Pack Princess: A Fantastical Werewolf Adventure (Wolf Rampant Book 2) Page 3

  Not giving me time to answer his questions—which had clearly been rhetorical anyway—my father leapt back to his feet, the wolf already beginning to claw its way up through his human skin. "But that's not why I came to speak with you," Chief Wilder bit out, fighting his wolf even as he spoke. "You'll sink or swim, nothing I can do about that." The alpha's expression reflected which option he thought most likely, and I couldn't prevent my gaze from skittering away from the preemptive disappointment on my father's cold face.

  "I came," Chief Wilder continued, shaking off the likelihood of my failure the same way a wolf would shed frigid water after a swim, "to warn you not to send one of those half-grown wolf pups to report back to your so-called mate, not if you want them to keep all of their limbs attached, that is. The tale you spun for Justin could explain why those useless mutts are present on Wilder land in the first place, but any back and forth between you and their bloodling leader will only jeopardize our operation."

  Pausing to make sure that his words had sunken in, my father stared into my eyes until I felt my head bow and a tiny whimper trickle out from between my human lips. Then, his point made, the Chief finished laying down the law. "There will be no contact between you and Wolf Young until All-Pack is complete."

  There was no need for me to confirm my willingness to obey my father's command since we both knew that my inner wolf was cowering at his feet. Instead, the Chief simply turned on his heel to leave, and I breathed a sigh of relief at his impending departure.

  But my father wasn't quite done yet. Casting his final words back in my direction without the benefit of another glance, Chief Wilder warned: "I'll be watching." And, after my woodland defeat this afternoon, I had a feeling that I'd be swiveling to look back over my shoulder for a long time to come.

  ***

  I bent my head and submitted when my father growled, but I had no intention of leaving Wolfie in the dark this time around. My mate's straightforward bloodling nature wouldn't be thrilled at the game I intended to play, but I knew that Wolfie would still support me in whatever manner he could...

  ...As long as my mate didn't catch me cuddling up to his brother with no warning beforehand, that was.

  So I would alert Wolfie now rather than allowing him to be blindsided. But how?

  I wasn't willing to risk the yahoos to my father's nonexistent mercies, so even though I found all four of the youngsters gathered together in the sitting room of the main house when I entered, I just shot them a quick smile and clattered away up the stairs. "Pack meeting in ten minutes," I tossed back over my shoulder, knowing that the young werewolves would understand that I meant a conference between them and me alone. Because, even though I was acting as the current leader of the Wilder clan and had been living in Haven for nearly two months, when I thought pack, Wolfie's band of misfits were the ones who came to mind. I might care enough about my relatives to bend over backwards in an effort to keep clan Wilder together, but I didn't particularly like most of Haven's current residents, and the four yahoos watching me walk away were the only ones who I trusted to be my local accomplices. So I would fill those four and those four alone in on my current conundrum, and together we'd work on tracking down a workable solution.

  But first I had to get word to Wolfie, and the sooner the better before my father managed to cut off all lines of communication between myself and the outside world. Luckily, today was Tuesday, my stepmother Cricket's usual time to spend a few hours shopping. And even though (or perhaps because) she would never knowingly go against the Chief's wishes, that timid woman was the perfect choice to act as an unwitting Trojan horse. Unfortunately, I couldn't ask Cricket to wait without cluing her in that something out of the ordinary was about to take place, so my stepmother's time line gave me only a few minutes to write a very complicated note.

  Wolfie, I began, pen scratching as quickly as I could move its tip across the back of a piece of junk mail. No time to explain. Father is back, making crazy demands...

  "Terra," my stepmother's timid voice came from outside my closed door, right on cue. "I'm heading out. Do you want me to pick anything up for you while I'm in town?"

  I won't be able to call or write. Don't worry. I love you and we are mates. I underlined these last three words so forcefully that I almost tore through the paper. Then I concluded: Please play along. Finally, hurriedly folding my so-called explanation, I addressed an envelope to carry the missive to my mate.

  "Just a minute," I called to Cricket, looking frantically through my desk drawer for a stamp. Nothing! "I've got an overdue book, if you don't mind running it by the library," I continued, speaking loudly so my stepmother could hear my voice as I sifted through badly organized supplies. "I just have to dig the thing up...."

  "Of course, dear," Cricket replied, and I felt more than heard the door knob turning as she entered my bedroom uninvited.

  I only had a second to decide whom to trust—my stepmother, or an unknown library patron who would have no reason not to steal my money and toss my letter into the trash. The choice was clear. Taping a dollar bill to the outside of the envelope, I slipped the whole thing inside the back cover of the library book, then turned to face my stepmother with a calm smile on my face.

  "Here it is," I said, handing over the text that had been sitting on my desk all along. The novel wasn't even overdue, and I was only halfway through the story, but true love requires sacrifices, right?

  Then I cocked my head, taking in my stepmother's rosy cheeks for the first time. She looked positively radiant, and I immediately guessed that the Chief had dropped by in human form to talk with his wife. Which meant that Cricket would be watching me now, reporting back to her husband about my every misstep. And while I was confident that the timid werewolf loved me in her own unique way, I didn't kid myself into thinking that she had ever gone against the Chief's wishes in the past. I certainly wouldn't expect her to start now.

  "Your father is able to shift again!" Cricket exclaimed in response to my questioning glance, confirming my supposition about the cause of her exuberance. If my stepmother had been a more demonstrative woman, she would have enfolded me into a hug, and as it was, one veiny hand did rise to brush against my cheek. "Isn't it wonderful?" the woman added.

  My father's menacing presence certainly wasn't wonderful from my point of view, but I forced a smile onto my face. Cricket's enthusiasm had the benefit of preventing her from taking a single look at the book in her hands, so perhaps Wolfie would receive my letter after all. And that was wonderful.

  ***

  "So, that's the deal," I finished, meeting each youngster's gaze in turn. We were holed up in my bedroom, the only place where I was certain we wouldn't be disturbed (now that Cricket was out of the picture, that was), and I was doing my level best to resemble a pack leader while perching on the edge of my hastily-made bed. Across the room, the three young males were sprawled across the other twin bed while the tomboyish Fen lounged at their feet on the floor. But none of the yahoos was as relaxed as they appeared.

  I'd like to say that the yahoos were patiently waiting for their marching orders, but the truth was that the shifters were simply displaying the modicum of manners required to let their alpha finish making a fool of herself before they rejected every one of my explanations and proposals out of hand.

  "No way," Blaze said as soon as my mouth closed. The youngest of the yahoos, Blaze saw the world as strictly black and white. He'd had a hard time forgiving me for my previous betrayal of Wolfie, even though there had seemed like no better option than pretending to be uninterested in the bloodling alpha a few weeks ago when my father kidnapped my nephew out from under my nose. Wolfie had taken the betrayal in stride, but his youngest yahoo had given me a bit of a cold shoulder ever since, and I'd known that Blaze would be equally horrified at the concept of me spending the next few weeks flirting with every eligible bachelor in our region. And, while I would have been glad to be proven wrong, the yahoo didn't disappoint. "That's not fair t
o Wolfie," Blaze continued.

  "Do you have a better idea?" I countered, then added: "And I did send him a note."

  "A note?" Blaze rebutted. "I sure hope my future mate never sends me a note to say that she's going to be kissing on my brother. But, not to worry, she loves me more."

  I blushed, Blaze's words remarkably close to the ones that had made up my thirty-second letter to my lover. And while I hoped that my mate would be able to plumb the depths of his calmer temperament in order to read between the lines both of my note and my upcoming behavior, I was well aware that it would be a tough sell for Wolfie to watch me sniffing around other males. I definitely would have loved to come up with a better solution, but my father wasn't the only one pushing me toward this underhanded method of maintaining clan Wilder's status. There simply didn't seem to be any other way to hold our pack together.

  Well, no other way except the obvious. "What's the point of all the cloak and dagger stuff anyway?" Glen spoke up before I could muster a reply to his friend. "If there's a challenge, we'll win it. Right, guys?"

  Blaze slapped his pack mate on the back in enthusiastic support, but Fen, Wade, and I exchanged solemn glances over the duo's exuberant heads. Wade was almost too old to be a yahoo while Fen lacked the testosterone that made fighting against long odds sound like fun, and I could see that both understood the situation in a way the younger guys didn't.

  Because the sad truth was that, even if Wolfie's entire pack piled on to help the Wilders out, there was no way we'd win against eight established packs. Instead, if our combined forces tried to fight that battle head on, I would quickly be deposed as pack leader, and the recuperating Wilder village would turn into an overtaxed territory under the thumb of whomever came out on top. Since Haven had already seen better days as a result of Chief Wilder's increasingly unbalanced nature over the last few years, we really didn't have any resources to spare.

  And that wasn't even considering the worst-case scenario. I vividly recalled the Green clan, taken over by force when I was just a kid. The vanquished pack's mating-age females became spoils for the winners, while everyone else was sent out to make their own way in the world. Similar annexations were depressingly common in the werewolf world, and I didn't even want to imagine my female cousins becoming chattel while my male cousins were turned into packless drifters.

  Not on our watch, my wolf replied silently, and I was glad to have a lupine companion to bolster my waning courage. The support of the two level-headed yahoos didn't hurt either. In fact, while I'd been reminiscing, Wade and Fen were already bringing their cohorts into line.

  "Oh yeah, great idea, guys," Fen said sarcastically. Although the young woman was half-human and only twenty years old, she still had all three of the other yahoos wrapped around her little finger, so Glen and Blaze were quick to quiet under her scolding gaze. "Let's start a war against eight clans at once," the girl continued. "Smart move."

  "If Terra thought there was any other way to hold this pack together, she would have suggested it already," Wade added, throwing his quiet support in with me and Fen as soon as the girl had finished. I shot them both a grateful glance, then waited to make sure that both Glen's and Blaze's wolves submitted beneath their human skins.

  As soon as the two yahoos' eyes flitted to the side, I went on, not needing to kick the shifters while they were down the way my father would have. "Well, you'll be glad to know," I said, finally back on task, "that we'll be starting our campaign with something a little less sleazy—tea parties. I have a good friend who I think might be able to help us out...."

  Chapter 4

  "No, dude, it's your turn to set the table," Glen said, cracking a dish towel across Blaze's butt.

  The yahoos and I liked to treat Cricket to a night off from her usual round of cooking and cleaning on her going-to-town days, so when my stepmother walked back through the door after her excursion, all five of us were busy putting dinner on the table. And even though I was struggling to remember whether you bring the water to a boil before or after adding pasta to the pot, I instantly looked up when a blast of cold air announced my stepmother's presence. Cricket was usually ultra-frugal, so it seemed out of character for her to leave the door open for so long...until I realized that the Chief was padding inside in wolf form right behind his mate.

  The good humor that usually marked our (very infrequent) joint dinner-making seemed to flee through the open doorway along with the room's warmth, but I refused to cringe as I met my father's hard stare. Even if he had beaten me down twice in the past twenty-four hours, this house was my territory now, and the room fell silent around us as the Chief and I engaged in an alpha battle of wills. Seconds stretched into minutes, neither of us willing to drop our eyes, and I was glad to discover that I could handle my father's presence in wolf form—in fact, I preferred physical menace over cruel verbal manipulation any day of the week.

  Just as the standoff heated to the point that my hackles were rising and I could feel my father tensing his muscles in preparation for a leap toward my throat, we both dropped our gazes at the same instant. Apparently neither my father nor I was willing to shake up the status quo with a physical battle. Interesting.

  The tension defused as quickly as it had begun, and I was finally able to ignore the grizzled wolf long enough to nod a welcome toward Cricket. I even opened my mouth to ask if she'd remembered to drop off my library book, but it was obvious that the query would have sounded out of the ordinary. The last thing I wanted to do was to raise my father's suspicions, so, instead, I just turned back to the stove, where Wade was steaming broccoli and where my own task of draining the macaroni awaited.

  "It's getting colder out there," Cricket said to the room at large, seemingly oblivious to the recent battle between stepdaughter and mate. Her voice was still vibrant with excitement at Chief Wilder's presence, but the rest of us breathed a sigh of relief when my father turned away and stalked over to lie down on an under-stuffed pillow beside the fireplace. I couldn't help noticing that my father's gait had become a bit stiff over the last few weeks, probably the result of sleeping out on the cold, hard ground of the woods while he let his wolf run wild. But it was hard to pity the old shifter when the temperature of the room seemed to drop by another ten degrees every time the Chief glanced my way.

  "Do you remember my friend Camilla?" I asked Cricket, trying to push my father's presence out of my mind so I could focus on planning the first foray in my clan-protection campaign. Camilla was five years younger than me, a third cousin whom I'd taught to climb trees and ford creeks when we were both children. I hoped that the spunky girl might have grown into an adult willing to help bring women's lib to werewolf society, but I hadn't seen or heard from her in years. Cricket, though, was more tuned in to pack gossip and was bound to know where the young woman had ended up.

  "Of course I remember Camilla," my stepmother replied, hanging up her coat and crossing the room in time to deftly push Wade out of the way and refill the pot of water beneath the broccoli before it completely boiled dry. "She's married now, with two little ones of her own. Why do you ask?"

  "I just thought I might drop by to visit her so I'll have a friendly face to look forward to at All-Pack," I answered ingenuously. As I spoke, I could sense my father's nose lifting from his paws, the wolf's hard eyes focusing on my back. So be suspicious, I thought silently. It's perfectly acceptable behavior for a pack princess to go visiting right before All-Pack.

  "What a perfect idea!" Cricket answered, taking my words at face value and not realizing that I'd never randomly dropped by a childhood friend's house in my adult life. The woman returned the broccoli to Wade's dubious care and then opened the cabinet to pull down the glasses that Blaze had forgotten in his rush to get table-setting out of the way so he could return to his card game. "Camilla married outside her pack, though," my stepmother continued as she finished the youngest yahoo's job, and I shot Blaze a quick glare to make sure that he realized I hadn't missed noticing his la
ziness. The youngster avoided my gaze but still leapt up to take the napkins he'd also forgotten out of Cricket's hands.

  "So she's not a Reed any longer?" I asked Cricket. That was a shame. The Reeds weren't one of the most powerful packs in our region, but since their clan had been founded by my father's cousin-in-law, the Reeds tended to back up the Wilders as a matter of course with no manipulation or intimidation required. I'd hoped that my visit to Camilla would allow me to feel out whether that support would extend to an unconventionally-gendered Wilder alpha, but it still wouldn't hurt to visit my third cousin no matter which pack she'd ended up in.

  "No, it's Camilla Walker now," my stepmother replied. Our dinner was basically ready, but the woman was incapable of sitting still while anyone else worked, so she busied her hands by pulling a hefty serving of raw hamburger meat out of the fridge to warm for her mate. As Cricket nuked the food, I spared a glance for my father, and saw that his gaze was following my stepmother's hands just like a hungry canine's might, his animal mind clearly at the fore. I should probably finish up this information-gathering session before the Chief becomes interested in me once again, I mused, surprised to be drifting beneath the overbearing alpha's radar in the first place.

  "Well, that's even better," I told my stepmother, "since the Walkers live so close by. In fact, if you don't have anything you need me to do tomorrow, I think I'll go see Camilla in the morning."

  "Of course, dear," Cricket answered. Then, just as I started to relax and to believe that I'd really gotten my plan approved right under my father's nose, the Chief growled.

  The sound was so quiet that you wouldn't have thought the yahoos could have heard it over their card game. But, once again, our homey tableau froze in mid-action as Cricket questioned Chief Wilder with her eyes. And when the older woman turned to me, the command that was lacking in her voice was solidly enforced by my father's cold stare.