choice but to listen.
“I lost my birth pack to Shifters,” I growl against his face. “I will not lose another. A hundred years before the United States had any ‘founding fathers,’ our founding Alpha came to this country. The last thing she did before departing the Old World was to eat a Shifter, a loose end that needed to be clipped off before they left. If you so much as inconvenience a single one of my wolves, I will follow Ælfrida’s example and eat you—eat all of you—myself.”
Cassius falls to the floor, gagging, the side of one hand bleeding from the deep puncture wounds left by my Deemer’s teeth.
A murmured sound of disapproval circulates through the room. “No, Alpha,” says Eudemos, Alpha of the 14th, Silver and Tiberius’s age group. “That cannot be.” He puts his hand on the hilt of his dagger. “You will not eat alone. The 14th will join you in the taking of their foul flesh.”
One by one, my Alphas repeat the pledge. Wolves are not particularly imaginative, so most repeat it verbatim, though Esme, perhaps remembering the taste of the state trooper some years back, opts for “rancid tallow” while Orvin, the fusty Alpha of the 1st, vows to partake of the “loathsome thews.”
Gea-la. Gea-la, they yell, a kind of general affirmation of togetherness that is as close to a howl as we have in this form.
Although I know she can’t, it is almost as though she hears us, and the Gray’s howl echoes down from Westdæl. The Alphas fall into a respectful silence, listening to the æcewulf, the forever wolf, as she sings her long and curious song. The only sound comes from the sick Shifter. From Magnus, whose red-rimmed eyes look beseechingly through the window toward Westdæl.
“Please. Someone answer,” he croaks through cracked lips. It’s the first I’ve heard him speak in the days he’s been here. Constantine shakes his head, telling him to be quiet. Telling him that no one said anything, but that’s not true. The Gray spoke and Magnus heard. He looks at me, a hopeless expression in his eyes. “Please.”
I size him up, this sick young man, trying to figure out what is niggling at the back of my brain. What doesn’t belong.
But he’s right, the Gray must always be answered. I clear my throat and start to speak, not with the voice that is the familiar one I have used since I came into adulthood but the other one. The one Alphas have always used to compel their wolves’ innate debt of obedience. I asked John, when he first became Alpha, how he’d learned to use it. “I didn’t learn it,” he said. “It was always there. Waiting to be needed. It’s like when a queen bee dies and another arises because it is needed.”
I didn’t think about it again until John died and the wolves of the Great North looked to me. Even though I was drained by my lying-in and heartsick, they looked to me and I had no choice but to lead or watch the Great North fall apart. That first night when decisions had to be made, I made them. And I made them using the voice of an Alpha, the voice that had always been inside me. Waiting to be needed.
Now, it vibrates through my chest and throat and the cavities of my face, and when I finally let it loose, it resonates like a wave through the assembled Alphas.
“Sona hy æcewulfas andwearde.”
The wolves lower their heads and murmur their reply. “The forever wolves will be answered, Alpha.”
Magnus slumps against the wall.
Chapter 4
Constantine
There is something about what she said. Or not what she said—I don’t know what it was—but how she said it.
Her head held high, so I could see the vibration along the deep ochre skin of her throat, a sure sign that I’m looking too closely. Her voice is like a physical thing unfurling from her and embracing everyone. The werewolves lean in like they are trying to lick up that last syllable before it fades away. Only after she has lowered her head do I realize that I am leaning toward her too. Now I see in the cloud of her hair a single parachute of a single seed sparkling among the black, like a lone star in the night sky.
There are holes in her jeans. Not the expensive, purposeful kind. These are free and come with age and wear. Muscles curl, sensuous and strong just underneath. Something ripples across