3 comments/ 5232 views/ 4 favorites After Dawn, What Came Next By: msnomer68 Native Dawn Series Book 22 After Dawn What Came Next Prologue Twenty-five years is a long time when measured in terms of a human life span. Twenty-five years to a vampire or a wolf is nothing but a drop in a very deep well. Time passed and kept passing. It moved inexorably forward with each swing of the pendulum and the tick of the clock. The town changed with the times. New families set down roots while old ones pulled up stakes and moved on. New houses were built to take the place of outdated homesteads that had stood for generations long since forgotten. The city much like the town had changed. People hustled and bustled about their daily routines thinking nothing much about the changes going on around them. Such is the way of it for human beings with their limited life spans and the busyness that comes with the work of desperately trying to achieve some measure of immortality in the few short years that are the sum of their lives. Buildings of brick and mortar fell to dust and ruin only to be replaced by glimmering towers of steel and glass stretching high up into the sky. Highways and interstates sprung up and older, slower roadways stretched into the distance traveling to places no one in their haste cared to visit anymore. Life changed. Technology blazed amazing trails forward always reaching ahead for the future. Pen and paper were novelties of a forgotten era. Everything existed in the surreal world of cyberspace. Money was no longer tangible in coin and dollar. Rather, while real and as important as ever, currency was more of a theory, a concept of cost, receipt for payment, and exchange for services rendered. Commerce took place in the netherworld of the Internet. Anything a person wanted, no matter how trivial or critical it seemed, could arrive neatly packaged in recyclable boxes on a doorstep within hours of a simple point and click selection. Cars were safer. Travel faster. Houses bigger. Families smaller. Yet, the population flourished in greater numbers than it ever had before. Medical science made amazing advances. There seemed to be nothing that couldn’t be cured by swallowing an innocuous little pill. People lived longer and better lives. Aging and the ailments that came along with it had become a thing of the past. The world was a cleaner, brighter, and safer place. Regrettably, it was also a busier and noisier, and much, much smaller as a consequence. There were people who remembered the things the rest of the world had seemed to forget in its haste to push forward into the future. Constantly battered, uprooted by the surge, and forced upstream by the relentless flow, the ones who lived through the past and remembered the time before were like rocks in a rushing current. The compound was full of life and activity. Peace had made the brothers reluctant to recall the times of strife and pain and of blood. They trained to fight an enemy nobody was certain still existed. Black leather gear that hadn’t been worn in decades hung in distant corners of closets growing dusty with the passing of time and soft with age. Nobody wanted to forget the price that was paid for the peace they so enjoyed. But, nobody necessarily wanted to remember it either. The world was filled with understanding, except for the things it could not accept. Vampires remained hidden from the light of day as they always had, preferring the shadows to the sun. Their secrets were more difficult to protect and the past had a way of finding them no matter how hard they tried to erase it. In this world of progress they were as they had always been, the silent watchers and guardians of the dark. The clandestine world of the wolf was much as it had always been. Brighter than their dark cousins they walked a dangerous precipice with one foot in the land of the living and one in the mystic universe of the unseen. Change wasn’t easy for the old ones. Progress was an enticement to the young that had grown up on nothing but stories from a time long since lived. The young were the essence of the current pressing against the solid rock of tradition, trying always to force the rocks upstream. Chapter 1 Marianne eased a sigh through her pursed lips and tried like hell not to fidget on the stool. Her hair fell in a waterfall of black velvet to pile up on the floor at her feet. Loose tendrils of hair efficiently snipped free by the scissors in Evan’s careful grip tickled the nape of her neck. She rested her palms on her knees and breathed in and out, trying not to think about what was coming with the dawn. She glanced up to meet his guarded expression in the mirror. He smiled at her and bowed his head down to resume his work. Although he tried very hard to hide it from her notice, concern for her flickered in his brown eyes. The pack had grown substantially from its first few dozen members that had traveled north from the Nevada desert to initially call this place home. In the beginning changes were rapid and not without their share of trials and tribulations. Eloise’s pack had joined theirs, and then Torr’s ragtag pack, and afterwards a myriad trickle of strangers. Lost Children who had finally found their way home. The times had changed and were still changing. Babies were born and some of those babies had grown up to have children of their own. Underneath this roof they were all still one big happy family. Meal times were the same zoo they had always been with everyone seated around a table as long as a football field and then some. The main house had been added to, floor after floor, room after room, until it grew into a maze of corridors and doorways. There was still a closeness amongst the pack that screamed of family and tradition. In these wee hours before dawn it was easy for her to imagine her grandfather bedded down deep under the comforters with Eloise at his side. No doubt, he was awake though, doing the same as she and preparing for what was to come with the rising of the sun. Evan fell into rhythm with the sharp snick of the scissors cutting the glorious mane of his wife’s thick hair. Long strands of hair, dark as a raven’s wings fell to the floor, slick and sleek beneath the soles of his bare feet. He regretted that she had to cut off her hair and regretted even more that he was the one to do it. He understood the necessity of it though and had volunteered to set himself to the task of making her ready. Hair down to her waist was a liability she could not afford. The silky length of it was a weapon that could be used against her. It was better this way, to cut it off and eliminate one potential threat to his wife’s safety. Cut off the advantage of her opponent and give her the best chances at winning that he could. He had spent the better part of the week studying techniques and styles. Marianne’s hair would stop at the nape of her neck, leaving the slender column exposed and vulnerable. There were all types of styles for women with short hair. He wanted his Mouse to look her best, but after going hand to hand in a fight to the death to win control of the pack from her grandfather. She probably wouldn’t care if he accidentally cut her hair crooked or not. Ultimately, he had settled for a simple cut. A short layered bob that came to a tapered point at the base of her skull. She looked like a little girl or some sort of a woodland sprite fresh out of a fairy tale instead of an almost forty year-old woman with two kids and a doctorate degree in business administration. Evan shook his head still wondering what kind of rabbit he had pulled out of his hat to talk her into marrying him in the first place. It wasn’t luck he supposed as much as it had been destiny that had landed them in the bonds of marital bliss. Destiny was a strange, strange thing. He had been six years old when he first laid eyes on her. He knew then at such a tender age that this woman, just a girl back then, was going to be his wife, someday. Destiny had blessed them with two beautiful children. Two girls that looked so much like their mother it made his heart burst with joy. Today, the balance of destiny would be paid in full with blood and pain as the currency. Marianne tried to think of happier things than the task she was about to set herself to complete. She had known, or been told, that this day would eventually come. If someone had asked her twenty or ten years ago, perhaps even as recent as yesterday, if she was prepared for this day. She would have said yes. Now with the rising of the dawn and the challenge issued. She wasn’t so certain. She did not want to do what she was going to have to do to ensure the future of her pack. She had never wanted to do what destiny planned for her to do. She had spent the better part of her life, once she had reached the age of true understanding, trying to conjure up a way out of this. Evan with his dreamy visions of distant places and times would simply shrug his shoulders and reassure her that everything would turn out exactly as it was supposed to. Somehow, she wasn’t very comforted by his unwavering faith in fate. Her grandfather held no grudge against her. He was ok with what was about to happen. Not that his reassurance offered her the least bit of comfort either. He was prepared to do what needed to be done to ensure the future. She was the one balking at the burden heaped on her shoulders. Responsibility was something she was used to. After all, she had grown up believing in her role in the destiny yet to come. Her grandfather raised her for this with the full knowledge of what she would someday have to do. He loved her too much. He had trained her too well. She was ready to take her turn at the helm and steer the pack into a new era. She simply wasn’t ready or willing to kill him in a fight to the death to do it. At one time in the distant past, her grandfather had been the one sitting in contemplation. Perhaps, trying desperately to wrap his head around killing his father in a battle to the death for control of the pack. He understood his time would eventually come. He had fought many, many times for his title and he had won against every contestant that had attempted to defeat him in the challenge. His day was at hand and the time of his term as pack master was finally over. He had every intention of fighting, but no plans of winning. She could be wrong about that, but she didn’t think so. Her grandfather was a long ways from being old and decrepit. He could beat her. That was something she didn’t want to think about. What might happen if and the thought of leaving Evan behind with the task of raising their two children. He stood behind her, his eyes flicking between the digital picture on the virtu-pad and her non-existent hair. He made a calculated snip with the point of the scissors and grunted in displeasure. Licking his bottom lip in concentration, he stepped back and then moved forward to clip the hairs at the base of her neck. Evan had been just another annoying little boy when he had first asked for her hand in marriage at the tender age of six. Sitting here contemplating her future, it was somewhat easier to think back to her past. He still had the same haphazard hair sticking up at crazy angles in unmanageable spikes. He no longer wore footed Spiderman pajamas or sat dazed in front of the TV watching cartoons. Well, sometimes he still watched cartoons, for the sake of the children, of course. He still slurped the milk from the bottom of his cereal bowl and grinned covertly at her knowing how irritating she found the habit simply because he could. The younger version of herself hadn’t been a picnic. She was sure of that. She had been a very determined and focused little girl. So serious and always looking forward into the distant future that she rarely gave much stock to what was actually going on around her. She was seven years older than Evan. Sometimes it seemed like much more than that and sometimes, it seemed like far less and she was the younger out of the two of them. This morning she felt ancient. The distant future was here and now, and she wished like hell it wasn’t. “Should I go wake the girls?” Evan asked. Tara and Lizzie were the apples of their mother’s eye. Born barely one year apart the girls were more like twins, carbon copies of each other, than siblings. Mouse and he had wanted children so badly. They tried for years and years before she finally conceived and gave birth to a screaming, red faced, beautiful baby girl. The girls were still so young, in his opinion too young to be raised without their mother. Of course, there were bits and pieces of him in them too. They had his sense of what he called other, for lack of a better term. They knew things, though not as acutely as he had at that age. Private things no little girl should know. This morning as soon as the sun broke the horizon his daughters would stand at the bluffs and witness things no child should ever see. Evan was the good cop to Marianne’s bad cop routine when it came to child rearing. He simply didn’t have the heart to tell his daughters no to anything. Perhaps, it was their long dark hair or the pinched expressions on their faces when they contemplated something intense and puzzling that softened him to the point of doting father. It broke his heart, the foreshadowing of blood and pain his visions showed him. The battle for pack master was a necessary thing and as such unavoidable. His mind’s eye saw the fight in vivid detail. The red of the blood and the purple black of bruises on marred flesh was a horror show constantly replaying over and over again in his head. His visions of the things to come were shrouded in mist. He didn’t know the outcome, only that there would be blood and pain. He didn’t see the shadows of the future beyond the fight because it had not been decided yet. Marianne, sitting so primly and acceptingly on her stool had not completely set her mind to what she was going to do. “No, let them sleep a while longer,” Marianne answered. The sun had yet to break through the horizon. She saw no harm in letting the girls sleep in as long as possible. They were young, perhaps younger than she when she had first learned of her destiny. At ages seven and eight they loved their mother and father, but they loved their great grandpa Nash too. She had tried to explain it to them. The harshness of the world she had bore them into and in the end hadn’t been able to find the words. Someday, they would understand and they would forgive her for taking their great grandfather away from them. If that’s what this awful destiny she wanted no part of had in store for her. “Ok.” Evan made a final pass with the comb and the scissors. “All finished.” He stepped back and allowed Marianne time to view his masterpiece. For unskilled hands the haircut hadn’t turned out half bad. It didn’t exactly look like the digital image on his tablet, but it was close enough and he was reasonably pleased with his abilities. Marianne didn’t bother with studying her reflection. She stared down at the hair and felt a pang of sorrow for cutting it off. Her former waist length glory littered the floor in untidy heaps. Her fingers flexed and curled into fists. She clenched them tightly in her lap to still the trembling. Nodding silently, she lifted her head and searched Evan’s face for answers. He said nothing. His expression was calm, almost placid. There truly was nothing more to say. If he knew what was going to happen today, he kept it to himself and perhaps it was better that way. That she didn’t know the future hinged on the present. Evan reached out and gathered Mouse into his arms. She rested her head on his shoulder, burying her face in the warmth of his sleep rumpled t-shirt. She trembled in his embrace. Scrabbling to find her courage and her focus in the uncertainty of things to come. He said his visions weren’t a certain thing. Sometimes, they weren’t accurate, or so he claimed. She wanted to believe that now more than ever and clung to the cloud of doubt like a life preserver in a turbulent sea. He knew so much, but nobody could know everything. She thought back to the night they had conceived Tara. He had smiled at and traveled down the length of her spent body to gently, almost reverently, kiss her stomach. He had whispered a name then and grinned his crooked grin up at her. His eyes had glinted with the knowledge of things yet to come. He had named their daughter before she was more than just the tiniest spark of life in her mother’s womb. The sound of a car idling up the driveway broke them apart. Gravel crunched beneath the tires. The car wasn’t powered by electricity and silent as a whisper in the pre-dawn stillness. She could hear the noisy rattle of a combustion engine and dual exhaust as the driver revved the engine and parked at the mouth of the garage. The car wasn’t illegal, but it wasn’t exactly practical either. The era of petroleum products and fossil fuels had come and gone. Nature and scarcity had forced humanity’s hand. Everything operated on electricity now. Owning and maintaining a classic car was a hobby only for the very rich and the driver of this car certainly wasn’t rich. Marianne glanced up from the shelter of Evan’s chest. She knew only one kind of machine that was capable of making so much noise. Surely, the car wasn’t still drivable. That old Camaro had to be at the bottom of a scrap heap somewhere. Yet, there was no mistaking the unmistakable roar of a V8 engine. “You called him?” Evan nodded. “Why?” Nobody had seen her brother in over twenty-five years. Occasionally, there were video calls or packages sent from Texas. He would randomly and unexpectedly call out of the blue whenever the mood struck him and spend hours chatting with whoever answered the phone. Sometimes, he would answer the phone or return a call whenever someone thought to call him and sometimes, he wouldn’t. There were months at a time when nobody would hear from him at all and then without any provocation, he’d call or drop an e-mail. There was no bad blood. It was just that sometimes the awkwardness got too much to handle and it was easier to let things go than to try to salvage them. Daniel had left home shortly after his nineteenth birthday and had gone to South Texas to try to make a life for himself in the refuge left behind by Eloise’s pack. He hadn’t returned for a visit and nobody had traveled down to see him either. For all intents and purposes, her brother was a ghost. An empty plate set at the dining room table with the hopes that someday he would return to claim the seat. Evan shrugged. How was he supposed to answer her question? More importantly, how much did she want him to say? Daniel needed to be here. Marianne needed him here, so did her grandfather, and so did somebody else that had been keeping a promise whispered on a cold December night, long, long ago. “Maybe, he decided it’s time for him to come home. I guess.” Chapter 2 Fallon spent the night pacing the floors. Even with all the technology in the world people still needed doctors. Thomas had retired and given up his practice, leaving it in her capable hands. She carried the torch within her meager capabilities and did her best to pick up where he had left off. Unlike Thomas, she limited her practice to the more clandestine of the world, to those that dwelled in both myth and shadows, to those like her. She delivered babies, nursed the occasional rare ailment, set broken bones, and doled out gallons and gallons of Nana’s infamous tea in an attempt to fill in the gaps left between science and magic. She had a medical kit outfitted and ready to go. Nobody was going to die today. She wouldn’t allow it. Marianne was her best friend. Nash had been a surrogate grandfather to her since she was a little girl. She loved them both too much to step aside and watch them bloody one another to the point where only one of them was left standing. She was not going to stand idly by and watch either one of them die for the sake of a barbaric tradition. After Dawn, What Came Next Her father had tried to explain the way things were in the pack. That this was the life she was born into and right or wrong this was just the way of it. She didn’t care. She didn’t agree with bludgeoning an opponent to death to determine the fate of over four hundred souls. She was not going to blindly accept and stand there and do nothing when there was so much that was in her power to do. Oh, she wasn’t blind enough to believe she held the power of life and death in her hands. As a physician, there were things she could do to stave off death and preserve life. Ultimately though, life and death were under the control of a higher power than one thirty-something female with a medical degree. She had lived in the world…the real world for ten years before her mother and she were found and brought to the pack. Again in medical school, she had lived away from home to study in the city. In fact, she had lived out there in the real world of people longer than she had lived in here in the world of tradition and magic. Her mother understood her abhorrence to violence and covertly supported her daughter’s opinions. Erica Grey had been born and lived in the human world as a human, never knowing the legacy she had birthed her daughter into. Sometimes, Fallon wished she didn’t know of her heritage or the strange world of her father’s pack. She wished…well, there were so many things she wished for, most of which she would never get. Her mother was aging, gracefully, but still aging. Gray streaked her hair at the temples and crown. Laugh lines creased the corners of her eyes and edges of her mouth. Her mom was a far cry from elderly. Erica Grey was not the kind of woman to succumb to the effects of time. She gave the passing of years a real fight for their money. Fallon did what she could to keep her mother healthy and strong. Her father wholeheartedly agreed with keeping the woman they so both dearly loved whole. Despite the advances in medical science, there was only so much Nana’s tea and the prescription bottles lining the shelves of the medicine cabinet could do though. It was odd to see her mom and dad together. Stranger perhaps now than it had been in the beginning when she had been a much younger version of herself. At the age of ten, learning that she had a father who loved her and of the wolf that shared her father’s skin had been both exciting and a little scary. Learning that it would someday happen to her and she would share her body with the spirit of a wolf was both terrifying and exhilarating. Her father was a powerful wolf, a pack master, and yes, he had killed his own father for the rights to the title. Fallon knew well of the story. When she was finally of an age to understand the whys behind the things he had been forced to do. He had told her all of it. She understood what it had cost him to kill his father in a fight to the death to free the pack from her grandfather’s rule. Once the truth was out. She had never asked her father to repeat the tale again. Her father was a strong and virulent male. An alpha although he lived under Nash’s rule. He had never wanted to be pack master. He had never wanted to be a leader of men. Fallon didn’t see it as a weakness in his character. Her dad simply wanted the one thing he had been deprived of his entire life, peace. He had his peace or at least some version of it. She saw the strain of this life, how much it had cost him, and the price he still paid, haunting the depths of his eyes. Her mom would age and die, no matter what attempts were made to preserve her life. Her dad hadn’t appeared to age more than a handful of years in the past two and a half decades. He would go on, healthy, strong, and whole long after her mother was in the grave. It was a burden the three of them had to live with. They rarely spoke of it, but the truth was there, overshadowing their lives. Most of the time they could ignore it and pretend the eventual wasn’t going to happen. But, when her mom and dad stood side by side. Her mother, graying and wrinkling around the edges and her father, tall and strong without a hint of the effects of the passing of time, it was more than something they didn’t discuss. Rather it was something they couldn’t afford to ignore. It was a fact that would come to pass, sooner rather than later. A wolf could live far beyond the two hundred year mark. Fallon couldn’t explain the science behind the magic of what the pack was. She had tried through careful research. She covertly studied the pack’s DNA and her own in an attempt to unearth the truth that made them what they were and had come up short. She had no answers. The pack…she and her wolf…simply were. The gift was inherited. Of that, she had no doubt, having experienced the shift and the magic of the wolf first hand. Sometimes, she hated the furry beast that shared her skin. Sometimes, she was simply taken aback in awe of the raw power and magic of the spirit wolf that lived within her. Her abilities were somewhat different than that of her distant full-blooded relation. She aged a little quicker than the purebred pack. She had more difficulty shifting from one form to another. As a side benefit though, she could go for longer periods of time, months on end without returning to the pack to recharge her metaphysical batteries. There were myths to explain why they were what they were and where they had come from. All wolves were the descendants of the Great White Wolf, the father of them all. That she could believe. Her genetic research was not without proof of that simple fact of nature. What their wolves did when they were not in control of the body she simply didn’t quite grasp. When her wolf was at the helm, a bulk of her consciousness went to a shadowy world of absolute perfection. She was still present, the rudder to the ship, but not completely aware. When the wolf wasn’t driving the bus of their shared body. It was said that the wolf guarded the borders of the goddess of them all, Kokumthena’s territory, the misty boundary between the living and the dead. She had never seen a ghost or a spirit. She had never felt the brush of Kokumthena’s mystical hand or seen evidence of Her influence in her life. Nash reassured her that just because she couldn’t feel it didn’t mean it wasn’t so. When she got into heated debates with her father on the subject. He would simply shrug his shoulders and mumble that Nash’s answers were as plausible as any other. Whatever it was, the magic beyond the science of what they were. Although, she wasn’t certain of what she believed or didn’t believe. There was something to it. Perhaps, all living beings contained just a spark of something other. As to what it actually was or was not, she simply didn’t know. Maybe, it was that spark that kept her clinging to hope when she had no reason to. She had made a promise once, over twenty-five years ago, whispered in urgency and desperation to a fractured boy. A boy that was so lost and perhaps would never be found. She had been thirteen at the time, a foolish girl in love. At nineteen, Daniel had seemed larger than life to her, unapproachable and unobtainable. He had left home a boy eager for adventure and returned home a meager shattered shadow of his former self. But, the things that had happened to him during those long months of his absence in the city had transformed him into a man. She had a basic understanding of the events, but no one, not even his father knew the whole story. At the time, Daniel saw her as a little girl. At the time, she had been so desperate to reassemble him she had made it her personal mission in life. Everyone tiptoed around him out of fear of his explosive moods and pressing him too hard for answers. Those were dark days filled with checker games and baked cookies in an attempt to ease the void within him. In the end it hadn’t worked. The week before Christmas, he left again for good and hadn’t been back since. He simply walked out on his family and left everyone and everything, including her behind. That night was the night she had gotten her first real kiss from a boy. She crouched at the windowsill in the den, watching him retreat in a swirl of cold, darkness, and snow. With her lips and fingertips pressed to the frosted pane of the window she promised, with all the vehemence a girl of her age could muster, to wait for him. He had turned and walked to the window with the grace only he could possess and bent down low. His eyes had glinted through their haunted shadows with understanding and perhaps, no small measure of sympathy. He pressed his palm to hers and his lips to her mouth. To this day, she could still feel the hardness and the coldness of the glass against her lips and taste the frost from his kiss on the tip of her tongue. Daniel’s kiss was the first kiss she had ever received and of all the ones she had marginally enjoyed afterwards, the only one she truly remembered. She had endured her fair share of suitors over the years. At thirty-seven and still unclaimed, her mom and dad had almost given up on her ever falling in love and tying the knot. They wanted grandchildren desperately, something of themselves to pass on from generation to generation. She would be happy to oblige the notion, but she simply hadn’t found the right guy. Not that the men she acquiesced to go out on dates with weren’t worthy in their own rights. They were. It was she that was the problem. None of the men were Daniel and therefore, in a way beyond explanation didn’t do it for her. At thirty-seven and still a virgin Fallon considered herself just a little pathetic. Practicality would insist that if she were going to start a family she had better get on the ball and do so. She was part wolf and part human and as to when her biological clock would run out of time was anyone’s guess. So far, she had held up pretty well. There was not one strand of gray in her fiery hair and not one wrinkle on her freckled skin. She was healthy as a horse as was the standard for the majority of the pack. But, she was still human or at least fifty percent human and which parts of her were human and which were wolf was still up for debate. For twenty-five years she had been carrying the torch for a man that was more ghost then flesh and blood. It was a little girl’s notion and a fool’s errand to keep her word. She had not heard from Daniel in all that time, not one whisper. Why she still felt the necessity to uphold her vow was something not even she could fully explain. Life had gone on for everyone in Daniel’s absence, for everyone except for her. Hunter and Gina had a daughter, a half-sister Daniel had never met. Marianne and Evan were married and had two kids, two beautiful little girls as innocuous in their behavior as their father and almost carbon copies of their mother. Fallon had a sister and a brother, one born on her fifteenth birthday and the other years later after she had left for college. She wasn’t exactly worried about the task of carrying on the family line. Her sister was the Suzy homemaker type and chomping at the bit to finally settle down and make lots of lots of babies. As for her brother, he was a player who wooed the females in the pack almost to the point where he had risked a shotgun wedding more than once. The family tree was definitely in no danger of dying out anytime soon. Fallon had absorbed herself, at first in her studies and then afterwards, in learning the craft of healing under Doc and Thomas’s careful instruction. She was far from knowing everything she needed to know, but skilled enough to no longer be considered a novice either. Her life was full and complete, but still a piece of it was missing. A part of her wanted to give up, find the first eligible bachelor she came across, and get busy making babies. Make up for all the years of lost time she had missed. She just…she just couldn’t do it. Daniel was still out there somewhere and she was still a little girl standing by the window on a cold December night…waiting for him and keeping her promise. She checked and rechecked the supplies in her bag. Had she thought of and planned ahead for anything that might happen? Claws and razor sharp teeth could do a lot of damage. One swipe of a massive paw or bite delivered by powerful jaws could prove lethal and in the end there might not be anything she could do to stop death from coming. Damn it though, she had to try. She hoped like hell she wouldn’t need the meager contents of her emergency bag. Nash was older, but he was a crafty wolf and experienced in combat. Mouse was younger, not the stronger of the two though, but definitely youth and speed were on her side. Mouse, Marianne, didn’t want to kill her grandfather and most likely Nash didn’t relish the thought of killing her either. In the end the wolf would take over in an attempt to defend itself. There might be nothing either one of them could do to prevent the spilling of blood. Death might come and there would be nothing she could do to stop it, but she was sure as hell going to give the Grim Reaper a run for his money. In the pre-dawn stillness of the house, sequestered in her room, the room that had once belonged to Daniel, Fallon squared her shoulders and exhaled a breath of steeled determination. In her world there was no such thing as advanced directives. The fight to save a life wasn’t over until it was over. As long as there was a heartbeat and perhaps afterwards, there was still a battle to be won. The rumbling sound of an engine idling up the driveway broke the silence. Stirred by the noise, the house around her drew its first timid breath of the day. Her brows furrowed at the clamor of a gas powered combustion engine breaking the quiet and jarring the pack awake. It simply couldn’t be. The car was a classic car, an antique, roughly seventy years old. Yet, she would recognize the sound of that particular engine anywhere. She had been listening for it for twenty-five years and now it was in the driveway. Her heart sped from a sudden surge of adrenaline. She was transported back to the little girl clinging to the words of a promise. Daniel had finally come home. Chapter 3 Thomas crouched at the foot of the grave. His mind was given over to the task of remembering the man slowly turning to dust in the ground beneath his feet. Mack deserved a warrior’s pyre, but he had chosen a more conventional end to commemorate his life. He had a funeral and was laid to rest in the old cemetery at the edge of town. Mack’s plot was right beside his son’s. Samuel Brown, the man Thomas had never met. His father. The only thing he had of his dad’s was the memories his mom and his grandfather had shared with him. Thomas supposed he looked a lot like his father, or at least that’s what his mom told him. It was odd, standing at the foot of two occupied graves and staring over at the headstone beside them. The empty grave belonged to his mother, but despite what the marker read, Barbara Sterling wasn’t in it and wouldn’t be for a very, very long time. The vacant plot next to Mack’s grave sometimes gave him the creeps. The empty square of ground roughly measuring four feet wide by seven feet long was waiting for him to occupy it. Now in the twilight of his life, Thomas realized someday, sooner rather than later, he was to get the chance to finally meet his father. He was not a fool to think he could cheat the hand of death forever. Nobody ever did. Lucien’s headstone was proof of that. Vampires could and did die. Jan hated it when he retreated to this less than happy place in his mind. She didn’t like to be reminded of his mortality. In his mid sixties, although he was pretty sure he had plenty of good years ahead of him. It never hurt to think to the certainty of the future. He was going to end up here, pushing up daisies as the saying went, eventually. Besides, he wasn’t exactly mortal, a piece of him would go on and on and on forever on down the line through his children and their children, so forth and so forth, for all eternity. Funny, before meeting Jan, marriage had been the last thing on his mind. Saving his mother’s life had been the only thing that mattered at the time and it had driven him to desperate, almost insane measures. He had managed to preserve his mother’s life. Not quite in the orthodox treatment of the day, but rather by more unconventional means. She had stayed alive for him while he struggled to find a cure for the cancer eating her from the inside out. He never had found a cure, but rather a solution to the problem. She had become a vampire for him. Strange, he had spent his life living solely for her and she had struggled to hang on to her life for him. Now, their roles were quite reversed. Thomas could feel the clock ticking faster and faster as the days passed and his time was almost up. He was aging and she was the one frozen in time. Barbara Sterling was as beautiful as she had been on the day she ‘died’ and he was the tottering old man with stiff joints, balding hair, and wrinkled skin. Thomas didn’t regret it or his decision to stay exactly as he was. Nope, joining the ranks of the fanged was not for him. It had never been for him. Oh, his mom would have been thrilled to do the deed, if he had ever asked. But, there were some things decidedly worse than death and perhaps cheating the Grim Reaper out of his prize albeit temporarily, was one of many. All in all, he supposed he was lucky. He had the life he always wanted. He had a loving wife. Jan had bore him four sons and three daughters. He had held out hope for an eighth addition to the family, but at sixty something, it was probably best to let that ship sail. Seven kids in total wasn’t such a bad legacy to leave behind. Their oldest, Barbara Eloise, named after his and Jan’s mothers, was turning twenty-seven this May and their youngest, little Gracie, had just turned eleven. The time he had been allotted in life had been well spent. People in this town trusted him with their lives. In his almost thirty years as a physician, he had ripped plenty of souls from the Grim Reaper’s bony grasp to live another day. It was strange, really, how the past caught up with a person. Wasn’t it only yesterday that he was a kid himself? Surely sixty years hadn’t passed so fast. He still pulled odd shifts in the ER and covered occasional office hours for the young pups still teething on their stethoscopes. It was a world for the young and he, unfortunately, had somehow managed to transform from one of those hungry young lions into an old goat. Fallon was going to be a hell of a doctor once he broke her of the habit of following the prescribed treatment regimens she had learned in medical school. Sometimes, A simply didn’t lead to B and B to C. The human body and especially the paranormal universe into which she had been born simply didn’t work that way. There were plenty of detours on the way from A to B and curves in the road from B to C. He had seen patients that he didn’t think would live until dawn get out of bed and walk out the hospital without so much as a limp or gasp for breath and he had seen patients go from absolutely fine to coding beyond the point of return in less than a blink of an eye. The patients who died for no apparent reason. He used to think they were the unfortunate ones. Standing here on the brink of his own demise in another ten or twenty or so years, he realized that the ones who simply fell over dead were the lucky ones. Being long lived, as he undoubtedly would be, had its fair share of drawbacks. Time was never a certainty for anybody. Especially not for those who are and would always be one hundred percent human, like him. And getting old was a bitch. He had no particular problem with dying today or tomorrow or with living well into his nineties or even his early hundreds, as long as he was still him until the time came. It was the unknown how of how it would happen that broke him out in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. He had seen enough medical horrors, tubes, wires, and equipment to know that was not how he wanted to go out. After Dawn, What Came Next Mack had been blessed. Thomas had tried for years to convince his grandfather to give up cheap cigars and beer, take his medicine, and to exercise regularly. Mack had done things his way and chose the methods of his own destruction. But, he had died happy with a steak on the grill, a stogie in his shirt pocket, a cold beer sweating in a coaster on the arm of his easy chair, and most important of all, dearly loved by family. He had seen little Gracie born and bounced her on his knee. He had lived long enough and stayed healthy enough to take his grandchildren fishing in the pond down by the lake for summers on end. Who could ask for anymore than that? It had been eight years since a heart attack had taken Mack away from them. His death had been sudden and quick and that was just the way Mack would have wanted it. Thomas wandered the crooked rows of tombstones and uneven ground. Mack was in good company here in this quiet place of timeless decay and solitude. He had been laid to rest beside his son. Robert and Danielle’s marker was in the row of gray tombstones behind Mack’s, Lucien’s was in the next row over and two down to the left. And Nurse Ginger was here too to take care of them all. Much to Thomas’s and the entire town’s amusement, the old busybody, Mrs. Jones, was buried in a place of prominence on top of the hill at the base of a gnarled old oak tree. She overlooked the whole cemetery. No doubt in it finding the captive audience she had always wanted. That old bastard, snot green eyed, hell spawn of a cat she so dearly loved had mourned itself to death when she passed. Not knowing what else to do with the carcass, her son, who hated the cat as much as the rest of the town, had seen it fitting to stuff the furry son of a bitch into a cardboard box and bury it at his mother’s feet. The graveyard had its share of visitors in the paleness of dawn’s first light and in the evenings just before the purple haze of twilight. Thomas read the names on the stones as he walked the rows. There were young and old, some who had died horribly and others that had simply slipped away. A few headstones that were so weathered by time he could only tell by feeling the faint impressions on the worn stones who was laid to rest beneath them. The town founders were buried here, the Grays, Grants, and the Harris’ of early Moore County. He had gone to high school with a few of the people immortalized by the names and dates engraved in granite. A rare few represented here he had brought into the world and there were those he had no other choice but to let slip through his fingers and give into death’s embrace for safekeeping. He wished nobody ever had to die. So far, medical science had no way to stop the inevitable from coming and probably never would. This early in the morning with his mother as a silent shadow on his heels, he wondered if it was a good day to die or if perhaps, tomorrow might be a better one. Oh, it wasn’t his death that concerned him, not yet anyway. Mouse had challenged her grandfather for rights to the pack and it was what might come with the dawn that preoccupied his mind. Jan, his wife, was pack. She had gifts Thomas still couldn’t completely understand. His children were half wolf-half human hybrids. His human DNA toned down their more aggressive tendencies, but he wasn’t exactly a marshmallow himself. He had stood on the bluffs and bled the ground red for Jan and for the future of his family. He knew plenty of pain and sacrifice. The earth was a thirsty place. Today, it was somebody else’s turn to bleed and suffer and maybe, to die. His children claimed their wolf heritage whole-heartedly. They had the gift of the wolf and although the two youngest weren’t of an age to shift, the other five were proud recipients of the lineage and the world into which they had at least in part been born into. Jan had chosen a more human life than her children chose to live. She maintained some measure of pack magic. Late at night when the moon was full and the song of the pack was in the air he would lay awake at her side and watch her battle the beast trapped inside of her skin. She could no longer shift. She aged at an almost human rate. Her hair was streaked with gray and the strain of the battle. The years of laughter and joy they had spent together lined the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth. Jan would be venerated upon her death in the ways of the pack and the brotherhood, as would he. The graves beneath the headstone they had yet to purchase would be for the most part empty. Their ashes would be released into the hands of the goddess in the open air and whatever remained of the pyres yet to be built and the shrouds yet to be embroidered would be buried here beside his father and grandfather. The kids would need a place to come and to remember and something left behind to remind them of where it was they had come from. Thomas rounded to the corner to the row of graves he hated the most. It was here he could feel the ghosts of the departed more acutely. His father and grandfather had moved on to whatever waited beyond this life. There were others buried here who had not. Alex crouched at the foot of a lonesome grave. One of her dainty hands rested on Lucien’s stone and the other arranged a fresh bundle of flowers at the foot of the headstone beside his. Lucien had been laid to rest on a pyre. The grave beneath his headstone was empty, but her mother occupied the ground beneath the marker beside it. Her mother, gentle Leigh, had fought a long and hard battle with breast cancer and had lost the fight. Thomas could feel her presence on the soft breezes of the dawn. He could sense Lucien in the rolling thunder of an oncoming storm. The two of them hovered in between the land of the living and that of the dead, keeping watch, he supposed over, Alex. Alex smelled Thomas long before she heard him approaching from the row of headstones behind her. The two of them were the coffee clutch of the Shady Rest Cemetery. She hated her morning vigil of coming here bringing bundles of cut flowers and laying them at the foot of her mother’s grave in offering, but how could she not? She had always thought that her dad was her favorite of her two parents. She couldn’t have been more wrong about that. Maybe, it was guilt that drove her to visit the grave day after day. There was something she could have done to keep her mom alive and in the end she had been too chicken shit to force it on her mother. Alex dug her fingers into the loose soil and clutched the grass in her fist. It had been almost a year, two years in total since the time of her mom’s diagnosis and the awful finality of the end of things. Her mom was a warrior princess, bravely undergoing each and every treatment with grace and dignity, no matter how slim the chance that some miracle might save her life. The miracle was within Alex, flowing through her veins, but in the end not even her vampire blood had been enough to save her mother. When the cancer got so bad, Alex had encouraged her to drink to ease the suffering. Without turning her, all Alex’s blood had managed to do was prolong the agony of living another day. One day the pain of it became too much for her poor mom to endure and at long last the battle ended. It was strange. Lucien had been gone almost thirty years, yet she could still feel him peering over her shoulder as acutely as she could sense her mother lingering in the breezes brushing her cheek. The two of them were together now and still with her. Perhaps though, that was just wishful thinking on her part and they were gone. Alex hoped whether they were here or there on the other side of the Great River, Lucien was taking good care of her mom. But, of course, he wouldn’t need reminding of his duty. Protective of anything and everything she loved, it was just his way. Her dad was doing ok and these days that was all she could ask of him. He went about the business of being left behind with stoic determination. Alexander Gray was not one to show as much as a hint of weakness to anybody, not even his daughter. He thought he was being strong for her sake. His show of strength had nothing to do was just as much for his own benefit as for hers. Maybe, her mom and Lucien weren’t the ghosts, but her father and she, the ones left with the task of living, were the specters. Her father’s name was carved on the stone in neat lettering. His birthday was coming up soon. It was a reassurance to run her fingertips over the date of his birth etched into the granite and feel the smoothness of nothing on the empty space on the other side it. If she had her way about things, there would never be a date of death engraved on the stone. The grave beneath her would never have a body in it. He wouldn’t want to live forever. Alex knew that, but she also knew sometimes, people weren’t given a choice. What she was thinking of was nothing short of heresy. The lengths she might go to save his life could very well cost her, her own. Force was not something the brothers agreed with and if her father died in the process, after the brothers caught up with her, she would die too. Alex wouldn’t risk Chance like that. Her husband was a warrior and a son. He would be expected to do his duty above all else. Alex hated it, but her dad was living on borrowed time. He would turn seventy-six this year and in all her days she had never seen a truly geriatric vampire. Vampires as old as the pits of hell itself, sure, but an elderly vampire, she had never run across one. Her dad had a paunch belly, weathered sun leathered skin, deeply grooved wrinkles, and his once red hair the shade of autumn leaves had faded from the pale blonde of late middle age to the snowy white of the winter of his life. She worried that her dad wasn’t long for this world. His posture became a little more stooped and she could see the spark fading from his blue eyes bit by bit with each day that passed. A part of him had already joined her mother in the grave and soon, the rest of him would follow. There were so many things she could do. She didn’t need to see the future to know how this was going to turn out though. He was going to die soon and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “How am I going to let him go, Thomas?” she asked in a strangled voice. Thomas didn’t know exactly how to answer that one. He chose to remain silent and let Alex thing through it herself. This was the curse of the blessing of a long, long life. Watching those around you wither and fade and slowly die bit by bit, piece by piece, day after day. Alex looked the same as she had on the day they first met. She had a young face and very old eyes that told the truth of her age. His mother, still hovering in the background was silent as well. But, he knew his mom and she was probably asking herself the same question about him. How was she going to stand back and do nothing when her only son drew his last breath? How did anybody do it? It was obvious to Thomas that graveyards weren’t for the dead, but for the living. This was how you let go and moved beyond all your grief and suffering to a place of peace. You remembered and after you were gone, if you were lucky enough, somebody else remembered you. Instead of answering, he rested a hand on Alex’s shoulder and gave the thin bones a squeeze. They stayed like that, her staring at the grave and him, anchoring her to the ground until the wind held its breath as the sun breeched the horizon and the voices of the dead grew silent. Alex squinted at the rising sun. She had been a vampire for over thirty years and she still could not bear the coming of a new day. Prisms of color assaulted her vision. Her retinas throbbed and pain like a lance speared her temples. Sunlight couldn’t kill her. She would not burn to ash. Out in the daylight she felt exposed and vulnerable. Being vulnerable in any way, shape, or form was not something a vampire relished. Alex still liked to think of herself as human, but standing here amongst the graves and knowing a millennium or more could pass before she occupied one. Her eyes seared by the first light of dawn. She realized just how far from grace she had fallen. “I should get to the bluffs,” Thomas said. He had his medical kit on board in the back of the truck. Fallon might need his help this morning. He had attended more than his fair share of battles fought for whatever reason. He had pulled some back from the brink of death and others, he had stood witness as they flung themselves headlong into it in their vie for immortality. He shrugged and said, “Just in case.” He turned to walk the stretch of grass leading to the lane and stopped to glance over his shoulder at her. “Alex, do you know what is going to happen today?” Alex shook her head. She was the prophetess, yet somehow the goddess had stayed eerily quiet about the future as of late. Perhaps, the future was not as set in stone as some wanted to believe. Sometimes, maybe just maybe, destiny wasn’t decided for you. Rather, you decided it for yourself. Chapter 4 Driven out of bed by insomnia, Nash spent a sleepless night pacing the confines of his study. This was his sanctuary. Except for the bathroom, the study was only quiet place in the entire damn house where a man could be alone with his thoughts. He had tried to sleep and simply given up in preference to waking his wife Eloise with all his tossing and turning. Let her get her rest while she could. It might be a long time before the comfort of dreams and the sweet solace of sleep came to her again. Deft fingers wound the silver strands of his hair into a tight braid and worked the braid into a plait at the base of his skull. The night before was always like this, sleepless, tense, and filled with more than its share of worry over what was to come. He had been challenged many times for his title. The adversaries were worthy, but none of them had been good enough to best him in a fight to the death. Today, this morning all of that would change and finally a contestant worth dying for and handing the pack over for safekeeping to had stepped forward. He needed no mirror to know his braid was tight and straight or to see the steely, grimness of the expression on his face. Every challenge mattered. Every contest had to be answered. This one was the last battle to the death he was ever going to fight. He sighed deeply and ran his palms over the soft, worn leather of his buckskin breeches. Today would be a good day to die as it had been for his father one hundred and two years ago when he, as a hungry young wolf, had issued the challenge to the man who had given him life. One hundred and two years was a pretty impressive term to serve as pack master. His father had survived this lofty place of honor for far less. Nash was no longer in his prime. Well over a hundred years old himself, he was getting too damn old to hold the title for much longer. There was still plenty of life left in this old dog though and he would rather go out bravely in battle with his back straight and his head held high and proud than wither and shrivel up into a dried husk of his former glory. He cracked the joints in his toes and swiveled at the waist to limber up his old body. He would have to put on a good show today. He would have to do the unthinkable and leave his mark on Mouse’s pretty skin. Exact his pound of flesh from her before he gave up the ghost and departed this world for once and for all. Nash tucked a single black raven’s feather into the braid and settled his weary bones before the crackling fire. Dawn was just beginning to peek her fiery head over the horizon. Before long he would have to abandon his perch of warmth and comfort and make the trek to the bluffs. His chest bare, he ran his fingertips along the puckered silvery line of scarred flesh crisscrossing his skin from the base of his right rib cage across his pectorals and up the side of his neck to end at a jagged point at the base of his jaw. The wound had been brutal, more damage than his wolf could heal. His father’s wolf had made the scar with a terrifying lunge and swipe of his massive claws. It had almost been the end of him, but his wolf had been younger and faster, and hungrier to earn the title than his father’s wolf had been to keep it. His father had been a formidable opponent. The fight had not been for show, but for life and death. It had been the dawning of a new era when Nash had challenged his father for the title. It was the dawning of another new era. One of rapid change and technology, fitting he thought, that in this new dawn, he was giving it up. His eyes scanned the pictures hanging in a collage of frames on the walls, lining the fireplace mantle, and taking up every inch of available space in the study. So many generations had passed. The first pictures weren’t really pictures at all, but hand rendered drawings of people and places that had long since faded to dust. The tin plates came next and then grainy black and white photos. The color pictures were his favorite, the vivid detail of the shade of a family member’s hair and the exact color of brown of a loved one’s eyes were what he cherished most. His picture was there on the wall along with so many others. He as a boy, wearing knickers and smiling stiffly at his mother’s insistence as the photographer captured the staged shot. That was a long, long time ago and an era that had faded into the past. The family tree occupied the wall behind his desk. He stood from his comfortable seat and meandered over to the wall. The names of his family had been carefully engraved on to brass plates and hung in their proper place of reverence on the green backdrop of the painted wall. He traced the branches of the tree, starting at the bottom with the youngest up to the top, to the very head of the immense tree. The first Great White Wolf, the Prophet, the father of them all. He missed the cryptic, cagey founder of their race. Nash wondered how much the old Prophet had known about the events that were to come when he had first sent the pack here over twenty-five years ago. There had been a lot of changes and a lot of new additions to fill in the blanks in the family tree. What had once been a sprig of twigs and branches was now a tree bursting with life. There were over four hundred pack living here, each name engraved and in its place on the family tree. His fingertips followed the brass branch down to his own nameplate and traced the line branching off of it. His sons and daughters had been quite fruitful. He had grandchildren and great grandchildren and even a few great-great grandchildren and so many pictures of them on the walls. The family tree had been carefully planned and positioned to maximize the wall space. There was plenty of room for generations and generations to come. Hell, maybe at some point in the far distant future, the walls of the entire study might be covered with brass nameplates. He had served his pack well. He hadn’t done it on his own though. He had a lot of help along the way. Eloise and Torr, the combining of their packs into one had filled in two missing branches of the family tree. He would miss Torr and his quiet reluctant ways. He would miss Eloise and her gentle smile so full of love for him. Out of all the regrets he had about what was about to happen with the rising of the dawn, leaving her was the thing he regretted the most. He fingered his nameplate and ran a fingernail up the line to his mother. He was second-generation pack and one of the most powerful males. Nana, as everyone called his mom, had gone to her pyre some fifteen years ago. God, he missed her, perhaps more than anyone else, even the Prophet. She never hated him for doing what he had to do. She had accepted the death of her mate, his father, with the stoic dignity and grace befitting a first generation daughter. In the end, pack was what it all boiled down to. The things the founders of each new generation did to ensure the future of the generation to follow. Today it was his turn to do what he must and someday, it would be Mouse’s turn to follow in his footsteps and do the same. After Dawn, What Came Next His wolf was active, pacing the boundaries of his mind. There wasn’t any more time left for goodbyes or thoughts of contemplation. The ancient power was with him today, coursing through his body and making the hairs at the nape of his neck stand at full attention. He drew a deep breath, trapping the pungent essence of wood smoke and musky scent of wolf into his lungs. Controlling the beast within him would be nothing short of a miracle. His wolf had yet to accept what his head already knew. Today was a good day to die. “I’ll see you soon, mom.” He whispered as he kissed the tips of his fingers and pressed them to the cool brass of her nameplate on the wall above his own. Eloise stood in the doorway watching her husband make his rounds. He eyed every picture on the wall, sometimes snaking out a fingertip to straighten one that had gone awry. She said nothing and gave him his space. He thought by coming down here instead of tossing and turning restlessly in bed and alternately staring up at the ceiling, she might get some rest. While his intentions were good, spending his last night down here alone instead of in bed with her wasn’t happening. She had worn those same shoes herself and they were not easy shoes to walk in. Leadership came with heavy responsibility and she had almost caved beneath the weight of it. She couldn’t quite regret the path she had walked or where that path had led. It had brought her here to him. Eloise didn’t waste time contemplating the would be fate of her pack. What would have happened if they had stayed in Texas or fallen under Seff’s rule. What was the point of such speculation? They were here. This was home now and had been for over twenty-five years. She was married to the man of her dreams and she had the one thing she had never had before. Love. She had done what a good pack mistress was supposed to do and had delivered her pack into safety and prosperity. They were in good hands, in better hands than hers. They belonged to Nash and most importantly, to themselves. DNA and good breeding had made her former pack what they were, but now they served a higher calling than the double helix. Pack married for love. Children were conceived because they were wanted and not out of a sense of duty. And the results of such freedom abounded in the rooms over her head. A fire blazed on the hearth. Nash took such comfort in the dancing of flames and the sweet, pungent scent of wood smoke. He was born of a time well before hers. He jokingly called himself an old goat. She had no trouble correcting him and reminding him that he was a man of extraordinary valor and good taste because he had the excellent sense of reason to marry her. Even now, pacing around the room and rippling with pent up energy he was a breathtaking specimen of manhood. Well out of his prime, but still so capable of making her toes curl and her breath hitch in her throat with nothing more than just a glance from his golden-brown eyes. His hair was threaded with more silver than black these days. Laugh lines formed deep furrows in the corners of his mouth and eyes. Hard muscles no longer bulged with the strength and resiliency of youth, but were no less capable than those of a much younger man. The smooth line of his chest had lost its hard edge, but the heart that beat beneath his ribs was brave and sure. Her fingers itched to trace the scars that he had earned so long ago. He wore the puckered silvery lines on his marred flesh with pride. He saw them as a testament to his character and his bravery. And indeed, they were. It was fall and the days were growing shorter. The air still held a tinge of summer’s warmth and the first frost had yet to blanket the ground. At a little after six, the sky was just now beginning to grow pink at the edge of the horizon with dawn’s first light. Eloise dressed for warmth in a pair of denim jeans and sweater, as if it were just an ordinary day. She understood the necessity of standing back and doing nothing while the fates determined which destiny would win over the other. Nash wore a pair of weathered, battle-scarred buckskins, hand stitched and interwoven with shiny beads at the seams. The leggings had been tucked away in a cedar chest at the foot of their bed for over two decades. He had worn them on their wedding day a lifetime ago. The leather smelled of sweat and pungent wood oil. There were rusty blotches on the leather, spattered stains of old blood, the spilled blood of battles past. He had worn the leathers on the morning of his first contest for pack master and on every subsequent challenge of his rule ever since. He intended to wear them one last time today and it wasn’t only to fight, but to his pyre. The thought of his intent terrified her. She understood the future could not take place until the past had been put behind them. Nash had been waiting for Mouse to set her mind to the challenge since she was old enough to shift. He had trained her to take his place. Marianne, Mouse, was wickedly smart, fast on her feet, and amazingly strong for a woman weighing less than a hundred and twenty pounds and barely clearing the five feet tall mark. In their world though, size didn’t matter for shit. Nash had infused in her his best qualities and unfortunately, the worst, as well. Mouse was shrewd and coldly calculating when the occasion called for it. She could be brutal and ruthless without a moment’s worth of hesitation. Eloise had also seen Mouse’s softer side. The compassionate mother and loving wife Mouse had become. Her grandfather meant more to her than life itself in so many ways. When her own father hadn’t been there for her, Nash had. Maybe, her love and her memories of him would be enough to save his life. There would be no truce. At the critical moment, if Mouse faltered and Nash was forced to take her life in exchange of his own. Even if he won the contest, he wouldn’t lead the pack for long. Killing her would kill him. There was no way out of what was to happen. There was but one option. Stand and fight. Ensure the future through his death so that the pack would flourish. Nash would never leave the pack to save his own skin. He would see this through and he would fail. Eloise twisted the emerald ring on her finger watching the firelight glitter off the facets in the stone. She was about to become a widow and as painful as that thought was she still hadn’t completely given up. There was still hope for a miracle. Something unseen that might still yet be brought to light. This was a new era and a new dawn. The old ways were slowly crumbling and decaying into the past. Maybe, there was a chance. The sound of Eloise’s suppressed hitching breaths drew Nash’s attention away from the fire. The house around them was beginning to awaken. The pack would be in attendance to witness the final outcome of the fight. He hated that the children had to learn of the brutality of their world. His last thoughts would be of them. The last thing he would see would be their wide eyes rounded with horror and fear. The children Eloise had brought with her from Texas had been cautious and hesitant. They had kept to themselves and it took a long time for them to trust. Refugees of war, the ragtag lot of them were the haunted, shattered ghosts of the children they might have been if not for the terror their eyes had seen. He regretted two things now, leaving Eloise and that the children had to be present on the bluffs. He wondered how many more things he would regret with his dying breath before it was drawn. “It’s almost time,” Eloise said softly. Nash nodded, not bothering with words. He could feel the sun creeping higher on the horizon deep within his bones. He extended his arm and tucked Eloise tightly against his side. The two of them had always fit so well together. He should have spent last night and the wee hours of this morning making love to her. He just couldn’t bring himself to admit, this was it and the finality of things to come. He tensed at the sound of a car idling up the drive and sliding into park. At long last, his family was together again under one roof. He would have liked to spend some time catching up with his prodigal grandson, but circumstances waited for no one. Perhaps, Daniel had come home to see him off into the spirit world and perhaps not. Ultimately, it made little difference why Daniel had driven up from Texas. All that mattered was that he was here. Whether Daniel believed it or not, the pack had not been the same since his absence. They needed him here at home where he belonged. Chapter 5 Daniel rubbed his eyes to clear the fog and slid the car into park. He had driven straight through to get here in time. Hopefully, in his old age, his grandfather wasn’t as punctual as he used to be and hadn’t gone out to the bluffs yet. Everyone had grown up with a steady diet of his grandfather’s predictions of the things to come. Daniel couldn’t believe it was actually happening. When Evan called to tell him the news, Daniel had asked him to repeat it. Twice. Mouse was challenging her grandfather for leadership of the pack. Not a good thing. Daniel couldn’t wrap his head around Mouse being an adult and married with children, let alone willingly engaging in a fight to the death. The last time he had set eyes on her, she was still just a scrawny kid. Time had gone on without him. The house was huge now. The cheery yellow siding had been replaced by a basic white out of necessity. Another story had been added and several wings stretched off the main floor. The wooden skeleton of yet another addition stretched off the garage and led to the back, where the kitchen was…at least where it used to be. Daniel wiped his sweating palms on his thighs. He hadn’t stopped to think about it before now. Somehow, he just assumed coming home would be like picking up where he had left off. He would need a map and a compass to find his way though the house. He had a half-sister he had never even met, little Claire. My God, Danni, his niece, his brother’s daughter, would be almost twenty-five by now, roughly the same age as his half-sister. His little nieces, Mouse’s kids, he had never even spoken to them ‘the twins’ as his father jokingly referred to them, over the phone. Would he even recognize them if he saw them? For that matter would he recognize his own brother and sister? These people were strangers. He was a stranger. His mouth was suddenly dry with doubt. He was worse than a stranger. He was an interloper. Daniel jangled the keys in his palm. Damn, did he even belong here at all? Why had he even bothered to come back? Was it simply because Evan called and asked? Or that he had driven over twelve hours straight under the deluded idea that his family needed him? They didn’t need him. Everyone seemed to be doing just fine without him. He should put the keys back in the ignition and get the hell out of here before somebody realized he had come home. Daniel had grandiose ideas in his head of walking through that front door and being welcomed with open arms. That probably wasn’t going to happen. If anything the pack would see him as an outlier, an impostor with a family resemblance. It was too late to make a graceful exit though. He had been spotted. The curtains in a second story window fluttered as they fell shut blocking him out. He counted the windows just to make sure. With this many changes to the house he could be mistaken. Someone had been watching him from his old bedroom window and he was almost certain he had seen a flash of red hair. A smile crept across his lips for a brief moment. Fallon, god how old was she now? Thirty something? She was a doctor, or so he had heard. He remembered her as she had been, as a little girl with the wildest tangle of curly red hair he had ever seen. Cute as a button, innocuously curious about everything, and trying so hard to fit in. Like a square peg into a round hole, Fallon had latched onto his sister like a leach. Maybe, it was because she had grown up as an only child and had no brothers and sisters of her own that she sought Mouse out with such veracity. He had tried to be an older brother to her. Unfortunately, the act was short lived. At nineteen and full of piss and vinegar he was hardly the older brother type or a role model for anybody. To this day, Daniel still felt bad that he had been such a shit to his family and especially to Fallon. He was her first crush. He had such big visions of the world and his place in it. He hadn’t had time for anybody except for himself. Fallon followed him around like a lost puppy and at the time, he had seen her as nothing more than a nuisance, a shadow he didn’t want. Damn had he been wrong about the world beyond the pack. He was just a little fish in a much bigger pond and a shark had almost swallowed him whole. Fallon had been on Mouse’s bandwagon to put him back together after the dark time, the time after Yessette. Those were horrible days filled with memories he would rather stay put behind him. Retreating to Texas and absorbing himself in the mundane tasks Catcher set him to complete was the only way he had survived them at all. His eyes flicked to a window on the first floor. The bushes had been dug up and replaced with flowerbeds neatly bedded down with straw for winter. Fallon had perched in the window that night, her cheeks glistening with tears, to bid him goodbye. His time in the city had taught him a thing or two. From the suffering of loss he had learned compassion. Seeing her there, crying over his departure had broken loose a dam inside of him. He had marched across the yard and stumbled through the bushes and given Fallon her first kiss through a frozen pane of glass. He knew a lot about wanting things and loving people you simply could not have. That night his heart broke for her and for himself. Perhaps, he had made Fallon such a trite offering to try to ease her pain, or quite possibly, his own. They were both older now. Life had happened and was going to keep right on happening. She was no longer a little girl and he no longer a self-centered shit. He had known love and loss. Daniel wished for Fallon nothing but love and that she should never know a thing of the heartbreak of loss. She was most likely married with kids of her own by now. Undoubtedly, she had moved on as had he and her life had taken her wherever it would as his life had him. Whoever the lucky son of a bitch was that had won her heart. He had better be good to her. Daniel wasn’t a very good substitute for a big brother back then, but he intended to be one now. And he had no qualms about kicking some ass to ensure Fallon’s happiness. Nope, there was no getting out of this now. He was in. For how long, he didn’t know, maybe for a day or two, maybe for the rest of his life. He was a drifter. A traveler with no permanent roots anywhere. He couldn’t go back and forward was nothing but mists and shadows with no particular destination. He didn’t know how he was going to answer the questions that undoubtedly would be asked or at least answer them honestly. He was here for Mouse, for his grandfather, and for his family, if they’d let him be. But, he had come back because of the memory of a woman with pale hair the color of spun platinum. A woman he had once loved more than life itself. Yessette in her own way had died bravely out of sacrifice. Carter had been there. He had drawn the blade that had ended her life. On a snowy plane in the far north, he had put her down. So many things were sacrificed for the future. Her life had been one of many. Carter had told him she loved him as much as she was capable of and in the end, perhaps, she had offered up her life, for him and because of her love. Today was a day of sacrifice. Two people would enter the challenge and only one would walk out alive. Daniel wouldn’t place a bet on who the victor would be even if he were a betting man. He didn’t want to see anyone die, not his little sister and not his grandfather. But, it was an unavoidable fact of pack life. He had come back to witness. Not only the fight, but to honor what it was they fought for. Everyone had battles. Yessette’s had been a battle for her sanity and her humanity. Daniel’s was for not his life as measured by breaths and heartbeats, but his life in terms of how he wanted to live it. Yessette had lost her fight. Daniel didn’t want to lose. Even this early in the fall, it was as cold as a witch’s tit in a brass bra. No longer accustomed to the cool damp temperatures of an Indiana morning, he shivered and hunkered down into the collar of his sweatshirt. The heater had died somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon line. Not surprising. Even less of a shocker was that there wasn’t a thermostat to be found in the entire state. Replacement parts for the car were as rare as finding a gas station that actually sold gas. These days cars ran on electricity and most of the old gas stations had been outfitted with charging stations. You could drive over a hundred miles for less than two bucks. That was a far cry from the thirty-two dollars fifty nine cents he had paid for a gallon of unleaded gas. Daniel shook his head at the shame of progress. Everything was clean and efficient, but there was nothing like the stain of motor oil beneath your fingernails, the rumble of a V8 engine thrumming through your bones, and the perfume of gasoline burning in your nostrils. He knew his older brother, Tristen, too well. There were a couple of classic old beauties parked behind the closed doors to the garage and probably a stockpile of spare parts too. It would be a way to rebuild a little of what had been lost. No matter if there were words between them left to say or explanations to be offered. At least his brother, his father, and he spoke a common language. The language of the combustion engine and it had never failed them yet. Daniel inhaled a breath of cool air, trapping the essence of fall and wood smoke and the musky scent of pack and wolf deep inside his lungs. His skin prickled with the magic of the pack. The bristling unspent energy of anticipation and the unknown tingled up his spine. He was home again and it was a bittersweet thing. He was hardly the prodigal son returning humbled and contrite. He had nothing to apologize for. For all his many shortcomings and downfalls he was who he was and he had done the things he had done. He did not have to beg for forgiveness from anyone nor did he feel the slightest compulsion to explain his actions, why he had left twenty-five years ago and not returned until now, to anybody. He hadn’t come here in search of a long lost home. He had no intentions of reopening old wounds and rehashing the past. What was done was done. His future might not be found amongst these walls or in the woods or even deep in the earth beneath his feet. It could be anywhere or nowhere. He had come to say goodbye to whoever wasn’t going to make it off the bluffs alive. To embrace his grandfather and tell him he finally understood…everything his mentor and surrogate father had been trying to tell him all those years long ago. He had come to give Mouse a hug and to make sure she knew he didn’t blame her for doing what she thought was necessary to secure the pack. He had come to forgive his father for not being there and to thank him for his part in making sure he had a future at all. He had come to forge a peace with his brother. He was back to say hello to all the family he had never met. And he had returned to give a redheaded little girl’s pigtails on last tug before he had to give her up to the woman she had become. Chapter 6 Tom glared doubtfully at Cat. The bluffs were cold and somewhat dark this early in the morning. The pink glow of first light stood out bright against the dark relief of skeletal balding limbs and tall bushy pine trees. The grass was crunchy and autumn dried beneath his boots. Gusts of air rolled and whistled down the sheer granite cliffs and outcroppings of stone to play havoc with unseen fingers riffling through his hair. At twenty-seven he shouldn’t be worried about getting into trouble. After all, Cat had made it her life’s ambition to land herself and anyone even loosely associated with her and her most recent scheme into the very jaws of trouble for as long as he could remember. “Are you sure this isn’t going to be like the time you started your meat is murder campaign?” After Dawn, What Came Next Cat snorted at Tom’s disgruntled question. After all, how was she supposed to know the pack would take such offense to the idea of going Vegan? She was trying to save lives, not only those of the animals in the woods but of the pack as well. All that cholesterol and red meat the pack consumed in mass quantities couldn’t be healthy for them. “Grant Thomas, you would bring that up again wouldn’t you. No, I promise this time it’ll be different.” Ray rubbed the bridge of his nose and took a deep steadying breath. GT would follow Cat to the ends of the known universe and beyond if he thought it would make her notice him as something other than a friend. Cat barely realized anyone or anything existed beyond her most recent pet cause. Today’s theme was a simple one and he wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment of making love not war. As if a peaceable protest no matter how well intended the cause would really stop the fight for pack master. She had this brilliant idea that they were going to sit in a circle in the middle of the bluffs soaked in mud and half freezing and that somehow everyone else would come to their senses, join in, sing kumbayah around the campfire, and all would be well with the world. It so wasn’t happening. But, here he was with the rest of the circus, like an idiot, following the head clown into the ring. Cat had been born about seventy years too late. This was not the summer of love. Perhaps, the spring of his greatest discontent, but hardly 1967. Cat was a flower child to the very sole of her vintage Birkenstock sandals. She doodled peace signs and scrounged through musty boxes searching for treasure from a forgotten era. She even had a lava lamp on her nightstand, not that he would know personally. Nobody in their right mind, especially a male, even a guy like him, would traverse her inner sanctum and risk the wrath of her father. He would like to blame her father for her lofty ideals. But, the Great Father was hardly the free love, live and let live type. Ray felt sorry for her. Cat was a star child from another time, trapped in the present, with the burden of the future riding on her shoulders. She had trained for war since the time she could toddle and wanted nothing but peace. She was born a princess to a kingdom without a throne. She had no tiara, but a floppy suede hat with a wide brim she had rescued from the bottom of a bin in a resale shop. Her father would wrap her from head to toe in bubble wrap and lock her up in a tower well out of reach of the world, if he could. She was perhaps the most protected woman in the world and therefore completely off limits. That he knew of she had never been out on a date in her life. Nobody was crazy enough to risk the brothers or more importantly her father, to ask. Cat never left the compound unguarded. She had grown up surrounded by warriors willing to risk their lives for her. The brothers doted on her and in so many ways each and every one of them was a father to her. From the back row, in the cheap seats, he could see the warriors’ influence on her. She was lethal with blade and body from John Mark’s relentless training. She was wickedly smart from the hours of study she had spent under Will’s careful instruction. She was a whiz at anything electronic with a motherboard thanks to Toby’s patient teaching. Cat could field dress a wound and probably cure death itself thanks to the hours she spent training with Doc, the Shaman. She could track a flea for miles in the middle of the Sahara, a little something she had picked up from Patrick. And those were just a few of the things she had learned from her father’s side of the family. The pack treated her with no small matter of indifference either. Their methods were no more or less unorthodox than those of the brotherhoods’. Her wolf was sleek and dark as midnight. A powerful creature as deadly as the pack master, her grandfather, himself. With a bullet, she could pick off a housefly sitting on a fence from fifty meters away, thanks to hours of instruction from Hunter. She could assemble an engine in her sleep with one hand tied behind her back, something she had learned from Tristen. She could plot and plan, strategize and played a mean game of chess, Tracker would accept no less from her. Cat was fast and strong, light on her feet, versatile in her fighting style and a thing of beauty to watch in the sparring ring. For all she was, there was one thing she was not. Free. She could do all these amazing things, but there was one thing she could not do, simply be herself. Watching her quivering with anticipation in the cold of dawn, so eager to do something to change the world and make her mark on it broke his heart. She was so idealistic. She didn’t realize she couldn’t change over two hundred years of hard won tradition with old-fashioned poster board and markers. No one would be holding hands on the bluffs today. Danni rubbed her eyes and tried to work up some enthusiasm for her cousin’s efforts. Cat sat plopped down in the middle of the clearing drawing peace signs in colored marker on scraps of poster board she had salvaged from the attic. Cat really didn’t get it. Danni blamed her grandfather for this fiasco that was Cat’s idealism. Having lived through them, the sixties were his specialty and he had filled Cat’s head with stories of social change and revolution brought about by protests. Strangely though, Cat had drawn quite a following this morning. Probably, everyone wanted to get the best position possible to view the fight and was here under the guise of a peaceable protest. Tom, Grant Thomas rather, GT for short, was following Cat around like a lost puppy, nothing unusual there. Ray, Ramon Junior, RJ as his mom and dad called him, watched Tom with a wistful expression of longing in his eye. What he was, covertly, wasn’t forbidden. She just wondered if Tom had a clue and what he would do about it if he did. Phoenix was trying desperately to build a small fire in the center of all the chaos to chase off the chill. Too bad she didn’t live up to her namesake and had managed to accomplish nothing but a pile of smoldering chokingly smoky wood. They laughingly called themselves the baby boomers. Born at the tail end of the war with the rogues, she, Phoenix, Tom, Ray, Cat, Barbara, and Claire were all roughly the same age. Her great grandfather and almost everybody else called them the brat pack. Unfortunately, most of the time, like today, he was right. Danni would like to think the trouble they somehow managed to get into was all Cat’s fault. But, who was the bigger fool? The fool or the fool that followed him? Cat was just a misguided visionary, a rebel without a cause or a clue. Danni got it. They all understood why Cat did the things she did. The protests, the speeches that lasted well into the middle of the night, and her constant bantering for change was just the way Cat exercised what little control she had over the world and her life. Cat’s most recent crusade, the meat is murder fiasco, had almost gotten them all ran out of town on a rail. Cat couldn’t have foreseen the impact of attempting to ban meat from a bunch of carnivores. Thank God Cat’s father had intervened on their behalf and talked the pack down. At his careful instruction, Dane had conjured up some interesting punishments to keep them out of further trouble. Scrubbing the exterior of a four-story, ten thousand square foot home with nothing more than a toothbrush, a bottle of dish soap, and a garden hose hadn’t been the worst of it. Barbara snickered at Cat’s failed attempt to draw a pair of hands encircling the world. Her dad would be proud of Cat’s efforts. Somewhat of a visionary himself, he always spoke of peace and healing. She wished she were at home tucked into her bed with the rest of her family instead of being out here freezing off her ass. But, quite frankly, she was pack and she had a vested interest in the outcome. She still lived in the world outside of the pack boundaries. Poor relation was what she considered herself. Her grandmother was a vampire, her father human, and her mom, one hundred percent wolf. And what did that make her? A wolf in a very human skin. She was somewhat of a misfit with one foot in each world but a firm foothold in none of them. The least she could do was support her friends. Who knew? Maybe, this time, it would work. She had never told Cat, but she still ate meat and probably always would. Tofu versus steak? Was there really any contest? Claire frowned at Ray and motioned for him to see if there was anything he could do to salvage the smoldering remains of Phoenix’s fire. A bit of a pyromaniac, she was certain he would come up with something. She had little hope that Cat’s idea would work, but a little hope was better than none. Soon, her grandfather and her half-sister would arrive and the contest would begin. There was no way of talking her dad into doing something to stop the fight. There wasn’t anything he could do except accept the challenge himself in his father’s place. She couldn’t ask him to do such a thing. Blood was thicker than water, but she was unsure how deep it ran. If a little handholding and a few corny chants would stop her grandfather and her half-sister from killing one another she was all for it. Cat claimed it had worked in the past. Claire had done a little research, but she wasn’t about to burst Cat’s bubble by mentioning the Kent State Riot of 1970 and the dozens of other riots of the 60’s that hadn’t exactly turned out peaceful. She put the finishing touches on her sign and held it up for Cat’s approval. “What do you think?” Cat smiled and nodded out of all her friends perhaps, Clare and Thomas were her biggest supporters. When the time came though, they would all stand behind her. “It’s perfect.” She clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. These people, this small band of mostly like minded individuals had a common goal. They were family, they were her friends, and they did not want to stand here and do nothing and watch somebody die for the sake of tradition. The sun was beginning to peek over the horizon, streaking the sky with shades of gold, purple, and vibrant pink intermixed with fluffy white clouds and brilliant blue. “Ok, you guys, hold hands,” Cat directed. Tom stood on her right and Ray on the right of him, the next to form the circle was Phoenix, then Barbara joined in, Claire and to the immediate left of her, closing the circle and clasping her hand with chilly fingers stood Danni. Seven people nobody really took seriously against the entire paranormal world and two hundred years of tradition. It didn’t seem like the odds were in their favor, but maybe, just maybe she would earn the name her parents had given her. Hope Catori Nakoma, Great Warrior Spirit, as it meant in the ancient tongue. Chapter 7 John Mark paced the shadows at the border of the woods watching Cat round up her band of protestors into a circle. A protest? He could throttle Hunter for introducing her to the concepts of the 1960’s. What was next? Orgies in the grass? Smoking pot? Tattoos? Thank God she hadn’t fallen in love with the eighties or worse, the nineties. He would wring her neck himself if she ever thought about getting her tongue pierced. What in the hell was he going to do to stop this most recent in a long line of fiascos? Cat was like a daughter to him and to most of the warriors at the compound. He could barely contain the impulse to toss her over his shoulder and lock her in her room for the rest of her natural life. Cat was not a little girl anymore. She was well out of the pigtails and frilly pink dresses stage. It made his fangs ache to see her as an adult and female. And it made him want to storm across the field and poke GT’s eyes out for ogling her curves. She was not a sensual being, she was asexual as an earthworm and the closest he would ever come to having a daughter of his own. Where in the hell was her father? Tala was her mother, but she was as capable of controlling her daughter as a weatherman was of diffusing a hurricane. Cat was a daddy’s girl to her core. Drew had the ‘look’ down pat. The sudden flash of an eye or twitch of a finger that was capable of bringing whatever Cat had in mind to an immediate halt. Well Drew didn’t have much time to stop this before it spiraled out of control. Dane slipped up behind him and exhaled heavily though his clenched teeth. John Mark at a loss asked, “What do you think we should do?” Dane grunted and scowled at the circle of bodies. Children, adult or not, were not his area of expertise. He would just as soon haul Cat off the bluffs by force than try to reason with her. Obviously, his attempt at disciplining the group had failed. Scrubbing down the pack home with toothbrushes had not curbed their rampant disregard for rules or the order of things. What were they going to do? Not his call. They were going to do nothing and let their parents handle them. Cat was pack and vampire, and she had the right, as well as the rest of them did, to be here. He couldn’t fault her reasoning only her methods. He remembered every drop of blood that had been shed on the bluffs and the causes for which it had been spilled. He didn’t want to watch it either, but stopping the contest was not his place. If blood was to be shed to determine the future, it would be shed and there was nothing anyone was going to do to prevent it. “Nothing,” he gritted. “Absolutely nothing.” It was clear to him that Cat needed a cause bigger than herself to believe in. It was also evident to him that the woods she had lived in her entire life had grown too small to contain her. It wasn’t that she was unhappy. There was just a much bigger world out there for her to explore than the one her father had provided her with. In essence, Cat needed the apron strings cut so that she could complete the task of growing up. At her age he…well he had been her age a very, very long time ago. The world was different now. Children didn’t grow up as quickly as they once had and that was a good and a bad thing. Cat was an adult. It was time for her to decide things for herself and make her own path in the world. Drew watched Cat prepare to do her worst. Tala had slipped up behind him and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. She was terrified for her father. This morning might be the last time she ever saw him alive. The fight was going to be bloody and painful. There was nothing he could do about that. This was the way of the pack. The young replaced the old. He had to allow the contest to take place. The pack was not a democracy. There was a pecking order to things and as much as he didn’t like it, this was just the way things were. Tala had been on the bluffs before. Standing in the center of the ring of bodies contemplating her death. Ultimately, she had fought Grant, but she hadn’t had to die to keep the pack in her father’s hands. The earth had tasted her blood and had hopefully drunk its fill. This morning the ground was thirsty again. There would be blood and plenty of it. Mouse was her niece, by pack law she was doing what she thought was the right thing to do and what she had been raised to do. She wanted no more part of it than Tala had, back when she had stood in the ring. Some things were the way they were and there was no changing them. Tala had fought for the life of one man. Mouse was fighting for the lives of the pack. If she lost, she would die. Someone would step up to challenge Nash for the title again. If Mouse won, her father would be dead and she would earn the security of the pack for generations to come. No matter what the outcome, nobody would risk the pack falling into the wrong hands. Even if it meant Tala had to go into the ring again to ensure it didn’t. She felt the ripple of tension in Drew’s shoulders. He bristled with energy. He was going to go out there and haul their daughter off the bluffs by force. It would humiliate Cat and perhaps alienate her from him forever. Tala believed it was best to let this play out. Maybe it was time for the old ways to be banished and for a new era of tradition to begin. She had named her daughter Hope for a good reason. So much rode on the narrow shoulders of youth. She squeezed her fingers into the bunched muscles of his forearm. “Leave her alone.” Drew didn’t want this for his daughter. With all the tension and preternatural energy rippling through the core of the very earth itself, the pack might very well tear her to shreds. They were revved up for the fight. So much rode on the outcome. He was about to storm across the wide expanse of ground and drag Cat off by force when Tala’s grip on his arm stopped him. He had always been reluctant to see Cat suffer one second’s worth of pain. He would spare her any of it that he could. He was also too reluctant to let her grow up. He wanted her safe, sheltered, and secure. How could he do that without standing to the side and letting her experience all of life’s hurts? He couldn’t. Tala had been on him for months about sending Cat away. Turning her over to Carter’s safekeeping so that she could explore the bigger world. Carter would see to her safety with his own life. Drew had no doubt about that. Carter was here, brooding somewhere in the woods, as was his way. The man had come without question or complaint at Drew’s request. Drew would have to play this just right to convince Cat to leave. Pretend to be the overprotective father, just once more. Not that it was that difficult of a role for him to play. Carter had no idea of why Drew had called him. But, he was about to find out. “It’s time isn’t it?” Tala nodded and gave Drew a hesitant smile. Drew wasn’t talking about the fight. He was talking about setting their little girl free to find her place in the world. It pained her to set Cat free, but keeping her here was to stifle the woman she had yet to become. “Yes, it is.” Chapter 8 Marianne bent to kiss her girls on their soft cheeks. Their skin was warm with the haze of dreams in contrast to her cool, reality chilled lips. In a little bit Evan would tickle them awake, feed them something quick for breakfast, and bundle them up in warm clothes for the trip to the bluffs. She gave Evan a ghost of a smile as she dressed for the hike. Beneath her sweatpants and jacket she wore as little as possible. Getting tangled in her clothing during a shift could give her grandfather the advantage he needed to take her out. The stitching in the clothes was weak, designed to break away under stress. The shorts and tank top bra were paper-thin on purpose and would tear to give her wolf maximum freedom of movement. Seconds would count. The contest might come down to which one of them could shift the fastest and regain control in order to sink deadly teeth into flesh first. Evan had done his best to brush away the wayward strands of her cut hair. She self-consciously scratched at the nape of her neck. Marianne didn’t have the heart to say goodbye to him. She simply refused to accept the eventuality of the fight. There was still a part of her that had not given up on the possibility that there was another solution to this mess. “Evan, I…I mean if…” Evan cut Marianne off with the gentle press of a fingertip against her lips. There was no need for goodbyes. She wasn’t going to die today. If he had his way about things she would never die. But, that was a little bit out of his sphere of control. He saw her in his dreams as an old woman many years from now and him, in the rocking chair by her side. He truly didn’t know what was going to happen. Whatever it was. Whatever today brought. It was going to change the future forever. Of that, he was absolutely certain. He pressed a kiss to her forehead and gave her a smile. He hoped it was genuine or at least genuine enough to hide his worry. “I’ll see you in a little bit.”