“Don’t try to shrink my head, hippie spawn,” I snapped at her.
“Well, now you’re expressing direct hostility,” she said. “Which is more your speed, anyway.”
“Shut it, Moonflower,” I shot back, using the super-secret, never-to-be-spoken-in-public legal name bestowed on her by her hippie parents.
“That was too far,” she growled. “See if I ever help you again.”
“Hey!” I shouted as she stormed toward the coat rack. “If you consider pulling my eyelashes out by the root help, you can keep it!”
I HUFFED OUT A BREATH through my muzzle as my paws hit the ground. I turned to see that Clay had cleared the fallen fir tree right after me.
He gave me a triumphant little wolfy grin and leaped ahead of me. I barked and chased, falling into step with him. Clay had insisted on taking me running after another grueling pack meeting, and I couldn’t help but be grateful that he knew exactly what I needed. The pack structure had been somewhat unsettled over the past week.
Somehow, my abandoning Lee in the middle of a patrol to chase after Nick’s scent was some sort of final straw for Uncle Frank. He went from quietly grumbling about how I wasn’t doing what he would do in this situation to straight-out questioning my ability to lead. Frank told the uncles that maybe he voted for the wrong alpha candidate. Maybe having a woman for an alpha wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe they should consider my first year on the job a “probationary period,” during which I was failing miserably. After all, there had been attempts on my life and destruction of pack property in my first few months on the job. It had taken Cooper years to get into that much trouble.
Still, I’d stayed true to my word and let Nick study the valley. We started out with short visits, introducing him to my aunts as a cultural anthropologist studying communities in remote rural areas. It raised a few eyebrows, but with Cooper’s endorsement and my own, Nick was soon charming his way into kitchens. He was stuffed with cookies and roast hare, while he asked innocuous questions about how the ladies of the pack spent their days. What were their favorite recipes? How often did they get to visit friends outside the valley? How did they meet their husbands? He never mentioned werewolves or packs or mates, but I gathered that he was picking up information about our other nature, here and there. He could see things that the average human couldn’t, just because he was open to it.
Nick had this engaging way about him when he was interviewing that kept people talking. He asked questions, kept a funny running commentary. It was subtle without being sneaky or manipulative. Hell, he found out things about my relatives that even I didn’t know. For instance, I had no idea my uncle Louis once ran away to Canada to try to join a carnival . . . although when I thought about it, it made a certain amount of sense.
I found myself accompanying Nick on these visits, telling myself that I was just keeping an eye on the outsider and learning more about my own pack history. But more than anything, I just wanted to watch him work.
Of course, Nick’s presence in the valley was another bone for Uncle Frank to pick. I was playing too fast and loose with the pack’s secret, he said. I was wasting time that should be spent looking for a mate. I thought about storming into his toolshed and giving him the verbal ass-whipping of a lifetime, maybe in front of a few of the uncles if I could manage it. But then I realized that probably wouldn’t serve much purpose, other than making Frank madder and ramping up his screwball campaign to undermine my authority.
Instead, I took a page from my mother’s book. When we were kids, Mom didn’t punish us often. If she had, I would have been grounded from birth to, well, pretty much now. But when she did lower the hammer, the dread of waiting while she considered our “sentence” was almost worse than the punishment. So, I asked one of the kids to drop by Uncle Frank’s on their way to school and ask him to come by my office around noon, giving him a good, solid, four-hour window in which to soil himself.
Uncle Frank had built up a healthy reserve of bluster when he came through my office door that afternoon. But I could smell the sweat on his palms and hear the little hitch in his pulse. I didn’t bother looking up from the ledgers I was scribbling until he was standing right in front of my recently replaced desk, like a kid being called to the principal’s office.
I finally leaned back and gave him a thin smile, gesturing for him to sit down.
“Uncle Frank,” I said, “I’m told you have some concerns about how I’m running the pack.”
“Hell, yes, I have ‘concerns.’ I have a heap of concerns. It’s like the whole family’s gone loco. First, your brother runs off and marries God knows who. You let him live a full hour’s run away from the valley. Now you’re letting some human waltz around the valley like he’s one of us, asking questions he doesn’t have any business asking, while you make calf eyes with Billie’s nephew. And let’s not even talk about what a bad alpha candidate he is. You keep tarting around like you are, and we’re ripe for another takeover. Other packs will perceive us as weak. Bad enough that we have a female alpha, but—”
“I’m going to ask you not to finish that sentence. Know your place.”
“I know my place,” he shot back. “I’m your elder.”
“I’m your alpha.” I gave him a hard stare, which he returned . . . for about a second.
He snorted dismissively and shifted his eyes down, a reluctant act of submission. “Well, you aren’t acting like any alpha I’ve ever seen. I don’t understand why you’re running around with these no-accounts when my nephew is just waiting for Cooper to finish negotiating for your paw. Lee is a leader. He can make this pack strong again. Our alpha is being attacked on our own territory, for pity’s sake. We need his pack’s protection if we’re going to survive. It’s the only choice that makes sense. And if you weren’t so pigheaded and prideful, you’d agree to mate with him. We don’t know anything about this Clay or his pack. Hell, we already know Billie’s gene pool carries some crazy. Why take the risk of passing it along?”
“Watch your mouth, Uncle Frank,” I growled. “Billie’s pack. Just like you and me.”
Frank snorted again. “Maybe she was.”
“Is,” I said. “As long as I’m alpha, I decide who’s pack and who’s not, something you need to keep in mind. I’m going to say this once. Whoever I date, whoever I mate with, is none of your business. And you will not sit around gossiping about my love life like some little old woman. I don’t care if you have a dozen nephews you think would be a good match for me. Keep your opinions to yourself. All of your opinions.”
He shot up, placing both hands on my desk in an attempt to loom over me. “And if I said I don’t want to live in a pack where my opinion’s not welcome?”
I did my best to look bored, picking up my pen and scribbling a note on my ledger. “I would remind you that you’re free to leave the pack anytime. And if you push me much farther, I’ll give you an extra nudge out the door.”
A boot up the ass could be considered a “nudge,” right?
He stood, his nose in the air. “I know where I’m not wanted. I’ll just go stay with Lee’s pack.”
“I think that would be for the best.”
Fortunately, Uncle Frank had enough sense to act as if it was his idea to move. He wanted to save face, so he told everybody how much better life was over in Lee’s pack. Better housing, better hunting, more wolves. He made it sound like some swanky werewolf retirement resort, but I don’t think many of my relatives bought it.
And after a nearly appropriate cushion of time passed, we could laugh about Uncle Frank’s defection. I happened to pass by as Pops and Uncle Jay were playing checkers at the community center one afternoon and heard Jay say, “Frank’s mouth has been writing checks his butt couldn’t cash for years. Glad somebody finally called him on it. If I had to hear one more story about his idiot nephew, I was going to bite him myself.”
A bit later, someone hung a bottomless “suggestion box” in my office, situated so the suggestion slip would fall through the slot, right into a wastebasket. Such was life in the pack. If something good happened, we were smart-asses. If something bad happened, we were smart-asses. If we weren’t all that emotionally healthy, at least we were consistent.
Behind me, Clay caught the scent of rabbit on the trail. He yipped to let me know he was going to chase it north. I barked back, wishing him luck. Heading in the opposite direction, I ducked under the brush, venturing to the very edge of the valley’s boundaries.
I sat at the end of the crescent, watching the wind play over the fir trees, like an annoying uncle’s hand ruffling the valley’s hair. I phased, eager to feel the weak rays of sunshine on my bare human skin. The breeze had
