Andrew reached up and pulled a branch off a tree overhanging the stream so he could snap it into smaller and smaller pieces. “The rumors are true. I … lost myself, for a while. The last few surrendered. Even in Europe, no one could remember the last time someone had ignored a surrender. They surrendered and I killed them anyway and tore out their throats so Death couldn’t find their voices and they’d wander forever, denied their return to the Lady.” Andrew didn’t believe it now, couldn’t remember if he’d truly believed it then, but the words and fear came from his childhood. Wander forever, voiceless.
He dared a look over at Silver and something inside him sobbed. At the mention of the stolen voices she’d turned partly away, good hand pressed to her face. Andrew swallowed, dry and painful. “Silver, I’m sorry—”
“Death says—” Silver’s voice came out as cracked as his own felt. “Death says that we are foolish indeed if we believe that a Were’s true voice rests within a small patch of flesh and muscle.” She straightened her head and scrubbed tears from her eyes, voice gaining confidence. “They are with the Lady.”
Andrew wasn’t going to let himself off so easily. He hurled the remainder of the branch into the creek. The shallow water barely mustered a splash. “What it meant to the dead is beside the point. It’s the message I sent to the living that mattered. I tore out their throats and then burned the Barcelona hunting lands to the ground.”
He let a breath trickle out, but Silver didn’t say anything more, so finally he continued.
“Madrid tolerated me for Isabel’s sake, never liked me, and when I”—he swallowed—“went after Barcelona on my own, and did what I did, they disinvited me from their territory, and kept our daughter to raise themselves. I tried to get her back, I tried everything—but there wasn’t much I could do, one against many. I had to run to North America before they killed me, and no matter how many messages I’ve sent over the years, I know they’re not letting them through.”
Silver finally spoke after another stretching silence. “When Death speaks with people’s voices, he sometimes claims it is their souls, speaking through him, not simply his words in their voices. I think he lies. But—your wife says that she’s happier you weren’t there to die with her. That she understands you regret what you did after.”
“It would have been better if I’d been able to keep her from dying at all,” Andrew said. He’d heard all the possible forms of condolence before. Hundreds of times. She would have wanted him to move on. She would have wanted him to be happy. Well, he had moved on, and he was happy after a fashion, he supposed. It wasn’t anything he put much time into thinking about.
“Mortality is the gift that Death gave to the Were.” Silver smiled a little bitterly. “I have not been particularly grateful for it myself. But their voices tell me I could not have prevented anything that happened to my pack.”
“No, Silver.” Andrew put out a hand to squeeze her shoulder. “I saw your house. You couldn’t be expected to take down someone like that all by yourself.”
“
You
don’t believe that about what you couldn’t have prevented,” Silver said with a dark slash of humor. “Dirty hypocrite.”
“Do as I say, not as I do,” Andrew said. A slightly hysterical chuckle bubbled up and he turned back up the path out of the park and back to the house.
Silver sighed and took his hand gently as they climbed up the hill. “Death’s very much of the kill-or-cure school of thought—he kept feeding me information to throw at you, like getting it all into the open will help you somehow. After you, you know, finish bleeding from the great wounds it would create.”
She said it like Death had told her about Isabel before Andrew had, but Andrew supposed her unconscious was just assembling clues from Craig and John and everyone who’d referred to his reputation. Or maybe she’d heard the rumors herself before silver had taken her mind.
Silver laughed, the sound thin. “I’m not much of an advocate for facing up to things, in any case.”
“That’s just the silver.” Andrew squeezed her hand. Dammit, what did you say in this situation? No, you’re not stark raving nuts? Yes, you’re crazy, but it doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon, so you might as well get used to it? I’m sorry?
“No, it’s not.” Silver looked away from him. “Since you … purged it, I can feel things at the edges. Names. Memories. I’d have thought you’d be first to sense that I wasn’t trying very hard … Dare.”
She said the word with a twist of effort, like someone pulling a foreign word from deep in their memory and trying to get the pronunciation right on the first try. It was only then he realized that he’d never heard her use his name or anyone else’s before.
“Just because I push myself too hard doesn’t mean that I expect everyone else to. Leadership 101. Be aware of people’s abilities. Don’t push them past their limits.” He dropped her hand and slung his arm over her shoulders to squeeze her bad arm, reminding her that it still hadn’t healed. “We have time. Some, at least. I won’t pretend that your attacker’s name wouldn’t be more useful than mine—”
Every muscle in Silver’s body went rigid, but she made no other comment for several moments. The leaves they passed under made shadows flicker in the sunlight across her face. “Not yet.”
16
After he’d told his story, Silver let Dare get ahead on the walk back, giving him time alone. His wild self growled and snapped at the air as it followed at his heels. She’d hoped his story would help banish them, but while the voices had receded enough for her to see the new weight of being alpha resting heavy on his shoulders, they had not disappeared.
His need for space suited her in another way too. Lately, she’d noticed Dare looked worried any time she talked to Death. It made her head hurt trying to think about it, but she seemed to recall that it hadn’t bothered her once that Dare couldn’t see Death. Now it felt wrong. She knew Death was there, was real, as real as the Lady, and yet everyone looked past him. Now she had the chance to speak to Death alone.
“Now you know his secret,” Death said in the musical voice of Dare’s dead wife. “What do you think? Do you fear him, now?” Death chose another voice, harsh and filled with the bite of command over the accent. The beta Dare had killed, perhaps. “He could kill again, just as easily. Just as gruesomely.”
Silver plucked off a leaf and twirled it between her fingers. “I thought you liked him for that. You told me he wasn’t afraid of you.”
Death shook his head, puffing up his ruff, and bared his teeth in a laugh. “I meant because he sought me for himself, once upon a time.”
“All the more reason to trust him.” Silver slowed and looked where Dare had disappeared off into the trees. “He knows the worst of himself, and is vigilant to make sure it stays buried. Better that than to be surprised by it and unable to stop the worst from taking over.”
Death flopped onto his side, forelegs out straight in front. He had chosen the darkest patch of shadows in the forest, and it was hard to tell where his flank began or ended, though a flick of his tail broke it away from the blackness for a moment. “You’ll just have to hope he’ll hear the sound of his enemies approaching over the voices of his past.”
Silver growled. “He’s doing all this to catch
my
enemy. I think there’s no danger of that.” She tossed her leaf to the wind, but it only flopped to the ground, upside down. “Is he going to find anything? Now he’s alpha of my mother’s pack?”
“He’s not going to find what he expects.” Death turned his head to look off into the distance.
Silver couldn’t help but notice that it gave him an excuse to display his profile. She waited a moment to see if any more information was forthcoming and then sighed. “He’ll figure something out. He’s a clever man.”
“You could always do something yourself, rather than waiting, helpless. Find your monster before Dare finds him by noticing the monster’s teeth in his neck.” Death gave the last sentence a malicious twist.
“Stop it.” Silver pressed her hand to her face. “Please. I can’t.”
“So you keep saying.” Death turned his head back. “It’s no concern of mine when your warrior’s voice finds its way to me.”
“Dammit, Death!” Silver looked around for something to throw but couldn’t find anything. He would have ducked it anyway, she supposed. “Why are you still here?”
To her shock, Death looked uncomfortable, avoiding her eyes. After a brief pause, he whuffed a laugh like he wasn’t going to deign to answer the question.
* * *
Andrew had to remind himself not to knock on the Seattle pack house door. As the alpha, he could just let himself in. As they entered, John strode up to hold the door open formally, the muscles in his jaw tight. “Welcome back, Seattle. Your room’s ready.”
“Thank you.” Andrew dumped the shoulder bag he’d gotten from the car on the floor inside the door. The alpha didn’t carry his own luggage upstairs. He opened his mouth to ask about seeing people individually again, but stopped without Silver’s intervention this time. Protocol after a successful challenge was that the alpha parked himself—or herself—somewhere and let people come by at their own pace to pay their respects. Now he’d had time to breathe a little, following protocol seemed like a much better idea. Maybe he’d get something out of the informal conversations, and if not, people would trust him more later.
He leaned close to Silver as they headed for the dining room, John trailing awkwardly. Betas didn’t carry luggage either. “Think you can keep everyone calm and worried about the poor low-ranked wounded bird again?” he said, low-voiced.
“Of course.” Silver nodded to him and turned back to John, smile springing up. “Don’t worry, I promise to make sure he behaves.” Silver jerked on an imaginary leash near Andrew’s neck. Going along with the game, Andrew grabbed her wrist to immobilize the imaginary hold.
The playful mood vanished when Andrew saw John’s face. Forget his earlier tension. This was pure fury. Andrew dropped Silver’s wrist. “Lady’s light, man—”
“What have you been doing to her?” John stepped forward. “Is that why you wanted the power? So you could take advantage of her when no one could stop you? You’re sick.”
Silver got up in John’s face before the man could come any closer to Andrew. “He’s been doing nothing I haven’t invited. Or allowed. Or is your memory so bad that you can’t remember that I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself?”
“You weren’t the last time I checked.” John pushed her aside and launched himself at Andrew. Andrew stepped aside and used John’s movement to slam him into the wall, where he held him.
“Silver.” Andrew wrestled his voice under control to make it calming. He knew by now what a sore point her sanity was with her—and by the same token, how unlikely to win any argument based on it she would be. She was, after all, not entirely there. “He has a right to be protective.” Andrew wanted to convince John he wasn’t doing anything, not beat him into stewing silently, dammit.
“But she’s right; if I was taking advantage, you have to admit she’s at least more than lucid enough to tell you about it.” Andrew held John still until his muscles relaxed a little and it seemed like the words had gone in. He let go and stepped back.
Silver snorted, grumbled something inaudible, and subsided. The two men measured each other in silence for a few more moments. John put an arm around Silver’s shoulders, and Andrew gritted his teeth rather than react. Silver crossed her good arm across her chest and stood there like a sullen lump.
“Come on,” Andrew said to Silver. “Guess we might as well make ourselves at home.”
Andrew had never been on this side of the process before, but he remembered the change of alpha in his birth pack when he was about ten. Accordingly, he found himself a cup of coffee and a newspaper to pretend to read, and settled at the table.
Were drifted in and out on various pretexts. He spoke to most of them, collecting names and trying to pick up a detail or two about each. Most disappeared off on Sunday afternoon errands, still tense, but at least reassured he wasn’t about to start passing out beatings just yet. The longer it went on, the more Andrew had to bite back pointed questions about any strange Were who might have come through their territory. Soon this would be done, and he could get to the real work.
One woman came into the kitchen holding a shy three-year-old whose curls stood up every which way around his head. They both had the same redheaded complexion, tending more toward freckles in the mother, and hair so light as to seem translucent in the son. The knees of the boy’s pants were clean, but had a dingy patina that suggested more constant grubbing in the mud than a washing machine could fix.
It was probably time for the start of an early lunch, as the mother switched her son to the other hip to have a hand free for getting an apple from the fridge. The movement dislodged his toy puppy, stuffed between him and his mother. He whined, reaching after it. The woman sighed, bent to retrieve it, and returned it to him. He dropped it again a minute later.
Andrew stood and picked up the puppy himself before the woman was forced to bend down once more. It was really a bean-filled husky, not a wolf, but it looked as thoroughly disreputable as Andrew remembered his childhood puppy being, nearly half a century ago.
“What do you say to the alpha?” the woman prompted the boy. She set him down, obviously intending him to walk forward and claim the puppy himself while offering his thank-you. Good for her. She was raising him right in pack behavior. The boy refused, however, and grabbed his mother’s leg and hid his face behind it. No real surprise, since the alpha he needed to show respect to wouldn’t usually be a stranger.
“What’s your puppy’s name?” Andrew bent to hold out the toy to the boy. The boy peeked out, then hid his face again more definitively. Andrew’s heart clenched for a moment as that peek set off a burst of memories of his daughter, but he pushed them away again. The intervening years had washed them out, anyway.
“I have to cut up your apple, sweetie.” The woman reached down and tried to pry off little fingers, but he just switched his grip to a different place on her jeans. Andrew sighed and straightened. Apparently he frightened even small children. Lovely.