Werewolf Wedding (16 page)

A howl in the distance pricked Jake’s ears. There were normal wolves in these woods too, but the call he heard was different from those. It was louder, more powerful, lower-toned.

And past that, he recognized the voice.

Dane
.

The name slid through his chest like cold venom, paralyzing the blood in his heart. He didn’t hate his brother, as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t hate him. He knew him too well, knew his life too well.

Another voice joined his brother’s – this one he didn’t know. Jake shook his head and kept running, kept filling his lungs with cold night air, kept letting his thoughts wander.

The wolf voices were distant. Miles away, probably, and their calling at night was nothing surprising or strange. It’s what wolves did; it’s what nature demanded of them, even if in so many other ways, they had long ago abandoned their wild, fierce selves.

I should go to him
, Jake thought.
If I do, I can threaten him, beat him, make him relent. He might be crazy, but I know how to fight.

The thought of crunching a fist into his brother’s nose, or swiping a paw across his chest gave Jake a warm, comfortable feeling – and that worried him. He was becoming what he feared, what he hated most about his brother. He couldn’t give in to those animal urges, not if he wanted to keep the pack from chaos, and not if he wanted to keep Delilah from descending straight into madness with him.

I can’t fall into that, not again. I’ve been there once. It took a long time to claw my way back out. I can’t, not again, not with her in it this time. Before it was just wolf business, just pack bullshit. With my mate on the line, I won’t do it again. I have to be a leader. I have to keep myself in check.

Something rushed past him in the darkness, whipping Jake’s fur with the tailwind it created. Shortly, two other unseen things rushed past. He caught a scent, but it couldn’t be – not with his brother howling in the distance.

The next rush wasn’t of something going past, it was of something ramming straight into his ribs.

White hot pain shot through Jake’s body as he collapsed to the side. He skidded a few feet through the leaves before he managed to catch the leaves beneath himself with his claws and flip back to his feet. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs.

Six eyes, four of them pale yellow and one of them dark, stormy blue, glared back at him.

Dane was taller than Jake by a few inches, and broader across the chest. They shared the same silvery-gray fur, but the look in Dane’s eyes was wild as he looked back and forth in the darkness. His two goons were dirty looking, their eyes squinty and close together.

“I won,” Dane hissed. His voice was rough and sand papery. The sound stung Jake’s ears an instant before Dane’s heft slammed into his side again. “I can’t believe throwing my voice fooled you.”

Jake, dazed and with a swimming head, fell to his back, his shoulders pinned hard to the soft, spongy ground below. Something dug into his side, which he realized was the mouth of one of Dane’s idiotic looking goons.

“Takes three of you to hold me down,” Jake hissed. “I guess you can call that winning.”

“I call whatever gets me to come out on top ‘winning’, brother. Maybe you should start to think the same way.”

Jake shook his body, trying to free himself from the weight of the wolves on top of him. “No!” he shouted. “That’s not what this is about, Dane. This is about the pack, it’s about what’s right!”

Dane snorted right into Jake’s face. “What’s right is what the strongest decides is right. How have you stayed alive this long in this world and not figured that out? How is it that the pack is willing to trust someone as limp and weak and pitiful as you with their safety?”

Jake snapped his jaws at his brother’s face when he drew nearer, but Dane was just out of reach.

“See?” Dane said, in a drawling, taunting tone. “Even you, even the stoic, peaceful Jake resorts to violence when he thinks it’ll work. I’m just wasting my time. It doesn’t matter anyway. I have her, Jake. I have your precious little Delilah. And she’s
mine
.”

Rage coursed through Jake’s body. He went tight with a spasm, and shook so violently he managed to shrug off Dane’s two goons, and get out from under his brother. “What do you mean?” he hissed, though all Dane had done was confirm his fears, he still couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“You heard me,” Dane answered, growling. “And it’s too late for you. I already claimed her. She accepted.”

Jake snapped again, but Dane pulled away, a grin curling his lupine lips as he danced away. “That’s what you do, brother, you lose. It’s your nature. Losers, you know, they always lose.”

––––––––

“W
hat have you done?”

There was an old woman talking to Dane, who I didn’t recognize. And really, she wasn’t that old, I just have a tilted perspective. Actually,
all
of my perspectives were tilted then. I could hardly keep my feet under myself for more than a few minutes. Every so often my equilibrium would go all squiggly and I would have to brace myself against something. Eating was difficult, and riding in a car wasn’t very fun.

When thoughts
did
come, they were confused and weird and usually about Jake. I missed him so badly I can’t even explain it. I’ve missed plenty of people – my grandma when I was a kid and left her house after staying the weekend or my parents when I went off to college – but this was different. This was intensely physical, like it wasn’t just my heart and my mind that missed him, but my entire
body
ached for him.

I wasn’t entirely sure what he was giving me, but whatever it was kept me in a daze.

I shook my head, to clear the cobwebs. Dane was laughing at the woman who I’d come to realize was his stepmother. I hated the way he was mocking her with every word he spoke almost as much as I hated what he’d done to me. Every word out of his mouth just dripped with venom and bile and hate, which didn’t make much sense because this woman was really friendly, and had made enchiladas.

“Dane!” she snapped. “Don’t you understand what you’re doing? You trapped that woman! That’s not a mate, that’s a slave!”

“Eh,” he shrugged, smiling as I involuntarily fed him a tortilla chip. “Ten of one, dozen of another.”

She cocked her head slightly, apparently just as confused as I was. “Don’t you mean—?”

“Shut up,” Dane snapped at me. “No one asked you to talk. Get more guacamole on the next one.”

“You’re insane,” the woman said flatly. She had told me her name, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember it. My entire being was shaky, like I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged – this world or a different one. Along with the equilibrium problem, my memory came and went. Sometimes I remembered things just as I always had, but other times I could hardly recall my own name, or where I lived. Although I guess that didn’t much matter since Dane had taken me to the place he called home, which was little more than a shanty outside of town.

“You’re a lunatic, and you’re going to kill this poor girl and drag us all down with you. All for what? To placate your nonsensical need for fighting and battle and blood?”

“No,
mother
,” Dane hissed the word, which made me hate him more. I dropped the guacamole-covered chip in his lap. With how clumsy I’d become it could pass for an accident, but... well, sad to say that’s what had become of my ability to rebel. “It has nothing to do with that. Well,” he paused for a second. “Okay, there is a bit of that. But why can’t you see what dad believed I was capable of doing? We used to be kings of the world, us lycans. And now we hide in the shadows, sulking around at night and happy that no one knows we exist because it avoids trouble.”

“It’s
peace
, Dane,” she said. “When lycans were kings there wasn’t a day that went by without some overly brave human hunting one of us down and using the skin for a cloak. There wasn’t a week that passed without a clan war either almost starting or actually erupting.”

The smile across my awful mate’s face told me that he was well aware of all that.

“That’s the way it was supposed to be,” he said. “Dad knew that. He trusted me.”

“No, he didn’t!” she got up in his face the way only a mother can. One hand was wrapped in an apron emblazoned with wolf paw prints that were all signed with grandchildren’s names, and the other was stuck right in the center of her enormous stepson’s chest. “Do you somehow not remember why you left? Is it possible you’re
that
insane?”

Dane stood up, looming over the old woman, but she didn’t back away a single centimeter.
I want to be like her when I grow up.
She stared right back at his face, her eyes burning with anger, but her voice calm and soft. “Then tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

There it is,
I thought.
The chink in this idiot’s armor
.

Dane tightened his jaws until his head was trembling. He clenched his white-knuckled fists, and his entire body shook with rage. He looked like a water balloon filled past the point where it can hold the water, ready to explode. But instead of popping, he drove his hands down to his sides and grunted like a kid throwing a tantrum.

“Right,” she said, as he backed down. “You remember. You remember him telling you that even though you were his first son, and he thought you probably
could
start another clan war, that he’d rather the entire pack wither to nothing? That all sound familiar.”

“Dad was an idiot,” Dane growled. “He didn’t understand either. He had no honor, no pride. He’s just like my spineless brother.”

That
got him a slap across the face hard enough to turn his massive head. On his face was an absolutely priceless look of surprise and horror. “You will not talk that way about the alpha of this pack in my house.”

Damn
, I thought, scooping up another wad of guacamole on a chip. For a moment I just stood there, holding the chip outstretched, and then I decided to once again exert my will by eating it.
That’s... good God that’s good guac.

“He lost the challenge,” Dane said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The only reason you call him alpha is that he’s your son. He’s nothing to anyone who matters.”

“Oh, and who is that? You mean that gaggle of old drunks led by your uncle Norton who acts like your own personal army of simple-minded thugs? That’s very frightening, Dane. I’m sure the
real
alpha, the one who didn’t have to trick sweet Delilah here into wanting to be his mate, is shaking in his boots.”

Every time she jabbed at his pride, or insulted his authority, Dane got more unhinged. At first I noticed beads of sweat on his upper arms and then that the hair on the back of his head was wet with moisture. The fact that his entire head was red wasn’t lost on me either, no matter how fragile my mental state may have been.

She was advancing then, gray curls bouncing with every jab of her fingertip. Dane was backing away, though he was gnashing his teeth and breathing really heavily to cover that he was being intimidated by a woman about a third his size.

“You,” she continued, backing him into the counter where the enchiladas were cooling, “you’re the one with no honor, no pride. What you take for dignity is just arrogance, just hubris. What you think is the honor of being a member of this pack is just a game.”

She took another step further. “You know what the difference between you and one of my four year old grandcubs who likes to play army is?”

A look of self-satisfaction came over Dane’s face, and he had just opened his mouth when she said, “Nothing, except they’re too young to know better.”

“God
damn
that was a burn,” I heard myself say, in the instant before I realized I was saying it. Immediately I clapped my hand over my mouth and hoped for a brief second that maybe I’d just had one of my confused spells and hadn’t actually said that.

“Thank you dear,” she said, with a benevolent, grandmotherly smile. “I thought it was quite sharp myself. Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes. I want you to stay in here with me. Dane can go enjoy himself somewhere else.”

My mate was growling, but he wasn’t saying anything. Big, obnoxious, over-confident Dane had been thoroughly put in his place. He knew better than open his mouth again, because almost certainly he wouldn’t come out looking any better for it.

“She comes with me,” Dane snarled. “She’s my mate.”

He snatched my arm, yanking me almost off my feet after him.

“No, she does not,” the woman said in that voice of calm, quiet, absolute command. “She stays right here, because I need to get to know my daughter-in-law. Is that clear?”

I looked in her direction and she gave me an almost imperceptible nod of her head. Obediently, Dane dropped my arm and shook his head, muttering a curse. “I’ll be at my house. She knows the way, get her a cab.”

He turned and tromped away, through a house full of laughing guests. His little posse, including drunk uncle Norton, gathered around the big man for a moment, and shot plenty of nasty glances back at us.

“I’m Greta,” she said. “In case either I forgot to mention it, or whatever he’s drugging you with is still fiddling around with your brains and you forgot.”

“The... what?” I asked, taken aback. “I... I’m sorry for being so rude. I’m Delilah Coltrane, I’m not sure what’s going on with my mind lately, but—”

“I’ll explain everything. And I know who you are already – my other son – the one I don’t wish would go get lost and never come back, told me all about you. Never seen him lose his mind quite like he did for you. That’s... quite a feat.”

*

I
t left me shaking.

Just an hour of simple conversation, something I went through at least a hundred times a week, left me actually trembling.

“I had no idea,” I said, trying to find something to play with to keep my hands from shaking like a two-day dry alcoholic. “I really,” involuntarily my throat closed in something similar to a swallow, but that had so little saliva involved that my tongue just stuck to the roof of my mouth. Greta sipped her tea, a faint smile on her lips.