Chapter 15
For a moment, it seems like every wolf in the Jacksonville hills is frozen into place. I tense, sure that I can hear all those minds whirling. Did he say that? Does he mean that?
Is this happening?
Something electric, some kind of communal understanding, shimmers through the packs. It’s like a wave. It builds as it goes—
And then, with battle-ready roars from all sides, wolves launch themselves into action.
All the males of fighting age and stature hurl themselves toward the center of our hilltop, pouring in from all the surrounding hills. The family groups they leave behind at the gathering fires huddle together, protecting the young and the fragile.
For a moment I wonder if we misread this moment. If the wolves are assembling to take Ty down together—the only slight chance they would have to best him.
But it becomes clear very quickly that there are already chosen sides in this battle. That Ty has support.
A lot of support, I see, as they arrange themselves behind him, and a wildfire emotion too militant to be a simple sob gets trapped in my throat.
It’s Ty and his men, of course, but it’s also the rest of the younger, newer kings. The ones who can clearly imagine a different path and a different way to live. The ones who looked at Ty’s success and didn’t begrudge it—or at least, not as much as they wished they could replicate it.
On the other side, with McCaffrey at the forefront, it’s exactly what I expected it would be, though it’s clarifying to see them clumped together tonight as if they’re the ones on a stage.
Janus. Alfric. That crusty-looking grandpa wolf from Utah.
All the old, bitter, angry wolves who prefer the world we lived in before.
The world where they lorded it about in their dens and their territories as they saw fit while their packs were too cowed by the humans and their weapons to argue.
They still want to control things the way they always have, even though we’re three years into a completely different world.
No matter what happens here tonight, I’ll remember who stood for the archaic old ways that—big surprise—favor males like these scared old men. I’ll remember these little kings who are so desperate to keep what little power they have that they’d sandbag their own packs’ prospects to do it.
“Fantastic,” Ty drawls as he eyes the battle lines from above. “Looks like a party.”
At first everyone adheres to the old rules of protocol. When one of McCaffrey’s lieutenants steps forward, my brother Liam laughs out loud.
“I can’t accept this insult to my king,” he declares. “I will fight in his stead.” He doesn’t look at Ty as he says it. He keeps his gaze squarely on McCaffrey’s man. “And may the moon guide me as I teach this lesson.”
Ty inclines his head.
Then we all get to watch as my brother spanks McCaffrey’s man.
It only occurs to me to look at my new sisters toward the end of the fight, when it’s still unclear if these will be fights to the death or simply to surrender.
Leah and Magnolia are both sitting down.
Leah is covering her face. Magnolia is in what looks like an intense conversation with pacifist Aunt Gretchen.
Kendra, by contrast, is standing with her head high and a look I can’t read on her face. When she catches me looking, she swallows. “I know who my father is,” she says quietly.
“That’s something that could have any number of meanings,” I point out. Then I shrug to show that I don’t mean that aggressively myself. “It’s all right to acknowledge that this is complicated.”
Kendra blinks, then looks back toward the fight.
“Your brother is currently fighting the mate my father handpicked for me and intended for me to choose. I was ordered not to put myself forward here with the rest of the unmated females. There were consequences when I did anyway.” She shoots a look at me out of the corner of her eye.
“I am . . . not displeased with the shift in my circumstances.”
Giving in to an urge, I reach over to grip her hand. I squeeze it. “There has to be a better way. I intend to find it.”
Kendra nods, hard. She squeezes my hand in return, and the look she gives me is fierce. It makes me wonder if this sister thing will be more like having friends than I imagined. “I will help you,” she vows.
Liam wins decisively, though he does not rip out the older man’s throat. He makes it clear he could, his teeth holding his opponent fast until McCaffrey’s man has no choice but to whimper, thereby announcing his surrender.
Though Ty’s dark eyes gleam, he otherwise doesn’t acknowledge it. This is strategic. If he were to start crowing about this victory, it could look like he cares too much about winning and therefore, some will argue, it will prove this is about his ego after all.
I can tell that he wants to fight himself, but he can’t. Not while the kings who oppose him only send out their lower-ranked men.
On the solstice, any wolf can challenge any other wolf for any reason, but this is different. It’s obvious that the older kings are sending in their seconds to show they don’t respect Ty enough to fight themselves.
If Ty fights them anyway, it will make him look weak.
This is exactly the kind of shit Ty hates and wants to be done with. I’m betting the older kings know that. They likely expect Ty to crack and jump in.
I know he won’t.
The fighting goes on, rising slowly through the ranks of different packs’ lieutenants on our side—each of them jostling to take a turn and demonstrate their support of Ty—until it finally reaches Connor. Kind, reasonable, extremely tough Connor, who has always stood at Ty’s back.
As Connor stands in the ring, I think about the fact that he’s an older wolf too. He was the VP for the king that Ty deposed, and rumor has it that Ty kept him on to soothe those who thought Ty was too much of an upstart and too hotheaded to handle the changes he created with his challenge.
He’s doing it again tonight.
Connor eyes the line of older kings and their many bruised, bitten, and bleeding underlings, then throws back his head to howl. Announcing to anyone who can hear him that he can still fight.
That’s what he does, taking down high-ranking wolves in several opposing packs until Janus surrenders. It’s the first chink in the old kings’ armor.
I think it’s a game changer.
The old white-faced wolf backs away with his nose toward the ground, muttering about fealty. All the males in his pack do the same.
Beside me, Kendra makes a low noise. When I look at her, she looks triumphant. The way I feel myself—but can’t show. Not out in public like this, when too many people can see me.
One by one, the old kings fall.
Until it’s only McCaffrey’s pack that remains standing against Ty.
“This has gone on long enough,” Ty says impatiently. “Do you imagine that you can stand against not just me but all the wolves in North America? Surely even you aren’t that delusional, McCaffrey.”
“I’ve never liked you,” the old man sneers. “It’s time somebody taught you some manners.”
That reverberates through the hills like the slap it is.
Ty laughs. Then he leaps down from the rock above, landing nimbly and easily—and directly in front of McCaffrey. “By all means, motherfucker. Teach me.”
But McCaffrey is not the king Ty is. He has minions to do his dirty work, and he sends in another one of his lieutenants. This means Liam goes back in, and when more of McCaffrey’s men join the fray, more of Ty’s supporters do too.
I can’t take it anymore. I move away from my family, winding through the crowd until I reach what feels like my proper place. I stand behind Ty, studying McCaffrey’s pack on the other side of the makeshift fighting ring.
Maybe it’s unsurprising that it’s Deirdre who catches my attention. She looks pinched up tight with temper—and is aiming it at me, if I’m not mistaken.
Somehow, this tracks. Ty is trying something no other wolf has dared to try. Packs are fighting and drawing blood. Her mate is sending other males to get beat on in his name.
But sure, Deirdre is pissed at me.
As the men shout insults at each other and then lunge in—shifting into blurs of claw and fang—the older woman eases around the outside of the ring to close the distance between us. “Stop this,” she hisses at me. “You have to stop this.”
I don’t actually laugh, though I come close. “Why in the name of the Wolf Moon herself would I do that?”
She presses her lips together so hard I’m shocked they don’t shatter.
“You young people are always so eager to move on from the old ways,” she bites out, a blank sort of fury in her gaze.
Or maybe it’s something else. Something like grief.
“You have no idea what you’re doing. Or what you’re wrecking with your carelessness. ”
“I think that some of the old ways make perfect sense to carry forward.” I lean in, and it’s a measure of how distraught she is that she doesn’t recoil the way she usually does when I get too close.
This tells me that tic of hers was always performative, but I knew that.
“Particularly the old law that states that should a king leave behind a queen with a dependent son, it is her choice of successor that will oversee the pack.”
Deirdre pales. Her gaze flickers, and I can’t tell where her eyes dart in that moment. To Kendra? To the son in question, a little boy of maybe five who should be back around her pack’s gathering fire?
“If I were you,” I say in a low voice, “I would think about that.”
“What does it matter if there is only one king and he’s out here on the West Coast, a million miles away from me and mine?” She spits that out at me, but she’s also looking across the ring, and this time I can see exactly what has her attention.
McCaffrey, her mate. The king who claimed her long ago and has made a great sport of fucking bitten women at her. The man who wanted to marry off her daughter to one of his seconds, who was soundly defeated in the very first fight tonight.