25

paladin

MORNING.

I WAS up before the sun came up, awake on the couch in the room upstairs. Kestrel was downstairs, doing the tail end of the watch. When Lazarus hadn't been in here, I'd gone and found him with her, which made me feel relieved, that they were together, that Clementine had someone in her bed.

Just… one less thing to worry about.

And I had a lot of things to worry about right now.

This, you know, this was why I did not want to be the wolf boss of this whole region. Being a leader sounds cool or whatever, and you think you're going to have power or that no one's going to tell you what to do.

But actually, you end up with all this responsibility to the people you are leading, and you have to deal with a bunch of conflicts and annoying issues and it's time-consuming and exhausting and you really end up having less freedom than if you were not the actual person in charge.

So.

What to do?

I could just give it back to Griff.

Griff was used to it, and he was okay at it, I guessed. Kestrel was always complaining about all the emails and the opt-ins and the threats, though. The way Griff had kept everyone in line was basically to threaten that he'd send Red and some guys to rough you up, or to just straight-up murder you.

If I was doing it, if I was the leader, I would not need threats like that.

It's a slippery slope anyway, if you have people only following you because they're afraid of you. It means that a rebellion is lurking all the time. If you're a threat, people are constantly thinking about eliminating you.

Okay, so, not Griff.

And not Red.

Definitely not Red. Red didn't even know how to be a leader. Furthermore, I was not in any mood to forgive him for what he'd done, and neither would any of the other wolves who'd had their mates violated or their pack members killed. Red was lucky he was alive. If it weren't for the fact that Noah was under Clementine's protection, Red would be dead already. I'd have killed him myself.

Liam?

Did Liam want it?

Would Liam be good at it?

Damn it.

It had to be me, or at the very least, us. The three of us. Between me, Kestrel, and Lazarus, we could do it, I thought. I just needed to find out if they were in.

If they weren't, someone else probably needed to step up.

Or did they?

Maybe we could live in some kind of loosely-governed anarchist wetdream out here, like a big, beautiful commune of werewolf joy. After all, the biggest problems came from the fact that wolves were shit to each other. We organized under a big boss wolf for protection as much as anything. There were issues of fairness, too, about people fighting over resources. If there wasn't someone over everything, a threat to keep people in line, then we'd all live in fear of someone coming to kill us and take our farms every night.

There it was again.

Threat .

Damn it.

I got out of bed and went downstairs to check on Kestrel.

He yammered to me that we hadn't gathered eggs on the farm in two days and that there was a cow in need of milking or she would start losing her supply, and that we couldn't just stay here for all time, and I nodded a lot and said he was right, of course he was right, and I went off, swearing under my breath.

"Hey, how long am I on this watch?" he called to me.

"I don't know, until I figure out what I'm doing with them," I called back.

It occurred to me that we could do something vaguely democratic, like voting or something. What would that look like? How would we count votes? Who would the others trust to actually count the votes and not lie about it? What if we elected someone democratically and then someone else just decided to take over with violence?

That could happen to me, too, I guessed.

I'd be putting my pack in danger. I'd be putting Clementine in danger.

All in all, it was stupid to lead.

I didn't even want it.

But, damn it, who else could do it better than me?

Anyway, they wouldn't challenge me, because they were all afraid of me. The rumors about me made me seem scarier than I actually was, and I would be able to use that to quell any kind of resistance.

No, say that another way, I thought. I could use that to preserve peace.

Yeah, that sounded better.

I chuckled.

So, I went through the house and found the several bunk-lined rooms where all these guys had been sleeping in this place. I found a few other rooms, men who were with women. I figured these women were the stragglers who'd been kept here before, by Griff, the ones without mates who hadn't been allowed to leave.

I told them all that we were going to figure out some way to distribute all the houses in this subdivision and they weren't all going to be sleeping in the compound anymore.

At this point, I had gathered them all outside, and it was a cold, chilly autumn morning, and I was walking in front of them, saying a bunch of shit.

And then the door opened, and there was Clementine, with Lazarus and Kestrel and Madrigal and Noah. They had coffee. They were passing out styrofoam cups full of steaming, hot dark liquid and they had set out sugar and creamers for people who wanted it, and I shook my head at her, because why didn't I think of that?

She came over to me and offered me a cup of coffee, and I put my arm around her. "Hey, there, my beautiful and very intelligent mate, how do you think we should distribute these guys into houses?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "I remember you were saying that. I think we should give the houses to the women."

I thought about that. "I was thinking that there were women here who'd probably want to leave."

"I mean, if they're still here, babe, they probably don't want to go back."

"Well, Griff wouldn't let them leave."

"The gate is not that far away," she said. "On a full moon, all the wolves are distracted. If you want out, there's a way out."

I considered what she was saying. She was probably right. "So, the women take the houses, and then what?"

"And then they decide if men can live in them or not," she said.

Suddenly, I realized why I was such an idiot. I slammed my palm into my forehead.

"What?" she said.

"You," I said. " You're the leader."

She laughed. "Um… okay?"

"Yes," I said. "Because you have three wolf mates to enforce everything you fucking say, including me, who everyone's afraid of."

She surveyed me. "But it'd really be you, though? You'd just be making me your puppet or whatever."

"I don't want to be the leader at all ," I said. "No, no, you run everything, and there should be a woman in every house, a woman who makes all the decisions for each house."

"Well," she said, "it sort of helps a little, I guess. Because Lazarus and I were talking about the power differential, how the men are always going to be stronger than the women, no matter what."

"Yes," I said, grinning. "Exactly. So, give the women the decision-making power."

"What about Noah? Does Noah get a house?"

"Tithes," I said. "Give the former tithes the power, regardless of gender."

"But it's about gender," she said. "It just is."

"Maybe." I shrugged. "Or maybe it really is just about strength. And power. Because we use each other the same, regardless of whether we're men or women, when everything's about threat. We need… connections. Real connections here. Love. And families. And babies. And a fucking community."

She kissed my cheekbone. "It won't be that simple."

I shrugged. "True. Nothing ever is."