“Now who’s ‘Kitten’?” I murmured, and although the low, grumbly sound he made was decidedly feline, it was still sarcastic.
“All right, children. Let’s get ready for showtime. Breckenridge, take care of Merit.” He lifted his gaze to me. “You’ll be a soldier, a warrior, someday, when you’re ready. That’s the legacy of you and yours. You nicked me, even without your steel. But he is my brother. This is my fight, my family’s fight, so I’m asking you to defer.”
“You don’t want my help?”
Gabe barked out a laugh. “I’m Apex, and he’s kin. This is the natural order of things, the way our world operates. There’s nothing you can do but get hurt, and get Sullivan pissed at me. In the event I survive this, I sure would like to avoid that.”
My heart stuttered, but I was smart enough to take his advice, at least until honor required me to intervene. I looked around the room and decided on a table that sat in one corner, the stack of cards from the poker game atop it. I crawled beneath it—a vampire hiding from a fight. Sure, it was a little humiliating, but I, too, was hoping to walk out alive.
Nick followed me, then turned and arranged his haunches on the floor, putting himself between me and the door—a few hundred pounds of now-feline shifter between me and whatever hell was about to break loose.
Gabriel began the methodical process of stripping off his own clothes, the muscles of his body taut beneath them. When he was done and stood naked before the door, he crossed his arms, and we waited.
When Adam finally pushed open the door to the back room, there was shock in his expression.
I decided not to take it as a compliment that he was surprised I was still alive.
“What—happened in here?” he asked haltingly. He was scrambling, I imagined, to analyze the situation, to figure out whether there was a way to salvage the script he’d developed or whether he needed to write a new ending.
“I’m still alive,” Gabriel pointed out. “Nick is also still alive, as is Merit. Everybody wave.”
I skipped the wave, but offered up a lip-curling snarl, which I directed at the boy who’d led me right into a trap—a trap he’d created.
“So just give me the basic refresher,” Gabriel said. “The point was, what, to take out Tony, frame him for the attack on the bar, and have me assassinated? And when that didn’t work, you decide to take me out yourself, take out Merit, frame her for my murder, and assume control of the Pack?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “And when that’s all said and done, what? You take on the Houses and lead the Packs into genocidal glory?”
Adam’s features hardened, his lips pulling into a thin line. And then his eyes darkened, and he stepped onto his soap box. “And what have you done for us?
We have meetings, while vampires are treated like celebrities. They control the spin. We’re part of this world—one with this world, like nothing else in existence—but we act like children running behind their mothers’ skirts!”
I had to admit, that speech wasn’t exactly hard to come by these days. Although the shifters at the convocation hadn’t made it, Celina and her cronies had. It was the same argument made by vampires who wanted power in the human world. I’d heard Celina say it, and two weeks ago I’d heard Peter Spencer make the same argument.
“The Pack acts like the Pack,” Gabriel countered. “We do not exist to control the fates of humans or vampires. We control our fate, and that’s enough.”
“Not when we could do more.”
Being supernatural was clearly no immunity against the weaknesses of the ego.
“Leading this Pack is not about power,” Gabriel earnestly said, as if we’d been thinking the same thing. “It’s not about ego or wearing the mantle of leadership.”
“I think Dad would have disagreed.”
A pulse of chilling magic filled the air; I guessed Gabriel hadn’t been thrilled about Adam’s bringing their father into it.
“Dad is no longer here. I speak for the Pack now.”
Adam rolled his eyes. “You hardly speak at all, and that’s exactly my point, brother. We both know why I’m here. Let’s get it over with. I have things to do.”
The pressure in the room suddenly changed, as if the force of the magic they both brought to bear had altered the atmosphere, and that difference was enough to make my ears ache. And then they shifted.
The light was brighter than it had been when Nick transformed, maybe because Gabriel was an Apex, and Adam shared some of those genetics. Nick let out a low growl and bumped back closer to me, until his back haunch hit my knees. I’m not sure if the move was made to protect me, or because he was as nervous as I was. Too curious to resist, I reached out a hand and stroked his flank, which felt like thick velvet stretched over taut muscle. He flinched at the contact, but settled into it soon enough.
The mist rose again, surrounding Adam and Gabe, and then sank as they shifted, Adam’s clothing apparently evaporating with the force of the magic.
They were enormous, and our intel had been correct. They were wolves, both of them, and huge. They were easily bigger than Nick, and both had thick, steel gray fur and pale green eyes. Their bodies were almost barrel-like, their muzzles pointy, their ears flat against their heads as they prepared to battle.
Adam was a little smaller than Gabriel, maybe because he was younger. He also had a white mark on his left shoulder, which was otherwise the only way to tell them apart as they moved.
And move they did. They made their first strike simultaneously, both of them standing on back legs to swipe at each other with their front paws. Their jaws were bared, lips pulled back to reveal thick white teeth. They jumped for a moment before hitting all four legs again, Adam in a lower position—maybe a recognition of his submissiveness to Gabriel—before apparently deciding that the time had passed for that submissiveness. With a high, keening cry, he pounced, teeth and claws at Gabriel’s shoulders.
Gabriel scrambled to recover, but not before blood was seeping from a wound at his shoulder. He let out a high-pitched cry that made me clamp my hands over my ears, before the whine turned to a canine-bearing growl. He rolled, taking Adam with him, then kicked Adam with enough force to propel him across the room.
And as if the sights and sounds weren’t enough, each time they lunged, they sent a pulse of magic into the air that made it hard to suck in oxygen. My senses, already on edge, were nearly overwhelmed. This wasn’t just two wolves play-fighting to assert their dominance. This was a battle of magical forces—powerful magical forces—for control over the Pack and its members . . . and the future of shifters. Gabriel represented the status quo; Adam represented a much, much different future.
Adam stood up again, shook off the force of the impact, and, with tail high, hackles raised, and ears flat, attacked. He tried to best Gabriel again, blood-tipped teeth snapping at the larger wolf’s muzzle, but Gabriel wouldn’t give in. He scrambled to loose Adam from his hold, then made his own move for dominance, pinning Adam to the ground and snapping at Adam’s snout. Adam yipped in pain, the sound more like that of a puppy than an oversized wolf, but Gabriel didn’t yield.
Adam scrambled beneath him, trying to reverse their positions, but Gabe rotated as Adam moved, canines bared and emitting throaty growls to keep the dominant position. Like grappling cage fighters, they continued that way for a while, chairs sliding as they tousled across the floor of the back room and the linoleum beginning to bear the bloody marks of their fight. Adam wouldn’t give up, but neither would Gabriel give ground. I wondered if Gabe had fought this fight before, and how many times he’d had to battle to keep his hold on the Apex position, or to keep order in the Pack.
Adam made one final attempt at the crown, running to the far side of the room as if to regroup, then bounding toward Gabriel with the strength he had left.
There couldn’t have been much left in him. They’d been grappling for ten or fifteen minutes, and Adam bore the brunt of the fighting. His once-thick, flat gray coat was now matted and bare in places, blood seeping from wounds on his face, neck, and front legs. But he came at Gabriel again, two-inch-long canines nipping at Gabe’s snout as Adam tried to push him to the floor. Gabriel yipped at the contact but managed to maneuver his legs enough to get them beneath Adam’s torso and push him again. This time, Adam squarely hit the thick wooden leg of a side table on the other side of the room. The vase of plastic flowers above it toppled, and the wood cracked as the table leg splintered with the impact.
Adam, still on his side, tail now tucked submissively between his legs, whimpered. He was alive, but he’d lost his quest for the Pack.
I wondered what fate awaited him.
Nick paced forward a few feet, and with another burst of flashbulb-worthy magic, shifted back into human form. Gabriel did the same, scratches and punctures still evident on his face and arms. I climbed out from under the table, ever the brave vampire, and dusted off my pants.
The room was quiet while they dressed again, slipping into jeans and T-shirts, then socks and shoes. Gabriel’s gestures were simple and efficient, and I wondered if the act of redressing was a kind of meditation for him, a process of readjusting to the human world and to his human form, after time spent in the body of the wolf.
When Nick was dressed, he moved back to me. “You all right?” he asked, scanning my face. I nodded, then shifted my gaze to Gabriel.
“The shifting didn’t heal him?” I whispered.
“Only wounds taken on as a human can be healed by shifting. Wounds taken on as a shifter are costlier. He’ll heal eventually, but there’s no quick fix.”
Gabriel, now dressed, offered Nick and me nods of acknowledgment, then moved toward his now-prone brother. He crouched down on one knee and stared into Adam’s eyes. Adam, still on his side, whimpered again.
“Change,” Gabriel commanded.
I had just a moment to raise my hand against the sudden light. When I blinked again, Adam lay on the floor, naked and curled, his body a mess of cuts and bruises.
“You are a disappointment to me, to the family, to the Pack,” Gabriel said.
Magic rose again in the room, but not the energetic buzz from before. This magic was old, heavy, and oppressive. Although it had nothing to do with me, my lungs burned with the effort of pushing in and out the air made heavy with the weight, and consequence, of Gabriel’s disappointment. There was no missing it.
“You don’t choose to be Apex,” he told Adam. “The Pack chooses you. Being Apex isn’t about power or wealth or status. It’s about family and commitment.