Noah watched as the blood slowed, but she didn’t heal. His suspicions about this pack were right. Acting collectively as a pack, they were fine, but none of them alone or even in small groups could challenge him. Livia wouldn’t heal properly until she’d had something to eat. Even then, it might take a day or two.
“You will never defy me like that again. Is that understood?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“I would have let you bury her if you’d asked.”
Noah turned back to the group and gestured to his mate. “If any of you don’t know, I’m Noah. Sydney and I are your new alphas. You are not lone wolves. You don’t take a piss without one of us knowing about it from now on. Are we clear?”
All throughout the large lobby, werewolves dropped to one knee and bared their throats. Except a small cluster at the back. He wasn’t surprised he didn’t have one hundred percent support. Especially after marking a vampire. Noah wasn’t sure if the group had noticed the mark Sydney had left on him, but it was none of their business.
“No,” one of the wolves in the back said, still standing, his arms crossed over his chest. “I’m not answering to a vampire. I’ve had to do a lot of things in my life for survival, but that’s not going to be one of them.”
Before Noah could say anything else, Sydney had blurred across the floor and shoved the wolf back hard. He landed with a loud crack as his tailbone hit the ground.
“Yes. You will,” she said, growling for emphasis.
Noah couldn’t be prouder. She understood things. But then, she’d been raised by the vampire king who, from the stories that had circulated in the exercise yard over the years, still made quite an impression on people. She was her father’s daughter, and she knew the game they had to play now.
The small cluster of hold outs dropped to one knee and bared their throats. Slowly the male who had spoken up joined them.
“Any further questions?” Noah asked as Sydney calmly made her way back to his side. He nodded his approval at her.
When no one made a sound he asked, “Did you hunt without me?”
Heads shook quickly.
“Good. Let’s go. Livia, stay here. We’ll bring you something back.”
She nodded.
The rest shifted to wolf form, and Noah led them out into the night.
Sydney watched her mate lead the pack outside. It was just her and Shira’s sister now. The girl was scared of her. She couldn’t have been much more than nineteen. Still, it was surreal to Sydney that anyone should be scared of her. She’d always been the weak one that had to fear everybody else. The only reason she hadn’t spent a lot of her life huddled in a corner was because her father had made it abundantly clear that if any harm came to her they would suffer a slow and painful death. And he’d acted on the threat more than once when she’d gotten minor injuries over the years.
A large animal pelt lay on the floor in front of a few chairs. Sydney picked it up and wrapped it around Livia. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Where do you keep your first aid?” She was sure her blood would heal others now, but she wouldn’t cross her mate or undermine him when he was trying to solidify his alpha status with the pack.
The girl relaxed a fraction and led Sydney to a small room off to the side. Sydney cleaned the girl’s wounds and bandaged her up, trying not to be squeamish about the fact that her mate had just done that.
“He could have killed me. It would have been completely normal,” Livia said.
Sydney was rusty on how packs functioned, but deep down she knew that was right. Especially with this girl being Shira’s sister. As brutal as it looked, that had been mercy. And from the expressions she’d seen on the faces of the pack, they had all read the signal loud and clear. Noah wasn’t going to be pushed around, but he’d give them a chance to follow him.
“When you guys were being shown to your room last night, I told Shira she shouldn’t have brought you here, but she wouldn’t listen. She said Noah was too strong. She thought if she’d challenged him in the desert that he would have taken her out and taken the pack then and there. She said he hadn’t marked you, and she was going to try to get him to mark her instead to get rid of you.”
Sydney’s hand went to her throat to touch the vicious-looking mark Noah had left there. “She wouldn’t have had a chance. I’ve known Noah since we were children. We’ve always been destined for one another.”
Sydney knew Shira couldn’t have competed with a true mate no matter what her strategy was. Shira must not have believed it was true. It wasn’t hard to see why. With Noah being strong enough to lead a pack, the idea that his true mate would be some weak little barely-a-vampire would be laughable to almost anyone. It had seemed unlikely even to Sydney until she’d felt the first effects of his blood.
8
Noah shifted back to his human form as he reached the shelter of the train station lobby. He’d have to maintain these displays of power for a while to remind them. He didn’t want to have to do something truly vicious to keep himself and Sydney safe. He liked the pack and felt bad he’d taken their leader from them.
The pack had accepted him as their new leader so quickly, it reminded Noah what a fraud he was. Another wolf wouldn’t have been so surprised. He kept looking for duplicity but couldn’t find it in anyone.
He didn’t understand packs, not really. He’d lived isolated, watching other wolves through glass, having brief conversations or mostly overhearing brief conversations among others in the exercise yard. There had been nothing of substance. No cohesion. No hierarchy.
There had been times when a wolf had tried to form a mini-pack during recreation hours in the yard, but the guards would quickly shut it down, isolating the would-be leader from others immediately with no hope of ever rejoining the group. It was a warning to the others about organizing. Most of them went mad with no interaction with others. Even the smallest interaction was better than nothing.
Noah might have been one of those would-be pseudo-alphas driven mad by total isolation, if not for the fact that he’d been taken so young. As a child, he couldn’t lead anything, so he’d stayed out of everybody’s way and observed the structure of how everyone had fit together at the facility. It had an organization to it, but it wasn’t the same as how a pack worked. Not exactly.
Now he found himself surrounded by pack, wolves he had thought would be more a means to an end to safely get him to his family, but who now might become a second family. They’d bonded out in the desert. It felt natural and right. Running free and hunting was exhilarating. He’d barely been able to contain his excitement. All the new and exciting smells. The hunt, the kill. How had he survived at all without any of that?
Maybe it was unfair to judge them for submitting to his leadership so easily when he found just being with them out there in the wildness had melted much of his anti-social wall. He’d still need a lot of space and time to himself away from others, but they didn’t make him uncomfortable like they had the first night.
One of the other wolves struggled just outside the door to reclaim his form. It was a wolf named Milo. Out in the desert, Noah had thought Milo might make a good second-in-command for the pack. His instincts were proving right on that score.