CHAPTER 7 #3
Michael leveled his gaze at her. “I would ask you to keep a civil tongue when speaking to Layla.”
This was turning into an unmitigated disaster.
His mother opened her mouth and made it worse. “She’s from the MacKenzie Valley pack.”
The reaction around the dinner table was immediate. Shock ripped through the bond. Kristin jerked back like she’d been shot. Amy put a protective hand on her belly, and several people rose from their chairs.
I sat amid the confusion, trying to control myself. My power beat against the bars of the cage I’d corralled it into, threatening to break free. A burning anger gathered inside me, so overpowering at first that I didn’t realize it was coming from Michael.
“Is this why you seated me here?” I asked his mother. “Crowding me with all these big men? Why the kids aren’t here? You thought I might be a danger to your family?” Hurt, bone deep, coursed through me. So much for trying to integrate myself into Michael’s family.
Beneath the table, he reached out and gripped my thigh through my dress. It distracted me so much that the threat of blasting them with wolf power subsided some.
I looked at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out like this.”
He squeezed my leg and released me. “There’s no need to apologize.
You should have been allowed the opportunity to tell me in your own time.
” He turned toward his mother. “These theatrics are uncalled for. If you were worried, you should have said something this afternoon instead of making such a scene at dinner.”
“They needed to hear it,” she said. “Besides, I was taking a page out of your playbook. What was it you said to me earlier? You didn’t want to have to repeat the tale for the entire family?” A cold smile spread over her face.
That settled it. Michael’s mother was a complete bitch.
“Who are the MacKenzie Valley pack?” a small voice asked near the head of the table. Lizzy. “Why have I never heard of them before?”
The alpha regarded her youngest child. “Because they were wiped out before their stupidity exposed our kind to the world.” She turned to pierce me once more with those mercenary blue eyes. “Go ahead, tell her the story.”
Michael’s hackles rose. “No.”
“The family deserves to know what you’ve saddled us with,” she shot back.
“I will not sit idly by while you force my mate to recount her tragic past like some sort of macabre dinner show.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“It is far from fine,” he said, nearly drowning me in his anger.
I wasn’t going to argue with him. I also wasn’t going to be the reason his family ripped itself apart at the seams. His mother did have a point, after all, though she was making it in the most disruptive way possible.
“I’ll tell you,” I said, focusing on Lizzy.
“A few hundred years ago, my ancestors, originally from the Apennines region of southern Italy, fled the preternatural overcrowding of Europe to look for packland in a new country. They settled in northern Canada, deep in the wilderness that surrounds what is now known as the MacKenzie River, though it had many different names back then.”
“Please tell us we’re not about to be subjected to a history lesson,” Michael’s mother said.
“You wanted a story,” I told her, barely resisting the urge to snarl.
Taking a deep breath, I refocused on Lizzy.
“We were the first white people that the First Nation there, the Sahtú, had encountered, and though our interactions with them were limited at first, our peoples soon developed a trading relationship. We brought steel tools and gunpowder. They had an encyclopedic knowledge of the area. We petitioned them and were granted lands they didn’t use, due to the lands’ inhospitableness. Lands that wolves would thrive in.
“There was peace for several generations, but even the remote wilderness couldn’t keep European immigrants out forever. Fur trappers, explorers, and hunters soon began to infiltrate the area. And where humans go, vampires follow.
“They aren’t endemic to this continent, like most of us, and until the mid-1700s, there were relatively few of them.
It was then that the vampires found us. From our very first confrontation with them, it was war.
They saw us as a barrier to their bloodlust, and soon we realized we would lose the war unless we found a way to tip the scales.
The vampires we faced were old world. Too strong and too fast for a wolf to take out in single combat.
The only way we held our own with them at first was through sheer numbers and the heavy aid of magic.
When they began whittling us away, we took drastic measures, starting what amounted to a breeding program.
Only the largest, the strongest, and the most brutal of our kind were allowed to procreate as we attempted to engineer a strain of werewolf that could stand on equal footing with the bloodsuckers.