Death-Touched

  DEATH-TOUCHED

  By Rhiannon Held

  Copyright © 2018 by Rhiannon Held

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by Kate Marshall (katemarshalldesigns.com)

  www.rhiannonheld.com

  Other Books by Rhiannon Held

  The Silver Series

  SILVER

  TARNISHED

  REFLECTED

  WOLFSBANE

  DEATH-TOUCHED

  Stand Alone

  HOUND AND KEY

  MIRROR BOUND

  To Corry, Erin, Shanna, and Susan

  Who haven’t had a dedication yet, and whose unwavering support deserves it.

  Even if we don’t have a name.

  CHAPTER 1

  It was a beautiful room for a wedding, Silver decided, even if that wedding had been intended merely as a platform for diplomacy. With that diplomacy refused, that platform empty, the event still lurched onward with its original unwieldy proportions. But with nothing else for it, should she not focus on the beauty of it? For a heartbeat or two, she let her perceptions slip away from what she’d taught herself to see of the world of her mate and her pack. What she saw was not real—or it was not what others had decided together was real—but sunlight stars glittered from every high tree branch around them and showered her with sparkled kisses of fractured colors.

  Then she concentrated again. No trees, no ancient grove. A room, filled with hundreds of Were; but the sunlight stars, those remained, albeit as light thrown by small hanging stones. Susan and Silver’s soon-to-be stepdaughter, Felicia, had done a wonderful job of decorating. Seven days ago, the Russian alpha had announced he would not be sending his promised envoys to the event specifically planned as an excuse to host them. A week was a nicely calculated period long enough to allow them the illusion of a choice to cancel—if they did not mind seeming to run their hunt based on his howls, in front of their entire pack. So they’d gone forward, but to put the original effort into the details of it, decorations and food, that had been Susan’s and Felicia’s choice.

  Death, slumped with his muzzle on his paws beside her, seemed even darker in protest of the light, blackness vibrating with its intensity in the canine silhouette at the corner of her eye. “So sweet and perfect. Like one of the humans’ children’s stories.” Death used his favorite voice and gave it a mocking note. Silver ignored him. If he was truly uncomfortable, he’d leave.

  Her mate, Dare, approached, smiling thinly at her. His wild self paced at his side, steely gray head a little bowed with the weight of their responsibility, their shared worries. It was an advantage Silver had, she supposed, to see wild selves and tame at the same time, and so read moods on the self others could not see. It often balanced poorly against all the other things of her mate’s world she could not see, however.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps we should find some excuse to keep everyone here after the usual wedding feasts,” Dare said. “Since Russia won’t talk, to give us the chance to convince him we have less than no interest in using you as a religious symbol to threaten his borders, he’ll be trying something else soon enough.”

  Silver looked out over the sea of Were from every one of their subpacks and matched the frustrated quality of his smile. “It’s a nice idea in theory—” And it was, practically all of their pack pulled into the safety of numbers, and all those staying behind on alert. But everyone had lives of their own, put on hold to travel here from their homes across the far-flung Roanoke pack territory. “But think of the mediation we’d need to do, given the additional time spent stepping on each other’s tails.”

  Dare snorted and smoothed fingers through his hair. “Too true. If only Tatiana’s sources could tell us something more about what her former alpha’s next move will be.”

  He’d spoiled the crisp line of the white streak in the dark at his temple, and Silver reached up to fix it to match the one on the other side. Their Russian—hostage? defector? somewhere between—had given them much more than they could have hoped for in terms of background knowledge of Russia’s strength, but information on future plans was obviously much harder to come by. “If only we knew the right bait to dangle to prompt it, so it would be in the open and we could simply deal with it. This guessing and prediction is exhausting.”

  He kissed her forehead, leaned back with a frown in his eyes. “Silver, I do want you to enjoy your own wedding at least a little—”

  “Only if you promise to as well. Shall we make a pact not to think on Russia until tomorrow morning?” Neither of them would keep to it, but they could pretend. She kissed him on the lips, just a peck. Anything else was for later. “I have a pretty dress…” She dropped his hand so her good hand would be free to smooth the skirt. They’d even given her a pocket on one side to slip her bad hand into. “And they put stars in here.” She gestured up and around the room.

  “That they did.” Dare lowered his head to nip at the side of her neck, and then tensed in response to whatever he’d seen over her shoulder. “What—?”

  A group of voices rumbled up and then spilled over by the front entrance, and people drifted closer in curiosity. Death’s ears pricked up. “Finally.” Silver had no doubt Death had been longing for any sort of mischief all day, but she couldn’t read from his pleased anticipation if this was likely to be something more serious.

  Her cousin’s voice lifted above the rest, and Silver frowned. She’d have expected that, as her beta, John would be the one to defuse disagreement, not create it, but his voice was clearly angry. “Now? Now you show up, Hugh? Where were you six years ago?”

  “That’s none of your business.” A male stranger’s voice, more calm, but no softer. “The Roanokes may throw me out as they wish, but you have no right to deny me entry.”

  Silver slipped her hand into the crook of Dare’s arm, to ground herself. She needed all her powers of concentration now. She knew that voice. Who was it? Dare frowned at her, and she spread her hand wide, still on his arm. “Wait. I…”

  “‘Who?’ is not the question to ask,” Death said. “You know who. The question is, how do you feel about him?” For a moment, his borrowed voice held the weight of all the years that Were must have been dead. Death had no voice of his own, had to use instead those of Were already gone.

  And Silver did know who. She stumbled a step when she started moving because she caught Dare off-guard and he dragged her back at first. She didn’t need the man’s scent to verify what she knew, not really, but she kept the word in her voice locked away until she’d drawn close enough to smell him anyway.

  A name had power, his name in her voice especially so. “Father?”

  Those who had gathered moved aside, except for her cousin, who hovered, protective. And Dare, who kept his arm very steady, as if he expected her to cling. She wished she knew if she wanted to cling. Death had been right—as he almost always was, insufferable cat—she didn’t know how she felt.

  Her father didn’t move. “Silver.” He sounded so collected. Silver wished he’d do something, so she could react. He looked like she remembered, and not. She’d been so young when he left to wander onward. She’d seen him last with a child’s eyes, even had there not been a bloody swath of memories she had locked away between then and now. In those memories, a monster had killed her brother and her pack, had poisoned her blood so she could not see the world properly, could not use her arm. The monster was dead, but the memories could still pull her into madness.

  Her memories of her father were clean, if ephemeral, but nothing could be untainted by how she’d
changed after the monster.

  She remembered him as big, and reassuring. He was of a height with her cousin, now, a little shorter than her mate, and to adult eyes he did seem centered. But centered with his weight forward, ready to move. Always a wanderer, as some Were were.

  “He couldn’t be bothered to show up when his own son died,” John snapped, crossing over to Dare. Silver supposed he assumed she was too emotionally tangled up to be counted on to throw her own father out. “There’s being a wanderer, and there’s being a cat’s bastard.”

  “And I’m here to speak to my own daughter now, if you’d stop getting in my way, Nephew.” Despite the heavy, almost insulting, emphasis, her father’s wild self stood quietly, no snarl, no lowered ears, no raised hackles.

  It hit Silver like a blow to her voice: her wild self was dead, she couldn’t remember what it had looked like, but would it not have had something of the wild selves of her parents? Her mother was dead as well, but her father’s wild self was right here for her to see. Its mostly gray fur whitened outward from a center bar of dusty brown that crowned its spine and striped down the top of its muzzle. Had Silver’s wild self looked anything like that?

  But the death of her wild self was buried deep in the center of all the things she could by no account allow herself to remember, or risk losing herself completely. Silver whined softly without meaning to. Death snorted. “Is he even worth this much trouble?”

  Her father’s head dropped. “I didn’t come to upset anyone.” He turned away.

  “Wait.” Silver’s mind tried to follow other useless trails—his blue eyes, strong line to his jaw, were those anything like her brother’s had once been?—but she focused on his words here and now, and things snapped into focus. “You used the right name.” Usually, those who’d known her before tried to use the name that belonged to the woman she was no longer, and that hurt. But her father…hadn’t. He was trying, at least, and if he was trying, he deserved to stay.

  She pulled away from Dare, and her father turned back. She got as far as standing before him when she ran out of reaction and fell back into confusion again. He looked her over, and even though his eyes crinkled with concern over what he found, she let him. It was only fair given how she must have been staring at him a few moments ago. He reached out and smoothed a lock of her white hair off her shoulder.

  “If you say she looks like her mother, I think your nephew is going to call you a liar,” Dare said, dry. The humor held a note of calculation, to Silver’s ears, but most around them laughed, and relaxed a little. John still frowned, but her father smiled and it lit up his face.

  “She looks like herself,” he said, and embraced her. Silver brought her good arm up a beat later. She’d had two arms when she’d hugged him last, though she was not entirely sure she remembered the action, only the comfort. “And a little tiny bit like the cute five-year-old I last saw for any length of time. You’ve grown up beautiful, puppy.”

  He tipped his head close to her ear, barely breathing the words to keep them between the pair of them, with so many werewolf ears pricked around them. “And Lady, I wish I could have come here only to tell you that. But there’s something I have to talk to you about as soon as possible, privately. If privacy is remotely possible around here.”

  Silver pulled back to search her father’s face properly. Whatever it was, she doubted she would like it. Perhaps it was something to do with a half-sibling of hers. She’d always wondered if she had one. She murmured a low syllable of acknowledgment, thoughts already ranging away. How was privacy to be procured?

  Where the food was being prepared, perhaps. That was a room of its own, with fewer eyes to watch and note a conference taking place. Silver dispatched her cousin to a resumption of the beta’s duties with a tip of her chin, took a grip on her mate’s arm once more, and directed their steps toward that room. He followed her lead without a need for her to voice her thoughts, and her father drifted in their wake.

  They could hardly move very quickly without drawing attention, however. And contradicting his stated urgency, her father paused to search the crowd with his gaze. “Will you introduce me to your human? I’ve heard a lot about her.” If she was the one he searched for, Silver was unsurprised his gaze had not alighted yet. Susan was the only human within a room packed full of Were, but all those scents were far too tangled to pick hers out. He would have done better to search for John, as he had fetched up by his wife after leaving their group at the door.

  “She’s not ours.” Silver said it automatically, then smoothed away her frown. Of course everyone knew about the Roanokes’ human. She and Dare had known that for years now, but it wasn’t often that an outsider was around to remind her of that fact. She traded a look with Dare, and he seemed more resigned than she felt.

  “Some might call her your responsibility,” Death said. He used the voice of the Were man Susan had killed defending them both. Defending Silver, especially. He kept pace with her as they joined Susan, in the same way her father’s wild self trotted at his heels. Though in truth, Death never walked behind her. His stride barely admitted to “with” her. “You invited her into the Were world.”

  And Susan had chosen to set her feet to that path, eyes open. The three of them caught up with her where she was leaning over the laid-out food, automatically straightening, banishing disorganization. She looked beautiful today herself, for all that she’d dressed to deflect attention as she organized. She seemed to find such satisfaction in that role. Her dress flattered and balanced her hips, and her short brown hair seemed to stay right where she’d told it to, soft around her face.

  Silver touched Susan’s shoulder and nodded to her father. Susan didn’t wait for any introductions. “So you’re Silver’s father. Hugh, my husband said?” She tipped a nod to John, hovering nearby, then offered her hand to shake, a gesture both Were and humans used here, but Silver could see from her father’s surprised reaction that she calculated the pressure to Were standards. She smelled slightly hostile for some reason.

  “And you’re Susan.” Silver’s father smiled, pleasant enough. “You’re not what I expected.”

  Susan lifted her eyebrows at him, and brushed her gaze past his, purposely threatening the measuring of dominance that full eye contact held. Silver hid a smile. She enjoyed seeing Susan put people in their places. “You’re not either. You don’t look at all like the kind of man who abandons his children.”

  Death laughed, and Silver was silent for a beat, shocked. That wasn’t a repetition of John’s sentiments; it sounded like an opinion of Susan’s own. She took a firm grip on Susan’s arm. “He didn’t abandon us.”

  John stepped up to press himself against his wife’s back, so Silver moved to give him room. The movement took her closer to her father, and she smelled that his patience with the hostility was wearing thin. She searched for the right words to explain to Susan. “Parents are not necessarily mates. My mother always knew my father was a wanderer.”

  “So he just gets a pass?” Susan twisted to look at her husband’s face, and frowned when she found embarrassment there. “Even when Silver’s mother died and he didn’t come back?”

  Rather than answer, Silver’s father looked straight at John, who coughed. “Some Were are wanderers. He called, when my aunt died. To make sure the pack was going to take care of Silver and her brother properly. But that’s not the point.” His words grew faster as he tried to cram in his justification. “The point is that he didn’t call, or show up, or even appear to notice when his only son—”

  Silver’s father made a violent slashing gesture, cutting John off, scent muddying with layers of anger and guilt. “Mistakes in the past cannot be undone. I can’t go back and do something different now.”

  “We are all shaped by our pasts,” Silver said quellingly. She didn’t know her side in this matter, but she did know she no longer wanted to discuss it at the present time. She focused her attention on her father. He was the author of this distractio
n in the first place, haring off after Susan. “You wanted to speak to us?”

  “Yes, of course,” he murmured and dropped his head.

  “See how well he listens to his alpha,” Death murmured in the same cadence, though he would never bow his head so to anyone. Roamers were not technically under Roanoke authority, except when they chose to attend an event such as this. So she was his alpha, for the space of a few hours. Silver’s balance moved under her feet—was this how Dare felt, outranking his parents? The sensation must grow more bearable with familiarity. To outrun it for the moment, she strode away from mate and parent both. She reached the small room for the food far enough ahead for a breath or two of private space before they joined her.

  A couple young Were looked up from among the odds and ends of food left from portioning out what had been prepared beforehand, and the greater quantities stockpiled against later need. No great scent from anything heating just at the moment. The young people took the hint from her frown, a jerk of Dare’s head, and made themselves scarce.

  Dare set his shoulder against the doorway, making his wish for this business to be conducted quickly clear enough. The rest of his manner remained polite, however. “What is it you wished to tell us?”

  Silver’s father took her hands, bad and good, though she would rather not have allowed him the former. He had to feel the way the weight hung from his grip, but he didn’t comment. “I don’t want to cry hunter of the wind, but everyone has heard about how Russia came sniffing around, how you had to take one of his spies hostage. I know a couple of Alaskans who came down for the wedding. We’re…drinking buddies, I suppose you could say. They’re in human more than some, to fish during the season and earn money to help keep the pack going. Then one day they’re all laughing it up because this new Russian friend of theirs promised to pay them handsomely for information on the wedding they were going to…and on the Roanokes’ human. Because he’s planning a prank on the uptight Roanoke pack Were: grab her and hilarity ensues.”