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Who was Cerys? Was she a version of me from thirty years ago?
Garrett told Sterling, “Your mother only traded a few letters with Rodero and it was over twenty years ago. He didn’t threaten her. He never contacted her again. It ended on a bad note.”
“What kind of bad note?” I asked.
“He promised that a paternity test would get Sterling a proper registration. It didn’t,” Garrett said.
“He is properly registered. That’s sort of the problem.”
“Oh, is that what you call what Rodero did to him?” Cerys spat at me.
My nerves frayed a few more nanometers, and I snarled at her. Garrett tapped the table to settle both of us. “Sterling’s biological father was never forced to acknowledge him.”
“Do you mean literally?” Were we actually mincing werewolf legalese here? I’d assumed when Marcella said Sterling’s father had never acknowledged him that he just didn’t send child support or birthday cards.
Cerys gave me a bitter smile. “Is there any other meaning for that term?”
“Yes, actually. The colloquial one,” I said coldly. “We’re all on the same side, so get your teeth out of my thigh.”
“Only when you’re out of my son’s life,” she hissed.
Sterling squeezed my fingers even tighter. “That’s not happening. Make peace with it.”
Garrett tapped the table again. “Do you want me to get the letter explaining it?”
“If you still have it. It’s from my father?” I asked. “You didn’t destroy it?”
“Of course I didn’t destroy it,” Cerys said coldly.
We didn’t talk while waiting for Cerys to return. She passed the old letter to me, written in my father’s neat hand on paper that had gone soft with age. It had his two seals on it: his Alpha seal, and the Chronicler’s seal. The date was September of the year I’d been born. At the bottom of the letter were the seals of each Elder Alpha and Luna who had been present at the time, and little glyphs to denote how they had voted: yay, nay, reluctant agreement, or regretful disagreement.
Elder Council voting was nothing like human voting systems. The votes of Lunas were weighted more heavily than the votes of Alphas in some matters—this being one of them. A yay or nay were weighed more than the reluctant or regretful. The Council’s vote had been fairly split between nays and reluctants, with a few regretfuls. The final tally had just barely been reluctant agreement. My father had been the one yay (of course), but my mother had been reluctant.
My mother’s vote was surprising enough, but the fact she’d voted at all stunned me. I’d been less than four months old. My mother had made the trip from Alaska, and a she-wolf who was still recovering from birth and had a nursing, tiny infant at her breast only left her den for an emergency.
Considering pups that had had the breast would never accept a bottle, and infant pups needed to nurse almost constantly, there was a very, very good chance I had physically been at that exact Council meeting.
The Male-In-Question (no name, no pack mentioned) admitted to carnal knowledge of the Female-In-Question (Cerys) around the time the Pup-In-Question may have been conceived, but that he had asked her to take appropriate precautions (she’d shifted forms in front of him) and he had also taken his own precautions (pulled out or used a condom), and that there had been other males of Us & Them (wolf and human) in proximity (she could have gotten pregnant by someone else, including a human).
The Male’s Pack (no name mentioned) disputed paternity, but did agree there was enough circumstantial evidence the possibility could not be easily refuted, and also considering that the Pup “may” have significant genetic value and it was unlikely the “damaged” Female would ever produce another (dickheads), that the Alpha (citing the Fifth Law) consented to the Pup being recorded as a bastard with the Male’s name as his sire for “recording purposes only” (whatever that meant) until and unless new information came to light, contingent upon the Male and the Pack never acknowledging the Pup or Female, and as long as the Pup remained a credit to Us (the species).
The letter concluded by advising Cerys that she was not to disclose the contents of the letter (except to Sterling when he was old enough) and she was to forget the Male-In-Question ever existed. In return, the male would do her the same “courtesy.”
I’d never seen anything like it. It was a monstrosity of mangled bits of Law crammed together into one flaming pile of slop.
My father had been so desperate to mate me off (or get his prestige back) he’d gone back to this poisoned well.
And now he was dead.
Gaia’s Will or Gaia’s Wrath looked very much the same.
Maybe Sterling’s biological father had been well-connected. Perhaps he was scum and letting him go on his merry way with no legal ties to Sterling was safer and better for everyone. Maybe the Council had forced him to disavow his offspring to punish my father for his hubris. It would not have been the first time the Council had seen their way to that sort of perverse, demented, narrow-minded, and self-serving type of justice.
Cerys’ temper snapped, and she lashed out at Sterling. “I raised you to know better than to get mixed up with wolves. Look at what those Clare wolves did to you, and the nobles are worse, but did you walk away? No. You should have closed that email and walked away!”
Sterling snarled, “So you want me to walk away from my mate like my sire walked away from you? That makes you no better than those noble wolves you hate so much.”
He gripped my fingers with crushing strength. Our wedding bands dug into my skin as he clawed at his dam’s frost. “You told me to pick the life I wanted, wear my fur, you only wanted me to be happy. Wolves like me don’t find mates, so you played the odds one day I’d accept the futility of living on the fringes of a world that doesn’t want me. I’d go and marry a nice human woman and adopt some human kids. That’s what you wanted so you could finally go to sleep and never wake up with fur again. This is about you and a promise you never thought you’d have to keep. But that’s not how it ended, and I find my true mate, and you have the gall to sit there and tell me she’s not my mate, and I’ve made a terrible mistake when I have done nothing wrong. I have fought, and worked, and struggled, and I died for the right to wear this fur and I will wear it and live it because it is my right and it is what I want! But this isn’t about me, this is about you and what you want and a promise you gambled you’d never have to keep.”
