ability to hold her own among the international council of packs, where decisions affecting Lupine society as a whole were discussed and debated and voted upon once every five years. Honor didn’t even doubt her ability to win any alpha challenge that presented itself to her. Lord knew she’d won three since the moment her father had drawn his last breath, and she knew in that sick place in her gut that’d she’d face even more; but she also knew the wolves in her pack. She knew their strengths and weaknesses, and unless a new, stronger wolf tried to come in from outside the pack, she didn’t fear for her position. No, Honor didn’t doubt for a second that she had the ability to become as confident and capable an alpha as the White Paw Clan had ever seen.
What she doubted was her desire.
“I was happier being beta.”
She whispered the words to the ceiling and heard the truth of them ringing all the way down into her soul. It felt like a sin to speak them, but the good kind of sin; one of the ones involving lust and gluttony and sloth, like staying in bed on a Sunday morning to make love and sleep and nibble on decadent pieces of dark, rich chocolate. Possibly all at the same damned time. She knew that if any of her pack could hear her words, they’d assume she’d lost her mind. Hell, if any nonsubmissive wolf in the whole damned world could hear, they’d think the same damned thing. Dominant wolves always wanted to lead. Period. The end. Happily ever after, and all those old cliches.
So, maybe Honor wasn’t so dominant after all?
She thought about that, mulled it over, tested out the taste and feel of it while the sounds of weighted tree branches settling and night critters scurrying drifted in through her open window.
It was a more complicated question than it seemed, but then, among Lupines, dominance was a complicated issue. No matter what their furry instincts might tell them at times, Lupines were
Like wolves, but not wolves; like humans, but not humans.
Among wolves, packs really amounted to little more than families, and in those families, the oldest—and therefore most often the strongest—male led the way. It was, if not simple, then at least a fairly straightforward and logical method of organization among animals, but when you factored in the human side of a Lupine’s nature, any thoughts of logic and straightforwardness flew right out the nearest window.
Lupine packs were definitely not family groups. They contained families, but because of their integration into wider human society, they needed to become more than that. Instead, wolf shapeshifters grouped in territorial packs, with all of the Lupines in a designated geographical area falling under the authority of the alpha of that area. In the beginning, it had probably started as a security measure, allowing all the Lupines in a community to keep an eye on each other and protect each other against threats from hunters, witch hunters, werewolf hunters, and the like. Over the centuries, it had become a political measure, maintained in order to keep the peace among groups of Lupines with no relationship to each other, to temper their natural instincts to get to the top of the food chain. Lupine alphas spent less time making sure everyone in the pack was fed and more time making sure they didn’t eat each other, to be blunt, something that required managing not only wolfish instincts, but human egos, emotions, and psychodramas. Frankly, Honor would rather lead an actual wolf pack any day of the week. At least wolves didn’t lie to each other.
Honor rolled onto her side and punched her pillow into shape, ignoring the twinge in her aching knuckles. With her Lupine metabolism, such a small discomfort would be gone by morning, but it was the only one of her problems that would be. When the sun rose, she might feel physically better, but she’d still be the reluctant alpha of an endangered pack, with a meddlesome stranger breathing down her neck and half of her childhood friends gunning for her blood. Her only real choice was what to do about it.
If she honestly didn’t want to be alpha, should she just step down? Just give her place to Paul or Darin or one of the other males who hadn’t hesitated to tell her that a female would never be fit to rule them? Honor’s very soul rebelled at the idea. First, because she’d be damned if she’d let any male tell her what a female was or wasn’t capable of doing. An alpha might need strength to lead a pack, but she also needed intelligence, cunning, an open mind, and an eye on the future. Testicles, as far as she could tell, counted as entirely optional.
Secondly, she truly did believe she would make a better alpha than any of them ever could. Her father had raised her to be just that. He had taught her not only about the pack and how its members related to each other, but also about the business that kept it financially afloat. She’d learned to do all that at her father’s side; no one else had that training or that experience.
Honor’s personal relationship with her father had been rocky and even tumultuous at times, but their working relationship had functioned as if it had been designed by a Swiss watchmaker. Ethan Tate had given the orders, and Honor had seen them fulfilled. She had guarded his back, his pack, and his privacy, and she’d done a damned good job of it, too. She had helped keep the White Paw Clan running smoothly and fluidly, but she’d still had time for her own pursuits. She had been on call twenty-four hours, true, but in a well-managed pack, those calls had come rarely.
Over the years, Honor had taken up kayaking and snorkeling. She had studied Native-American and Lupine mythology and taught herself how to throw pots. She had earned a degree in business administration with a minor in environmental management and spent most of her spare time in the studio, spinning her wheel and stoking the fires in the brick kiln she had built with her own hands. In other words, before her father had died, Honor had been a normal woman with a life of her own. Now she began to understand that as alpha, the pack would become her life.
She didn’t want that. Her sense of duty to the pack ran just as deep as any Lupine’s, but the need to serve it did not consume her. She had the willingness to give, but not the willingness to give up that which the position of alpha required.
Why then was she fighting to stay alpha of the White Paw Clan?
Good question, and one she had begun asking herself almost hourly.
Gods knew it wasn’t for the glory of it. Honor snorted at the thought. There was very little glory these days in being alpha of any clan, and even less in one of the small, subordinate clans like this one. Being the Silverback alpha might float Graham Winters’s boat, but the Silverback was the overpack to the entire Northeast. All the packs from Maine to D.C. said their pleases and thank-yous to the Silverback. The White Paw Clan had less than a hundred and fifty members, and that generous estimate included the pups and the elders. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of glory to be found in “ruling” a group the size of the local high school’s graduating class when most of them could run their own lives just fine without any interference from her.
To be honest, the only answer that had come to her had been that she wanted to lead the clan by default. Hardly a rousing answer, but a truthful one. It wasn’t that Honor wanted to lead the pack; it was that she didn’t want anyone else to do it.
She didn’t think it was a power trip. After all, given the lack of glory, one could rightly assume that the power of the position didn’t exactly shake the earth. So, not a dog-in-the-manger routine. She just honestly didn’t see how any member of the pack could make a decent White Paw alpha.
It hurt her to think it, actually. She hated thinking so badly of her family and friends, the group of people she’d grown up with, that she knew and loved. Or at least tolerated out of a sense of familial loyalty. She wanted to believe every one of those people had the strength and intelligence and fortitude to lead the pack into prosperity, but the sad truth told her none of them did.
If there was anyone, it might have been Paul. Paul was smart. At least, she’d always thought so, before he decided to challenge her earlier that afternoon. He had a good head on his shoulders, and a sense of humor that had seen him out of more than one scrape in his life. But he also had a temper that could get out of hand if he wasn’t careful, and for all his considerable intelligence, the man couldn’t devise a long-term strategy if it came with illustrated instructions. He could barely manage to plan what his next meal would be, and often didn’t even bother with that. The pack just couldn’t afford that sort of leader. This was a critical time for them, and if they didn’t have an alpha who could lead the pack in a new direction, Honor felt certain they would stagnate themselves into extinction.
