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  The envoy rebuilt a smile piece by piece, ending before it reached her eyes. “The boy had such an alpha’s air,” she said, and everyone laughed lightly. In her case, Silver did it more to reassure the envoy than to appreciate the thin joke.

  “Do you have any siblings?” Sacramento tilted her head as she asked it. Her wild self laid its muzzle over the envoy’s wild self’s neck. Interesting, that when everyone was thinking about the abstract of alphas’ children, her question seemed to indicate an interest in the envoy personally.

  Sacramento seemed to have a real talent for falling for the wrong woman. Silver would have to discuss with Dare whether they should meddle, or even just warn Sacramento.

  “If you want her to chase the Russian all the harder, you should definitely speak to her.” Death’s fur brushed against Silver’s legs as he settled himself more comfortably. “Or do you actually think you could keep her away?”

  “I—” The envoy looked down at her food, and seemed to realize that the real purpose of a meal was to eat. She gathered up a bite, but did not raise it. “I am my mother’s only child.” She started eating, deliberately. Silver wondered what other children her father had. That phrasing had been too careful, and the envoy had clearly been tipped off-balance about something. Something to do with Edmond.

  “Do you have any children of your own?” the envoy asked Sacramento. Silver didn’t know if the envoy had planned it that way, but Sacramento’s startled laughter helped ease the atmosphere.

  “Someday, I’d like a few. All the better to show how a woman can be an alpha and a mother.” Sacramento grinned and nodded to Dare, then Silver. “Witness their self-control in not commenting on the idea, though. I’m too young and carefree at the moment.”

  Silver made her silence more pointed, by way of playing along. She didn’t think Sacramento would be a bad mother, far from it. But raising cubs was about working together, with a partner, with family, and Sacramento wasn’t so consistent about that. Or about not making having cubs as a female alpha a political stand.

  Everyone else ate in relative silence for a few moments, until Dare broke it. “Where would you like to start in your search for your . . . heirloom?”

  “I believe the family I am tracking first settled in Alaska, then came south to escape the winters. Washington State seemed a likely place to start looking for them, but I might need to expand back up into British Columbia.” The envoy was calm now, so Silver’s attention widened enough that she caught a flicker of movement farther down the table. Tom had jerked his head up, surprised by something in her remark. He opened his mouth, then dropped his head, frowning.

  “Yes?” Silver said, raising her eyebrows at him. He was right to read the situation as tense enough not to jump in without prompting, but information about the truth of this woman’s story would be useful. Was there really such an heirloom as she’d described? “You know where to find the trail of the family she seeks?”

  Tom flicked a glance at the envoy, then spoke toward Silver instead. “When Felicia and I weren’t speaking last year, you remember how I went roaming alone? I did some tracing of ancestors in eastern Washington. And I found this family burial plot where they had tombstones, and some of them did have Cyrillic characters. And they had pictures of wolves and all sorts of stupid shit carved on them for everyone to see.”

  Only belatedly did Tom seem to consider Tatiana’s reaction to that judgment, but she stayed neutral, undoubtedly because of her encounter with good sense earlier. Silver wanted to shake her head. Writing and painting Were secrets on everything. Unforgivably dangerous.

  “Perhaps I can visit this plot,” Tatiana said, and offered Tom a small smile. He didn’t seem to know what to do with it.

  “We can certainly escort you anywhere you want,” Dare said with a dip of his head. “Or if you will give us names, we can search for them in that town’s human records. It’s very difficult to avoid those.” He lifted a hand in the approximate direction of the exit from their den. “But for tonight, perhaps you’d like to come hunting with us?”

  “Certainly. I am very curious to see a North American hunt. A chase to clear the mind.” The envoy looked at Sacramento as she said it, with the smallest hint of a smile. Silver had to suppress the urge to put her face in her hand. She could feel Death’s smugness radiating into her skin, though he remained silent. At times like these, he didn’t even need to laugh.

  Chapter 6

  Evergreens grew taller and thicker along the roads as they drove toward the pack’s hunting lands, but Tatiana could still see the development behind them. She suspected that once she was out of the car, this forest would smell completely different than those at home, too. It would be full of glass and concrete and exhaust and garbage and humans—an instantly recognizable mixture that said “city” for some distance, even as the houses thinned out.

  Tatiana stared out the window and focused part of her attention on memorizing the route, as she had the one from the airport to the pack house. With the rest of her attention, she tried to decide if she was being self-indulgent. The blond woman who’d fought in the guesthouse and been seated next to her at dinner had been introduced as Sacramento, one of that strange class of sub-alphas. In practice, she seemed ranked just below the beta. Cultivating her could give Tatiana valuable information, much as she could have gotten if she’d been successful with Felicia. But Sacramento was also gorgeous. A little uptight in how she carried herself, and her hair and clothes, but that just made Tatiana ache to be the one who coaxed her into letting go.

  And Felicia really was the alpha’s daughter. And no one else was. Tatiana’s mind bounced from thought to thought like she was on her first mission. She could hardly conceive of the idea. North Americans knew their parents. From birth. Everyone acknowledged their parents.

  At home, every cub was called the alpha’s, to pretend the pack was like one of true wolves, though Lady knew Were had enough other differences from their animal ancestors. That explanation read to Tatiana more like an excuse for an ancient tradition that had lost its original purpose. The cubs were all raised together in the knowledge that they belonged to the alpha pair, though in practice everyone knew their mother. It was a little hard to hide who had nursed you. If your mother had a mate, the conclusion was obvious, but Tatiana’s mother had never had a mate, or even a steady lover.

  Lady. If she’d been born in North America, she would have known who her father was.

  She wondered if her alpha had had any conception of the cultural differences when he’d sent her here. She certainly hadn’t. She’d assumed that since she knew Europe well, she knew North America. And it might even be that she didn’t know Europe properly, either. She’d never been invited into a European pack house, never met their children to think to ask about their parentage. She’d always talked with adults in neutral locations. Perhaps the Europeans acknowledged their children as well.

  Tatiana thinned her lips to break that line of thought before smoothing her expression again. She was not completely without information. She knew about the North American practice of “hunting lands” from Europe, though at home, her pack had no such thing. They had wilderness clear enough of humans to hunt, and forests that weren’t. The idea of owning a patch of trees, fenced and taxed in the human manner, seemed too constrained to her, but eminently logical for Were living where wildernesses rarely lacked humans anymore, and those that did had few opportunities for Were on two legs to make a living.

  The road narrowed and grew steeper, trees pressing close on both sides. The houses drew back, set away from the road up winding gravel driveways. Tatiana sat straighter to get a wider range of view out the window, which suddenly rolled down, along with the others in the vehicle. She glanced over to see Andrew just taking his hand from the driver’s controls. She wasn’t going to hang her head out the window, but she did draw in lungfuls of the scents. She craved immersion in a place with growing things and a chance to run on four legs after the plane
ride.

  Their SUV, leading a minivan with the rest of the pack adults, pulled up a driveway to a gate. Felicia’s boyfriend hopped out and opened it, then stood back and motioned everyone through with a grinning flourish. The vegetation on the other side of the gate showed evidence of repeated flattening under tires, and both vehicles pulled off onto it as if settling into habitual parking spots.

  Everything was boisterous chaos for a few minutes as everyone undressed and shifted. Andrew edged to the back of the group before pulling off his clothes, which only made Tatiana curious what he was trying to hide. She slipped after him in time to catch a glimpse of the knotted scar tissue across his lower back as he partially turned to reply to someone. Odd. North American alphas must sometimes keep their scars to boast about past battles, though she would have expected Andrew to show them off in that case.

  Tatiana also noticed red tinting on several of the wolf forms, something she’d never seen at home. Andrew was within the gray Russian spectrum, though with a patch of coarser, white fur over his back, probably from the injury that caused his scars, but Felicia was red-tinted black and her boyfriend was a sandy brown shade that Tatiana associated with pictures of coyotes.

  “Is the red in people’s fur a North American thing?” Tatiana asked Sacramento as she strolled by, nude, with a bundle of her clothes. It was another question she asked more for the sake of asking than any expectation of useful information coming out of it, but part of her also wondered if she could draw out another laugh like the one Sacramento had given at dinner.

  Sacramento did laugh, warm and surprised again. “You know, I’d never noticed that. I suppose it could be, if you don’t have it at home. We have red true wolves in the southeast, here. Or we used to. They might be only in zoos now. And the original Roanoke pack landed in what’s now North Carolina.”

  Sacramento glanced at Tatiana as if to check that North Carolina meant something to her in conjunction with southeast. Tatiana shook her head. She’d have to look at a map later to get her U.S. states straight. It didn’t really matter, anyway. She’d started this conversation with good intentions, but it was getting harder to avoid being rude by visibly appreciating Sacramento’s nudity.

  “So people could well have blood from red true wolves, as well as from the colonists.” Sacramento shrugged, caught her panties trying to escape from her clothing bundle, and lobbed everything underhand into the minivan. She turned away toward the others, but spoke back over her shoulder, showing off her ass at the same time. “If you see any tinge in my fur, we can nose through my ancestors when the hunt’s through.”

  Sacramento wandered off to shift with a bit more privacy, leaving Tatiana alone with Silver, still in human. Tatiana refocused her attention on the alpha with a promise to herself that after she’d found out more about the alphas, she could let her information-gathering carry her back to Sacramento at the end of the night—but only if she didn’t allow herself any distraction now.

  Tatiana wasted time folding her clothes very precisely, but Silver didn’t even make a move to undress. She lounged with her ass against the closed passenger door of the minivan where everyone had been piling their belongings. Did North Americans leave a guard on their belongings, since they ran in such populated areas? But why in the Lady’s name would that guard be an alpha?

  Silver bent and retrieved a shirt that had fallen short on the van’s step, thrown from too great a distance. She tossed it on the seat and folded it over, only using one hand the entire time. She must not be able to run properly with that arm, Tatiana realized. Certainly, one could travel on three legs, but not well, and not as quickly. Some of the stories about Silver said she couldn’t shift at all, but Tatiana didn’t believe it. No one could be alpha and not shift. It was rare enough to be an alpha and choose not to remove your scars. Tatiana wasn’t surprised that such an injury had been exaggerated to being unable to shift.

  Tatiana bet Silver thought enigmatically refusing to shift was better than fumbling weakly around on three legs. She wasn’t wrong, either. Tatiana carried over her clothes and nodded respectfully to Silver before stepping back far enough for privacy when she shifted.

  She might have made the same choice herself, in a similar situation. After all, staying so calmly in human when it was near full and everyone was itching to get into wolf showed a definite strength of character. Not the same as the physical strength of four sound, fleet legs, but better than nothing.

  Tatiana surfaced into her wolf form with a gasping sort of relief, similar to that of leaving a room you hadn’t even realized was stuffy for a cool breeze outside. Sharper scents, not the same as those at home, but carrying the same association of simple rightness. Hunts in wolf form were simple. Not like her mission hunts for information.

  Usually. The last mission she’d finished in wolf form slipped to the surface of Tatiana’s mind before she shoved it down again, hard. No human women were being hunted tonight.

  A wolf body slammed into her from the side. Tatiana stumbled and caught herself, braced to fight, before she realized that in her current role she probably shouldn’t show that kind of familiarity with combat. She yelped, only a little late, like someone caught completely off guard. Sacramento, wolf form also Russian gray, stood there panting in a canine laugh. She shook herself all over to ruffle up her fur, as if inviting a search for any red. Tatiana launched herself at the other woman for a return strike, because that was clearly what was actually expected of her. They tussled, rolling around in the pine needles.

  It was expected of her, but it wasn’t exactly a hardship, either. Tatiana hadn’t had a chance to play like this very often since she was a young woman. Alexei probably would have indulged her in the name of training, but when new to adulthood, she hadn’t wanted to look unprofessional, and then it had become a habit.

  She enjoyed it a little too much, in fact, and pulled away after a few moments. She was here for a hunt, not to play. No distractions, she’d promised herself. Everyone in wolf form was gathering around Andrew. Tatiana joined them, hanging to the back, since as an outsider she would not be part of any tactics that the alpha directed. Sacramento slipped into the crowd, but not too far away.

  Tatiana tipped her head back and howled. It felt a little lonely, knowing the voices that answered and blended with hers would hold none she recognized, but she was here to learn the North American voices.

  Andrew shifted back, fast enough to make the usually graceful process jerky. “Quiet,” he snapped, then panted a few breaths, crouched with one hand on the ground. He straightened after Tatiana fell instantly silent. What had she done wrong? How could they not howl?

  “You’ll have Fish and Wildlife up here in an instant. They keep track of practically every true wolf in the state.” He touched his neck, humor returning now his perceived danger had passed. “I don’t know about you, but a radio collar isn’t my style.” Tatiana dipped her head in acknowledgment. She’d never considered the danger, but she understood it perfectly now. And she was sure Andrew didn’t mind showing off his ability to shift twice in succession without too much visible effort, either.

  Andrew shifted back and returned to the head of the pack, but he didn’t particularly direct anyone. Instead, he loped away and everyone followed, fanning out into the trees in small groups. Tatiana didn’t move, trying to figure it out. They must be scouting for prey, and the alpha would direct matters once a quarry of the correct size was located.

  Fair enough. Tatiana would scout with them, and watch their behavior, and see what she could find out. Hopefully without stumbling onto any other forbidden things.

  ***

  As soon as Andrew lost the envoy, he circled back around downwind of the area he’d told the pack to keep to. At the moment, that was conveniently at the vehicles, but Silver knew to meet him elsewhere if it hadn’t been.

  Silver waited with her ass hitched on the SUV’s front bumper, creating a great line of hip and leg. He nurtured a wish to appreciate it pr
operly to provide motivation to shift when he was tired and rather sore from so many in a short period. At least this time, he could take as long as he wanted, though too long and the process got painful.

  Silver watched him with a little half smile, bittersweet as always at the reminder of the shift forever denied to her by her injuries. He stepped over and cupped her cheek before kissing her hair.

  Silver leaned into the touch and caught his lips for a proper kiss. If only there weren’t so many other things to worry about. “Are we safe to talk?” Silver said, pulling away a little. She smelled of a reluctance to go back to worries that matched his own.

  “Should be, as long as we keep our noses to the wind. We should have plenty of warning if she gets within earshot.” Andrew exhaled in amusement. “Plus, I asked Sacramento to distract her.” He’d planned to ask Felicia to do it, but with Sacramento’s obvious interest, it had seemed like a good use for her.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Silver flicked him a sharp sideways glance.

  “What?” Andrew matched her glance.

  Silver frowned at the ground, mostly covered with hardy weeds rather than grass here in the usual parking area. “Sacramento loses her judgment when she gets romantically attached, and she falls into attraction so easily. I’d worry the envoy might try to manipulate her.”

  Andrew frowned in the direction Sacramento had run with the others. “She’s not stupid. She’s certainly a competent alpha, just not when it comes to delegation.”

  “You weren’t around the last time she fell for the wrong woman,” Silver countered, though the beat of silence afterward sounded at least thoughtful.

  “It’s probably too late now, anyway. You saw them after shifting, just now. Do you think warning Sacramento will do any good?” Andrew looked back at Silver.