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“At the Great Rite?” Kerin asked with a curl of her lip, the other women gasping in response to this. “They’re going to destroy everything they can—buildings, crops, houses, people, bonds, love. It all feeds the dread lord below. He is death, he is destruction.” Her eyes shone red for a moment, and I felt a burning need to take a million steps away from her in case her head started rotating as she spewed up green pea soup. “All to be rebuilt again, for the next bloody cycle.”
“Out of death comes regrowth,” Brandon and I said.
“Fuck, you got any other weapons in that stash of yours?” Aaron said. “We need schematics, maps, numbers of men, ratios of Volken to non-Volken…”
“You won’t get it,” Sylvan said with a shake of his head.
“Right, right, suicide mission it is then.” He looked up at me and said, “I agree, then. Jules goes tonight with as many of the outer limits women and children we can manage under the cover of night.”
“No,” I said, my heart twisting at the thought of what he said.
“Yes, love.” Aaron said the words, but I saw it in the gaze of all of my pack. They met my gaze without flinching, standing together against me.
“No, no, you can’t make me. You can’t make me do anything.”
“I saw our child,” Hawk said. “In that vision. You could be pregnant now. We’ve all been at it for long enough. This is the way it is, why the Great Wolf provides more men than women. We’re dispensable, we protect our mates so they can carry on.”
“Asher said I wouldn’t get pregnant if I didn’t want to.”
This was just met by a unified silence. Was I? I’d opened everything I had to them, everything. Did that include my womb? I looked down at my body, finding it difficult to believe it could be changing right now. Cells multiplying, growing, creating…
From death comes regrowth.
The Great Wolf’s words rang within me like a bell.
No.
From death comes regrowth.
NO.
“No,” I repeated.
“Jules,” Finn growled, the pressure building.
I stood in my borrowed pinafore and felt the weight of everyone’s stares on me. The Great Wolf’s words throbbed inside me, and Finn’s gaze felt like it had actual weight to it, but I held my ground.
“I’m not a womb, not a receptacle for some kind of legacy you see carrying on after you’ve nobly thrown yourself on your sword. I’m your mate, we’re a pack, and we do this together. You don’t dictate to me, and I don’t do that to you. Whatever happens, whether the gods are with us or whatever, we do it together.” I paused for a second. My eyes ached, the effort of keeping them open, of blinking away the tears that welled there had a cost. I wouldn’t brush them away, wouldn’t cede an inch. Because I couldn’t, that’s what they didn’t seem to understand. What was life without them? We’d only just forged this bond, found our way towards each other. I could no more turn my back on that than I could have monkeys fly out the arse of every single Volken. “I can’t continue on without you guys. We’re in this together.”
I don’t know who touched me first, everything having gone blurry in a haze of tears, but it didn’t matter. I felt the energy spike each time one of them made contact, until it vibrated inside me like a newly plucked guitar string. People liked to use a lot of deficit language when talking about love, like it filled a hole or a missing piece in you, but that’s not what this felt like. I felt like I was more than me, or Finn or Brandon, I was pack. We were pack. We were an entity in ourselves, more than the sum of our parts, and we glowed.
I heard the cries of the women, the chairs being knocked over as they scrambled to get away from us, and then they paused. When I opened my eyes, I saw we filled the room with light. Kiralee wriggled out of her mother’s grip and stepped forward.
“Sun!” she said.
“No, darling,” Arelia said, and her eyes strayed to Sylvan’s, who looked upon us, upon her wide eyed. “A pack. That’s what I want for you, my love, a pack.”
This was ill advised. The Volken guard could’ve walked in at any moment, and we’d done nothing about feeding the rest of the women and their kids, but I clung to my mates, needing that good, clean feeling with all I’d seen lately. I felt like I shook off what I’d seen of the Volken like dirty clothes and stepped free of it all, the most seductive yet vulnerable of experiences.
The sound of a key in the lock had all of us turning, pulling apart abruptly, and I dropped to the ground to pick up the mess Kerin had scattered. The door swung open to admit five Volken men, one toting a clipboard.
“I’m interrupting your meals?” Lian said as he approached. “My apologies.”
Everyone stood and dropped down into a deep bow, only my Tirian instincts saving me from being the only one standing there, staring.
“You may rise,” Lian said, and we straightened though kept our eyes trained on the floor. “And what has happened here?”
Lian’s tone was mild, yet everyone’s eyes went to the mess I was piling into a bag I found on the bottom of the trolley.
