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“You aren’t going to be thinking,” His scent had become a warm musk of playful ardor—half teasing, half serious.
“Keep squirming and definitely not.” He inhaled the scent off my neck and kissed my skin. “I could use the distraction. So could you. The pack did put all that mistletoe and—”
“Ack, don’t talk to me about mistletoe!” It meant fertility, and the absolute last thing he and I needed was a pup.
He bit me gently. “It also means virility.”
“So now you’ve got something to prove to them?”
“Well, they do seem to monitor such things.”
“You need me to think.”
“You can think from my lap.”
“I would never have taken you for a cuddler.”
“Says the lousy cuddler.”
“I am a perfectly adequate cuddler,” I said indignantly.
“Adequate. You are content with being adequate?”
“We work now. Fate of the species. The pack. Certain death. That kind of thing.”
“If we must. Well, as you can see… when you combine my father’s portfolio with mine, it suddenly paints a very colorful picture.”
If by colorful, he meant panic inducing? Sure. If this was the empire Demetrius had accused Garrett of building, this map sent panic along every feral fiber I had. Sterling and Garrett didn’t obfuscate their activities behind nebulous offshore holding companies and convoluted papertrails traversing distant tax havens, but they also didn’t make it as easy as plugging their names into a search engine. You needed to know the paperwork terrain and have their scent to find them.
If Apharia was the tip of the iceberg. If. If.
If, it eliminated the players to a small pool of elite wolves. Wolves who would know, or be able to discover with little difficulty, who Sterling was, the events of twenty years prior, and be able to keep a tight lid on everything. It was so many ifs required that I almost dismissed it out of hand.
Except it fit one small detail that had been a hot point of gossip and speculation at the last Greater Meeting.
“So,” I asked, working through this all slowly, “when did you buy this land? The stuff in Alaska, specifically, to start.”
“It started being released into the private sector five years ago. I closed my first deal three years ago. Dad was in from the beginning.”
Feral packs tried to keep their territories up against public lands and nature preserves. That meant they monitored, very closely, what was going on with those lands. They’d have looked into who was buying the land so they could decide if it was safe to stay, or if they’d need to move before heavy machinery and development rolled in. When they’d ran up against holding companies that didn’t apparently do or manufacture anything, they’d have kept digging until they got to a name: Mortcombe.
There was one pack in the arctic, right dead in the middle of this land, that had power, influence, contacts, and they ticked every other box: hated humans, hated human allies, were powerful, large, well-established, sticklers for tradition, isolationists, and at the last Greater Meeting there’d been gossipy intrigue involving them.
I asked, “Did you go see any of this land in person?”
“Survey flights.”
Up close, Sterling’s eyes were a striking blue-silver flecked with jagged cuts of slate. “Imagine you’re an Alaska feral who discovers your territory—which is largely public land—is for sale. You do your research on who or what has bought it so you know if you need to move. You trace it all back to two men: Sterling and Garrett Mortcombe. The names mean nothing, but a little easy digging turns up that Sterling is Garrett’s adopted son, and that they’re estranged from but related to the oil-industry Mortcombes.”
“Seems very reasonable.” Sterling nodded, eyes bright and hard like a still pond. He pulled me a little closer.
“Then one of them arrives at an airstrip for a survey flight. A worker at the airstrip catches his scent. Checks the passenger manifest. Sterling Mortcombe is a werewolf. Said worker anxiously reports this information to his Alpha, who carries it to a pack in the Arctic with the resources to deal with this, and by the time it gets to them, there are multiple reports of these Mortcombes buying land all over.”
I pointed at a purple blob that overlapped much of the blue two hours west of Fairbanks. “The FrostFur, my mother’s birthpack. A century ago they were also an Elder Pack, picked too many fights and nearly died out, but have rebuilt their powerbase. Speculation is they’ll be the ninth Elder pack soon, even though they haven’t petitioned for it.
“This past summer, the FrostFur had a private meeting with the Council. Usually the private hearings aren’t totally private because you have to petition to be heard, and rumors leak. But the FrostFur are powerful enough they can invite any Elder to dinner as they please and keep things hush-hush. The wild, unfounded speculation is that the Council asked them to petition for Elder status to squeeze out GranitePaw’s upcoming bid attempt. What if the meeting was actually about this?”
Sterling wasn’t convinced. “You think something that large could stay quiet?”
