Chapter Four #3
T HAT NIGHT, I HEARD the students filing into the auditorium for the second time in two days.
I heard it, not saw it, because I was busy backstage with Edric, cursing and fighting with the sound system. Behind us, Ash looked on with those unsettling owl eyes, forcing us to keep our conversation internal.
“ Are you sure this is going to work? ”
“ I’m sure, ” Edric replied, fussing with tangled cords. “ You want to show the alphas—all the alphas—that you mean business? This is the way. A show of force doesn’t always require violence. ”
“ My alpha voice killer is the definition of nonviolent warfare. I still don’t understand why you’re not proud of me for coming up with that one. You’re the one who keeps saying I’ve got to stop killing everyone. ”
He gave me a flat look. “ Just get your fine ass out there. I’ll take care of this. ”
“ Okay, ” I replied, shrugging, “ but only because you’re correctly fond of my fine ass. Eventually you’ll realize all the rest of me, including my plans for world domination, is perfect too. ”
Edric just shook his head, his cute growly laugh rich and alive even in his head.
I set off for the stage and Ash was right behind me, sticking closer to me than a pulsating boil on a backside.
After breakfast, I told her all about the open forum, and she hated every bit of it. Apparently, this wasn’t a Wolfy’s—the restaurant chain—and we didn’t take customer complaints.
She said that if students had legitimate grievances, they could take them to the honor board, but expecting the two of us to grin and bear it while they complained at us about rules that weren’t going to change was a waste of time. I did helpfully point out that there was no us involved and she didn’t have to be there.
She didn’t like that one bit.
As a result, Ash showed up in my office an hour before the forum, holding a folder of rules, expectations, and an agenda for the forum she wasn’t invited to in the first place.
I wasn’t surprised she tried to take over the whole thing. I was only surprised she let me beat her to the microphone.
“Good evening, everyone.” Ash hovered over my shoulder like a cockatiel. “Thank you for attending Corvin Academy’s first open forum.”
When I said everyone, I meant everyone. I didn’t make it mandatory, but still the rows were packed with alphas, betas, omegas, secret police, and my epsilon girls taking up the front row. Right behind them were Nia, her friends, Paxton, and Orion.
I tensed a bit seeing Paxton and Orion together. I tensed even more when Paxton laughed at something he said.
What did the two of them have to talk about? I knew they were friends long before they met me, but Orion hated my guts while Paxton was trying to get me to fall in love with him and save both our lives. Their current goals did not mesh at all, so again, what did they have to chat about?
I forced myself to focus. “Now, I know you’ve never done anything like this at the academy before, so let me explain how this works.”
“Ah, yes.” Ash grasped my shoulder. “This is a good time for me to step in and explain the rules, thank you, High Priestess. If you’ll just—”
“Thank you , Vice Headmistress, but we’re not at that stage yet. I have to do the introductions first.” I pointed. “If you wouldn’t mind taking a seat, I’ll let you know when I’m done.”
She sniffed, flashing me her ever-present disapproving glare, but she finally backed off and claimed her seat on the stage.
“As I was saying,” I continued. “When I first came up with this idea, I thought it’d be a great way for us to discuss how to improve school life, but that’s not necessary anymore. Vice Headmistress Ash has that covered.”
“Yeah! Whoo!”
Cheers and applause for Ash broke out. The alphas and betas whooped it up, big-time convinced that no matter what Ash changed, she was ultimately here to make life better for them and them only.
Ash smiled slightly, tipping her chin at the praise.
“With that being the case, I figured we need to think bigger,” I went on. “All of you in this room are about to inherit Wolf Nation. You are the future leaders of the Golden Age, and it’s you who have to change and fight for the nation you want it to be, so instead of thinking only about how to improve life for the school, this forum will be about how we can improve life, equality, and happiness for all wolves in the nation.”
That got a smattering of applause in return. Plenty from the omegas and epsilons, but the betas and alphas didn’t twitch.
“Now, before Vice Ash takes over, let me introduce you to our guests.” I swept out my hand to the big, white screen hanging overhead. Right on cue, Edric flicked on the video chat. Seven stern, blank, bored, and annoyed faces came onto the screen, staring down their noses at us all.
Ash fell out of her seat. “Clan leaders?! What on earth—! What is this?”
“I’d be more than happy to explain.” I beamed the same shit-eating smirk on Ash that she gave me on this very stage. “It was helpfully pointed out to me that I can make all the changes I want in the academy, it doesn’t make a lick of difference. The real change has to happen beyond these walls if we’re ever to have any hope of fulfilling Luame’s vision of the future.
“A point I made to the leaders of the moon, sun, water, earth, fire, metal, and wind clans.” I smiled at them—who could see me just as well as I could see them—but not a one smiled back. “Since they’re just as committed to Luame and the Golden Age, they’ve agreed to listen in on our weekly forums, come up with concrete plans to enact these changes, and then propose the new laws to the council—”
“Excuse me?” Ash screeched.
“Oh my gods, is this real?” Nia cried, jumping up. “But this is amazing!”
“Isn’t it wonderful, everyone?” I sounded off, clapping and jumping up and down. “Today your clan leaders will listen and hear you.”
My enthusiasm was infectious, getting everyone on their feet—but not for the same reason.
“You can’t be serious!” Megan shouted.
“A few omegas whine and cry, and you go changing the laws? That’s ridiculous!”
“You wouldn’t care about the laws changing, alpha, if you didn’t know they were skewed in your favor!”
“This is highly irregular,” Ash belted, rushing over to the podium. The secret police were swarming the stage to do the same. “I was not informed of this. The council wasn’t informed of this! We are not doing it. This forum is canceled!”
Magnus, the metal wolf clan alpha—and the bearer of a quite beautiful rising-moon-face tattoo—cocked a brow. “Canceled, is it? What a pity. I’ll be off, th—”
“You were paid for an hour of your time,” I sliced in, a hard edge bleeding into my sweetness. “Leave now and I’ll expect that money back.”
Magnus, and the finger that had been about to slam the escape button, paused. “That’s not necessary,” he gritted. “I will happily keep to my commitment, but in return, it’s not too much to ask for you to be ready and organized.”
“Exactly,” the others agreed. “You’re wasting your own time.”
“We are more than ready and organized. The students are too,” I said. “Everyone, if you’ve got something to share with your leaders, line up between the rows and—”
“No,” one of the secret police officers barked, even though the students were tripping over themselves to form a line. “Unless you have authorization from the council for this meeting, and provide that proof now, this forum ends now.”
I crooked a brow. “Authorization? Since when do clan members need permission from the council to speak to their leaders? Unless you can provide proof of that new law change, you end now. You have no business on this stage,” I stated. “You’re here to investigate Dagem’s murder, not get in the way of school business.
“Get off, or get out.”
The man exchanged looks with his colleagues, and then they all turned to Ash.
She stood there fists balled and nostrils flaring. She was shaking so hard, her tattoo was doing a rumba on her cheek. “High Priestess, please be reasonable,” Ash hissed. “You sprung this forum on me with no warning—”
“Nothing was sprung on you. You weren’t invited.”
Ash blew past that like I hadn’t spoken. “A gathering of the leaders is serious. Proposed law changes are serious. If this is to be done, it must be done the right way,” she hissed. “Let us now thank the leaders for sparing the time, let them return to their business, dismiss the students, and then you and I will meet with the clan leaders and the council privately to discuss your concerns.”
“My concerns? My concerns have nothing to do with this,” I replied. “It’s been pointed out to me several times that I don’t know about the lives of the wolves of Wolf Nation, and I shouldn’t pretend I do.
“Every student here has lived among these clans,” I said, sweeping my hand over the crowd. “They know what it’s like. They know what needs to be changed. They are going to speak now, Mrs. Ash ,” I stressed, refusing to use her title like she refused to call me headmistress. “I put a lot of time and money into making this happen, so you’re going to step aside and stop wasting it.” I pointed to her chair. “Now.”
She snarled, eyes yellowing. Getting in my face, she growled, “This isn’t over.”
“I’d be disappointed if it was.”
Ash stomped off, leaving me under the weight of seven disapproving glares.
The collective assortment of pricks could be as pissed as they wanted. Even though everyone assumed Lucia was my bank, the truth was I had plenty of my own money. My father was clan alpha before he was killed and replaced by the middle-aged, bespectacled, dreadlocked moon wolf sitting blank-faced at the bottom left of the screen.
Clan alphas were far from poor. How could they be when they had the right to tax their people as heavily as they wanted, and pocket all the money.
My father wasn’t greedy, or corrupt, but he did end his time as a wealthy man, and everything he had he left to me in a healthy, secret, offshore bank account. The same bank account Castor topped up for me and our daughter.
I drained half a million dollars out of that bank account just to get all seven of the leaders to give me an hour of their time. Damn right I wasn’t letting Ash piss that money away and end the meeting.
No one was getting away that easily.
“Sorry for the interruption,” I said to the leaders. “Before we begin, I’m disclosing that this forum is being videoed and live-streamed on Loop Garou by that wolf in the corner with the fine ass.”
“Excuse me?” Ash shot up, twisting around to see Edric waving from the corner. “Absolutely not. Turn that off. Turn it off, Mr. Blaze, or that’s a demerit!”
“I’ll take the demerit.”
I thought she’d rip his head off. Especially when he winked at her.
“ You are so sexy right now. ”
“ Focus, woman. I’ll fuck you after. ”
I rolled my eyes, hiding my smile a lot better than the leaders were hiding their discomfort. All of a sudden, they weren’t looking so arrogantly smug.
“Actually, I don’t know how cool I am with being recorded,” Jayson, the water leader, said. I was looking into the blue eyes of the weak-ass nepo baby himself. “You never said anything about that.”
“No, what I said was that this forum would be the start of the new laws created and put forth by the clan leaders. What? Did you think if you didn’t tell anyone else about that promise, you could deny it if I ever did?”
Seven faces hardened in unison. That was a big, fat yes.
“Whoops, too bad,” I sang. “Everyone’s going to know, and everyone’s going to see. Matter of fact, Eddy baby, how many people are tuned into the live right now?”
“One hundred thousand and counting, baby.”
“Excellent.”
Growls sounded through their screens.
“Enough of that, let’s get started.” I moved closer to the podium, making sure the mic picked me up loud and clear. “First, I’m going to give you the new laws we’ve already agreed upon so that you’re not getting a bunch of repeats. After, the students will run the forum.” I beamed at Jayson. “First, the approved jobs lists are gone. Every wolf everywhere will have the right to apply for a job they’re trained and qualified for—regardless of their wolf type.”
Magnus snorted. “Perposterous. What use is an omega police officer who can be commanded to get back in their cruiser and drive away? We have the laws we do for a reason, girl.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” the alphas went off.
“Exactly.”
“It’s not oppression, it’s common sense.”
I ignored their heckling. “We have the laws we do because we’re too ridiculous and too pathetic to enforce said laws against alphas and betas.”
Meya, the moon leader, sputtered. “I beg your pardon!”
“What Magnus just described is evading arrest, which is illegal the last I checked. Since when do we blame innocent people for having crimes committed against them? That’s what criminals freaking do. Commit crimes,” I drew out. “And when an alpha commits a crime like, for example, using compulsion to evade arrest, what if instead of going—oh well, it happens. We hit the bastard with double the penalties and triple the fees.
“Which brings me to my next suggestion,” I plowed on as they all started talking at once. “Harsher punishments for power-based crimes.”
“You have no idea what you’re—!”
“There was a serial rapist running around free in the fire clan for years,” I bellowed, blowing up six brows and shutting two mouths. “He used his alpha voice to force himself on omega women. So many of them reported him, and nothing was done! Maybe if all those blessed alpha officers had done their job and cut his fucking dick off, he’d have learned to use his voice nicely!”
“Yeah!” nearly every woman in the room screamed—Nia loudest of all.
Yes, I was betraying my temple vow by telling them what Mason told me, but in his case, the rules no longer applied. Mason gave himself away that night when my fates and I burst in on him with Nia. Once he revealed himself to be a rapist, the secret was out. Therefore there wasn’t a secret for me to keep.
It was tricky navigating the rules. Mostly because Luame was temperamental and was liable to change said rules whenever she felt like it, but in Mason’s case, I had a feeling I was safe.
She didn’t like that rapist piece of shit either.
Mara leaned in close to the screen. I knew her as the fire clan leader, and the sister of the woman Orion’s father killed, but I’d never seen her in person before.
She also wasn’t what I pictured. Mara took over the clan after I ran away that fateful night. The woman looking down on me was slender, pale, and dressed simply in a plain white top with no makeup or jewelry. Every other leader was dressed like the rich people they were.
“I’m not aware of any serial rapist among my clan, or that reports were made against him,” Mara said.
I looked her in the eyes. “Exactly.”
Eyes yellowing, Mara’s lips pressed in a thin line. “Women are safe in my clan, High Priestess. That was the promise I made when I took over...” Her eyes flicked off my face. I didn’t have to look to know who she was staring at. “It’s a promise I intend to keep.”
“There are women from your clan here right now, Alpha Mara, and they want to tell you what they need to feel safe. All I ask is that you listen to them.”
She stared at me, face unreadable. Then she reached for something off screen. “I’m listening,” she said, flipping open the notebook. “Let them speak.”
Nodding, I turned to the waiting audience. “All right, now’s your chance. One at a time, come up, speak into the mic, and share your concerns with your leaders. We have less than an hour, so be concise.”
A wind beta girl literally blew on stage, using her power to blast over everyone’s head and get to the microphone first. I braced myself to intervene.
She cleared her throat. “The law says that the alpha in the relationship gets full custody of the kids in a divorce, and that’s wrong,” Bindi said, voice small. “I haven’t seen my mom since I was seven, and now I don’t know where she is or how to find her. I don’t even know if she’s alive. It’s wrong,” she repeated, then walked away—leaving quieter than she arrived.
Mara said nothing. She just silently wrote it down.
“ See? ” Edric said as another student stepped up to the stage. “ No violence or maiming required, Daze. The omegas needed to know you could affect real change beyond these walls. More than that, they need to know they could.
“ Getting all the clan leaders together to listen to the concerns of people they wouldn’t stop to piss on if they were burning in the street? That’s huge, baby. Ash is right that nothing like this has ever happened before, but you made it happen. ”
“ Big, fat checks and all the blackmail Idalia collected on them under Sunella’s command made it happen, ” I amended. “ But you get credit for the idea to hook the two of us up. ” I glanced up. “ We really do need each other to pull this off. ”
A third-year omega guy stepped up to the podium. “The entire education system needs to be changed in every clan, not just Corvin,” he said. “We should all be taught the same lessons.”
“Yeah,” someone whooped, setting off a round of cheering.
Megan was very quick to storm the stage and shove him not-too-gently aside. “I would just like to remind everyone here that Wolf Nation is the best, strongest, and happiest dominion in the world.”
“Yes, thank you!” another voice shouted, setting off the alphas.
“We’re the only dominion that’s never had a civil war, and you know that,” Megan cried. “Because we all know our place. We know who we are and what we’re meant to do, and it’s not because the alphas and betas are soooo mwean ,” she mocked, pulling a face at me. “It’s because we obey Luame and the path she chose for us!”
“Yeah!”
“All of you should be ashamed of yourself, whining and crying to our alpha leaders because you hate your own lives, but you should be ashamed most of all, High Priestess.” I didn’t think someone shorter than me could look down their nose at me, but damn, Megan nailed it. “Luame is so ashamed of you!”
I gave her a crazy look. “How in the hell are you going to tell me how Luame feels? I’m the one she talks to!”
“Are you sure those aren’t the voices in your head, Crazy Dazey?”
“Tell her, Megan!”
The alphas and half the betas were on their feet—clapping, stomping, assaulting everyone’s sensitive ears, including their own.
“Settle down,” I shouted. “Be quiet, everyone!”
“What is this nonsense? I can’t hear a thing,” Magnus gruffed.
“Little girl wants to steal a school, but doesn’t know how to run it,” muttered Kenyatta, the new moon clan alpha.
She set the other alpha leaders off laughing. Everyone except for Mara, but even she was losing her patience.
“Okay, enough!” I held my hands out over the crowd, wishing right then I was a forest wolf who could summon clumps of dirt and stuff their mouths! “This is a waste of time, sit d—”
“Shut the fuck up! This is our one chance to be heard, and of course you fucking alpha assholes are ruining it!”
“Who the fuck are you calling an asshole, fish!”
“Your mama’s a fucking fish! She glub-glub-glubs on this dick all night long!”
His friends howled at the comeback until said alpha asshole leaped out of his chair, launching at them.
“Shut up!”
A tidal wave of water appeared in the air and splattered the alphas and betas, washing half of them bellowing out of their seats.
The lines turned on each other. Yellow eyes, dripping fangs, lethal claws, flames, water, vines, and all the powers at their fingers clashed in a furious mob of growls and snarls.
“Stop it!” I screamed. “Ava! Melisent!”
My epsilons shot out of their seats, running to break up the fighting.
I spun back on the alpha leaders just as Magnus signed out, leaving his square dark.
“No, wait!”
Shaking her head, Mara’s disappointment was heavy in her eyes before she clicked out too.
The complete and utter satisfaction on Ash’s face was obscene. The woman laughed full in my fucking face.
“Don’t go,” I cried, running to the podium. “Just wait five minutes, and I’ll—”
Boom!
The stage heaved, throwing me off my feet.
I crashed on the floor, ears ringing as the projector went completely dark—wiping away the last five judgmental faces in a blink.
“What the hell is going on?” I shrieked, nose filling with the harsh, acrid sting of smoke.
“It’s the projection equipment,” Edric cried in my ears and my head. “It’s destroyed! Blown up.”
“What! How?!”
“Oh, dear,” Ash tutted. Her shadow fell over me, looming as large as her grin. “It would seem the forum is over. Indefinitely.
“Back to your dorms, students,” she sang, gliding off the stage. “We won’t trouble you with this nonsense again.”