“… Change … powerful.”
“… miscarriage …”
“… five in the entire country! Five!”
Five what? Five Rabids? I hoped to God that wasn’t true.
“Two in your territory, Callum.” Shay’s voice traveled better than the other alphas’. He talked more loudly, putting more power into his voice, because of all of them, he was the youngest and he had the most to prove. Wolf understood this better than I did, and I pulled my understanding of the situation from instincts that weren’t mine.
“Your numbers are growing. Two babies, one new wolf. Stone River is already the largest pack.”
Wolf knew what this meant, his innate grasp of the intricacies of Were politics putting mine to shame. More babies, Wolf said, meant more wolves. More wolves meant a bigger pack. A stronger pack.
A stronger alpha.
I got the message loud and clear: in the wild, math was simple. The strongest alpha was only as strong as the force of his pack. And right now, Stone River was the biggest pack.
Alpha. One alpha. One pack.
Wolf growled the words, and I absorbed them. To werewolves, dominance was everything. The most dominant wolf had all of the power. The strongest wolf was meant to dominate them all.
Unite the packs. Unite the power.
That was the siren’s call that set each and every alpha on edge when the Senate was called. They needed to challenge each other. One of them needed to dominate, the others needed to submit. Wolf’s instincts gave way to my explicit knowledge of the situation, and I did the math.
Callum had the biggest pack. Callum had a knack for seeing the future. I would have bet my life that Callum was older and stronger and more everything than any other person in that room.
Callum was the biggest threat, and the fact that his pack was growing faster than the others did nothing to assuage the others’ fears, their instinctual suspicions that if Callum had wanted to, he could have been their alpha, too. The realization startled me, but it didn’t surprise me. It took me off guard, but it made perfect sense. Callum was experienced. He was powerful. He was smart.
He was Callum.
“Five births, and two of them yours.” Shay again. I hated him, but appreciated his enunciation, because the rest of the alphas’ voices blended together in a blur.
“… no births …”
“Only one …”
The other alphas didn’t like the idea of Callum’s pack growing while theirs shrank. They had to have known, the way Wolf did just being in the room with them, that if Callum tired of democracy, the entire North American continent could be his.
“… Rabid …”
At that word, Chase’s wolf ears literally perked up. Even with his mind jumbled, he recognized it.
This was why we were here. Why we were listening.
“Answer … not that simple …”
“—prerogative—”
I could only catch bits and pieces of words, but even that shocked me because they weren’t the words I’d expected to hear. The alphas should have been talking about strategies for hunting the Rabid. They should have been sharing what they knew of his potential location. They shouldn’t have been saying …
“… unless … we need …”
“… turn … blind eye—”
Blind eye? Blind eye? They couldn’t have just said those words in a discussion about a rabid wolf. They couldn’t have. The men in this room were a twig’s snap away from attacking each other in one giant dominance struggle. This Rabid had killed in their territories. His very existence was a challenge, and alphas didn’t abide challenges.
Alphas were strong. They kept their packs safe. They eliminated threats.
“—in exchange … desirable …”
“So we barter with murderers now?” Callum’s voice carried, for the opposite reason as Shay’s. He had nothing to prove. It was power, not volume, that carried his words to my ears, and Wolf crouched, belly brushing the ground at the sound of the tone.
Callum wasn’t Chase’s alpha the way he used to be. But even now, that tone, that power—
There was an instinct to obey. To fold. To give in to the power of his words.
But Shay didn’t. “Is that your final word on the matter, Callum?”
“It is.”
For a moment there was silence, and then Shay spoke up again. “And what are you going to do about it?”
Nobody spoke to Callum like that. Not the other alphas. Not his own wolves. Not even me … most of the time anyway.
Shay wasn’t challenging Callum. Not exactly. He was daring Callum to challenge the rest of them. To force his will on them. To prove he could.
To do it.
One pack. One alpha.
“Are we a democracy or aren’t we?” Shay threw down the gauntlet. “Do we vote or do you decide?”
Vote on what? Decide what? To barter? To turn a blind eye?
Challenge them, I screamed silently at Callum. Do it. Take them. Take it all.
He could have. Every part of me, every memory, every instinct I had said that Callum could stop this. He could make them understand.
He could make them submit.
But he didn’t. “We’re a democracy,” Callum said, his tone never changing, his surety never called into question.
Wrong. Wrong-wrong-wrong. Wolves weren’t meant for democracy. Werewolves weren’t meant to vote. Callum was safe. Callum was strong. Callum should have done something.
He didn’t.
“All in favor?”
In favor of what? I couldn’t hear the vote go down, didn’t hear anyone’s answer but Callum’s, but I knew based on the tone of his voice that it must have been in the minority, that the others were voting to do the unthinkable.
I tried to wrap my mind around it but couldn’t. The Senate wasn’t going to hunt the Rabid. They were going to make him a deal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“NO!” I SAT UP IN BED, THE SCREAM TEARING ITS WAY out of my throat. On the other side of our bond, Chase was going wild, his wolf giving in to bloodlust, hunting. Rabbits. Deer.
Chase needed to kill something.
I could relate. My own fingernails dug into my pillow, and I came dangerously close to tearing it apart. As I extracted myself from Chase’s mind, I was hit with two pangs of withdrawal. One was his. The other was mine, and they mirrored each other so perfectly that at any other time, I would have turned the feelings over and over in my head, remembering the feeling of his skin and being inside it and hurting in sync with his loss.
With the way that we’d both just been betrayed. Again.
Callum could have fought the other alphas. He could have fought them, and he could have won, but we just weren’t worth it to him. Chase and my parents and Madison Covey and who knows how many other children who’d been torn to shreds—they weren’t worth it.
I wasn’t worth it.
“Bryn!” Ali came rushing into the room, a knife in her hand. The image seemed wrong. Ali wasn’t a fighter, and I could take care of myself.
I was the one Callum had trained to fight, not her.
“Are you okay?” Ali’s eyes were wild, and for the first time, I felt her pack-bond brushing against what was left of mine.
Ali was Pack, and I’d scared her to death.
“I’m fine,” I said, thankful that she didn’t have a Were’s ability to smell the truth. “Bad dream.”
Except it wasn’t a dream. It was real. The Rabid was alive, and if the Senate had their way, he wouldn’t be experiencing a shift in condition anytime soon. And Callum had just stood there and let it happen in the name of democracy.
Screw democracy. And screw Callum, too.
Ali sat beside me on the bed. “It must have been some dream,” she said, stroking my hair back from my eyes.
I reminded myself that Ali was family. Ali would never have betrayed me like this. But Ali wasn’t a fighter, and she wouldn’t understand that I had to fight. That if the Senate wasn’t going to kill the Rabid, I was.
She’d worry, and she’d yell, and she’d lock me in my room until I turned thirty. And while I sat around doing nothing, other people would die.