20

Case had traveled all over the country and seen all kinds of weather. He’d seen flooded-out roads and deserts where droughts had left nothing but cracked, dry hardpan. Once, he’d even had to pull his car under an overpass to hide out from a surprise tornado. But he’d never come across anything like the emotional atmosphere in Mountainview after Reeve Steele caught that plane. No one knew whether or not he would come back, so even though his absence had them giddy, the uncertainty still had them walking on eggshells.

It was strange to be living through sunny weather without knowing whether it was genuine or just the eye of the storm.

As the days went by, they did their best to cope.

The biggest diversion—and the best one, aside from the nights in Lydia’s bed—was learning more about his wolf. He loved the “wolf lessons” Lydia and the pack would stage for him, from play-fights in the backyard to hunt-and-track sessions in the woods. It was all great, but he paid particular attention to the fighting, learning the play-bites that he might one day have to do for real. It was strange to snarl and lash out at people he liked more by the day, but it was necessary. He couldn’t afford to assume Reeve would stay gone for good.

According to his primary fighting teacher—the grizzled but hardy Horace—Reeve could challenge the two of them for control of the pack anywhere between Ruth’s death and her funeral.

“It feels morbid to be on tenterhooks waiting for what’s going to happen after someone dies,” Case said.

He might not have had the highest opinion of Ruth’s view of the world and how she had instilled it in Lydia, but he respected her. He hated playing this kind of waiting game with her life.

“Tell me about it,” Horace said. “If you were an old-timer like me, you’d be even more annoyed. I don’t want people distracted from my death because they’re waiting for some punk to show up— SHIFT ,” he bellowed suddenly, testing Case’s reflexes.

Case moved into wolf form almost seamlessly, which was definitely an improvement.

“Your shifting is getting faster,” Horace said. “It’s still better when you’re working off instinct alone, but it always will be. But you’re not having to think about it much now, which is good.”

Horace shifted too now, changing forms much more smoothly—but then, he’d had decades more practice than Case had had.

Unfortunately, fights to the death didn’t issue handicaps to more experienced wolves to keep everything fair. When he faced down Reeve— if he faced down Reeve, because his fingers and paws were still crossed that Reeve was gone for good—he wouldn’t get any grace for being new to all this. That was what these lessons were for.

He and Horace circled each other, wary and alert. By now, Case had been in enough practice scuffles with him to know how Horace liked to operate, which was an advantage he wouldn’t have with Reeve. No matter how much he rehearsed the alpha challenge, he was acutely aware of how different the real thing would be.

But it was still good to have Horace on his side and know that these fights were making him more and more familiar with how wolves tended to attack each other. This time, he even managed to knock Horace down and get in the play-nip that stood in for the real killing bite. It wasn’t the first fight he’d won, but it was close.

Horace shifted back, panting from exertion but grinning all the same. “Not bad, kid.”

“I think you’re going easy on me.”

“A little, but less and less every day. You forget how damn old I am. You’re already in better shape for this fight than I am. There was a time, though—” He sighed, wistful. “There was a time when I would have already tried to mop the floor with that asshole ... if Ruth would have let me, which she wouldn’t have. Alphas never want to put the pack at risk.”

Case had noticed that, but he thought there had to be a difference between not putting the pack at unnecessary risk and not letting the people in it make any real choices of their own. Especially when that kind of over-protectiveness tended to backfire. If Mountainview fell into Reeve’s hands because he and Lydia couldn’t save it on their own, everybody in town would pay the price.

“Do people here want to fight Reeve?” he said cautiously.

Horace sighed again. “It’s complicated. We don’t have a lot of fighters, period. I’m one of the last of them, and most of the tougher kids I’ve mentored over the years have either moved away or become acupuncturists who couldn’t bite through tissue paper. But maybe, maybe we could have all teamed up and fought him off when he first showed up. There would have been losses, because he’s a mean son-of-a-bitch, but we might have been able to do it. But Ruth and Lydia didn’t want the pack to take that chance, even if Lydia was out there with us. And now it’s too late—if he comes back at all, it’ll be for the alpha challenge, and then we can’t interfere. All the shifter laws forbid it.”

That was a lot for Case to take in. It didn’t change anything now, not according to what Horace said, but it made him feel surer than ever that the pack needed and wanted a different kind of leadership than it had been getting. Maybe everyone here had gotten used to not being able to act on their own behalf, but that didn’t mean they liked it. Not deep down.

He knew he needed to bring that up with Lydia at some point, but it was hard to find the time. After wolf practice with Horace, he went back to the house and alpha practice with Lydia ... which turned out to mean listening to a father and son bicker with each other.

He knew by now that alphas helped settle pack disputes. But did this really count?

“It’s the fifth time in two weeks,” Dan Graves said. He was seething so much that his face had turned a disturbing tomato color, and sweat was popping out all over his brow. Just yesterday, he had been Case’s relaxed, genial instructor in lunging attacks in wolf form, but now he was a dad, not a teacher. “The fifth time! In a fortnight!”

Sixteen-year-old Sean Graves blinked. “Wait, Fortnite?”

“Different Fortnite,” Case said.

“He means two weeks,” Lydia said to Sean.

“Jesus. Then just say that, Dad.”

“I did say that! I was repeating myself for f—flipping emphasis! And maybe if you spent less time playing games online with God knows who and more time studying for the PSATs, you wouldn’t need our alpha— one of our alphas—sorry, alphas-in-waiting—to give you vocab lessons!”

Sean gave Case and Lydia an exaggerated “can you see how uncool my dad is?” look that was both obnoxious and sort of flattering. Case guessed at least the kid had classified them as marginally cooler than the dad who scolded him about insufficient PSAT study time.

Actually, that was too low a bar. He couldn’t be proud of that. And maybe Sean did need to study for the PSATs, for all Case knew.

It took another ten minutes of irritated father-son sniping to work out that Dan Graves wasn’t here to complain about his son not doing his due diligence when it came to trying to get into college. Even that would have been a stretch as far as pack business was concerned—or so Case would have thought—but that wasn’t it.

“Wait,” Lydia said, seizing on a pause in the Graves’ mutual eye-rolling. “ What was the fifth time in two weeks, exactly?”

“He fills the dishwasher up and then doesn’t run it,” Dan said.

“God, Dad, all you have to do is put the dish soap in and then—”

“Exactly!”

“—turn it on! It’s not a big deal!”

“If it’s not a big deal, then why don’t you do it?”

“Why can’t you thank me for loading it in the first place?” Sean said. “None of my friends load the dishwasher!”

“Oh, well, if none of your friends jumped off a bridge—” Dan stopped himself with a wince. “That wasn’t going to make any sense,” he said to Lydia and Case. “I swear I’m not trying to sound like a generic TV dad—or, you know, my dad. I’ve been like this since he hit his teens. It’s every day with this sh—crap.”

“You can say ‘shit,’ Dad,” Sean said wearily. “I’m not a kid. I say it.”

“And I don’t care what you say on your own time, but I don’t want to curse around you, and I don’t want you to curse around me.”

That seemed like a reasonable enough boundary, but again, Case had no idea why Dan and Sean were having this conversation in front of him and Lydia . Let alone why they had left the dishwasher currently in dispute behind to deliberately have this conversation in someone else’s house. He and Lydia didn’t even have any kids. They didn’t have any special insight into this. What were they supposed to add?

Maybe he was being ungenerous. He had never really been part of a community before, but it was normal for people to want their friends to weigh in on their little problems and disputes, right? Most of his adult friendships had been casual, easily drifting to the occasional email or Instagram comment once he had moved on to the next town, but it wasn’t like he’d never hung out with anyone before. Friends and even acquaintances complained to each other. It was how life worked, and having someone to vent to was important.

Except Dan and Lydia didn’t seem to be that close, and it wasn’t like he was dumping all this on her just because she was there. He’d made a special trip for it, and he’d even hauled his non-dishwasher-running son along with him. And not even so he could complain, but so Lydia could intervene and tell them how to handle a routine family squabble.

That wasn’t normal, was it? It couldn’t be.

But Lydia acted like it was. She listened without even letting herself show a trace of impatience or incredulity. To Case’s astonishment, she calmed both father and son down, got Sean to agree to try a little harder, and led Dan to the admission that he was really proud of his son—“And I think you have a really good vocabulary, essentially,” Dan said almost tearfully. “You’re going to do great on the PSATs”—which made Sean turn red with embarrassment. Everything was fine (until the next time a teenager did something teenager-y, Case was guessing), and Lydia gently herded them out the door.

She was a wolf, but the pack had her acting like more of a sheepdog. That was fine if that was what she wanted, but Case wasn’t sure it was, especially since Lydia immediately dropped down onto her bed afterwards, slumping back against the headboard.

He put his arm around her. It was still a little unreal to him that he could do that and that she would always cuddle up to him, tucking her head against his shoulder with a pleasant little rumble in her throat that was oddly purr-like for a wolf.

It felt right, sitting in bed with her like this. He had always liked people and gotten along well with them, but he was still a bit of an introvert at heart, someone who had to go off by himself to recharge. Social situations always took a little out of him. But Lydia didn’t. Being with her was restful and peaceful. He only hoped he could make her feel the same way.

Lydia did need some relief, even if she didn’t think so. She needed Case to be a cool breeze across her overheated mind.

Because even if Reeve was gone, the pack still needed a lot of help. If tonight was any indication, Case had to say they needed a little too much.

It wasn’t their fault. Horace had basically spelled the it out for him: the problem was that Ruth had, with the best of intentions, run the small mountain village like her own private fiefdom. As far as Case could tell, there had even been a time when that kind of approach had been, if not exactly necessary , then at least helpful. Mountainview had gone through some tough times, and Ruth had been a pillar of strength. Of course everyone had relied on her, and of course they were now relying on Lydia, who was just as tough and even more openly caring.

But the circumstances had changed. And even though the town was happy to help out when it came to Case’s wolf lessons, they seemed to feel helpless when it came to anything else. Even when they wanted to do something, they were told it was too dangerous for them to interfere. They weren’t even encouraged to resolve their own family squabbles. Everyone was still acting like Mountainview was on the verge of catastrophe, something only a strong leader could help them survive, and Case couldn’t see any sign that that was actually true .

It was still struggling a little, economically, but Case had seen a lot of small towns. If someone could keep an adorable bakery open, things couldn’t be too bad.

And again, the village had options. Wendy wanted to open that B&B, and she would have done it a long time ago if Ruth hadn’t kept blocking her on it. Their shifter-related secrets weren’t that hard to keep. He’d been here two weeks now, and yes, that wasn’t that long, but it was long enough that he would have noticed if people in town had made a habit of prowling around downtown in wolf form. And they didn’t, because Mountainview already had a few residents who weren’t in the pack and didn’t even know it existed, and it had always been fine. Keeping that up shouldn’t be a problem.

And everything else ....

Alphas were good at organizing the community. If your son was late getting home and wasn’t answering his phone, an alpha wolf would have the whole pack out looking for him. Alphas could run charity programs. They were—at least within their packs—a universally recognized authority, so they could even settle heated feuds that needed to be dealt with so life could continue on a smooth course. Case understood all of that. More than understood it—the wolf inside him responded to it, falling into the co-alpha-in-training role alongside Lydia. He felt an allegiance to the pack and a strong desire to help it. He would fight for it and even die for it, if he had to.

He just didn’t want to die for dishwashers. He didn’t think anyone would blame him for that.

“I like solving problems that need solving,” she said, like she knew what Case was thinking, “but ones like that wring me out. I feel bad. They’re good people.”

“They’re good people,” Case agreed, “but what the hell was that? Why were they coming to you—”

“Us,” Lydia said with a grin.

He couldn’t help grinning back at that. True. They were a team, in this and in everything else, and the pack didn’t have any problems recognizing that. They’d welcomed Case with open arms.

That was another reason he liked Mountainview and wanted to help them. But he wanted to give them help that actually mattered, and he didn’t want them to swamp Lydia with requests that were slowly taking the life out of her.

“Us. Why were they coming to us about loading a dishwasher?”

Lydia blinked at him, puzzled. “Because it’s a dispute.”

“It’s a dishwasher.”

She laughed like he’d made a joke, not just pointed out the obvious. “Yeah, it’s kind of a silly dispute, but it’s still a dispute. They always bring those to their alphas. Technically, they should be taking them to Ruth, but she’s not up for this kind of thing anymore.”

“But she used to be?”

“Sure,” Lydia said, back to being puzzled. “It’s the job.”

A job neither Ruth nor Lydia had ever gotten paid for, as far as Case could tell. Unlike being mayor, being alpha didn’t come with a salary or even a stipend. Someone like Reeve could force the job to pay, by leveraging the power that came with it, but all Ruth and Lydia had was responsibility.

Was this a wolf thing he didn’t understand yet?

I don’t think so , his wolf said. It seems weird to me too.

“Do other packs work like this too, or is it more of a Mountainview thing?”

Lydia’s puzzlement turned more contemplative. “I don’t know, actually. I mean, it’s not like we get a set of rules about it from the Overpack. It’s tradition, that’s all. This is the way Ruth always handled things, and now I feel like people expect it. They need it.”

Did they, though? Dan and Sean had certainly felt better at the end of the conversation than the beginning, since Lydia had handled it so well, but there had been moments when they’d both been flustered and resigned. They’d lost a good chunk of their evening coming here, when there was every chance they could have resolved the problem on their own or talked about it with someone who was closer to hand.

Maybe this setup wasn’t sustainable for anyone: not for the pack and not for the alphas. No one liked to be told they weren’t up to solving their own problems, and no one liked being told they had to solve everyone’s. Relationships that were too lopsided were a recipe for unhappiness. He didn’t know if Ruth had started it when times were tough and unity had seemed more important than anything else, or if she had only been continuing an old and already-broken pattern, but either way, he didn’t think it was working.

Even in the midst of worrying about Ruth and Reeve, Case’s wolf lessons had perked the town up. Horace looked ten years younger now than he had when they’d started. People liked feeling like they were contributing. Why didn’t they get to do that more often? Why did it often seem like they didn’t even know they could , unless someone specifically asked for it?

And how could he help Lydia feel like she was allowed to ask for it?

He had been mulling it over since the conversation had wrapped up, and he still didn’t have any answers. It felt wrong to charge into Mountainview and demand that they change things, but even if he was a new arrival, he wasn’t a stranger here anymore. He had a stake in the village, and he had even more of a stake in Lydia.

But if he was going to propose changing the way things were done, he would have to wait until after they all felt sure Reeve would stay gone for good. So for now, all he could do was hold Lydia tight and hope for the best.

“Did you call your moms?” Lydia said.

“Not yet. Every day I wait is another day I’m going to have to explain the hell out of, because I usually don’t keep things from them like this, but I figured it would be better to do it once we had everything settled.”

“And it’s probably hard to tell them about werewolves over the phone,” Lydia said.

“That too. They’ll have to see it with their own eyes before they know for sure that I haven’t lost my mind. And the story doesn’t make sense without the werewolf part.”

“I don’t know.” She moved to rest her head further down on his chest so she could listen to his heartbeat. “A gallant knight riding to the rescue of an imperiled maiden—”

“Who is also, herself, a gallant knight.”

“Thank you. Or you could be a heroic cowboy. We’re in the right state for cowboys.”

That suddenly made him think of something. “Are cows going to be afraid of me now?”

Lydia tilted her head to look up at him, her soft black hair tumbling back down her shoulders. “Why would cows be afraid of you?”

“I mean, can they sense the wolf? I assume cows wouldn’t be huge wolf fans.”

Technically, if cows knew better, they wouldn’t be big human fans either. He and Lydia had grilled up some burgers for dinner, and his inner wolf hadn’t had anything to do with that . But even though he wasn’t a vegetarian, he had to admit that he didn’t like the idea of animals suddenly shying away from him. He might never be around cows enough to notice how they felt specifically, but dogs and cats ....

To his relief, Lydia was shaking her head, further tousling her hair against his chest. “No, it doesn’t bother them. Not unless you’re actually a wolf at the time.”

A sigh of relief escaped him. “Well, that’s good.”

“You care a lot about what cows think of you?” she teased.

“I couldn’t be a heroic cowboy if I didn’t, could I?”

“That’s true. Speaking of heroic cowboys—”

She nudged Shadows towards him. The heroic cowboy, Milton, had been introduced in the last chapter, and neither of them could tell if he was flirting with Levi or if he had mistaken him for the evil twin and was trying to kill him. Little Susie kept saying that the cowboy’s horse was a unicorn in disguise, and it did have a silver sheen to its mane.

They were a hundred and fifty pages in and still had no idea what on earth they were reading.

Case found their dogeared page. “‘What was it Milton had said last night? Your little girl’s smarter than you, hoss. Maybe she takes after her mother .’ Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Is Milton negging him?”

“Maybe he’s not that heroic of a cowboy after all.”

“‘It was like Milton had surveyed the terrain of Levi’s life—’ Okay, I get that he’s a geography professor, but not every metaphor needs to come back to that. ‘It was like Milton had surveyed the terrain of Levi’s life and understood it better than Levi himself ever had. Milton saw him from a height. His pale eyes had the same silver glow as the horsehair.’”

“He’s a magic cowboy. Maybe—"

The rest of the sentence never made it out of Lydia’s mouth. She moved with a ruthless, fluid grace that Case couldn’t help admiring, even though the air was now filled with dread. He was moving too, sliding to his feet as soon as she had straightened up enough that he was sure he wouldn’t send her spilling to the floor. His wolf’s senses were on high alert. There was a scent in the house—acrid and somehow overripe, too stinging and too rich at the same time. He’d been catching hints of it from the start, but now it was in full and horrible bloom.

Death , his wolf said solemnly, and then it threw its head back and let out a long and mournful howl that made a shiver run up Case’s spine.

He couldn’t even imagine how Lydia’s wolf’s howl sounded.

He took her hand so they could go to Ruth’s room together.

*

This was it.

Even if Lydia wanted to deny it, wanted to hope against hope for another week or even another day, her wolf knew.

These were her grandmother’s last few minutes of life.

Andrea, her face drawn and her eyes welling over with tears, stood up as Lydia and Case came in.

“I was going to come out and tell you we were—close,” she said, sniffing and rubbing at her eyes. “I was trying to collect myself. But I’m sure you—” She touched her nose.

Lydia nodded. Her own tears were already threatening to spill over too.

“All this fuss,” Ruth said, in a thin wheeze that was now raspier and more rattling than ever. “All this fuss over nothing.”

“You’re not nothing,” Lydia said, easing into the seat Andrea had vacated. Case stayed at her side, his fingers still tightly laced in with hers.

Ruth let out a strained, breathy noise that was probably a laugh. “I’m an old wolf who’s had a good run. That’s all. But,” she added to Lydia’s surprise, “I’m glad I got to see you find your mate.”

It wasn’t like Ruth to be at all sentimental. Lydia could count on one hand the number of times her grandmother had said something like that to her, something “gushy” as Ruth herself would have called it. But she’d said it now. That made the hot tears well up even more, and Lydia finally gave in and blinked, letting them roll down her cheeks.

“I’m glad you got to see that too.”

“I’m glad I got to meet you,” Case said to Ruth.

Lydia knew the two of them had already butted heads a few times, and Case had been polite but clear about thinking that Ruth had been too hard on her, but he sounded like he meant it. And she knew he did, too. That was one of the things she loved about him, one of the things that made her know in her bones that he was made for her and was exactly the mate and co-alpha she needed. He was honest, and he cared.

“Take care of the pack,” Ruth said.

It was what she’d been telling Lydia her whole life.

“We will,” Lydia said, and Case nodded too.

“I did,” Ruth said.

Lydia’s next nod made even more tears fall. “You did. Nobody could ever say otherwise.”

“I don’t have ....” Ruth sucked in a breath that should have been deep, for all the effort it took her, but was horribly shallow, just a sip of air to someone else. “Regrets.”

Her eyes—still bright and keen, even now—were glittering, and it took Lydia a stunned second to realize that Ruth was crying too. It rocked her back. She had never seen her grandmother cry: not at her own husband’s funeral, not when her own son pulled up stakes and moved as far away from her as possible, and not when they eventually heard he had died too. Not even when Ruth had decided not to leave Mountainview for the funeral. She had sent Lydia there on her own. It was the only flight Lydia had ever made, in her crumpled black dress, stiff and awkward with her wolf distressed and yowling up a storm inside her.

Ruth had hugged her when she’d come back—that was one of the “gushy” things Lydia could count—but even then, her grandmother had stayed as dry-eyed as ever. If she had cried in the last twenty-odd years, she had never done it where Lydia could see her.

Was that because Lydia was still part of Ruth’s pack, even if she was Ruth’s heir? Had Ruth kept a distance between them because she believed that was what alphas did, but now the wall was finally crumbling?

Or had she really buried everything over the years, like Lydia had always tried to?

Either way, it made Lydia’s heart ache that the tears had finally come right as Ruth had claimed to have no regrets. She reached out to gently brush her grandmother’s tears away.

At the touch of her hand, Ruth closed her eyes.

And that was it. It was done.

Lydia twisted around to bury her face in Case’s shirt, and he held her tightly, stroking her hair. Her grief was already hitting like a boulder, trying to smash her flat, and she knew that the weight of all her new responsibility would come along soon to try to finish the job. But as long as he had her, she would be able to make it. She knew he would never let her go through this alone.