8

“Ruth, can I have some of your morphine?”

Even in her last days, with her skin creased and yellowed and her every breath rattling, Lydia’s grandmother was sharp. She never needed much in the way of explanation. In fact, Lydia had always had the eerie sense that whenever something happened in her life, her grandmother understood it well before she did.

“So it didn’t work,” Ruth said. She slumped back against her mountain of pillows, her face freshly lined with exhaustion. “Fine. Take the morphine. He’ll need it more than I do.”

When Ruth had felt satisfied that Case was the right choice—or at least the best one Lydia could possibly make under such fraught circumstances—she had stopped her bitter fight for survival. Lydia had seen her start to give in to the inevitable.

Would she be able to start fighting again, making it through day after day on grim determination alone? Someone Lydia didn’t think so. It would be so hard, almost impossible, to get back to that after you’d had a moment’s relief.

You have to hold on , Lydia wanted to beg her. I don’t know what I’m going to do on my own. I don’t know how to be without him and without you.

But as she rummaged through Ruth’s medical supplies, she bit down on her tongue to keep any of those pleas from coming out.

At some point, wasn’t it cruel to ask her grandmother to keep struggling to live? Even with the morphine, Ruth was sometimes still in a fair bit of pain. She had given her whole life to her pack. Shouldn’t she at least get to have her death be on her terms, whenever she was naturally ready for it?

But that wasn’t what being an alpha was about. Not the way her grandmother had ever handled the job, anyway, and not the way she had raised Lydia to see it. Being an alpha meant always putting yourself second. A distant second. It meant not even having a chance to mourn the man you loved.

Or, in Lydia’s case, mourn the chance to even have a life with the man she ... with someone she had already felt strangely at home with.

She had to put all that aside. Whether or not Ruth was down for the count, she wasn’t. She couldn’t afford to be.

No break. No companionship. No support. No fun.

Lydia locked those thoughts away. She found the morphine and started back toward Case—

Only for all a spike of adrenaline to suddenly surge through her, putting her on high alert.

Someone was here. Someone wrong .

If she’d been in wolf form, she would have picked up on the trespasser long ago. But her senses in this form—even though they were sharper than a normal human’s—were comparatively dull. She couldn’t smell the trespasser at all.

But she could hear him. A lifetime of Mountainview had made her an expert in the ordinary, familiar sound of a fellow pack member coming up to the house. It wasn’t hard to tell the difference between even the shyest approach and this lingering, skulking attitude.

She didn’t need her nose to tell her who was creeping up to her door.

Reeve .

He had the absolute worst timing of anyone she’d ever met, and she couldn’t even tell him so. It would only make him even prouder of himself.

She hesitated for a second, wanting nothing more than to duck back into her bedroom and give Case the painkiller he desperately needed. But she couldn’t afford to leave Reeve prowling around outside. She just had to hope that it would only take a minute or two to drive him off.

She slid the morphine into her pocket and headed outside.

It wasn’t as nice a day as it had been the last time she and Reeve had run into each other. That had been a clear, picture-perfect spring afternoon, sunny but the tiniest bit cool. Today, it was too damp. Lydia immediately felt like her clothes were sticking to her skin. It was like the weather itself was determined to clue her into the fact that nothing was going to go as she’d hoped.

She didn’t have to look hard for Reeve. He was leaning against one of the pillars on the porch, looking as cocky as ever.

Other members of the pack were milling around on the street, looking tense and worried. One man had his phone out and turned it towards her, so she could see he’d already dialed 9-1: one nod from her, and he’d punch in the last number.

It wouldn’t do much, unfortunately. They could get Reeve thrown in jail for trespassing, under human law, but he would be out almost immediately. It wouldn’t save the pack.

She liked that he was trying, though. A couple other people looked like they were gearing up to take a swing at Reeve if necessary, too. It would be nice if she could let them. At least it meant that a tiny fraction of this problem wouldn’t rest completely on her shoulders ....

Shut up , she told herself fiercely. You can’t be an alpha if you’re going to think like that. No alpha worth their salt sticks the pack with the hard work.

That needed to be her mantra. No one was going to help her. No one was going to save her. No one was going to take this burden from her shoulders, even for a little while. Her grandmother was dying, and Case was sick. It was all on her, even if she felt like she might collapse under the strain.

Maybe someday she would. But for right now, she was still on her feet, and the pack was counting on her.

She got her voice as clear and ringing as she could make it. “Reeve, I’m pretty sure I made it clear that you needed to stay out of our territory.”

His smirk made her skin crawl. “But I’m here to pay my respects. You wouldn’t call the human law on me for that, would you?”

“You don’t have any respect for anybody here, so that excuse doesn’t wash.”

“Let’s say I’m offering my condolences, then.” His nostrils flared. “I can smell your grandmother getting worse.”

It wasn’t that hard for wolves to smell sickness and impending death, but if Reeve claimed he could really catch that sickroom scent this far away, in his human form, he was lying. It had to all be part of his attempt to seem like a purer, stronger kind of werewolf than “civilized” types like her. He had probably come into town on four feet and only shifted back once he’d gotten closer.

For a guy who prided himself on being animalistic, he sure did like his mind games. Well, Lydia wasn’t going to play them with him.

“Ruth isn’t dead yet,” Lydia said bluntly. “So go.”

Reeve leered. “I wanted you to know you’re in my thoughts, that’s all.” He turned to take in the rest of the pack in their huddled circles. “All of you are.”

Lydia could see them shiver. She knew exactly the kind of calculations they were doing right now, and she couldn’t blame them for it. They were wondering if it might be better and safer for them to try to sidle on over to Reeve’s side. If they could curry favor with him before he was their alpha, maybe he would go easier on them. Maybe that would be safer than throwing in their lots with her.

If Lydia could really see it working, she might have stood by and let her people go over to him, one after the other. But while Reeve might be a gracious victor at first, his generosity wouldn’t last. If he was in charge, everyone would get a bad deal sooner or later.

“I’m not going to tell you again,” Lydia said.

“Don’t antagonize him!” someone in the crowd cried out. “You’ll make things worse for us!”

Dammit. She’d known some of them were thinking that, but hearing it said out loud ....

There were people here who had already written her off. They’d spent weeks praying she would come up with some kind of solution, and they’d finally lost hope. As far as they were concerned, Reeve was already their next alpha, and Lydia was already—

Dead .

She swallowed. Maybe they weren’t wrong. Maybe she was doomed. But even if she was, she wasn’t going to spend her last few days on Earth crawling to Reeve Steele and watching him glory over her. If she never saw his stupid smirk again, it would be too soon.

“I can’t make things any worse for you than they already are,” Lydia said to whoever had called out. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that he’s going to be any easier on you if you go along with him. He doesn’t want to be a leader. He wants to be a tyrant.”

Reeve kept his back turned to her. He spread out his hands, and the gesture made him look like a carnival barker ready to trick people out of their last dollar.

“Do you really believe that about me, people of Mountainview? Maybe I’m a little more rough and tumble than you’re used to, but I’m not so bad.”

There were little murmurs in the crowd. They wanted to believe him, because wouldn’t it be easier and more convenient if he were telling the truth?

But he wasn’t. They knew his history the same as Lydia did. They knew that he’d left his original pack out of disgust at its “softness”—softness like “having actual town elections instead of leaving everything to the alpha,” “collecting money for charity,” and “treating gay mate-bonds as legitimate.” The Mountainview Pack was mostly poor families and retirees. Reeve’s doctrine of survival of the fittest, where the weak fell by the wayside so the strong could feed on what they left behind, would kill them.

If he ever took over, the pack’s best hope would be him getting tired of having such a boring prize. They might have peace again if he abandoned them for a shinier, newer set of people to grind down and terrorize.

They were good people, though, so they weren’t going to settle for any option where that was their best hope. Maybe a small fraction of them would, but not all of them.

“Lydia’s right,” the 9-1 guy said, his thumb still poised above the touchscreen of his phone. “You’re just trouble.”

“We don’t want you here,” someone else chimed in.

A few more people seconded that, some of them obviously fuming with anger, but most of the crowd was too tense and too wary to speak up. Besides, it wasn’t Mountainview’s way for the pack to get involved in alpha disputes. Reeve was testing that tradition to its very limit, but it hadn’t broken yet.

He raised his voice to test it even more:

“If Lydia steps down as her grandmother’s heir, would anyone stand in her place? This could all be over right now. Let Ruth Willmore’s alpha position pass straight to me, and we won’t need to have any bloodshed.”

As remote as that possibility was, it had an obvious appeal.

“Maybe you should step down,” an old woman muttered to her feet, clearly not wanting to look Lydia in the eye. She wiped away a tear as it tumbled down her face.

Lydia knew her. Pam Delaney used to watch her after school sometimes when she was little. She used to always have a stack of Oreos and a mug of cold milk waiting for her. She’d taught Lydia how to play chess.

She counted up the people who were shuffling their feet and nodding reluctant agreement. There weren’t many of them—only six or seven out of a crowd of over thirty—but it was enough to depress her.

Taught me art in high school ....

I went to her baby shower ....

He used to try to look at my paper during history tests ....

They were her people—or they were supposed to be. They always had been before.

It was hard to get angry at them when they didn’t look angry. They didn’t seem mutinous or fed up with her. They looked tired, that was all. Tired and drained and sick of worrying, like her. They’d lost hope, and she couldn’t blame them.

And they’d lost confidence in her. Did that give her permission to walk away? Did she want to walk away?

For a second, Lydia let herself imagine it. No more grinding pressure. No more responsibility. She could finally see something of the world and find out who she was outside of Mountainview.

Maybe she could even hitch a ride with Case, once he was back on his feet. They could have that dinner date without anything else hanging over them, and then—

Yearning made her chest tighten up.

But realistically, she knew how she would finish that sentence she’d left dangling. If she abandoned her pack and ran off with Case, they wouldn’t even get through the salad course of that dinner date before she started worrying about everyone she’d left behind. She would remember that fear made people irrational and desperate to seize on any way out, and she’d know that it wasn’t fair to abandon her pack because Reeve had some of them on edge. Even the scared pack-members were good people, and they’d raised her as much as Ruth had. They deserved a little bit of grace.

That wasn’t how she wanted that night with Case to go. If she ever got to be with him like that, she wanted the focus to be on the two of them, not on everything she’d given up to get there.

Also, fuck Reeve Steele. He didn’t get to drive her away from her home.

“I’m not stepping down,” Lydia said, locking eyes with Reeve. He was her opponent here, not the pack. She wouldn’t let him turn them against each other. “And it wouldn’t make any difference if I did. The rest of you know that, deep down. He didn’t come here to offer peace. He’s the one starting a fight. We don’t need him, but he thinks we should turn Mountainview over to him, and then he’s trying to make it sound like he’d be gracious enough to let us give him what he wants. He’s a manipulative, power-tripping asshole. If you give in to him, maybe he’ll be generous for, oh, a week—as long as you keep thanking him for it, and you bow and scrape enough. But then he’ll get over it. You know that ... and so does he.”

Reeve’s eyes flashed, and his self-assure smirk finally twisted into an openly nasty scowl.

“All I know,” he said in a low growl, “is that you’re in my way.”

Lydia squared up to him. “And I’m going to keep being in your way. I’ll die in your way if I have to.”

Reeve leapt at her, changing mid-lunge from human to wolf. Lydia was honestly stunned to find that her reflexes were sharp enough for her to shift before he collided with her. If he’d hit her head-on like that while she’d been in her human form, he might have killed her.

And he still knocked her over. She was on the small side as far as wolves went, and he was huge .

Maybe he’s secretly half-bear , Lydia thought, dazed and breathless from getting slammed into the porch. That wouldn’t surprise me.

He was going to kill her right here and now, on her own front porch. It was against all human and wolf laws, but who was going to stop him? Clearly not her. And even though she could see a few people shifting to come to help, she already knew they wouldn’t get here in time.

She’d done everything she possibly could, and this was how it was going to end. It had come down to brute force, and she was the loser. It didn’t matter how hard she’d tried. It didn’t matter that she was smarter than Reeve, or that the people of Mountainview had chosen her, not him. He was bigger than she was, and that was it.

And he’d knocked the wind out of her, so she couldn’t even go down fighting.

Lydia was about to close her eyes and let it go when a black blur sailed over her and careened into Reeve, knocking him aside.

What the fuck?

A tall, lean wolf stood above her, his hackles bristling. He’d planted himself in front of Reeve without a moment’s hesitation, and his growl made his stance very clear: Get away from her.

Who was he? Where had he come from? From ... the house?

She knew she’d gotten her bell rung, as her grandmother would say, but that didn’t make any sense. There was no one in the house but Ruth and Case. And Ruth was dying, and Case—

Case?

It couldn’t be. He’d been twisted up in agony when she’d left him. Her bite hadn’t transformed him, it had poisoned him.

She’d never heard of someone coming back from a failed transformation. Never. And when she’d come up with the idea of changing Case, she’d done her research. People’s bodies didn’t reject the transformation and then ... un-reject it. It just didn’t happen.

But now, apparently, it had, because she couldn’t think of any other explanation. The wolf in front of her was Case.

No one else would come to protect me.

Reeve growled back at the black wolf, but Lydia could tell there was more confusion in the sound than anything else. He shifted back, and the black wolf followed suit.

She was right. It was Case. In his human form, he looked haggard, still pale and sweaty and obviously under a lot of strain, but he was far from the feverish, tortured man she’d left behind a few minutes ago. His new shifter strength was already flowing through him, keeping him on his feet when any ordinary human would have been flat on his back.

“You must be Reeve,” Case said. There was a weary humor in his voice that Lydia very much doubted anyone else would have had.

She’d caught her breath a while ago and had been too stunned by Case’s arrival to even think about joining the fray. She scolded herself for it now and shifted back to stand at his side.

That felt good. Natural. It had been a long time since she’d done something that felt both right and effortless.

“Hi,” she said to Case.

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Hi yourself. Your bite packs a punch.”

“You—” Reeve sputtered, indignant and gloriously (if all too briefly) speechless. “You turned him? Who even is he?”

Lydia half-turned to Case. “You want to introduce yourself?”

He nodded. “Case Jackson,” he said to Reeve. “But I don’t think I’ll shake your hand. I know I got here late, but I feel like Lydia’s probably already told you to leave.”

“I have.”

“And then you attacked her,” Case said. The hint of humor that had been in his voice vanished completely at that.

Reeve ignored all of this to say belatedly, “I don’t care what your name is! What are you doing here? You can’t—” He wheeled on Lydia. “You can’t turn humans! They don’t have any right to join our world! And he can’t interfere in an alpha challenge. Don’t even think of getting him involved in all this.”

Oh, I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought all about it, and I’m going to enjoy it. Especially since it seems like now I’ve bowled you over for a change.

“Your weird ideas about who deserves a wolf aside,” Lydia said, “it’s perfectly legal to turn a consenting human who knows what he’s saying yes to. The Overpack has never had a problem with that. Case signed a form and everything. It’s on file at Turner Lowe, and they can even show it to you if you’re curious.”

Of course, that wasn’t good enough for Reeve. Turner Lowe was a shifter institution that had been around for over a century, but the idea of writing down laws and abiding by them was still a little too “human” for Reeve, even if generations of his own ancestors disagreed with him about that. His way of looking at the world had nothing to do with wolf history. The tradition of self-important “savagery” he was ostensibly trying to hold on to had never actually existed.

She was pretty sure Reeve secretly knew that, too. Everything he claimed to believe in was just another way to get what he wanted.

She talked over his ranting explanations about how Turner Lowe and informed consent didn’t matter, all that mattered was keeping the world of shifters secret and pure. She added:

“And you’re wrong about another thing, too. Case can get involved. If you come and challenge me when the time comes, he will be involved. He’s going to be my mate.”

The second the words were out of her mouth, she had the nightmarish realization that Case could have changed his mind. One look at him, thank God, told her that he hadn’t.

“You recruited and turned a human to fight me,” Reeve snarled at her. “And you think that’s fair?”

The answer to that was so clear that it legitimately took her a moment to realize he meant it as a real question.

“Yes! Obviously! If facing down co-alphas is too much for you, you’re more than welcome to never come back here .”

Reeve’s whole face twisted in disgust. “You’re not getting off that easily. Not you, and not your human .”

“I’m clearly a werewolf now,” Case pointed out. “You saw me.”

“This isn’t over,” Reeve said, spitting at their feet. He shifted and stalked off, the pack parting to let him through. The ones who had shifted indulged in growling at him before they turned human again.

It could be wishful thinking on her part, but Lydia was pretty sure that her people looked a tiny bit less cowed than they had earlier. They were certainly eyeing Case with open speculation, and at least some of that speculation was hopeful. It was hard to make a better debut than saving another wolf in a fight.

“So ....” It was Pam Delaney again. She looked back and forth between Case and Lydia. “Is this for real?”

Wolves believed in the power of gestures over words, and this seemed like the right time for a good one.

Lydia held out her hand to Case, and he took it.

To her surprise and delight, the pack erupted in ragged cheers.