Two days later, we had a secret meeting in the conference room at Aconitum Hall. Just Owen, me, Hannah, Ryan, and of course, Xiao, who stands by, guarding the door.Hannah has us all set up, with whiteboards and different colored markers— “to stay organized!”—as well as notebooks, pens, highlighters, and all types of stuff we don’t need.“You just wanted to take a trip to the office supply store,” I accused her.“I can neither confirm nor deny,” she answers, contentedly stroking a pack of gel pens.“While the abundance of stationary is impressive,” Owen begins, “Let’s start with what we know so far.”The whiteboard reads and writes “weeks” in the upper left corner.All of us, even Xiao, make alarmed noises at the chaotic shape of the letters.“How about someone with better handwriting?” Ryan suggests, tacking on a hasty, Nono offense, Your Majesty.”“He doesn’t get to take offense here,” I remind Ryan. “Remember, this is informal.”“Well, who has better handwriting?” Owen demands, an
Do the thralls want to exterminate werewolves? “That doesn’t make any sense. They need us—”“Needed us,” Tara stresses in the past tense. “They have all the arcane knowledge they need now, except for one thing.”“Dominion over life and death.” Owen stands and paces the length of the room.The earlier sense of proactive hope sucks from the room.“They forced you two to breed,” Hannah says. “Dominion over life.”“There’s more.” Tara steers us back toward her research. “After the gods fall and the earth is submerged in water, life begins again. Two humans survive Ragnarök: Lifthrasir and Lif.”“How do they survive the end of the world,” I ask, silently tacking on and who would want to?“They hide. They run away to the woods and hide until everything is over,” Tara says with a shrug. “And when they come out, they repopulate the world.”“That would be dominion over death, wouldn’t it?” Owen suggests. “Rebuilding anew on top of that destruction?”“Are the thralls acting out Ragnarök, then?
We plan furiously, and fast. Xiao secures a location, a tiny cabin that’s way off the grid in Manitoba. We’ll be isolated from the world, but most importantly, from the pack; they don’t know that our thralls have hideouts all over Canada.Even though she only has to make a few calls, we decide not to let anyone know that we’re leaving. Yet again, we’re bugging out. We’re leaving our kingdom because our subjects want us dead.It’s almost midnight when Owen and I go to my bedroom, and I start hauling out all my luggage.“You don’t have to pack tonight,” he says gently.I don’t look at him. “I don’t have to. But I’m going to.”“You’ll tire yourself out. We’ll have a long drive tomorrow.”I shake my head. “Then I can sleep on the drive.”Owen comes to my side and puts his hand on my arm. “Ella… don’t do this to yourself.”“Don’t do what?” I snap. “Take anything with me to fucking Manitoba? Just resign myself to dying in the wilderness, ripped apart by polar bears?”He doesn’t get angry a
If there’s anyone I can question relentlessly about the political nightmare of the past five years, it’s my best friends. Hannah, Ryan, and I have been a matching set of three since kindergarten. We still are, even though Ryan and Hannah are mated now.Despite having been apart for so long, going to their house is like all of us getting together after school. Sure, there was full immaturity squeezing over each other when I arrived, but we quickly fell into our old ways, like I didn’t break contact with them for five years.Except for the “my best friends are in a mating bond” thing. “How did that happen, anyway?”“It was him, or marriage to Dave Byron,” Hannah says with a gagging noise.I echo her disgust with, “Gross.”“Be nice,” Ryan admonishes her. “It’s not his fault his parents never told him no and gave him every damn thing he wanted.”Hannah ignores him. “Ever look at someone and just know, deep in your soul, that they were an ugly baby? That’s Dave Byron.”We’re clustered aro
Tara and Clare recommend that we meet together for lunch since the ball didn't provide us much of an opportunity to converse.at an eatery for people.I endured salads and the main course, and right now, while I sip my drink, I'm trying not to ask my own sisters whether their husbands are aware of where they are."And that's what they were discussing at the Ella," said the speaker. Clare snaps, gesturing with her palm toward my face.“Sorry. It's too many mimosas. That is false. I've had two of those, and I'm not even drunk. I make an effort to pay attention to what she says. She said something about remodeling her master bathroom. You said before that they couldn't knock down a wall."Are you alright?" Tara questions me sincerely.Do I tell them that after the ball, my head is all over the place? Because I'm unsure of my place in the pack? Because if my closest friends don't trust me after that, my sisters may not either. Their spouses also don't appear to be great supporters of the
Mother is waiting for me the moment I step through the door. “Ashton is here,” she hisses, reaching to fuss with my hair. I dodge her and she clucks in frustration. “What were you thinking, running around the lawn like a stray dog?”“I was thinking how nice it is to be home.” I blink innocently at her.Her eyes narrow. “Is this all a game to you?” Before I can answer, she goes on. “After the stunt you pulled, leaving the pack and now whatever that display was at the ball, it’s a miracle that anyone will still associate with us.”“Why wouldn’t they—”“Because they’re afraid that what you did will spread!” Mother snaps, loud enough to be overheard, so she immediately lowers her voice again. “You were the first werewolf in a hundred years to reject the transformation and invoke the Right of Accord. Everyone was terrified that you’d opened the floodgates. People wouldn’t speak to us because they were afraid of losing their young, too!”It never occurred to me that by invoking the Right,
The full moon is a holy time for werewolves. Much in the way humans might dress nicely and congregate at a house of worship, a werewolf pack gathers for their own ceremonies together. For the Toronto pack, the place we gather is about an hour and a half northwest of Toronto. Long before Canada was New France, back in the days when our ancestors fled northern Europe in longboats, a pack inhabited a small village in the area, on what is now two-hundred acres of unspoiled land we can safely roam as the creatures we become every full moon.The transformation ceremony takes place in the ancient circle of standing stones built over five centuries before Columbus could erroneously claim the first European steps onto the North American continent. The three stones bear tributes to the gods of our pack: Fenrir, the wolf who will devour Odin at Ragnarök, Lycaon, the cruel king punished by Zeus, and Lupa, she-wolf mother of Romulus and Remus. Once, the circle stood in a forest clearing. Now, i
The deep, hollow toll of a bell announces the midnight hour. In the round courtyard below, pack members file into the sacred circle. They wear ceremonial robes of silver silk, easy to remove once the transformation takes hold.Humans imagine scenes in movies where werewolves scream in agony and tear out of their clothes, which I’ve never understood. We know when the full moon is. It doesn’t take us by surprise. And we know how to dress for it.Or undress. My breath freezes in my lungs as Owen walks into the circle. He stops in front of the monolith to Lycaon and drops his robe.I shamelessly look him over, the way he did to me, from his broad shoulders, down his chest dusted with dark hair that thins to a line on his shockingly sculpted abs. I wasn’t expecting him to look as good as he does. I wasn’t expecting that my mouth would water at the sight of his cock, that my thighs would clench together at the thought of how huge it must be hard. I hope he feels me, smells me.And I hope