Chapter 9
Cold Moon, waning crescent
Wolves keep showing up all week. All of them eager to prove that they’ll do exactly what they want, when they want to do it. And more, that they won’t be told otherwise by anyone. Especially not by an upstart young king like Ty.
Typical wolf bullshit, in other words.
Still, there’s something about wolves simply being everywhere in the valley. Assholes aside, I can’t help but love it. Wolves howling in the hills. Wolves on two feet, prowling around Jacksonville to poke around in the boutiques, drink coffee, and watch the humans a little too closely.
“This is a safe zone,” I tell a cluster of three young wolves from Saskatchewan when they look a little too narrow-eyed and hunt-ready. “You can’t eat them.”
“We don’t have that shit in Canada,” one of them says with a laugh. “We claimed the provinces long ago.”
“You’re not in the provinces,” I remind him. “If you want to snack on humans, go into Medford and see what you can find. But I warn you, there are a lot of vampires over there, and they don’t take kindly to poaching.”
They wander off. Whether to troll the streets of Medford for humans foolish enough to go there, I can’t say.
I already knew that things were different here in the Rogue Valley.
That was very clear even five years ago, when we were all still in hiding, and all the other pack leaders seemed astonished by the way that Ty managed things.
Now it’s even more clear. Not all of the female wolves are as busy putting on performances as Deirdre, so they’re the ones who tell me that while some of the packs live in places where they interact with other Kind clans and with humans the way we do, most of them don’t.
Most of them, these females whisper to me in one way or another, are jealous of what appears to be the abundance out west.
“Abundance doesn’t fall from the trees like fruit,” I tell them all. With a laugh, because I have to seem easy. Jealousy of our abundance can easily turn to a run at Ty for having it and hoarding it. “It has to be planned, carried out, and executed perfectly. Ty’s been doing this for decades.”
One of the older queens, Mariella, was like a mentor to me five years ago.
Meaning she protected me from Deirdre. This week we go and have coffee in a corner of the coffeehouse in Jacksonville, and she tells me all the rumblings that people think she’s too submissive and well behaved to repeat to anyone else. Especially me.
“Everyone thinks that there must be some magic involved in how Ty was able to transition so quickly once the Reveal hit. Other packs foundered.” Her king heads up the Texas pack, and he’s significantly less excitable than some I could mention.
It’s clear she doesn’t mean him. “There are some bad feelings too. Some think that if there was magic, why didn’t Ty share it with everyone else? ”
“This is so funny,” I say mildly. “Because I remember Ty attempting to share some of the ways that he was running protection up and down the interstate here in advance of the Reveal, and no one wanted to listen to him then. That’s my memory of the last gathering. Why would he think anything changed?”
Mariella nods. “A lot of the packs got a little too excited three years ago when the Reveal changed everything,” she says, with an eye roll.
“There was no forward thinking, but a lot of time to turn regret into a grudge. They also don’t like to collaborate.
I don’t think McCaffrey is likely to mention this, but word is, they have a significant wraith problem in New England. ”
I shudder. Wraiths are kind of like banshees in that they seem insubstantial and can float around where you least expect them. Only instead of sticking to their own melodrama, they take it out on everything and everyone around them. They also don’t work well with others.
They prefer to feed on them.
“People are hungry,” Mariella tells me, her gaze serious over her coffee mug. “And instead of looking to themselves and the situations they could have handled better, they’re looking to see what others have. Things they think they should be given.”
Every night, after we all sit around the fires, tell stories, and talk like one big, happy family, I relate these things to Ty.
We lie together in that big bed of his, tucked away in the farthest reaches of the den.
Usually we release a little tension first. Sometimes we take a break in the middle. We always indulge ourselves after, too.
Because nothing is a better counterpoint to endless politics than the way we fuck, so blisteringly hot that we can’t think about anything or anyone else until we’re done.
The man is like medicine.
Sometimes I forget.
“These old assholes,” Ty mutters one night during this endless in-between week.
“Always up in my face, telling me that I should learn respect and bend a knee to my betters. Always whining that they don’t have what we have here.
Mind you, not one of them bothered to listen to me when I told them how to do it themselves. ”
“The exact point I keep making,” I agree.
He runs his hand over my head as I lie there, limp on his chest. His voice is low. Something like proud. “I hope you also tell them that you’re a better queen to me without a crown than any of their women could dream of being.”
I smile against his skin. “I assume that goes without saying.”
Then I crawl my way down the length of him, passing all the delectable ridges in his hard torso. I taste him as I go, lowering myself until I can take that giant cock of his in my hands, lick him until he groans, and then open my mouth wide to take him in deep.
Not that he lets me do that for too long without taking control.
He holds me down until I’m sobbing out his name. Then he makes me scream it.
The next morning, he wakes me up with an arm beneath my belly to tilt my hips up. He gets his teeth on my neck as he pounds into me, making me come hard and long, groaning out the glory of it into his soft mattress and his sleeping furs.
“Happy Thursday, babe,” he growls in my ear, his deep voice rich with satisfaction and laughter. “Kick ass today. It’s not even wolf week yet.”
I think about that when I stop and get coffee in Jacksonville, running into a little party of wolves from the Dakotas. I’m sure they tell me which Dakota, but I don’t track it.
“Must be fun,” says one of them, a little shit of a male wolf that I vaguely remember as a cub five years ago. “Acting like a human girl. Thinking you’re one of them.”
“The way you think you’re a wolf?” I reply, with a smirk.
He doesn’t like that, though some of his friends laugh. I don’t have to make nice with assy cublings. Only their kings.
But it’s a common theme. After I get my coffee, I walk back outside and find another group of wolves. They’re from all over, and they’re a little too interested in a couple of human old ladies trying to access one of the shops.
Human old ladies I know.
“Good morning, Mrs. Bloom,” I say. I nod at her friend. They were both librarians when I was in school, and I thought they were old back then. Now they practically creak. “Mrs. Schroeder.”
“Happy holidays, Maddox,” says Mrs. Bloom. “The tourists are already taking over the streets, I guess.”
“I didn’t think we had tourists these days,” says Mrs. Schroeder. “I thought they got eaten.” I remember then that she was the one who let me read too much Stephen King at a tender age.
“It’s that time of year,” I reply merrily.
I turn back to the wolves after the old ladies go inside. “Leave them alone,” I say, as softly as I’m able. “Or you can take it up not just with Ty but with the other two powers in this valley. Believe me when I tell you that none of them will be happy.”
“Do you mean your sorceress friend?” one of them asks. Another snot-nosed male. “Or do you mean the vampire?”
“You know that you’re supposed to go to an oracle, hear what they have to say, and then go back to being a wolf, right?” asks another. Also snot-nosed. Also male. “You’re not supposed to act like you’re an oracle yourself.”
“I’m pretty sure I can tell your future,” I say mildly. “If you keep talking.”
“Everyone gets it, Maddox,” says the lone female in the group, who, in fairness, is likely here to find a mate.
I’d be bitter too if fools like these were my options.
“You’re not like the rest of us. You break tradition whenever you feel like it.
Congratulations. Not everybody has that kind of leeway. ”
What I don’t say is not everybody has that kind of guts. I don’t say it out of respect for the female, who admittedly doesn’t have the choices I do. There’s no Ty on her horizon.
But that’s what I’m thinking as I walk back to my truck, and then wish that I’d had a fight with both sets of wolves, because Johanna is waiting for me.
She’s leaning against the side of my Explorer, looking around at all the wolves and humans and assorted other creatures on Jacksonville’s main street as if they’re all out here specifically to irritate her.
Though when she sees me, it’s pretty clear that I’m the one who irritates her the most.
“Do you have any idea what they’re saying behind your back?” she asks me.
“I know what they say to my face,” I reply, keeping it cheerful. “I’m betting it’s along the same lines.”
My mother makes an exasperated noise. “What explanation do you imagine anyone will find acceptable for why it is you’re living apart from our alpha?”
“For one thing, that’s nobody’s business but ours,” I say, and practice staying steady while I say it.
“I’m pretty sure that’s what he would say, if anyone bothered to ask him.
But we both know they won’t.” Her mouth tightens.
I keep going. “Anyway, I’ve been sleeping in the den all week.
Exactly where I belong. All nice and proper. ”