Page 10

Xander

ONCE OUT BACK, I take in the surroundings. The porch extends out from the house about eight feet or so, and the planks, railings, posts, and banisters all match the wood of the house, stained dark brown. It overlooks a stone patio that extends from the lower level. Beyond the gently sloping hill is a medium-sized lawn big enough for a volleyball game without risking the ball hitting the industrial electric fencing that surrounds the property and begins a few feet from the darkening conifer tree line. The sky is already turning shades of orange and pink with the setting sun, which comes earlier and earlier every day this time of year. The floodlights in the back and the ones outside the large garage will be coming on soon.

Ethan holds his position at the corner behind me, watching both directions, and my mother stands in the center of the porch, facing me. Her fingers are interlaced low in front of her dark-green pantsuit, which is partially covered by her unbuttoned black peacoat. Her face is calm but expectant.

“Thank you for coming with us,” I say, slipping my fingertips into the front pockets of my jeans in an effort to not fidget. I roll my shoulders back, forcing myself to get to the point. Meeting her awaiting gaze, I say, “I would like to see if your wolf would be open to meeting mine.”

She rolls and presses her lips together before blowing out a breath and reluctantly answering, “I figured as much. After what Bruce said, I can see your concern.”

“And I understand yours, Mom,” I say, stepping a little closer but refraining from touching her. “I understand probably better than anyone. I’m not him, Mom. I won’t hurt you. I could never hurt you.”

“I know that, Alexander,” she agrees in a weak voice while spinning her head around to avert my gaze and instead stare out over the setting sun. “It’s more complicated than that,” she adds. “I don’t ever again want anyone to have access to me like he did.”

I sidestep just a bit so I’m at the edge of her sight and contend, “But I won’t, Mom.” She lifts her chin and meets my steady gaze, her own eyes watery and wary. “I’m not asking to bond to you as a mate but as your alpha, and only if your wolf allows it.”

“But you’ll...” My mother gulps, and her eyes slam shut in pain as she whispers, “You’ll see her, see how weak—”

“Don’t you call her weak,” I interject, my wolf coming to the surface. My mother’s eyes snap open, hers glowing in response to mine. I grind out, “Don’t you dare call her weak. Not after the years of pain and abuse she’s endured. No weak wolf could have survived all she did, all you did. Neither of you are weak.”

At that, my mother’s eyes glow even brighter, a fiery copper, and her wolf’s energy presses outward like she’s sniffing the air. I let mine stay passively at the surface, not reaching out, not engaging, rather letting her wolf lead, letting her sense him, circle him. My mother physically steps back to create distance, and I feel her wolf trying to resist. I feel her stretching out for mine. A low growl of warning thunders from my mother’s chest, and she stumbles in my direction. Her eyes widen, and she frantically reaches out for anything to hold on to other than me, catching the railing.

“She wants to meet us, Mom,” I state like the fact it is. “Your wolf wants to meet mine. Would you deny her that?”

“I’m scared!” my mother cries out, her grip on the railing turning her knuckles white. “I’m scared, Alexander... so, so scared after everything!”

“Who chose to bond with my father, you or your wolf?” I probe, hating that I’m making her face this truth, knowing the pain it will cause, but needing her to understand—needing her to acknowledge it wasn’t her wolf. Her body shakes, and her lips clamp around her teeth, pressing them tightly together, fighting her wolf, fighting her from speaking the truth.

“What are you doing, Mom?” I ask, my voice holding a scrape of pain, sensing the desperate strain of her wolf. My mother vigorously shakes her head over and over again while she hunches in on herself. It’s as if she’s trying to wrap herself around her wolf, cage her in. I have to close my eyes and breathe through my nose to stop myself from moving toward her, stop my wolf from taking over. We want to help her wolf, we want to protect her, but they’re connected—they’ve both been traumatized. We can’t help one if it hurts the other.

I take a large step back to give her space, and I lean a hip against the railing, my back against one of the posts, forcing myself to relax, coaxing my wolf to trust—to trust in my mom’s luna, in her strength, and let her come to us. My mom’s grip on the railing eases, and the tension around her eyes recedes.

Taking several long deep breaths, I half turn to look over the yard and lift a shoulder. “Maybe I misunderstood some of the things you’ve told me about bonding with... William . Was it your wolf that pushed for the bond and not you?”

My mother flinches, and she fully turns to face the backyard, her shoulders rounding and her head dropping down. “No,” she admits with a short shake of her head. “My wolf did not force the bond. It was me more than her.” She lifts her head up, the setting sun casting a pinkish glow over her drawn face, her eyes seeing beyond the horizon. “We were friends. We...” She swallows. “Will and I got along very well, and his father was a tyrant. As was mine. He hid his alpha power at the beginning, but it didn’t matter.” She blows out a breath. “He was the most alpha male I’d ever met, and my wolf and I liked that. He was a visionary, charismatic and determined to be a leader, and it was all very attractive... very alluring. My wolf, she was strong, a true luna, and she wanted to lead, wanted to make a difference, make the pack stronger, our wolves stronger. At the time, we both believed he was capable of doing all of that.”

She hesitates and briefly shuts her eyes before turning back to gaze at me.

“I won’t go into the details, but we’d been together for a while before the idea of bonding came up, of taking our future in our own paws. I took him wanting to bond with me as a compliment, an honor. I was not to be his mate if we let the Divine choose, but he wanted to choose. He wanted me as his mate and was willing to risk just as much as he was asking me to risk. When our wolves interacted, his was more than willing to let mine lead, to let mine be in charge, and that was very appealing because we were the stronger wolf. She was resistant. She didn’t feel the pull to him, but we both felt the pull to lead. I foolishly thought that if the bonding didn’t work or the relationship wasn’t what I thought it would be, we’d be able to break free, because we’d be the dominant one.”

She brushes a shaky hand down over the sharp points of her hair and holds my gaze with unflinching intensity. “We were wrong. She sensed something, a change in him that night, something too eager, and she tried to get me to stop. But I screamed at Will to inject me, and then it was... too late. Once the drugs hit, everything was a blur.” She inhales and says, “He didn’t try to pull from us at the beginning, easing my concerns. And again, we liked each other—there was love between us. He didn’t ask us for help until he took the role of alpha from his father. We offered up our life force, and he hit our pleasure centers.” She licks her lips, and her lids drop to half-mast. “I’d never felt anything like it. Not even the bonding felt that fantastic... that euphoric. It was addictive, and I...” She pauses, and her face pinches. “ We , we became addicted. Addicted to pleasing him, to giving him our life force. It was so messed up.” She slaps a hand through the air and grumbles, “But that’s not what you were asking. No, my wolf didn’t decide to bond. I did.”

“What does she want now, Mom?”

My mom answers in a quavering voice. “To meet her son’s wolf. To meet the alpha that came from her.”

My wolf rises, and my eyes glow bright. I offer up my hand, feeling his energy swirling around my palm, and I implore, “Let us meet, Luna.”

The tips of my fingers tingle feeling her wolf’s energy reaching out to mine, and my mother’s eyes glow once again. She tentatively extends her thin hand out, hovering it just over mine, our energies swirling in the space between, holding and mixing with ease. I wait, as do our wolves. My mother takes in a deep inhale, and on the exhale, she drops her hand into mine.

“Luna,” I say in a deep rumble that is all my wolf. “Know us, and if you choose, accept us.”

My mother’s wolf pulls me and my wolf inside her, pulls us into her mental landscape, and we follow. She sends a silent communication, telling me to hold on to my mother’s hand. My mother gasps at the request, and I quickly do as her wolf says, taking a firmer hold of my mother’s hand.

My wolf and I calmly follow my mother’s wolf into her current existence. She is mostly hidden in the shadows, and a feeling of walking down a dark, derelict alley creeps over my skin, and chills prickle down my spine. Her wolf’s coat is light, a bone white. The glimpses of her fur are the only brightness in the darkness surrounding us.

I see no trees, no meadows—not even rocks or mountains or a horizon. All that surrounds us are dark buildings. It resembles a city more than anything else. The smells of tar and rubber and of urine and rubbish become more concentrated and thicker like a low-hanging smog the deeper we go. Without hesitation, without thought, each step my wolf takes he cleanses the place here and there. He wags his tail in long strokes, wafting the polluted air away. His paws fling pieces of broken bottles, cans, and needles—fuck, so many needles are scattered on the wet pavement—off to the side, and they disappear from existence as we follow her sure yet light-footed steps in and out of the shadows.

She stops and waits for us by a boarded-up brick building. Craning her head back and looking up, she retracts onto her hind legs and gracefully launches herself skyward to the rooftop in a blur of fluid motion. My wolf looks up, and although the building is more than five stories high, this is a mental landscape where belief and acceptance are major components of what one can do. We lean back, coiling our muscles and spring ourselves up and over the short parapet, landing softly on the gravel rooftop.

The roof is high enough to be free of the shadows and most of the heavy smog, allowing the moon to cast a soft blue glow over the area. Spinning our head around, we find my mother’s wolf seated on an old mattress in the center of the roof, half-hidden in the only shadow created by the large air duct or HVAC system that is more or less just a metal box. The mattress is surrounded by potted plants, many containing moonflowers that are blooming and crawling out of their pots and spreading across the gray expanse.

We look around and survey the area from this height, and it reminds me of a rundown mill town, very humanized and not at all the healthy habitat suited for a wolf.

A disturbing thought crawls out from the depths of my consciousness, prickling my scalp like the spiky legs of a centipede scrambling its way toward the forefront of my mind. My wolf senses the dread and anxiety building with each tingle of awareness, and he expands his chest with a deep inhale, forcing me to do the same, forcing me to regain control before the truth fully emerges.

This is what can happen if we continue to distance ourselves from our wolves, from our shifters, and from the Divine. It’s like the industrialization of human society moving away from nature in favor of machines. It’s the focusing on the ends and not the means, seeing the meaning of life as production and power instead of quality and purpose.

It’s as if each choice we make that is not aligned with our shifter, with the Divine, brings us further and further away from nature, from the core of our existence. Not all have the same magnitude, but even those choices that seem small or inconsequential, when made repeatedly, will ultimately tip the scales. Promises of progress, a new future, a new wolf order, a way to hold more control in an existence where so much is left up to faith, to powers outside ourselves, gives us what we think we want while taking us away from who we are.

They must have been aware of what was happening because I do not think this level of deterioration could occur with just one choice. It is possible, I guess, with the injection, but I’m hesitant to believe so. My mind flashes back to my mother’s comment about the pleasure she felt in pleasing my father, and then to the alleyway and all the needles. An even harder truth seizes my heart: They became junkies—junkies that had led them from the security of the mountains, their home, to this. A crack house.

My mother’s wolf walked us through the alley, but we did not stay there. Yes, perhaps at one time she did reside there or even inside the building somewhere, but she’s not hiding in the alley anymore. She found the strength, the will, to assail the building, to bask in the moonlight and bring here whatever nature she could.

I want to interact with her, I want to help her, but her posture, her affinity to remain hidden, has my wolf erring on the side of caution. We can’t push her to engage. Instead, we look at the environment, and as we did with Bruce, we determine what she needs, what will bring her wolf about. But in order to do that, she must accept us.

She is a luna. We will not force or assume anything. She needs to touch us to accept us as her alpha. My wolf sits back on his haunches, and we close our eyes. We close our eyes and hope that she comes to us, that she rubs up against us and allows us to help her. My mother’s hand in mine trembles, and I curl my fingers around it while letting my thumb stroke back and forth over the loose skin.

After a long moment, I feel fur rubbing against fur, and the smell of juniper and milkweed permeates the air right before a jolt of energy shoots through my arm—a little more than necessary, a little more than needed in order for her to accept us as her alpha—and a smile slices across my lips. She’s a luna. Even after everything she’s been through, even after showing how far and deep she had fallen, she’s still a luna.

My wolf keeps his—our—eyes closed until she moves away and then we look around her shifter’s landscape once more. She’s back in the shadows, and we let her be. My wolf trots around the area, going from ledge to ledge, determining what the best course of action should be. Small changes, nothing drastic. Just a bit... perhaps more than a bit.

There are several smokestacks releasing thin tendrils of smoke into the air, and we set our gazes on those stacks. Our chests rumble, and the sound builds, layering rumble on top of rumble, until a deep roar thunders out from my wolf. The air between us and the smokestacks vibrates with the sound, causing the bricks and mortar of the stacks to quake. Loose bricks fall at first, the tops crumbling and then all at once imploding on themselves and disappearing into puffs of dirt. My wolf inhales, and my chest expands with his. On his exhale, he blows the remaining smog out in one direction. He blows and blows until the moon in the sky is accompanied by hundreds of twinkling stars.

With the air clear, we can see a slope of land in the distance, covered in long hay-like grass leading to a sparse forest. Focusing on that land, that parcel of earth, we use short sonic barks to send ripples through the terrain, causing the land to crack and fallen trees to roll down the hill, catching on the dead grass and pulling it from the soil. The area continues to vibrate, overturning and aerating until rich black fertile soil covers the hill. Sweat beads on my forehead from the effort, and we suck down a whistling inhale, pulling some of that soil toward us, arching it through the air like a bridge made of dirt and spreading it out on the roof. We keep pulling until the potted plants become fully submerged and the old mattress has been changed out for one that is more natural, one made of the dry grass and patches of moss freed from deeper within the forest. With a grind of my teeth, we rock a large boulder free and plop it down, crushing the air duct.

We take a moment to breathe, to assess. Focusing on the freshly turned land, my wolf runs toward the edge of the roof and sails over several buildings until he’s landed on one midway between my mother’s wolf’s rooftop and the hillside. Then he takes one more bounding leap, landing on the damp, dark soil. He turns back to face the dilapidated town and spreads his paws out, digging his claws into the earth. He pulls more power from our source, whipping it around, charging it. Using the roof we were just on as a visual boundary, he sends that power into the ground below his paws. It races over the land and then sinks below the edge of her town, creating deep fissures of bright-blue lightning that crack through the streets, growing wider and wider until the buildings between us and the roof we were on crumble, getting swallowed up by the land. The soil around us rolls out in waves, being pulled down into the large opening, filling it with fresh earth.

We stop there. We stop there because she has the power and the strength to continue on her own. My wolf looks up, and my mother’s wolf is out of the shadows, standing on the ledge of her roof. Throwing her head back, she howls into the clean, clear night air, and my wolf joins her.

We begin to pull back while she continues to howl. We do this in respect and in acknowledgment, letting her have the last howl, showing her that we know how strong she is and that she is our pack’s luna. I release my mother’s hand and open my eyes. It takes a moment for my vision to adjust. What felt like hours spent in her wolf’s home must have only been minutes based on the still-setting sun.

My eyes come fully into focus, and I find my mother standing before me. Her eyes are still hidden behind their lids, but her cheeks are puffy and red and wet with her tears, and her lips are curved into a smile.

“Thank you, Luna,” I drily whisper. “Thank you both for holding on, for trusting us, and for being strong enough to rebuild.”

My mother’s eyes flutter open, and they’re bright and gleaming, and I swear I see the moon and stars reflecting in them, the night sky from her shifter’s realm. She blinks, and it’s gone. “Alexander,” she cries and then wraps me up in a tentative hug. “Alexander... you, your wolf...” She gulps and whimpers “Thank you. Thank you both. I...” She inhales a clogged breath. “My God, what an alpha you are.” She pulls back to look up at me, her hands cupping my face, my hands resting on her shoulders. “So different, Alexander. So different from your father. Not just in the strength of your wolf, but in you—you and your connection to your wolf. And the control, the...” She presses a hand on my chest, and a tear rolls down her cheek. “The heart. The heart you have. How you can still hope and trust after everything. I just...” She falters and blows out a long breath. “Eleanor. Eleanor made sure.”

I glance over my shoulder and then back at my mom. “And my pack-mates, Mom.” I take a shuddering breath, and now it’s me with tears brimming in my eyes. “I... I didn’t know, Mom. I didn’t know that was happening to you.” I shake my head and grind my teeth to hold in the anger. “You never let me know, never said anything.”

“Shame,” she mutters, releasing her hands from me and wiping her cheeks. “I was ashamed and lost and hurt, and...” She lifts a shoulder. “I loved him once. It made it hard to see, to understand, what was happening behind that love and the pleasure he offered. And with how he was with you, I was scared if I stood up, if I tried to stop him, he’d seek the power from somewhere else. But I’m luna enough to admit the addiction was a large part of it.”

“You and your wolf have come through so much, Mom,” I assure her, “and you don’t have to go through it alone. I’m here. Gran is here. You’ll make what you went through matter. I know you will.” Just then, the rumble of an engine sounds from the front of the cabin, soon followed by the opening of doors and the low murmur of deep voices. “Sounds like the food is here,” I say with a tilt of my head. “Let’s head on in and start rebuilding our pack, Luna.”

My mother dips her chin in agreement and strolls past Ethan toward the door. When I reach him, he places a hand on my sweaty nape. Without me asking, his beta energy tickles along my skin, and I open for it. My body warms with the swirling power, and my wolf begins transmuting the energy from beta to alpha. “How’d you know?” I ask, my voice hoarse.

His hand squeezes my neck, and he closes the distance between us, his chest to my back. “I’m your beta,” he lowly whispers into my ear. “And you’re my alpha, simple as that.” Then not because he’s my beta and I’m his alpha, but because he’s Ethan and I’m Xander, he hugs me tight to him from behind, and I lean into the embrace. After a moment, he slowly releases, giving me just enough. Enough of his power, enough of his support, enough of his love.