“The soup’s a good start,” I told her.
Mo leveled that bizarrely calm gaze at me. “You know what I mean.”
As Cooper warned her that any violent acts on her part would be over his cold, dead body, I wondered whether Mo had always been so cool under pressure or if living through so much of our pack drama had given her such strong nerves. Still, I told her, “This isn’t your fight.”
She huffed, “Oh, right, Cooper and I will just trot on home and let you handle this. Because if Clay’s pack runs you off, they’ll just stop at the valley, right? They won’t come after me or my family be cause we’re connected to you. They won’t be threatened by the presence of a strong male wolf in their territory. The same wolf who, you know, killed their dad. They’ll just ignore my family, my baby, except for the obligatory ‘new neighbor’ Bundt cake they’ll be bringing over.”
“Damn it, Mo, stop making sense.” I muttered around a mouthful of soup. “No, no, I can’t let you get involved. The best thing for you to do would be to take the baby to Grundy and stay there until the coast is clear. Or better yet, go to Washington. Go visit your parents.”
Cooper snorted.
Mo was aghast. “First of all, Samson’s wanting to date Alicia makes more sense than me going to visit my parents. Second, this is it for you, Mags. This is the defining moment in your leadership of the pack. And it’s your chance to change things. You can’t keep the dead-liners out of pack business anymore. Or us humans, for that matter. You’re our family. This is our home, too. What are we supposed to do? Send you off into a fight with this bunch of wackos, sit on our hands, and wonder whether you’re coming home or not? It’s not fair, Maggie. I can help. Nick can, too. You can’t exclude us anymore.”
“So, what, you’re going to stand on the battlefield with a fire extinguisher?”
“Helped me kick your ass,” she retorted.
“You didn’t kick my ass, you just bruised it a little.”
Mo smirked, winked at Nick, and dragged Cooper into the kitchen with Mom. I leaned my aching temple against Nick’s shoulder and rolled my options over in my head. I’d charged into fights before, but I’d never led. And I’d never been so frightened—but not for myself. Every face in the pack hovered at the edge of my brain, the feeling of responsibility, of obligation, dragging me under rushing black water. I would never be strong enough. I would never be fast enough to protect all of them. Some of us probably wouldn’t survive this, and knowing that made me want to throw up.
Sometimes being a leader really sucked.
16
Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli
ONCE MY FACE HEALED up to something that didn’t resemble a recalled eggplant, I called a pack meeting and instructed members to bring all of their family members—even the dead-liners. After I convinced them that I was not kidding and they went back home to retrieve said dead-liners, I laid everything on the line for those who hadn’t been invited to pack meetings until now, every weird coincidence and hinky feeling I’d had since Clay had moved into the valley. And when I dropped the bomb about Clay and Alicia’s dubious family connections, two of my uncles literally wolfed out and chose to destroy a couch to express their anger.
The reaction was a sort of venting by proxy for the other pack members, and by the time Uncle Jay and Uncle Rob were trying to digest spring coils, my relatives looked a little bored.
“Does this happen at every pack meeting?” Mo asked Evie. Having never attended a pack meeting before, Evie shrugged.
Nick was grinning like an idiot. “This is the coolest thing I have ever seen!”
I buried my face in my hands for a second and contemplated chlorinating my gene pool before wedging myself between the furry idiots and shaking them by the napes of their necks until they phased back to human.
“Sit,” I told them both as they shuffled back to their seats and looked as sheepish as two wolves could. “So, do we have that out of our systems?”
Rob and Jay refused to meet my gaze. I outlined what I considered to be a pretty damn reasonable plan. Able-bodied adults, wolf and dead-liner alike, would stay in the valley. My mom and the older aunties would take the kids, even self-proclaimed badass teenagers, and split them between Cooper’s and Nick’s places for the next few days.
“And then we go to the mattresses, right?” Jay said, his white teeth gleaming. Evie rolled her eyes. For Jay, all situations related somehow to The Godfather.
“And then we try to talk to them,” I countered.
Jay’s face fell into a contemplative frown. “I did not expect that.”
“But they killed Billie!” Uncle Rob protested.
“We don’t know that,” I snapped. “It’s a possibility. But from what Dr. Moder said, Billie could have tripped and hit her head. Which is sort of my point. If we rush into this, rush into judgment, rush into action, we’re going to find ourselves even more vulnerable and screwed up than we were after Cooper left, and we all know how that turned out. Sorry, Cooper.”
Cooper shrugged.
I added, “What if we say, ‘Fuck it, we’re going to kill them all’? Say we chase them down, and we find that their pack is twice the size of ours. Or that they’ve set some trap that we’ve walked right into? What happens then? We’re dead.”
“Never took you for a coward, Maggie.” Jay snorted and then turned white after the look I gave him.
“OK, fine, we go after them with both barrels. We’ll lose a couple of our pack and take down a few of theirs. And in a few years, their kids are going to show up and what? Fight our kids for what we did? We’re going to leave our kids to make this same choice? What would you want them to do?”