by Dean Murray
"Different how?"
Geoffrey waited for so long to respond that I almost repeated the question by the time he opened his mouth again.
"When you were hurt it hadn't been quite such a long time since my last feeding. Not only that, you had just finished rescuing me from Imastious. It's easier to control myself around someone I care about or someone I owe a debt to."
"Easier, but not easy?"
"No, not easy, at least not when it's been so long between feedings. It gets progressively harder as each day goes by."
"So what do we do about that?"
"We do nothing. Have no fear; I'm still able to control myself. I'd just been too long with nobody but you and Ben around. All of that blood caught me by surprise. I'll be fine for another day or two and then I'll make some kind of arrangement to deal with the hunger. Possibly there is a blood bank nearby that I can raid."
"Possibly?"
Geoffrey turned on me with the kind of suddenness that usually presaged an attack, but he didn't escalate further than that.
"Yes, possibly. I'm sorry, but I don't have any better answer than that. I understand your fears, but I will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that I'm capable of continuing our quest. One way or another I'll feed enough to make sure that the hunger doesn't cause me to turn on you at an inopportune moment."
I'd had an abstract, distant understanding of what Geoffrey's existence must be like, but in that instant I got a true taste of what he went through.
"You do this every time, don't you? Wonder whether you'll be able to feed without killing?"
Geoffrey's nod was curt. "Yes, but it's not just about killing anymore. My control has grown, but I still worry about what I'm taking from them. I don't like being a parasite, don't like taking without providing some kind of value in return."
I considered that for several long minutes before responding. "You know, a few days ago I would have said that it wasn't possible for a vampire to be anything other than a parasite. You're starting to convince me."
"Don't get too caught up in the possibilities. I'm not even sure myself whether it will be possible for me to provide enough value on a long-term basis to convince people to voluntarily open up their veins for me."
We passed the rest of the drive in silence, and all too soon were pulling up to the large stone house that was the headquarters for the Duluth pack. I'd made three separate calls and six texts to drag that particular address out of Alec.
As nearly as I could tell it wasn't that Alec didn't want to help, but it was looking very much like he was having problems of his own, big problems. That wasn't something designed to make me feel very good about the medium-term future. If Alec fell then the rest of us were all as good as dead.
That probably wouldn't make any difference to me, I was likely going to die before the afternoon was out, but there were a lot of other people I really cared about who were depending on Alec for survival. I pushed all of those worries aside and rang the doorbell to the manor house. What I really wanted was another slice of the serenity I'd achieved earlier in the day, but that continued to be soundly out of my reach.
The man who answered the door looked like a younger, unscarred version of Donovan. "Hello, my name is Cruthers, how may I be of service?"
Geoffrey looked over at me and I forced out the words that I'd been dreading since before I'd talked to Isaac.
"Please tell your master that I'm here to challenge for leadership of this pack."
The butler's expression didn't change in the slightest, but I could feel the disapproval radiating off of him. Things only got worse when the wind shifted and he was able to smell Geoffrey.
"You may enter, but that thing may not."
I grabbed him by the throat, moving too fast for him to react, and slammed him into the door. "He'll enter into your damn house and you'll like it. He's my witness, so unless you want the dispossessed to find out that you're not living up to challenge law, you'll back off and let him in."
It wasn't exactly a bluff, but the truth was that I didn't want to involve the dispossessed any more than the Duluth pack did. The dispossessed normally didn't take much interest in the comings and goings of the rest of us, but the one thing guaranteed to make them coalesce into a ravening horde was news that one of the packs wasn't living up to the long-established challenge law.
Geoffrey held up my phone, which already had a rather long, detailed text on it ready for him to hit the send button.
"I'd rather not have to send this."
The butler looked at me with hate in his eyes. There was no guarantee that the dispossessed would come here in response to a text from me of all people, but if they did, if my message was convincing enough, then they'd kill every man, woman and child in the pack and torch their homes.
"Fine, it can come, but you're responsible for it."
We followed Cruthers into the house and to a sitting room less than two dozen feet from the front door.
"I'll inform Mr. Stekensbridge of your presence."
"Fine. You've got twenty minutes. Anyone you can't get here by then can't face me across the circle."
He knew the rules as well as I did, possibly even better, but it didn't hurt to make sure that he knew I wasn't going to cool my heels while they called in people from two states over.
Less than fifteen minutes later Cruthers returned and conducted us deeper into the house. We went down two flights of stairs before arriving at our destination, a large room nearly two stories tall and half as big as a football field. It had been carved out of the bedrock that the house rested on, and obviously served as the place of challenge for the Duluth pack.
Geoffrey acted unimpressed as we walked through the house, but I knew him well enough to realize that he'd been shocked at some of the artifacts we'd seen before being led downstairs. The Duluth pack was as old as any. They'd fallen on hard times as of late, but the Stekensbridge family had led the pack for more than three generations. A thousand years was a long time to gather up pretty bits of art, but I'd grown up around better in Sanctuary.
The Graves family had been in power in one form or another since the monarchy. Alec could have bought and sold the Stekensbridges out of little more than petty cash. Not only that, the house itself was less than two hundred years old while parts of Graves Manor were much, much older than that.
I was in the middle of reflecting on the irony that Geoffrey, who potentially had been alive for longer than any of the rest of us, was the one most impressed by the ancient air of our surroundings, when the first of the Duluth pack started trickling in.
What started as a trickle quickly grew into what felt like a flood and I had to tell myself over and over again that the Duluth pack was on the smaller side, that they were my best chance of saving Melody and thereby saving Ben.
When all was said and done, there were eleven men and women gathered along the far wall. There were a few other people as well, young kids who weren't old enough to have manifested a second shape yet and a single human spouse, but those eleven were the ones I had to worry about and I knew it. They gave off an unmistakable aura of power.
Some were weaker, some were stronger, but all of them were moonborn and therefore dangerous. I took a deep breath, held it for a three-count and then stepped forward to the edge of the thin circle that had been cut into the cold gray stone.
Geoffrey was a reassuring presence at my back, but ultimately this was all up to me. I had one card up my sleeve, and one card only. None of the wolves and hybrids here knew that I was a hybrid.
Every pack in North America maintained files on every other known moonborn. The flow of information between packs was far from perfect with packs routinely withholding information where they thought doing so might give them an advantage, but the files were still maintained with the best information available to the pack.
Eventually word of my manifesting a third shape, long after it should have been possible, would trickle out along the grapevine and everyone would kno
w that I was now far more dangerous than I'd been before, but for now everyone here was underestimating me by a great margin. It was an advantage, but when stacked up against the possibility of having to fight my way through ten other wolves and hybrids just to have a shot at the alpha, it wasn't worth much.
As I stepped forward to the edge of the circle the moonborn across the way also stepped forward, forming a partial circle that left the two members on each end only a few yards away from me. The circle here in Duluth was smaller than the one back in Sanctuary.
"I'm here to challenge for the right to lead this pack."
The man standing directly opposite me shook his head. "What, no fancy words? I would have expected someone so ready to threaten us with the wrath of the dispossessed to be more anxious to hold to the old forms."
I didn't need to be told that I was looking at Stekensbridge. He was big, but no bigger than James. With any luck that would mean that his hybrid body was roughly the same size as James'.
"Very well, my name is Jasmin Bianchi. That's all you really need to know, that's all you really wanted."
My accusation was met with a hint of a smile, and then a barely-perceptible ripple of calm spread out from the center of the other pack, working its way out to the submissives. They'd all been assuming the worst-case scenario. They'd been worried that I was some hybrid with a powerful ability, one who was virtually guaranteed to defeat them all. Now they were confident that any of their hybrids and some of their wolves could defeat me without too much effort.
Stekensbridge opened his mouth to name his first champion, but before he could get the words out the man on his left, a big, redheaded brute who had to be at least six-three, stepped forward.
"A moment?"
For a second I thought that Stekensbridge would refuse, but he didn't. That one fact told me everything I needed to know. I was looking at Branson, and Stekensbridge and Branson both knew who was truly dominant between the two of them. Branson allowed Stekensbridge to remain the pack alpha for some reason known only to himself, but he was the one who should have been ruling in Duluth.
I watched as Branson crossed the circle, walking slowly towards me, and it was obvious just how dangerous an opponent he would be. He moved well, much better in human shape than most people that big, and there was a lazy confidence to him that told me he was used to winning fights, which considering that he'd clawed his way into an honorary position with the Coun'hij's enforcers said quite a lot about his skill.
I shifted my weight slightly forward, moving more onto the balls of my feet. The challenge match hadn't officially started, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. A guy like Branson was more than capable of attacking without warning and I was determined not to go down from some cheap shot.
I didn't make a show, but once you've been in a few dozen fights you get very good at reading people's body language. Branson could tell that I was ready for him to attack, and that just made him smile.
You had to worry about sneak attacks from a hybrid more so than from a wolf. For a wolf to attack they had to shift, let gravity pull them down to the floor so that they had something to push off of, and then lunge upwards and lock their jaws around someone's throat. In a sense, for wolves the change worked against them.
Hybrids were exactly the opposite. When a hybrid changed, from human or wolf form either one, there was a natural upwards motion as their body grew up to the full measure of a hybrid's stature. That meant there was not real pause between when the hybrid started transforming and when an attack could land. All that was required was for the transforming hybrid to do a kind of modified uppercut as they transformed and their claws would be driven deep into their enemy.
It meant that that the only true safety when you were dealing with a hybrid was to make sure that you were far enough out of reach that you'd have a chance to react before they could get close enough to hurt you. Branson was purposefully stepping too close to me, threatening me with his presence in a way that he thought I couldn't match.
"Jasmin Bianchi, of the Sanctuary Bianchis, I presume?"
I nodded, but I didn't let my eyes look away from his hands. He smiled even wider.
"I guess they finally told you then."
"Told me what?"
He shook his head in much the same way that Stekensbridge had done a few seconds earlier, but his gesture was even more mocking.
"Don't play dumb. This is exactly the kind of grand, juvenile gesture that I've been expecting from you for years. They finally told you about the night that Kaleb Graves died."
"You were there. So were a lot of others. The Sanctuary pack was nearly as big as the Chicago pack back then and Agony brought enough men to make sure that he outnumbered the Sanctuary pack by a huge margin. Are you looking for a medal for having participated in one of the biggest massacres in recent history?"
His smile flickered slightly, he hadn't lost his sense of superiority, but it was obvious that I hadn't provided him with the response he'd been expecting.
"They didn't tell you then. You have…anger issues, everyone knows it. If you really knew what happened back then you wouldn't be so calm. Why are you here then?"
"I already told you, I want to take over this pack."
"You can't possibly hope to win, and you know it."
This time it was my turn to smile. "You might be surprised."
I could see the ripple of unease move through the Duluth pack. I hadn't been lying, which made them all nervous, it even made Branson a little worried. I'd just told them the truth and they'd been able to tell it was the truth because my body hadn't given off any of the normal signs of a lie. My breathing hadn't sped up, my pulse hadn't changed, my body temperature had remained even, there were a host of clues telling them that I believed what I'd said.
They were shape shifters, so they knew that the 'truth' they'd thought they'd just heard might not be quite the truth I'd been telling them, but it was still the kind of thing that made people wonder what else was going on.
"Bold words for a third-rate wolf from a pack that's been scattered to the four corners of the continent."
I cocked my head to one side. "Have you heard reports of the battle in Sanctuary already up here in Minnesota? I'm betting not. That's just what your contacts on the Coun'hij told you was going to happen, isn't it?"
"We've heard all about it. Graves Manor is a smoking pile of rocks. You all evaporated like a desert mirage before the might of the Coun'hij."
"That's an interesting take on events, but I was actually there for the fight. Puppeteer brought in dozens of werewolves backed up by a couple dozen worthless bullies like you. By the time the night was over the house was destroyed, but all of the werewolves were dead and the enforcers died within seconds of the last werewolf falling."
Again, they knew I was speaking the truth, but it was a truth that their minds couldn't accept for many reasons.
"That's right, Puppeteer brought werewolves in to destroy the massed strength of four packs. He did what the Coun'hij has threatened to do for decades. They are so scared of Alec and what he represents that they risked a mass revolt by every other pack in North America to try and kill him."
Branson didn't like that, both my telling his pack mates just how far the Coun'hij had gone, and the fact that his contacts hadn't bothered to tell him about our having killed all of the werewolves.
"You lost people too."
A collage of faces swam past my vision and I found myself nodding.
"Yes, too many, but not as many as your side lost."
Branson had been just barely within striking range before, but now he stepped in closer, sticking his mouth just inches away from my ear.
"Your mom died that night when Agony came calling, but he didn't kill her. I did."
My beast tore free of the metaphysical chains I'd used to bind her, but it wasn't like anything I'd ever felt before. I didn't change, at least not immediately, but Branson's words had hit me with the strength of a w
recking ball. A verbal blow like that should have devastated me, but that titanic force bounced off of something in my core, something that refused to give into the blow that he'd expected to crush me.
My inner landscape seemed to be composed of huge walls of ice and my beast's anger perfectly offset the force of Branson's barb, canceling it out and leaving me motionless inside. It wasn't an enduring kind of stillness, it was nothing more than a pale shadow of the peace I'd found earlier during my meditation, but it was still enough to channel the power from my beast with brittle walls that still refused to give way before her.
Branson had stepped forward and to one side, trying to flank me, and I'd turned with him. Even while in a state of profound shock, I still reflexively made sure that the biggest threat was where I could see him. As I turned my hand moved forward without any conscious decision on my part, but rather than the impotent blow I'd been expecting to land on Branson, my hand exploded outwards with the deadly, semi-retractable claws of my hybrid leading the outermost edge of the change.
My claws went through the soft flesh of his human body like it wasn't even there. One second we were standing there looking each other in the eye, and then his corpse was lying on the ground in front of me as his blood dripped off of my hand.
I was still in shock, I could feel it, but I knew I needed to do something. I reached for my beast, begging her for the power required to do a full transformation, but for a split second nothing happened. My beast was shocked too, she hadn't realized we were capable of a partial transformation and she had to pull deeply on the golden thread that fed her power before she could turn around and offer me the energy I needed.
A whisper of sound behind me brought me around, but despite the fearsome form of my right hand, I was still just a human, still too slow to have any chance of surviving against the enraged moonborn of the Duluth pack. I turned just in time to see a large gray wolf sailing towards my throat.
I couldn't dodge, not in this body. My one hope was to shift, to move my throat out of range of the attack by the simple virtue of growing more than a foot, but my beast was still depleted. In the instant before my attacker would have fastened his jaws around my neck, a blur of silver flashed past me.
