.
Despite the bites on his throat, Marcus didn’t feel mated. His bonds with Harland and Max had snapped into place the moment they’d claimed each other – he could feel them both across the link inside his mind – but with Warren not fully committed, it felt like they were in a holding pattern.
At least now they were all working toward the same goal. It was a relief, not having to worry about Harland and Max being competition.
“That’s all the pack business dealt with,” Bruce said, putting down his iPad and picking up a second, identical iPad. “Should we move on to business?”
“No, so boring,” William complained.
“Yes,” Marcus said. He pulled out his laptop and opened it. “Where did we land on the patent? Did S.T. accept our offer?”
William got up and went to the galley, leaving Marcus and Bruce in peace to discuss everything that Marcus had neglected over the last couple of days.