Big Bad Wolf

by Christine Warren

  The only consolation was that Fate had balanced things out. Lupines healed remarkably fast, potentially fixing a broken bone in a matter of a few hours and cuts and slashes within minutes. They also benefited from an immune system that protected them from many of the diseases that plagued humans, making them impervious to most infections. Once a male Lupine reached the age of fifty-five, chances were he could survive well past his hundredth birthday. The problem was that only about 5 to 10 percent of the males ever made it that far.

  Female Lupines had it slightly better. Because they tended to fight fewer challenges for advancement within the pack and took far fewer stupid risks in their youth, their average life expectancy put them well into their late eighties, with many living to celebrate their centennials.

  Graham himself was thirty-four. If he survived another twenty years, it would not be thanks to his cousin Curtis.

  The door behind Samantha’s desk opened and a rough, age-shaken voice called out, “Winters. We can hear you out there. Our ears aren’t gone yet. Come inside. We want to talk to you.”

  Samantha saw him wince and asked, “Do you want me to page you in fifteen minutes? I could make up an emergency only you can handle.”

  “Not that I’m not tempted”—and oh, how he was!—“but I’m hoping this won’t take that long.”

  She shot him a skeptical glance but said nothing. She just watched while Graham straightened his shoulders and entered what should have been his private sanctum but had instead turned into a den of hungry lions.

  They had taken over the comfortable sitting area at the far end of his office, three elder statesmen of the Lupine race and one spoiled brat with delusions of grandeur. Jonathan Grey, Nathaniel Hawkins, and Edward Fleet sat relaxed and sharp-eyed on a dark leather sofa and matching club chair, while Curtis MacAlpin lounged in the corner between them, arms crossed over his chest and one shoulder propped against the wall in a pose Graham instinctively recognized and vowed never again to consciously adopt.

  Especially not if I look like that big of a prick when I do.

  Curtis looked as well-groomed and useless as always, his brown hair carefully and expensively styled, his clothes a veritable billboard for the latest hot designer. Worst of all, his nails shone with the careful buffing of a recent manicure. He had the kind of hands that had never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Hell, not an honest hour’s. Curtis felt as if he deserved to have what he wanted handed to him on a silver platter, and when he didn’t get it, he got mean.

  Graham dismissed Curtis the way he always did, with a glance.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, nodding to the elders and closing the office door softly behind him. “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

  Fleet snorted. “No need to charm us, pup. No one here thinks pleasure would be your first reaction to seeing us turn up on your doorstep.”

  Graham felt his mouth twitch. Edward Fleet was reputed to be almost 80 years old, but he looked more like 120. His jowls sagged and his shoulders drooped with age, and the hand that rested on his elegant ebony cane bore a road map of protruding veins and discolored age spots. His hair, though, was thick and lush and the color of stainless steel, and his eyes still glinted sharp and golden beneath the snarling thickets of his brows.

  Lupine eyes.

  He’d always respected Fleet, Graham acknowledged silently, so his response contained more self-control than he might otherwise have bothered with.

  “Maybe not,” he said, “but curiosity was right up there. I don’t think I’ve seen the three of you in one place since my breaking year was up.”

  Every alpha served the first year of his term under the close scrutiny of the elders. The Lupines might expect a leader who claimed power by force, but they wouldn’t tolerate him for long if he proved incompetent at the job. Even though he’d taken power with a ceremonial challenge match at the age of twenty-five when his father had decided it was time to retire, Graham hadn’t even needed the year. He’d been born and bred to rule his people.

  “We thought you might be able to smooth things out better with less interference from the peanut gallery,” Fleet acknowledged.

  “Yes, and look where that’s gotten us,” Hawkins grumbled.

  Hawkins was always grumbling. Graham had long ago decided the elder had swallowed something bitter during his whelping and the taste of it lingered with him still.

  Graham clung to his diplomatic skills with carefully sheathed claws. “One of the most peaceful and stable periods in pack history since the time of my great-grandfather?”

  Jonathan Grey scowled. “If you want to look at it that way.”

  “How else would you suggest I look at it?”

  “I think what the gentlemen are trying to say, Cousin, is that they have developed some . . . concerns regarding your leadership style.” Curtis spoke from the corner, his voice carefully serious, his muddy yellow eyes glinting with mockery and malice.

  Graham couldn’t stop his lip from curling. After all, when a man smelled something rotten, he couldn’t exactly pretend everything was rosy sweet, could he?

  “And I think that if anyone wants to criticize my methods, he can do so for himself,” the alpha said, his tone a clear warning rumble. “From his own lips and in his own words.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call them criticisms, Winters,” Fleet broke in. His eyes stayed on Graham, sharp and steady. “They’re more like a few issues we thought you might want to be paying a bit more attention to. Suggestions, like.”

  What the hell was going on with the universe lately? Graham wondered as he frowned at his unwelcome guests. First he finds the woman of his dreams, only to discover she’s human. Then his new mate has the gall to try to run from him before her skin had fully cooled from his touch. And now his cousin—because Graham hadn’t needed Curtis’s presence in the room to know what this was all about—had set the pack elders on him to grade his performance as alpha of the Silverback Clan. Had everyone in the world suddenly forgotten what being alpha meant?

  Clinging desperately to his rapidly fraying temper, Graham raised an eyebrow and attempted a look of mild inquiry. If it managed not to come across as blind, murderous rage, he figured his luck might be changing.

  “Oh?” he drawled.

  “Absolutely. We’ve discussed a number of problems we’d like to see you put right.” Nathaniel Hawkins reached into the breast pocket of his conservative—some might say funereal—suit and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “It is, after all, your duty to guide the pack in the proper direction.”

  Blessed Mother Moon, Graham thought. He’s got a freakin’ list.

  “Not only that, he’s got to lead the pack without disregarding tradition,” Grey added, leaning forward as if to emphasize his point. “Lupines have never recorded their history and laws and customs in books like the humans do. It’s always been too dangerous. What if a human got their hands on that kind of library? Ours is an oral tradition, but that means we need to be especially diligent at making sure nothing gets lost.”

  “And the only way to do that is to carry on those traditions the way we’ve always done,” Hawkins concluded. “Which brings us nicely to our first point.”

  “Does it?” Graham ground out. “And what, pray tell, is your point?”

  “There are some members of the pack who are upset that you’ve never gotten around to appointing a new guthi after old Hank Chase passed away,” Curtis pointed out.

  Graham turned and pinned him with a stare. “Are there? And I suppose you’re one of them.”

  The alpha’s sarcasm was obvious. The idea that Curtis cared one iota about keeping filled the largely ceremonial position of pack storyteller when most of the progressive packs in the Western Hemisphere had abandoned it a generation ago was ridiculous. Graham knew it and Curtis knew it, and the fact that such a lame opening salvo in their private little war for supremacy was the best the other man had to offer made Graham frankly uneasy.

  Hi
s cousin shrugged. “I’m not without concern, but I wouldn’t say your failure to appoint a guthi was my number one concern.”

  “No? So what is?”

  “We’ll get to that,” Hawkins snapped. “We’re just getting started here, pup.”

  Graham had been willing to let Edward Fleet get away with the casual form of address because he respected that old man and had detected no trace of mockery in his words. Hawkins’s, though, had been clearly laced with contempt.

  “I’ll hear every item on your list, old man,” Graham said softly, his quiet, intent voice more fierce than the wildest howl, “but it will happen a whole lot neater if you remember how to address me. You might be old enough to be my grandfather, but I’m still your alpha.”

  Hawkins stiffened, his gaze meeting Graham’s for a long, tense moment before he dropped his eyes to his list with a dismissive sniff. “We’ve got more important things to do here today than argue.”

  Graham unclenched his fists slowly. “Can’t prove it by me,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Some members of the pack think the lack of a guthi is just a symptom of your lack of respect for our traditions,” Grey jumped in to say. He carefully kept his tone free of Hawkins’s antagonism, but the message came through clearly. “People have noticed your ignorance of Common Law. Any time an issue with a Common precedence has been brought to you, you’ve had to confer with advisors to learn what the proper ruling should be.”

  Lady, please grant me patience, Graham prayed. He took a deep breath.

  “First of all, I have a deep and abiding respect for the traditions of our race and of this pack,” he said evenly. “I would never have sought to become alpha if I didn’t. When Chase died, no one stepped up to express a desire to take on his responsibilities as guthi. It’s not an easy job, so I don’t blame our younger members for not champing at the bit for the chance to do it. But we do have other choices available to us that weren’t when the role of guthi was created, and I availed myself of those. In the five years we’ve been without a storyteller, I have hired—at my own expense, I’ll add—a university-trained and highly respected anthropologist from California to make a complete record of the Silverback history and mythology. He’s Lupine, so he’s familiar with our basic culture, but he’s also an outsider, so every story he hears has been recorded faithfully, without the bias of someone who has heard some of them a hundred times. If that’s not respecting our traditions, I don’t know what is.

  “And,” he continued, “I know for a fact that my father was no more versed in Common Law when he took over as alpha than I was. If that were a requirement of the position, we’d give it to the pack’s best lawyer instead of the pack’s best leader.”

  Graham didn’t even bother to try to gauge the reactions of his audience. He was too disgusted. He couldn’t think of a more colossal waste of his time than to stand here defending his spotless record as the Silverback alpha to a bunch of interfering busybodies his cousin had dragged out of their rocking chairs to grill him like Torquemada wannabes. He could care less what they thought. He knew he had been a good alpha to his pack, and history would bear him out. And they could all suck his left—

  “There is also the more serious matter of your relationships outside the pack,” Fleet said, interrupting Graham’s mental tirade and focusing the alpha’s attention back on the matter at hand.

  For a minute Graham thought the elders meant to take him to task for his choice of Missy as a mate, and he was already making a mental note to have Sam call upholstery cleaners for quotes on how much it would cost to get the blood and other bodily fluids cleaned out of the carpet and leather sofa cushions.

  No one had better try to come between him and his mate.

  “Before you took over, the pack’s involvement with the Council of Others was always kept to a minimum.” Curtis took on an air of concern while insincerity dripped like poison off his tongue. “We heard what they had to say, but all decisions about the pack were made within the pack. We didn’t allow any outside entities to tell us what to do with our own lawbreakers, or how to keep our own veil of secrecy intact.”

  “And you think someone is doing that now?” Graham said incredulously. “You honestly think I am taking orders from the Council on how to run my pack?”

  His cousin shrugged. “You’ve have a very close relationship with both the past and current heads of the Council. No one likes to speculate, of course, but given that fact, it is difficult to ignore how often you and the Council seem to find yourselves in perfect agreement.”

  No one likes to speculate, my ass!

  “Did it ever occur to you that I might agree with the decisions of the Council because I felt those decisions were reasonable, well thought out, and in the best interests of the pack?”

  “Dmitri Vidâme and Rafael De Santos are not members of the pack.”

  “No? And here I thought vampires and Felix were now eligible for junior memberships and the basic version of our super-secret decoder ring.”

  “Gentlemen!” Fleet held up a hand. “Let’s not turn this into an argument.”

  “I think it’s a little late for that,” Graham snarled. “I’ve just been accused of putting the bonds of my personal friendships over the needs of my pack! And I’ll be damned if I’ll take that kind of insult from anyone, elder, cousin, or the Lady of the Moon herself!”

  “No one is accusing you of anything.” Jonathan Grey was beginning to sound nervous, shifting his weight and licking his lips, and he fixed his glance on the alpha’s shoes. “We just thought these were matters of concern that should be brought to your attention. Perhaps if you put certain limits on your involvement with people outside of the pack, it might reassure those who worry about your loyalties.”

  Graham thought again of the woman upstairs, the delicate blonde with the warm cocoa eyes and the luscious figure and the heart as sweet as cotton candy, and felt his jaw tighten. The first one to suggest he limit his involvement with her would learn what it felt like to wear their lungs as a backpack.

  “My loyalties are exactly where they need to be,” he said, his voice as hard as his expression, “with my pack, my family, and my future. Anyone who has a problem with that—”

  “I think the problem is that none of us know where that future is going,” Fleet interrupted, pushing to his feet and straightening as far as his osteoporotic bones would allow. “What kind of future does an alpha Lupine have without a mate? Hm?”

  “I don’t know. Want me to ask him when I find one?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Graham saw Curtis stiffen.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded. “Are you trying to tell us that you’ve found a mate all of a sudden? That seems awfully convenient for you. Who is she?”

  Graham heard the anger and unease in Curtis’s voice and cursed himself for his outburst. The last person he wanted to talk to about Missy was his cousin. The second through the fourth to last were also currently staring at him with avid curiosity.

  “Well, boy, out with it,” Fleet urged. “This is big news. An alpha needs a mate, and I’m not afraid to tell you it would ease a lot of minds if you had one of those to introduce to the pack. You need to send up a Howl to make the announcement. Hasn’t been one of those in too long, either, if you ask me.”

  The alpha slid a glare toward his cousin. “I believe Curtis has taken care of that for me. Isn’t there going to be one next weekend?”

  Fleet waved a hand dismissively. “Bah, that can be rescheduled. Howls are your responsibility, and if you override the one your cousin sent up, no one will even bat an eyelash.” The old man leaned in close to Graham and lowered his voice to keep from being overheard. “In fact, anyone who thought about throwing their hat in with him will be happy enough to come back to your side, Winters, no matter what promises Curtis made to them.”

  “Promises?” Graham murmured, his fingers itching for the opportunity to close around his cousin’s disloyal little
throat. Just because Graham had believed Curtis had been plotting against him for a while now didn’t make having it confirmed any more palatable.

  “He’s offered to make us elders members of an official ‘privy council,’ to be consulted on all major decisions. Privy council,” Fleet snorted. “Probably the best name for it, since the idea stinks like the inside of an outhouse to me. You mark my words, Winters, that pup is up to no good. He fancies himself the next king, and he doesn’t care if he needs to cut your head from your shoulders to get his hands on the crown.”

  Graham grimaced. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. But I’m not ready to introduce my mate to the rest of the pack just yet,” Graham said, deliberately raising his voice so that the others could hear.

  Jonathan Grey frowned. “I’m not sure that’s in your best interest, Alpha. The pack will want to see her. You know how folks are. The longer you make them wait, the more they’re going to start speculating about what’s wrong with her.”

  “There is nothing wrong with my mate, and anyone who speculates otherwise will owe me a few explanations.” The alpha turned back to Fleet with a deliberately conspiratorial grin. “You know how females are today. They all want to be ‘dated,’ not mated. They think things should be like what they see the humans do on television, pretty words and ‘pretty please’ and all of that.”

  Fleet snorted and shook his head. “I tell you, things were a whole lot easier back in my day. When we saw the girl we wanted, we threw her down and crawled on top, and if we managed to stay there long enough for a little hide-and-seek, we called it a wedding!”

  The three older men chuckled at the crude joke and Graham smiled along. Only Curtis looked less than pleased.