Alpha (22 page)

She clung to me, sobbing, and her tears soaked through the shoulder of my wrinkled blouse.

“Mom…” I glanced at Michael over her shoulder, but
he only shrugged and leaned against the door facing. His glasses sat crooked on his nose, his hair stood up funny on one side, like he'd been sleeping on it, and his eyes were ringed in dark, dark circles.

“Mom…” I tried again, and this time held her at arm's length so she'd have to look at me.

My mother looked like hell. Her slacks were wrinkled, her blouse was stained with coffee, and her straight, chin-length gray hair was tangled like she'd tried to pull it out a handful at a time. Her face was red and swollen from crying, and her gaze searched mine desperately when she stared back at me. “Is it true?”

“I'm sorry. Mom, I'm so, so sorry.” I blinked through fresh tears and pushed hair back from her face, trying to find some semblance of the mother I knew. She was in there somewhere, buried beneath soul-shredding grief and denial.

“I want to see him. Bring him in—I need to see him.”

“No, Mom, you don't want to…”

“Katherine Faythe Sanders, you will not argue with me.” She stood up straight and tugged her blouse into place, as if that would restore her usually flawless composure and appearance. “He's my husband, and I want to see him.”

“Okay, Mom…” Michael stepped forward to put his arm around her and led us both away from the door so the guys could bring the bags in. “But we can't bring him inside.” He looked at me then, his expression half exhaustion, half apology. “Holly's here. She thinks it was a car wreck, so the gunshot wound is going to be hard to explain.”

Great
. I had to unclench my jaw to speak. “What the hell is she doing here?”

“She's trying to help,” Michael snapped, while our mother stared at the van, silent tears rolling down her cheeks. “What was I supposed to do, tell her she wasn't welcome at my father's funeral?”

“You're right. I'm sorry.” I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep breath before making eye contact again. “It's just that this is a colossally bad time to have a human wandering around the ranch.”

He sighed. “I know.”

But he didn't really know. I hadn't told any of them about Malone's threat to replace me as Alpha, because I wanted to deliver the extrabad news in person, so I'd only have to say it once.

“I need to talk to you. I need to talk to everyone who isn't Holly, actually. In the office. It's…it's bad, Michael.”

He held my gaze for a moment, apparently trying to judge our placement on the disaster scale by my expression alone. Then he nodded and left our mother with me while he went to gather the rest of the household.

“Mom?” I said, and she turned away from the van to look at me. The tears had stopped and she'd composed herself. Now she just looked exhausted, and wrung out, and…
old
. “I need to talk to you, and it's important. Are you… Are you going to be able to listen?”
And understand…?
Because I knew as well as anyone what havoc grief could play on a person's comprehension.

“I'll be fine once I've seen him. I just… I have to see for myself.”

“Okay. If you're sure.”

She nodded and crossed her arms over her wrinkled blouse. “I'm sure.”

“Just a minute.” I jogged down the steps and met Marc by the van. “Hey, could you guys drive to the barn and lay him out in there? Mom wants to see him, and I can't talk her out of it.” And honestly, the sooner she saw him, the sooner she could start to accept his death.

“No problem.” Marc slid in behind the wheel while Vic climbed into the passenger seat, and they headed for the barn in the east field.

My mother started down the steps to follow them, but I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Mom.” I looked pointedly at her bare feet, and she followed my gaze. “Shoes.”

She nodded absently and headed into the house, brushing past Jace on his way out.

“How you holdin' up?” he asked, and I let him fold me into a hug. A chaste, comforting hug, with my cheek on his shoulder, because we hadn't told those who'd missed the floor show in Montana about our relationship yet.

“My head's spinning, and there's a little nausea,” I admitted softly. “There's so much to do. So much to say. It's too much all at once, for them and for me. And I honestly have no idea where to begin.”

“Start with your mom,” Jace suggested. “She needs you, and she shouldn't have to hear about all of this with everyone else there.” I nodded, and he pulled away so he could see my face. “And as much as I hate to say it, maybe the part about you and me shouldn't be a broadcast announcement. It's not really anyone else's business, and they have more important things to focus on right now.”

I scrounged up a smile. “Mr. Hammond, I believe you're getting wise in your advanced age.”

He chuckled softly. “Twenty-six doesn't feel as young today as it did last month.”

“Neither does twenty-three and three-quarters.”

“Faythe?” my mother called, and we both looked up, startled. I stepped away from Jace and realized that if we hadn't looked suspicious before, we did then.

Smooth.
So much for not telling anyone yet…

“Are you ready?” I asked, and she nodded. “I'll go with you. Jace, could you check on Kaci? Tell her I'll be there in a minute?”

He nodded and ducked into the house, pushing the door closed behind him.

My mother and I walked in silence for almost a minute, our shoes crunching first on gravel, then on the frozen, well-worn path through the east field. The main house lay behind us, long and squat, a one-story ranch house my father had designed before I was born. The barn stood ahead, much older than the house and picturesque with its peeling red paint and tall gables. I'd lived most of my life in and around those two buildings, but I'd never once imagined myself living there without my father.

I hadn't even been in the house yet, but already home didn't feel entirely like home without him. I felt like I was playing pretend, or like I'd wake up any moment from a nightmare.

“So…you and Jace?” my mother said, and I froze, then had to jog to catch up with her.

“Was it that obvious?”

“Subtlety was never your strong suit, Faythe.” She stopped to look at me, and I searched her eyes for
disapproval or reproach, but I found nothing I recognized, other than the fact that she was searching for something in my eyes, too. “You love him.” It wasn't a question; it was a statement uttered with the confidence of long-held authority on the subject.

“Yeah. But we don't have to talk about this now. It's not really the time….”

“Faythe, there's never going to be a good time for this discussion, and I think you know that.”

I nodded. Whether because she had advice to offer or because she wanted to distract herself from a reality she soon wouldn't be able to avoid, she obviously wanted to talk about my screwed-up love life. And I would have done anything she wanted in that moment, if it would help her deal with our mutual loss.

“What about Marc?”

I sighed and absently kicked a rock at my feet. “I still love Marc so much it hurts to turn around and not see him next to me. Jace is something…different. Something separate, but
strong.
”

My mother frowned, then finally nodded. “You have to choose.”

Why does everyone keep saying that?
“I know.”

“Marc is Alpha material, Faythe, and if Jace ever starts to show any Alpha tendencies…this could get very bad.”

“He already has tendencies,” I said, and she nodded again, as if I'd just confirmed her suspicion. “How did you know?”

“I knew because I know you. You're strong, Faythe. Too strong for most toms. Most tomcats will either expect you to obey them, because you're a woman, or to lead them, because you're an Alpha now. But you're
only ever going to love men who will be led by you, yet can hold their own with you. Men who challenge you.”

I shook my head hesitantly. “But Jace doesn't challenge me.” Not yet, anyway…

Her sad smile spoke volumes, and her eyes seemed to peer right into my head, and maybe my heart. “Yes, he does, or you wouldn't be interested in him. My guess is that he challenges you to be true to yourself. That he dares you to take risks you're secretly dying to take, and to feel things you're afraid to let yourself feel.” She closed her eyes, and when they opened again, they shined with aching wistfulness, and some spark of excitement I couldn't comprehend. “He makes you feel alive, doesn't he? Like the entire world is one dangling live wire, just waiting for you to grab on and ride the current.”

I stared at her like she'd suddenly started speaking Russian—and I understood it. “How on earth do you know that?”

Her smile grew wistful with distant memory. “I know because your father was my live wire.”

T
he barn doors were closed, and knowing my father's body lay beyond them made his death feel somehow even more real—more devastating—than when I'd witnessed his last breath.

“Mom, you don't have to do this.” I slid one arm around her shoulders while we stared at the doors, neither of us moving to open them.

“Yes, I do.” She swallowed thickly, and that spark of memory—my father as her live wire—was gone, replaced with pain and dread so thick and heavy I could practically taste them on the air. “If I don't see him, I'm never going to really believe it, because he's alive in here.” She laid one trembling, gloveless hand over her chest. “He's so alive inside me that I can still hear him.”

“What is he saying?” I asked, as her face blurred beneath my tears. I'd failed her more than anyone.

“He's calling me a coward.” Her voice broke on the last word, and she sniffled in the cold, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes suddenly more defined than I'd ever seen them.

“No, Mom, he would never call you a coward.” Not even if it were true. He would never intentionally hurt her, and he'd never forgive himself for doing it unintentionally. “You're hearing yourself.” She was the source of my frank tongue, if not the coarse language that often fell from it.

“I know.” She sniffed again and stood straighter. “But it sounds like him. He's daring me to go in there and deal with this, so I can come out stronger and ready to do what has to be done. The funeral and the packing.” She faced me then, eyes wide with real horror. “Faythe, I don't think I can pack up his things.”

“Then don't. Who says you have to?” I tried to smile, but the best I could manage was a not-frown. “There are no rules, Mom. There's no grief timeline.” Other than the five-day Alpha deadline I still hadn't told her about.

“You're right.” She took a long, deep breath, then turned back to the barn. “I'm ready.”

We went in through the normal-size side door, and my mother froze two feet into the barn. Marc stood beside a platform made of leftover hay bales, upon which a dark blanket covered my father's still form. I wasn't sure where they'd found the blanket, but I was grateful. It felt much less cold and sterile than sheet plastic.

When my mother finally approached, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs, he folded the top of the blanket back to my father's neck. I tried not to look, but I couldn't stop myself.

I'd seen a lot of death, of both friends and enemies, but seeing it on my father was an entirely different experience. His face had grayed since I'd last seen it, and
he no longer looked alive enough for me to pretend he was only sleeping.

My mother shrugged out from under my arm and approached him slowly. Marc backed away to give her some privacy, and we joined Vic near the first long-empty horse stall, where he stared down at his own worn black hiking boots. His face was red, his eyes swollen.

Marc looked much the same. I wrapped my arms around him for a moment, then twisted in his hold to press my back against his chest.

My mom dropped onto her knees on the dirty barn floor. She put one hand on my father's cold chest and pressed the other against her own mouth, like she could stop the whole thing from being real if she could only hold back the words.

But she couldn't.

I didn't hear what she whispered, and I didn't want to. Some things are private. Some things needed to be said, even when the person who needed to hear them couldn't hear anything. Ever again.

Thoughts ran through my head so fast I couldn't truly focus on any of them. So much to be done. So little I knew how to do. So very much pain I didn't have time to deal with.

The funeral. The fight. Planning for both. Maybe I could funnel my anger over the necessity of burying my father into the plot to assassinate Malone and ruthlessly gut my father's murderer. You know, two birds, one big, bloody stone? That's an efficient use of anger motivation, right?

And Kaci. Somehow I'd have to find a way to talk to her about the fact that she'd just lost someone else.
The man who had taken her in and protected her with everything he had—including his youngest son's life—after she'd lost her own family. Kaci couldn't take much more loss, and I couldn't in good conscience tell her that my father's death would be the last.

Chances were good that we would lose someone else. Maybe several someones.

No.
I went stiff in Marc's grip, and his arms tightened around me, wordlessly comforting me even though he didn't understand what had upset me.

Planning the fight was one thing, but anticipating the tragic outcome was another entirely. I couldn't think about who those potential casualties might be. Except for me. One of them might be me, and then what would happen to the Pride when I was gone?

“It doesn't feel like thirty-three years,” my mother said, and I looked up from my own thoughts to see her still kneeling, still facing my father, but obviously speaking to us. “I would never have thought three decades could possibly feel so fleeting, but it feels like I slid my hand into his last week and promised to love him forever. And I've never regretted a single moment of it. Not even when he left the bathroom light on or when he fell asleep at his desk at two in the morning.”

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to stop my silent tears, or how best to dry hers.

“We used to run together, you know. Just the two of us, out in the woods, euphoric over the wind, and the smells, and each other. We never needed anything else, but we were blessed with so very much more.” She twisted to look at me then, and the pain etched into her face brought me to my knees, the ache in my heart an endless, nameless oblivion.

Marc let me go and I crossed the floor toward her.

“We were blessed with you, and with your brothers. As you grew up, I felt so helpless, like I could do little more than watch as you became your own people, all five of you. It was like witnessing a miracle, and it happened so
quickly.
One day we were fascinated by how tiny Michael's newborn feet were in those little booties, and the next, you took off for college without a backward glance. I don't know where the time went, but I spent it all with him, and it slipped away so fast.”

I sat next to her on the floor, the straw scratching my back through my shirt, and pressed as close to my mother as I could get. Touch was the only comfort I knew how to give; words had abandoned me entirely.

“I don't know how to live now, Faythe,” she whispered. “They say you never know what you have until it's gone, but I knew. I knew every moment, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do now, with him gone.”

“You still have us,” I said, well aware that we weren't enough. Having grown children wasn't the same as having the love of your life. The other half of your own soul. But I had nothing else to offer her.

Except his last words.

“He gave me a message for you,” I said, and she turned to face me, her blue eyes red with tears and wide with hope. “He said to tell you that you're his whole life, and have been since the moment he met you. He said that you're in his heart, and in his soul, and even death will never really separate you.”

And I believed it. If any love could transcend both time and life, it would be my parents' love.

My mother sobbed again, but this time she was
smiling, and I was glad I'd saved his message for that moment. When she truly needed it.

She sat there for several minutes, thinking. Probably remembering. Then she blinked and gave her head a little shake, and I knew she was back in the present. “We have to bury him. I have to call people…”

How could I possibly tell her that we couldn't do that? That we'd have to bury him like a criminal in the night, to keep the political fallout from making everything impossibly worse?

“I haven't even told Rick yet.”

“He knows,” I whispered.

She looked startled for a moment, then she nodded. “Of course he knows. He was there. I should have been there.”

No, she shouldn't have.

“Mom…we have to talk about the rest of this. About what else happened.”

She looked up, and I was relieved to see clarity in her eyes, even if her hand still stroked his arm, unmoving on the bale of hay. “He named you, I know.” She looked suddenly worried. “That was always his plan, but it happened so soon….”

“Yes. He left me in charge of the Pride, but, Mom, the council won't recognize me, and if we don't have an ‘acceptable' Alpha by Saturday, Malone's going to try to place one of his own choosing.”

My mother's eyes flashed with fury, and her entire form went stiff. “He'll have to kill me to do it.”

“Us, too,” Marc said, and Vic nodded.

But actually, he only had to kill
me
.

“Faythe?” Owen said, and I looked up to see him standing in the doorway with Parker. Owen held his
worn cowboy hat over his chest, and as I stood, his gaze slid past me to the bales of hay where our father lay. He stepped forward, and I helped my mother to her feet, then went to meet my brother.

Owen's arms slid around me along with the scents of clean sweat and earth. There wasn't much farmwork to do on an animal-free ranch in February, but the telling scents clung to his hat and his boots, triggering a warm, familiar comfort I wouldn't find anywhere else, now that Ethan was gone.

But comfort could only do so much.

“I should have been there,” he said into my hair, his chin stubble scratching my forehead.

“There's nothing you could have done.” But I couldn't tell myself the same thing. I'd seen it coming. I'd seen Dean aiming his gun, and I hadn't moved fast enough. I couldn't. “We can't fight bullets.” But we could rip off the hands holding the guns.

“Mom's taking it hard,”

“I know. We all are.” My father's death was shock and devastation like none of us had ever felt. It changed everything. We were hacking a new path through virgin territory without him, and the backlash of branches had already left me bruised. “We'll get through it—with a healthy dose of ass kicking disguised as therapy.”

“Speaking of which…” Owen let me go and stepped back, gesturing for Parker to come forward.

Parker held out his arms for a hug, and I tried to ignore the fact that he smelled like whiskey. Like a
lot
of whiskey. “I'm so sorry, Faythe,” he said, when he let me go, running one hand through graying hair that suddenly seemed to be more salt than pepper.

Over his shoulder, I saw Owen wrap one arm
around our mother while they shared a private, silent viewing.

Parker cleared his throat and glanced at his feet before looking up again. “You saw my dad? How was he?”

I sighed and resisted the urge to avoid his eyes. Delivering bad news was definitely my least favorite part of the job so far. “Well, let's just say he is not my biggest fan. In fact, he may be the charter member of the ‘Faythe must die a slow and messy death' club.”

Parker cringed. “That bad?”

“He called me a disgrace and a whore.”

“Why would he call you a whore?” Owen asked, twisting to face us without letting go of our mother.

“What, the disgrace part doesn't surprise you?” I forced a grin to let him know I was kidding—and to avoid answering his question. Behind him, Marc stiffened and crossed his arms over his chest.

Parker frowned, too distracted by his personal problems to even process Owen's question. “I just… I'm so sorry for how my dad treated you. How he's probably going to treat us all.”

I shook my head and stared up at him, trying to convey import with my gaze alone. “It's not your responsibility to apologize for your father. None of this is your fault.”

“Knowing that doesn't lessen the guilt.”

“I know.” Jace felt the same way about his stepfather's leading role in the effort to take over our Pride, and I had similar feelings about both my brother's and father's deaths. Guilt was the least rational emotion I'd ever experienced—and the most difficult to overcome.

“Hey, Brian said we missed the formal swearing,
so—” Parker shrugged, and at his words, Owen and my mother turned toward us “—we're ready to make up for lost time.”

Owen forced a sad smile, one hand curling the rim of his dusty brown hat. “I think the only good thing to come out of this whole thing is the fact that my sister is now the first female Alpha in werecat history. Disgraced or not.”

“She was already working hard on infamy, so I'm not sure this really makes that much difference,” Marc quipped.

My mother frowned. “It makes all the difference in the world.” Her warm, thin hand slipped into mine. “I'm proud of you, Faythe. Your father would be, too.”

I blinked back more tears. How long would it be before we could talk about him without crying?

“I can't… I don't think I can be what he was.” I swallowed thickly, and her hand squeezed mine. “At least, not yet. But Marc and Uncle Rick promised to serve as advisers, and I was hoping you would, too, when things settle down a little.”

She actually managed a half smile at that. “I'm even prouder of you now.”

 

“So, no one can come to the funeral?” Owen said, and I nodded, leaning over the back of my father's armchair. I couldn't bring myself to actually sit in it, but I had to assume some physical position of authority. It was expected. Sometimes people recognize leaders based on subconscious clues, and standing near my father's traditional seat of authority was the simplest, most seamless way I knew to reinforce the idea of me as his successor.

But since Owen and Parker had sworn their loyalty and no one present had questioned my authority yet, I couldn't help wondering if I was really trying to convince myself.