Chapter Thirty
THIRTY
Ann doesn’t get a chance to tell Rufus anything, because after she throws up on him, she passes out, and then we’re all scrambling to both help Rufus clean himself and get Ann out of the pub, and I’m grateful she’s unconscious because she really wouldn’t appreciate the catcalls and comments from the patrons.
Once on the street, Rufus and Julius carry her, one arm over each of their shoulders, while Bishop walks with me.
“She’s never drunk before,” I say, feeling the need to explain. “She’s had a very difficult and long day, and of course she’s still grieving from the deaths at Trevelyan. She wanted to drink, and I did counsel restraint but…” I shrug. “I’m her younger cousin.”
“It’s fine,” Julius says. “I’ll give her something tomorrow for the pain, and if we can rouse her, we should get her to drink tea or water. That will help.”
“What did she want to tell me?” Rufus peers over his shoulder at me. “I keep thinking I must have done something wrong, but the Annie I knew wouldn’t have needed to drink before telling me off.”
I shrug, not able to bring myself to lie when he’s looking so bewildered and concerned.
“I must have done something,” he says.
“Maybe don’t tease her about her dresses,” I say finally. “She lost everything at Trevelyan. We all did.”
“Oh.” He curses under his breath. “I should have thought of that. I just … I got carried away. It’s just so good to see her. But I need to remember she isn’t a little girl anymore. Obviously.”
A few steps in silence, then he says, “So she stayed at Trevelyan? With the Pack?”
“Yes,” Bishop says.
More silence. “I overheard you and Annie talking about a William earlier. I’m guessing he died in the massacre?” Rufus pauses and then pounds his thigh with one fist. “Fucking hell. I never thought of that. Was he her mate?”
“No.”
“But she’d have a mate by now. Obviously she’d have had no shortage of suitors.”
He glances over at her as he says this, as if she’s a great beauty who’d have been fighting off the wolves.
Ann is a handsome woman, though living at Trevelyan she seems to have styled herself to ward off any suitors—dressing plainly, wearing her flame-red hair tightly pulled back, and emitting a clear stay-away aura.
At Bishop and Julius’s pause, Rufus looks over. “I’m saying she’s a grown woman, not the girl I remember. I presume she has someone.”
“No,” Julius says. “There was no one in the Pack.”
“Outside it, then? Like her mother? Of course, every wolf wanted to wed the Alpha’s daughter, but she didn’t pick any of them to father her child.
Went and found herself a man.” He grins.
“At least temporarily. But if Ann didn’t have anyone in the Pack, she must have had a lover, maybe in the nearby town… ?”
“Rufus?” Julius says. “Enough. Please.”
“I’m only trying to understand the situation. So I don’t jam my big foot into my mouth again.”
“If Ann wants to talk to you about her life, she will,” Julius says. “Until then, I don’t know what she was like as a child, but as an adult, she is a very private person.”
“She wasn’t much different as a child.”
“Good. Then you know how to deal with her.”
“Tease her mercilessly until she tells me what’s bothering her?”
Julius sighs.
“Fine,” Rufus says. “I won’t do that. Yet.”
We’ve found no sign of any werewolves in Cardiff.
That isn’t unexpected. At last count, the Cambrian Pack had about sixteen wolves, which makes it a small one.
We’d only come across a scent if one was in town on business, but according to Ann, they don’t have “business” in the way the other Packs do.
We still linger the next morning, in case Franklin Doyle has heard we’re coming and sends a wolf to stop us before we reach them.
Ann and I use that time to replenish her wardrobe.
She balks at that, but we want her to meet the Cambrian Pack looking like an Alpha’s granddaughter.
Like the cousin and companion of the new Alpha’s mate.
If she shows up in her drab dress, her status will seem clear …
and it might tell the Cambrian wolves they can freely harass her, as a woman of no standing.
We aren’t sure what sort of men the Cambrian wolves are.
From the intelligence Bishop gathered and the extra Ann can add, they’re mostly young—few over thirty-five.
They sound like Bishop’s boys, the wolves he brought to the Albion Pack.
Young wolves looking for something better.
The impression Bishop and Ann have is that they’re a wilder bunch than Bishop’s boys, with Doyle being a wilder sort himself.
That could reflect poorly on Franklin Doyle as an Alpha, but Bishop really is an anomaly.
Doyle would be closer to what one might expect of a young Alpha.
He’s in his early thirties, and he seems to have cobbled together a Pack mostly by happenstance.
He came from the American Pack with his current second-in-command, a wolf named Jesse, and more young wolves joined them until Doyle realized he was forming a Pack, whether he intended it or not.
Bishop, on the other hand, had “intended” to be an Alpha from the time he was a teenager.
When Ann says the Cambrian Pack is wilder, she means less settled. And maybe a little more given to carousing, in all its forms, from their women to their drinking to their general state of mind. Like a group of young human men, living together and enjoying themselves before settling down.
The settling-down part has begun, though, and if Hamish is correct, it started with luring away his wolves.
My opinion—which the others share—is that this reflects more poorly on Hamish than Doyle.
Technically, a werewolf Pack isn’t supposed to poach members from others, but Rufus says movement happens all the time.
In an oversized Pack like the Caledonians, young wolves could be wooed away easily.
If we aren’t sure what to expect, that’s mostly just that we don’t know how Doyle will react to our envoy.
He’s been friendly to William, though William was supposedly sent by Silas.
Might it be different when the envoy is the Alpha—even younger and newer than himself?
And when that Alpha brings along two other wolves?
That could be perceived as a warning to a new and unstable Pack.
This is where having both myself and Ann should work to our advantage. It’s hard to interpret guests as a war party when two are women, especially in werewolf culture, where women don’t typically play roles of any significance.
Rufus does agree to let Ann and me visit the dressmaker alone, though that means they drop us off at the door and tell us not to leave without them.
While we’re getting nice secondhand dresses altered for Ann, the men prowl the city center, checking for any sign of werewolves.
Two hours later, we’re done, and there’s no trace of anyone.
Time for the next step: Approach the wolves in their den.
Bishop hadn’t been able to send William to the Cambrian Pack in months. Too much had been happening with their own Pack. But the last he heard, the Cambrians had set up base in an old farmhouse ten miles from Cardiff.
We rent a coach and horses. Renting horses is tricky for werewolves, but being in a city, we find ones so accustomed to endless stimuli that they don’t balk at werewolf passengers.
After lunch, we set out for the journey. Rufus drives the coach. When we’re within a mile of our destination, he lets us know, and we look out to see green hills and grazing cattle.
“Can you see any buildings?” Bishop asks.
“I think I spy the farmhouse,” I say. “There’s nothing else around.”
“All right then. They’ll see us coming if they have a watch.”
After about ten minutes, the pounding of hooves suggests the Cambrians have a watch … and we’ve been spotted. Rufus stops our coach and waits.
“You there!” a voice calls in an American accent. “Turn around. You have no business here.”
“I do have business,” Rufus says. “I—”
“Drop the reins and put your hands up.”
“That’s no way to treat visitors, boy.”
“I said drop—”
“Is that a gun? What kind of wolf are you, using a gun?”
Silence. Then cursing, as they must catch a whiff of Rufus.
Then the other wolf snaps, “Get your hands up and get off that fucking coach, and tell whoever’s in there to get the fuck out now.”
“Watch your language, boy. We have ladies with us.”
“If you think that’ll get you in, bringing whores—”
“I bring ladies. The granddaughters of Arthur Stockwell.”
“Who the fuck is—? Never mind. Everyone, get out of the coach now.”
“Do you want us to leave?” Rufus says. “We can do that, though I don’t think your Alpha will be pleased when he hears who you turned away. At gunpoint no less.”
“I don’t care who the fuck it is. Get down from there, and if you turn that coach around, I’ll put a bullet through your thick skull.”
Bishop reaches for the door handle. Both Julius and I move to stop him, but he lifts a hand, and Julius only growls under his breath. I say nothing … and slide out behind Bishop, who doesn’t notice me until I’m standing beside him.
“Cordelia…” he says under his breath.
“Greetings, gentlemen,” I say, curtsying. It’s two wolves, one with a rifle that looks like something out of a Wild West show. I remember that Doyle and his second are American—and the speaker’s accent was also American. I really hope this isn’t them.
I’d also hoped that seeing me might set them back. But the one with the gun only fixes me with a hard look. The second has the grace to seem discomfited, but he’s clearly not the one in charge.
Bishop takes over. “My name is Bishop Da—”
“I don’t care who the fuck you are,” the first one says. “I don’t care who the fuck she is. I don’t care who the fuck any of you are. How is that not clear? You’re trespassing on the territory of the Cambrian Pack.”