There was no room for questions like these in a room full of the most dominant wolves in North America. We had to stay in control.
“Callum.” It was Chase’s voice and Chase’s response. I guided his body language, but I couldn’t guide his words. I couldn’t respond to the look in Callum’s eye or wonder what it meant.
“The Senate would like you to describe the Rabid, his attack, and your recovery.” Callum didn’t phrase the words as an order. He kept his voice low and soothing, but I saw the way the other alphas’ eyes lit up at the question. They had a vested interest in finding out more about this Rabid, about what had happened to Chase.
Sandstone and fish. Cedar and sour milk. Ocean salt and sulfur.
Their scents flooded Chase’s senses, making it hard for him to concentrate on anything else.
Don’t let your lip curl up. Don’t growl. Don’t show your teeth, I told him.
He didn’t, but inside him—inside Us—his wolf was awake and ready. It wanted to take control. I wouldn’t let it.
Wolves, it argued back. Not Pack. Protect girl.
If my presence here caused Chase to lose it, I would never forgive myself, so I channeled everything I had into keeping him calm. Soothing his wolf. Guarding his mind as his story spilled in monotone from his lips.
The alphas asked questions—more detailed questions than I’d ever thought to ask. What was the length of the duration of the attack? How long had Chase lain on the pavement before Callum’s wolves had found him and brought him back? Did he have any insight into how he’d managed to survive? How did he guard his mind from the Rabid? Did the Rabid ever take control of his physical body? Had it ever asked him to attack Callum? Could that happen?
No, Chase explained. Callum had brought him into the pack and trained him to use his pack-bond to guard against the Rabid’s psychic advances. Chase refrained from mentioning that I’d manipulated that bond, that I was the one who chased away the Rabid’s presence in his dreams now.
Finally, the questions stopped. One of the alphas, the one who smelled like sea salt, had the last word. “You’ve done well with him, Callum. You’re a strong boy, Chase, and you’ll been an even stronger man. Stone River is lucky to have you.”
That didn’t sound like a compliment. It sounded like a complaint, but I didn’t have time to process that fact, because the next instant, Chase and I were dismissed.
“You can go now,” Callum said. Chase wanted to argue. He wanted to stay. And for a moment, I wanted to let him, but the older, wiser part of me, the part that had learned about surviving in a werewolf pack from the very best, couldn’t let him.
Go.
I read the order on Callum’s face. I might have imagined that he knew, on some level, that I was there in Chase’s head, but I wasn’t imagining the compulsion behind his request that we leave.
I wasn’t imagining the promise of violence if we didn’t.
Go, I told Chase. Leave the house. Go as far away as you can and still hear.
After all, Callum hadn’t specified where we had to go.
As the door closed behind us, Chase’s body relaxed. He walked quickly, keeping one ear to the conversation in Callum’s house.
It was silent.
They wouldn’t talk as long as they could hear us. There wasn’t a single man in that house who had become an alpha by virtue of their stupidity. The alphas didn’t trust Us, and they weren’t taking any chances. I wanted to scream. Chase wanted to scream. His wolf wanted Out.
The incessant plea—Out, Out, Out—gave me an idea.
Are your senses better in wolf form? I asked Chase silently.
His response told me that he wasn’t sure of the answer. In wolf form, Chase always had trouble thinking. Trouble remembering.
Shift anyway? I asked him. I might be able to think for both of us.
Yes, the wolf inside of Chase said. Yes!
Chase shuddered. The muscles in his neck relaxed. His head rolled to the side, and then pain, white-hot and bone-shattering, enveloped his body.
I felt it. I welcomed it. And as Chase’s human form gave way, a rush of power washed over the pain, turning agony to ecstasy and back again.
Run. As a wolf, Chase wanted to run. It would have been so easy to lose myself to the same overwhelming need, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. In wolf form, Our senses were doubled, and as We padded away from Callum’s house on all fours, the alphas finally began talking. We could hear them, but they couldn’t hear Us.
Wolf didn’t want to listen. Wolf wanted to run.
No. Unlike Chase, whose conscious thoughts were scrambled and wordless post-Change, I was still me. I could still remember why We’d Shifted, and I could still make out the meaning in the words the Senate was saying, even if I could only decipher about one in every three.
“… 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.