From the corner of my eye, I caught Cole exchanging a look with August. Sadly, I knew what that look was about. Cole oozed wariness. It wafted off him like the stench of his cigarettes. He was wrong to be wary. Not wanting August to touch me had nothing to do with harboring secret romantic feelings for Liam. I simply didn’t want attention from the pack-be it from Liam or from any other Boulder.
August gripped the railing as though ready to splinter the wood he and our fathers had sanded down years ago, tendons pinching in his hands, making the dried blood that still stained his skin crackle.
A low howl pierced the bright-blue sky, and then a second howl answered.
“And so it begins,” Cole whispered under his breath.
My hands joined the many other sets gripping the deck railing. The fight had started about ten minutes ago, and although the light-brown fur on Cassandra’s back was tinged red from where Julian had sank his teeth into her, she was still on all fours. She moved slowly, as though the pain in her rear was taking a toll on her body. Considering he’d bit her at the start of the fight, she should’ve begun to heal.
Julian waited for Cassandra to creep closer before jumping on her. She flattened against the grass, then rolled over onto her back. I expected she’d keep rolling, but no… she stopped moving, as though waiting for Julian to land on her. The second his body came within limb-length of hers, she slashed his belly with her claws, then whirled around beneath him and bucked him off her injured back.
Julian landed with a heavy thump a couple feet away from her. For a moment, he didn’t move.
I held my breath.
Everyone held their breath.
Cole said, “He’s going to end her.”
Julian pressed back onto his paws like a mountain rising from tectonic plates and lunged toward Cassandra again, dark muzzle wet with her blood, fangs bared. He gripped her thigh in his mouth and shook his head as though trying to dismember her. Her leg stayed attached, but she toppled over. He dragged her a couple feet, but then she bucked, and Julian sputtered, emitting a great choking sound as though he’d gotten a mouthful of fur. The moment he let her go, she crawled away from him, belly to the ground.
But he was still wheezing, batting one of his legs across his muzzle as though trying to brush off Cassandra’s blood. He retched.
Voices began to rise, shouts, jeers, cheers. Like spectators at a sports match, the crowd was becoming boisterous. Although they kept a safe distance from the wolves, Nora and Lori orbited around their Alphas.
At the sound of Julian vomiting, Cassandra flipped around, positioned herself in a crouch, and, with a keening moan, heaved herself up. Her momentum was so sluggish it looked as though she were moving in slow-motion and yet she managed to tip Julian over. Both wolves crashed down in a mix of bloodied brown fur, bodies writhing and jerking.
A snarl echoed against the tawny trunks of the swaying pine trees and ricocheted like the blaring sunlight on the tall glass façade of the inn.
A whimper ensued.
And then the wet snap of an overextended vein.
My skin broke out in goose bumps as one Alpha stole the life of another.
Julian had fallen.
The upset created a ripple of cries and outbursts down below but also on the deck. Every Boulder body tightened and straightened, every set of eyes strained, and every mouth pursed. No one spoke beside me, not even Liam through the mind link. We all just stood shoulder to shoulder, solemn in our shock and grief.
Yes, grief…
Even though I hadn’t much liked the Pine Alpha, I liked Cassandra even less.
A sharp cry tore through the field as Nora rushed to Julian’s mangled, inert form. Robbie sprang away from his pack and caught his mother before she could throw herself atop her brother. She whimpered and whined and snarled at her son, while he spoke quietly into her ear. After a long moment, she stopped snarling and slid back into skin. Shaking with sobs that were so shrill they could probably be heard in the middle of town, she burrowed her head against Robbie’s chest.
My gaze skated over the strange scene below. People had begun pouring onto the field to felicitate their Alpha, who was still in fur. On the other side of the field, Sarah had crumpled to her knees. I started to go toward her when August caught my wrist and shook his head.
“No,” he said, his tone brooking no argument.
“But Sarah-”
“Sarah will be taken care of.” His grip was all at once loose but firm, as though he was fighting his urge to hold me tighter. “Stay up here.”
Margaux and a redheaded girl had kneeled next to Sarah, but still I itched to go to her. What decided me to stay away was the pulse of terror throbbing through the link. My already clenching stomach roiled and contracted with August’s fear.
I returned to the railing, and he let go of my wrist. Although he didn’t put his hands on me again, he held on to me through the tether as though he didn’t trust me not to sprint down those stairs.
“I won’t go,” I reassured him, but it did little to loosen his invisible grip.
I turned my attention back to the ground below. For the final time, the fur receded into Julian’s pores, his muzzle retracted, and his limbs twisted back into his human ones.
“Do you wish to contest the fairness of the fight and challenge the Alpha today?” Lori hollered, back in skin and clothes, her voice thundering over all the others.
Along with every shifter present, I watched Nora. Watched as she turned in her son’s arm. Watched as her lips trembled. Watched as her head shook, first with a shudder, then with an answer.
No.
“Do you wish to challenge the Alpha in one moon cycle from now?” Lori asked, voice loud and clear.
Again, Julian’s sister shook her head. Robbie plucked the blonde hair sticking to his mother’s pale forehead and cheeks. Margaux tossed a sort of cape over her mother-in-law’s shoulders, and then Robbie wrapped an arm around her and helped her off the field. A cry ripped from her throat, and then another, her grief echoing against the Flatirons and the farthest and tallest mountain peaks.
“Alpha of the Creeks!” Lori turned to her mother who was still in fur. “The fallen’s heart is yours for the taking, and with it, the fallen’s pack.”
The fallen’s heart?
I wasn’t sure if I asked this out loud or if August read the confusion etched on my face, but he said, “The victor eats the heart of the loser, thus acquiring a link to the dead Alpha’s pack.”
A lump of bile shot up my throat.
August stepped in front of me and tucked me into his chest. “I told you it was brutal.”
I didn’t look, but I heard the watery tear of flesh, the placid crunch of bones, and the bloody squelch of what had once fueled life into a man and would now fuel magic into a woman.
Even though I was probably imagining it, I felt as though I heard the blood drip off Cassandra’s muzzle and mix into the tear-and-vomit-soaked soil.
At long last, triumphant howls ripped through the summer sky, announcing that an Alpha had fallen and another had taken its place.
I thought back to the last trial I’d had to endure against Liam-the test of strength. Was what I’d just witnessed what the elders had in mind? Had they hoped Liam would tear open my breastbone and eat my heart?
I shuddered, which made August squeeze me tighter, and I let him. I didn’t care who spotted me in his arms. I still had a heart beating inside my chest. I wouldn’t force it to be quiet to avoid criticism or stares, just like I wouldn’t force August to keep his distance. I needed him. I wanted him.
If today had taught me anything, it was that life was too short to worry about what others thought. I wrapped my arms around August’s waist and burrowed closer, hoping that his scent and warmth would help dull the terrible images and sounds that kept replaying in my skull.
Voices grew louder around us. Ambient conversations began to penetrate my buzzing mind.
“What do you think he swallowed that made him throw up?” Matt was asking his brother.
“Fur, or maybe a chunk of flesh. That’ll make anyone gag.”