Every few years, when the idiots had forgotten too much, or new idiots were born—the Marrok had to remind them why they obeyed him and not the other way around. Usually, Bran was sharp enough to make sure that the idiots didn’t hurt anyone but themselves along the way.
Asil’s body knew these woods, he’d spent nearly fifteen years here, and his feet knew every rock and hole within miles of his house. He was pretty sure he knew where the howls had been coming from. If Kara was leading them here, she’d take the most direct path—and after a week and more of coming to his greenhouse every day, she should know the most direct path.
The idiots were still making noise, so either they hadn’t caught her yet, or they were playing with her. Asil jumped a creek bed hidden under the snow and a thin sheet of ice and, with the trail flat and straight before him, stretched out and ran. He thought he’d hit top speed when Kara yipped in pain. He found another gear and moved faster.
They were loud, which was foolish and arrogant in these woods. Arrogance was a fine trait—but not when combined with stupidity.
Even as his wolf raged that one in his care had been hurt, his human brain was picking at the motivation. Everyone knew whose woods these were. Everyone knew that wolves who did not belong to the Marrok’s pack were not allowed to hunt here unless they were invited. Everyone here would know about Kara—she was unique, a child Changed who survived when no child survived a werewolf attack. Everyone knew she belonged to the Marrok, even though they did not know that she belonged to Asil—the Moor.
For fifteen years, Asil had tuned out gossip that came by him. He was no longer an Alpha, he had come here to die—what did he care about other werewolves?
There was a narrow gully up ahead, where prey could be trapped. From the sounds of it, that’s where his prey was. He quit worrying about why and began thinking about what he planned to do. He left the trail and ran up the side of the mountain so he could come at the gully from the side.
Kara growled fiercely, and his heart ached at the fear in her voice. Someone would pay for the fear in her voice.
He would kill them all.
No, Asil thought. He would let Bran kill them all. Because if he started killing, he did not trust himself to stop—and Kara was at risk. He would let the monster out someday, but not when it risked the death of someone in his charge.
He caught a glimpse of his quarry, mostly hidden by the drop in the terrain, and leaped in among them. He took them totally by surprise, three werewolves that his eyes didn’t know, though his nose told him that he’d met at least one of them before. Kara, blood streaming from a shallow cut along her ribs, yipped in terror and tried to jump in front of him. To protect him.
It hurt his pride even as it charmed him.
The strangers recovered their wits, such as they were, and turned to face him. Showing their fangs and snapping them together in an attempt to frighten him. They thought him helpless in his human skin.
“What are you?” he asked them in disgust. “Crocodiles?” He showed them his teeth as he let his power sweep over them, the power of an ancient wolf who had led his own pack for many centuries. The force of it rumbled in his voice as he said, “Down.”
All of the wolves dropped to the ground, including Kara.
But calling upon his power was a mistake. To call upon his dominance was to bring his wolf to the fore, and his wolf was savagely angry. He roared, tearing the tissues of his throat with the sound. He tasted his own blood before the werewolf healed the violence he’d done to himself.
It was Kara who saved him. She whined piteously, her wolf sensing his rage and not understanding that it wasn’t her at fault.
The wolf hesitated—and Asil locked the beast down with gentle finality. Not yet. He would not give in just yet. He wanted to see what this child of the wolf would grow into.
“Pobrecita,” he said to her tenderly. “Not you.” He lifted her to her feet. “You I am not angry with.” She pressed her unwounded side desperately tight to his leg. She was shaking and panting in fear. Not of him, he hoped.
“It is all right now,” he told her. “You are safe.”
One of the wolves lunged to his feet, snarling. She flinched, and Asil drove him back down to the snow-covered ground with his gaze. The man beneath the wolf’s pelt might want to attack, but his wolf was outclassed and knew it.
As long as they were in their wolf forms, they could not attack him. Asil glanced at Kara, who was fair game—though he thought that she would not be vulnerable for long. She had a backbone, that girl. He thought of the way she’d gotten between him and the other wolves because she mistakenly assumed that because he was in his human form, he might be outgunned. No, she was born to be a protector, she just needed to grow up.
For now, though, it was for him to protect her. So he did to the strangers what he had not done to Kara and used his power to drag them into their human bodies. The change would hurt—a lot—and then they would get cold on the walk to his car. He did not care at all about their sufferings.
I do, I want to see them suffer, said his darker self.
While the wolves who had thought they could hunt on the Marrok’s land changed, Asil checked Kara’s wound and she licked anxiously at his fingers. Her fur was caked with blood, but beneath the gore, her skin had already sealed.
“You’ll be fine,” he told her, ruffling the hair on the top of her head. “You did well to call to me—and to lead them here. I am sorry I could not kill them for you. But they will be suitably punished.”
Bran would probably not kill them unless they had been trouble before. But that there were three of them made Asil wonder who their Alpha was—and why he’d allowed them to hunt today and in this place. There was no way any kind of competent Alpha would not feel a hunt as chaotic as these idiots’ hunt had been through the pack bonds.
Perhaps their Alpha had sent them.
Asil considered the wolves who were nearing their human forms. The one he’d thought he’d recognized was the wolf he’d seen outside Bran’s office. Eric. Who had already disobeyed Bran by not staying away from Bran’s house until after the great day of Change was over.
Who would gain from such a brash breaking of Bran’s rules? Who would gain from Kara’s being harmed while she was under the Marrok’s protection? He did not know because he had kept himself ignorant—he had been self-indulgent and lazy, or maybe he would have seen this coming and spared Kara the fright.
Not your problem, Asil told himself fiercely under the sting of guilt. It was not self-indulgence because he had come here to set down his responsibilities and die with honor. He was not an Alpha here. He’d tended to such matters for long enough. Here his duty was clear. He would take them—and take Kara—to his Alpha. Once delivered, he was done.
Speaking of his Alpha . . . he took his cell phone out of its holster and called Bran.
“Asil?”
“I am standing in the middle of the forest where three of our werewolf guests had decided that hunting our Kara would bring them some benefit,” he said.
“They are still alive?”
“If they were not, I would be hunting my next victim instead of calling you,” he said.
“You sell yourself short,” Bran told Asil, but his voice was distracted. That argument was an old one. Asil did not make the mistake of thinking that Bran’s calmness meant he did not care that these wolves had trespassed. People died when Bran was at his most reasonable. Some of them died horribly. All of them idiots.
“I assume that Kara is all right,” Bran said. “If not, I would be getting reports about a werewolf who had killed every living thing in Aspen Creek and was heading next for Troy.”
Someone listening might think that Bran was being facetious, or even mocking—and they might be right. But it was himself he was mocking, not Asil. They both knew that Bran had been that monster.
“Probably,” agreed Asil. “But I would be a much better monster than you were. There would be no stories about my reign of terror because no one would live to tell the tale.”
Black humor took the sting out of the truth—but did not obscure it. And Asil knew the stories came later because the monster who had once ruled Bran’s body had not left victims alive, either. Bran had come back—and the reason for that was the reason why Bran Cornick was Asil’s Alpha and not the other way around.
“They’re almost done,” Asil told him.
“Done?”
“I made them change back to human—that way none of them will be able to hurt Kara when my back is turned. It’ll take us fifteen minutes or so to get to my house and another fifteen to take them to you.”
“Don’t make it too easy on them,” Bran said.
Asil smiled at the first of Kara’s attackers who was trying to stand up. “I won’t. You have my word.”
“See you in half an hour,” Bran said, and hung up.
• • •
Asil made the other wolves sit in the truck bed. If they had really been human, he’d have been risking their lives by making them stay out, naked, in the cold for so long. But werewolves can’t be killed by a little cold.
“It isn’t that cold,” he told Kara when she whined in concern while her attackers climbed in. “They are tough. If they are tough enough to pick on little girls”—he looked at them, and they turned their heads away—“then they are tough enough to ride in the back.” To them he said, “You stay there until we get where we are going. If you jump, I will back up and run over you until you are too broken to heal—and leave you for someone who cares to pick you up. It might take a while.”
They heard the truth in his words, and he saw their submission. They would stay where he’d put them—which disappointed him. He could have run them over with his truck without disturbing his wolf. He would have enjoyed it.
He opened the driver’s side door and gestured to Kara. She leaped in gracefully, the only evidence left of the wound the mess the blood had made of her fur.
He drove to the Marrok’s house, following four other cars and a truck doing the same thing: the Marrok had summoned the wolves. Because he knew where the only place big enough to house everyone was, Asil drove past the house and took the back road that allowed him to drive all the way to the pole barn. The truck in front of them did the same thing, and there were more trucks and SUVs parked at the barn—pack members.
The pole barn had been built about thirty years ago because the Marrok did not like Changing people in the school auditorium. “Too much blood and misery,” he’d said. “I am old enough to believe it leaves a mark on a place.”
Asil agreed.
Bran leaned against the outside wall of the pole barn as Asil drove up. He met Asil’s eyes through the windshield and pointed to the empty space in front of him, right next to the entrance. So Asil pulled in and parked.
Bran looked considerably less dangerous than Charles—the huge, blank-faced man who stood alertly beside him. Not for the first time, Asil thought that it had served Bran well to have a son who oozed threat like a Twinkie oozed plasticky cream filling. Everyone looked at Bran’s son Charles and forgot who the most dangerous person was.
Asil got out and held open the door for Kara. She jumped down beside him and gave Charles a wary look. Bran’s son was too busy taking in the shivering and naked men in the truck bed to notice. He threw them each a pair of sweat bottoms—which Asil hadn’t noticed him holding.
“Get dressed,” Charles rumbled at them. Once they were clothed, if only a little, Bran’s son took charge of herding them inside.
Once they were gone, Bran looked at Kara, who shrank under his gaze.
“It would have been better,” Bran said grimly, “if we hadn’t handed ammunition to our enemies. I’m afraid I’m as much at fault as you are, Asil. But it is Kara they want to pay.”
Asil frowned. Surely it should be the wolves who attacked Kara who would pay. “Explain that,” he said. Then, because he remembered that he wasn’t Alpha anymore, “Please. I don’t pay attention to politics anymore,” he told Bran, half-apologetically. “That’s your job.”
“Yeah,” Bran said. “Well, my job sucks.” He knelt and slid his hand along Kara’s jaw. Helplessly, her tail wagged her body—her wolf delighted by his attention. “You are mine, darling. I’ll keep you safe.”
Bran’s idea of safe, which paralleled Asil’s own, sometimes meant dead. Asil quit breathing for a moment.
Asil thought back over what he and Bran had done to imperil Kara. The last interaction had been in Bran’s study. He glanced at the door where the miscreant wolves had gone, preceding them into the pole barn. Eric of the “we attack children” pack had been waiting just outside that study door when Asil and Bran had spoken of how long Kara had been a wolf. She’d been a wolf for three years and had yet to be in control of her change.
That werewolves have one year to prove themselves or they have to be killed was a hard and necessary law. It required people to kill their loved ones to preserve the rest of the wolves. They were willing to do so only because that law applied to all of them. If Bran made an exception for Kara, it would spell decades of resentment and rebellion. If he did not make an exception for Kara, then Asil and Bran would have that battle that Asil came here for.
It was oddly stupid of them to hunt Kara so loudly where there were wolves to hear. It was odd that they had done so little damage to her. What if it had not been stupidity—or rather, it had been stupidity on a much grander scale? What if someone had wanted this meeting, wanted to push the issue of Kara out into the open?
Asil’s eyes met Bran’s—letting Bran know that Asil understood the issue, and that he would not allow Kara to be harmed without a protest. If Bran upheld the law, the battle that Asil had been seeking almost sixteen years ago when he’d first come here would take place.
“Whom do they belong to?” Asil asked.
“Hatchard Cole. A wolf who wants to expand his territory to include all of Alaska. He’d gladly take care of Liam Oldham and Ibrahim Ward—all he needs is my endorsement. If I don’t give it, he might just present me with a fait accompli.”
“Ah,” said Asil. “Is he here?” And is he still alive after a blackmail attempt like that?
“No,” Bran said sourly. “He gave the orders and left his wolves to spin in the wind when it didn’t work. When I called to inform him of the trespass after you called me, he commented about privileged wolves who do not follow the rules. I’m sure he’ll get some unsuspecting wolf all hot and bothered about it—someone who had to put a brother, mother, sister to rest when they couldn’t control themselves within the allotted time.”
“He wants your position,” Asil said. “Hatchard Cole.” He took a deep breath and thought about the werewolves he knew who were powerful enough to think they could take on Bran. “Was he perhaps once Conrad Hatch? I met him about three hundred years ago, give or take a few decades. Decent man, I thought then.”
Bran nodded. “That’s him. He hasn’t left Alaska since the 1880s. I’ve let him be, and until now he has given me no reason to complain.”
“Dominant wolves who do not live under your thumb forget why they swore obedience to you,” Asil said. “They become arrogant. And most of them do not like that you have brought us out into the eye of the public. They are stuck in old habits, and change frightens them.”
Bran smiled—a flash, then gone. “They?”
“I’m beyond that,” Asil said aloofly. “Now I’m just bored. He thinks that being Marrok is like being Alpha. If he can just knock you off your pedestal, make you look weak, it will reduce your support. Weaken your magic.” He snorted. “Idiot.”
Kara gave him an anxious whine.
“It will be okay,” he told her, his voice confident. Bran would he
ar the lie, but she wouldn’t—and that was all he cared about. To Bran he said, “I will stand with her.”
“Then go find Charles—he’ll be in the center of the floor with the three Alaskan wolves. I will come in when everyone is here.”
Kara beside him, Asil pushed his way through a group of people talking just outside the doorway. One of them turned to snarl, saw who it was, and shut up with gratifying suddenness.
The interior of the pole barn was set up with hay bales set around three sides in a horseshoe shape for seating, leaving the center as a stage. Bran hadn’t called the whole pack, but a casual glance told Asil that all of the wolves Asil would have considered stable—excepting himself—were there. The Marrok’s pack had more than its fair share of unstable wolves. Sage was seated near the far wall, but she caught his eyes and raised her eyebrows in a “do you know what’s going on?” He gravely nodded to her, though he could not conceive that his knowing anything helped her in the slightest. The three men he’d captured were on their knees in the center of the room, with Charles standing beside them.
He could hear the whispers of speculation; apparently Bran had not told anyone what he was doing. As Asil and Kara passed through the invisible ring imposed by Charles’s impassive regard, they became the subject of attention so thick Asil could taste it. When their audience noticed the blood on Kara’s side and digested what that meant in conjunction with the strangers on their knees in disgrace, Asil felt the pack bonds flash with the eager anger of the collected pack. Kara belonged to them, too.
Kara growled when the emotion hit her—and Asil put his hand on her head. “Shh,” he said.
Charles gave him a stiff nod, looked at Kara, and flinched almost imperceptibly. If Bran decided Kara must die, Asil would have to defeat Charles before Bran in order to save Kara. And even if he managed it, that would leave him in charge, not just of a pack, but of all the packs in this part of the world.