Running With Wolves

The emotions in the house were overwhelming and suffocating. There was yelling, there was worry, there was anxiety and fear, anger and annoyance; every one of the emotions as loud and suffocating as the others.

“What the hell are we going to do?!” It was the most vocal I’d ever heard him and while I could drown the others out to clear my mind it was hard to ignore Knoll.

“We’re going to lay low and stay here.” Conan stated pacing back and forth around the dark wooden dining table. “It’s the closest house to Falcon Ridge—apparently that’s our territory now.” I didn’t have to look at Conan to see the annoyed look he was throwing my way. In any other pack it was a sign of disrespect and it would be handled accordingly but our pack was different. I swore I wouldn’t be like the others. We’d all have our voices, none of them would be suppressed, even my older brother who’s every other word was one of annoyance and aggravation toward me.

“You should all leave.” Lukas stated his voice hard. He was as still and silent as I was for the most part, allowing the others to get everything off of their chest at once. “My father will come and he will not be alone.”

“Yes he will,” It was the first time I’d spoken since we’d gotten back to his house and the chaos had let loose. Their heads turned to me as though they’d forgotten I was there.

“He’ll come alone because he can’t stand to be disrespected in front of his pack, it’s humiliating to him. He knows I don’t have any respect for him. If he comes it wont be to start trouble—not yet anyway. Not when this pack contains two out of three of his sons. Viktor may be furious for the two of yours betrayal but he’d never risk your lives over a pack he doesn’t even deem real.”

“I still think we should tell Mankato.” Even Mia had found her voice in this newfound family. “Maybe he can help.”

“Mankato will not help us,” I stated assuredly. The last thing I wanted to do was knock on his door. “Mankato wanted to be Alpha more than anything. I’m the only one that can challenge him to that and if not standing with us has the chance of me getting killed, well then he won’t do it. If I die he’s free to run Western however he pleases.”

“Sage,” Conan started but he didn’t finish his words. Surprise and shock was evident all over his face and it caught in his throat. “He’s your godfather.”

“Yeah well the war changed all of us even him; he won’t help us. Besides if we involve the Western pack we risk starting a war amongst Weres that spreads for one hundred miles.”

“We’re sitting ducks here.” Lukas reminded. He’d gone into protective mode, they all had. They would all have a thing or two to say to me later about this whole pack thing but for now we had bigger things to worry about. “Since we are all,” He glanced around at everyone in the room. “Pack now, it means that even here we are trespassing; this house is Eastern territory.”

“So what do we do?” Rune questioned sounding lost. She looked smaller and more vulnerable than usual as she stood between tall Knoll and muscular Lukas. “Where do we go?”

The others fell silent. Their silence echoed Rune’s question.

Where do we go?

and they looked to me, their friend, their sister, their soulmate, their Alpha, for an answer.

“We stay here for now,” I stated my voice ringing out against the silence. Because the truth was we didn’t have anywhere else to go. We didn’t belong anywhere accept with each other. “but we build.” I turned to Lukas and Conan. “We can build like we built the tree house as kids.”

“Dad helped us with that, this is different.” Conan argued. “We can’t build a playhouse. We need houses.”

“How many times did we sleep in that tree house for days? It never killed us. Dad always did over kill, that ‘playhouse’ is more of a house than a playhouse and you know it.” I straightened slightly. “Those woods are ours, we may as well make it home.”

“Why exactly did we make it ours?” Jasmine questioned in grumbling annoyance. “That place is fucking dangerous or have you forgotten what happened?”

“No,” My voice was sharp and hard and it caused Jasmine to flinch and swallow hard, momentarily forgetting that I was Alpha.

Alpha.

The idea still seemed foreign to me, that I had an actually pack. Everyone expecting you to become Alpha is one thing but becoming it is another thing entirely. “I haven’t forgotten. Those woods are the only thing for one hundred miles that aren’t claimed by a Were pack. It’s dangerous because no one claimed it. But it’s safe to us because we know those woods, because it is ours.”

“We are trapped on both sides by a pack that isn’t going to take kindly to us as neighbors.” Knoll reminded. “We’re fucked if they come after us. Those woods are no better than a large cage.”

“That isn’t completely true.”

I moved to the nearby drawers in the coffee table and pulled out the map I knew to be there. I unfolded it and spread it wide across the table we had surrounded. Spread out for all to see, and color coordinated for reading convenience, was a map of all of Blackwood; green for Eastern, blue for Western, and red for…Red for Falcon Ridge. “look here,” I pointed to where it was written ‘FORBIDDEN AREA, OUT OF ALPHA’S COMMAND. DANGEROUS.’

Knoll was right, for the most part. Falcon Ridge was almost completely surrounded by either pack on both sides but the teardrop shaped territory had a point that went outside both packs command. If ever we had to escape from them both, we had an exit. “We’ll build here.”

“Near the tree house?”

“It’s in the middle of Falcon Ridge, no closer to either pack on either side. Plus if we have to go in a hurry it isn’t a far exit. At least in the middle of the territory we are farther from other outsiders.”

“I don’t know,” Rune muttered. “Maybe Mia is right, maybe we should try to make an ally out of Mankato. You don’t want Western and he’ll know that if you say so.”

“I don’t trust either pack at this point.” I stated flatly. “I don’t trust them nearly enough have our backs.”

“They were family Sage, allies, friends.” Knoll mumbled quietly.

“Why?” It was Lukas who asked and it momentarily took me off guard. “Why are you so willing to cut Western off? Eastern I understand but Western was your home.”

Jasmine had given me the letters when we were in the car ride home. She assured me that she hadn’t read them but had held onto them because she thought they must be of some sort of importance for me to have clung to them so tightly when Lukas had brought me back from the woods.

“These,” I pulled them from my pocket and tossed them onto the table. “They’re from Cheyenne.” The startled looks were evident on everyone’s faces. “She was writing as a sort of dairy to herself or to me if I ever found them. Go ahead read them.”
Conan reached for a letter quietly but for a moment no one dared touch the other papers.

After a momentKnoll then reached for one hesitantly, his eyes scanning Cheyenne’s words. Rune reached for another, disbelief written in her eyes.

“She found something in the Blackwood achieves and she thinks they may have gotten her into trouble.”

“The archives?” Rune echoed in surprise. “How did she even get in there, they are only allowed to be seen by Alpha’s and council members.”

Rune would know. She was good at sneaking into places unseen but the archives had always been one of the few places she hadn’t managed to break into.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled “but she did and she found things out.”

With his curiosity peaked Lukas reached for a letter and after a moment his face turned into evident surprise. He swallowed hard, looking slightly wary of the things he’d read. “She thought Coralie and Catalina had something to do with why the war started? But they left, it wasn’t anything uncivil.”

“Did they?” I questioned rhetorically. “or were they taken? We only know what our fathers told us.”

“Watch it, you are starting to sound like one of those crazy people who believe in government conspiracies.” Conan mumbled, his eyes never leaving the letter in his hands.

“What if this one is real though? I mean think about it, does anyone here in this room know the real reason why the pack exploded and went to war?”

“Viktor wanted to be Alpha.” Conan stated easily but Knoll and Lukas both gazed up at him in surprise.

“It was because Corneliu thought the pack was growing too large to be ruled by him and he wanted to thin out the pack—just cut some loose, including Kerrick.”

“What?” Conan balked. “What the hell are you talking about tha-“

“Do you see what I mean,” I spoke up cutting them both off before a nasty argument broke out. “Both packs were told two different things. One was told it was Viktor’s power hungry greed, the other was told something entirely different. The point is that neither of the stories are remotely similar and yet both were told by our Alphas.”

“But what does that have to do with Cheyenne?” Knoll wondered looking slightly lost.

“Maybe everything,” I began. I’d gone over the letters in my head a hundred times, I knew them front and back now. The only thing I could figure was that the story was something entirely different and something so much worst than what we’d all been told. “Maybe Coralie and Catalina are a part of what really caused the war. What if something happened to them, I mean a sister and nephew to Corneliu Wolfe, married to a Canis, its not exactly out of the realm of possibilities to be a cause of conflict between Viktor Canis and Corneliu Wolfe. What else would divide my father and Vikto? They were best friends and after Coralie and Catalina were gone, a few months later the war broke out.”

“What do you think happened to them?” Rune questioned, her eyes slightly wide.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it was a Canis or a Wolfe that caused their disappearances. Our families were at peace then. Cheyenne thinks they were kidnapped, that a string of women were. That would have something to do with Cheyenne.”

“Who would take them?” Mia wondered. “If what you said is true and the pack really was that strong back then who would dare kidnap women from such a strong pack?”

“Who would attack girls in no man’s land?” I questioned rhetorically, my eyes on Jasmine, Mia, and Rune who paled slightly. “They basically admitted to taking Chey. What if they took Cat and Coralie too?”

“But why would that start a war?” Lukas questioned bothered. “That all makes sense but why would it divide the pack? Families were destroyed by that war, what did they die for? What did they fight for?”

And that was the question.