Chapter 20 #2
The fight doesn’t stop just because there are spectators. The only thing that stops is my howl, now that everyone is here. Now that everyone can see what’s happening and who the traitor is.
The wolves can scent it. The vampires too—they certainly know their blood.
Everyone else can draw reasonable conclusions about why Ty would be fighting his VP within five feet of my cottage with an abattoir at the ready.
Connor keeps coming at Ty. Ty swats him back again and again. Then, as the fight goes on, Ty lets the other wolf get close. Yet every time it looks as if Connor’s about to sink his teeth in deep, Ty somehow rolls away.
This happens again and again, until it becomes clear to me—and possibly everyone else watching—that Ty is actually toying with his former VP.
Batting him around like a toy, exhausting him, making him work harder than Ty has to in order to keep him at bay.
Ty isn’t exactly resting, but he’s making it clear that he’s not fighting at full capacity, either—and he’s a lot younger and stronger than Connor, which would be an advantage even if he wasn’t a better fighter.
Which he is.
I remember him telling me that he could take down all the kings, too. He really, truly is more powerful than any werewolf in memory—and I don’t think it’s occurred to Connor that he’s giving everyone gathered here a demonstration of exactly why Ty is the first and only high king of the werewolves.
Thanks, asshole, I think.
Connor keeps coming for Ty, like he’s not tracking the fact that Ty’s toying with him. He attacks again and again, and it starts to seem as if he’s not feeling the swipe of Ty’s claws, or the size of his teeth.
“Why?” Ty demands. “Why would you do this? And how long have you been working against me?”
Once he says that, things begin to come together in my head.
The uptick in bullshit along our delivery routes that I knew about but attributed to chance and asshole, shit-stirring, lower-dwelling members of the Kind.
Routes that we kept switching, that no one outside the pack could know.
It grew in intensity until right before Halloween, then stopped for a while, before returning—until I started telling only the men who were making the deliveries which routes to take, right before they left.
Something I didn’t do during wolf week, because I was busy. And that’s why the bullshit was rising again.
I’m glad I didn’t tell Ty any of this earlier.
Because fuck Connor. There’s no way I could have avoided what he did.
There was no way I could have figured it out from looking in my notes, either.
Connor is the VP of the pack. The wolves I told to tell no one wouldn’t have thought that applied to Connor. Ever.
I think about how Connor heard me talk about disruptions in church that day.
He knew that we were onto him—but by then he’d also gotten on the Vin?a train.
Whoever got to him after Halloween turned his existing grudges into a little holy war of carcasses and intimidation instead of messing around with our shipments up and down the West Coast.
But it started a long time before then. I know the inciting incident as well as I know my own name.
“It started not long after I came home from New York,” I call out. “If I had to guess, right about the time you sanctioned me working in the office instead of submitting to my fate like a good little wolfgirl.”
There’s a lot of grumbling at that, I hear. From wolves who probably felt the same way back then, if we’re being honest. But everything’s different now.
Besides, no one else took to a little bit of bloody stalking and fell in with a death goddess. The grumbles of moral superiority aren’t entirely unearned.
Connor is crouched low, facing Ty, his tail moving back and forth in warning. He hears me, though. I know this when he bares his teeth in my direction.
“Fucking cunt,” he growls, which is hard to say in the old language, but he makes it happen. That takes commitment. “Filled with demands and no sense of duty. Making a mockery of this pack.”
“Great, so you hate me,” I say, as if he bores me. “Join the club.”
In truth, I’m surprised at how much that actually gets to me.
He was always kind. Tough and rough around the edges like most of our males, but supportive where it counted.
I knew that a lot of members of the pack weren’t exactly thrilled with my decisions over the years, obviously.
They let me know it all the time. My own mother was one of them.
But to go to these lengths? And let me trust him all along? That hurts.
“You think I’m bad for the pack, but you’ve been sandbagging us for the past three years?” I shake my head at him. “How does that make sense? Where’s your sense of duty?”
He flinches like I landed a blow. He moves like he’s going to come for me, but Ty angles his huge body between us.
“You’re the weakness in this pack,” Connor growls at me. “He’s too blind to see it, but no one else is.”
There’s more growling from the pack now, and it’s not at me.
Ty bares his teeth in a terrible growl. His golden eyes find mine, then go back to Connor, but when he speaks he’s talking to all of us.
“He started this years ago. Figured he could weaken the pack’s standing before the gathering.
If we were weak, he assumed that someone would challenge me and take me out.
Put the pack back on the right foot.” He barks out a laugh.
“With a little psycho-bitch death cult conversion in the middle to make it that much creepier to be a liar and a backstabber and a traitor to us all.”
The wolves press in, many of them low in battle-ready positions. All of them, I’m happy to note, focused on Connor as their target. Not Ty.
Not a single one focused on Ty—telling me that whoever Connor has been working with, it’s not another wolf.
It’s a little hit of relief in the middle of all this ugliness.
“Too bad it went the other way, I guess,” Ty is saying to Connor, shaking his head as if he’s disappointed when it’s clear he’s not. “Such a fucking shame that you were wrong not only about Maddox but about me.”
He looks around at all the wolves who’ve come tonight, then. He doesn’t seem to spare any of them. “You think I don’t know all the shit you’ve been muttering all these years? Do I really strike you as someone who’s led anywhere by anyone? Much less my dick?”
This time the growls have a different tenor. A little more rueful, maybe.
“If I want to follow Maddox’s advice it’s because it’s good advice,” Ty snarls. “If some of you would start listening to something besides your own testicles, maybe we could take this pack out of the Dark Ages.”
This time there are barks of support, and the volume starts to rise. What’s clear is that Ty is done. He doesn’t look at the pack again.
He delivers his full and furious attention directly to Connor. “But you’re not going to have to worry about that, old man. You should have stayed in the Dark Ages.”
“The one I serve is coming,” Connor snarls back at him. “And she will have her vengeance. Just you wait.”
“If you mean that worm-faced death bitch, bring it,” Ty throws back at him. “Last time I was bored out of my mind with her douchebag priests. As far as I can tell, she has pathetic taste in minions. You’re not changing my mind on that, brother.”
The way he says brother is an insult. It’s deliberate. It makes most of the pack howl, because it’s as good as a death knell.
Connor knows it. He throws himself into the air, claws outstretched, going straight for Ty’s head.
What it looks like is that Ty simply . . . moves aside.
That’s all.
It’s simple and elegant, and it doesn’t look like he does anything at all.
When Connor crashes to the ground, everything is quiet. Breath held in all directions—until we all realize that Connor isn’t moving.
It only takes a second before I can see that there’s fresh blood everywhere.
A lot like someone ripped the better part of his stomach out.
Ty circles back around Connor’s fallen body, then lets out a long battle cry. The wolves all around echo it, me included.
“Say hello to your bitch goddess for me,” Ty taunts Connor, leaning down close so he can growl into his treacherous second’s face.
Yet Connor, even though he’s gurgling blood, laughs. “She’s already here, asshole. Do you really not get it yet? It doesn’t matter what you do. You’re all marked for death. She’s here.”
Ty snarls and rips out Connor’s throat, and it’s done.
The snow continues to spiral down from above. The wind is cold, sweeping down from the mountains. I see the glimmer of Savi’s usual golden light, but it doesn’t seem to make a dent in the darkness.
The pack is restless on their feet, but no one makes a sound.
I don’t think I’m the only one who feels Connor’s last words lingering.
Like the pool of blood on the snow at our feet and all around, they seem to stain everything.