This is a work of speculative fanfiction. No profit was made nor was intended to be made. All rights to to Twilight and it's sequels and prequels belong to Stephanie Meyer and Little Brown Publishing company. I make no claim to ownership on any of those rights nor to any intellectual property of Stephanie Meyer.
AN: Hello all. I doubt I will be able to keep my 2 chapters a month promise this month, but I will try. There's been quite a lot of construction around my home this week and it has seriously impacted my internet access and my children's sanity. In other news, I have created a website with another author, Essathetwerp, called The Word Garden. It's a place to discus and post works of original fiction, fanfiction, poetry and non-fiction. We have a little bit of everything and if any of you are interested, the link is on my author page.
Okay, enough self promotion... on to the chapter!
Chapter Eleven:
Jake and Paul were in the diner at the Seattle airport, they had just seen Sam, Leah, Seth, Ingrid and Quil off and were loading themselves up on shitty airport food before the drive back to La Push. Paul was looking out the window at the tarmac, his jaw clenching and Jake was looking at Paul.
"So you and Leah, huh?"
Paul curtly nodded his head once. "Yeah. Me and Leah."
"It was sort of bold of you to have sex with her at the barbeque you know."
"How did you... nevermind." Paul said.
"Dude, the two of you disappeared and when you came back, she had freshly fucked hair and you both smelled like sex and each other. And even if we were all too brain dead to notice that, you've been sniffing around her for a while now and she's been letting you. It's not exactly a shocker."
Paul pushed his runny eggs away. "You have a tone Jake, it's the 'I'm not sure I approve but I want to hear you out' alpha tone that you get. Just spit it out already."
Jake paused, gathered his thoughts, Leah and Paul, Paul and Leah... without a doubt his two most volatile wolves. If Sam and Leah had been a bit of an opposites attract type of couple, Paul and Leah were more like the male and female versions of each other. He was not intimidated by them, but he also realized that it was foolish to antagonize them... just because he could.
"In a way, I suppose this was a bit inevitable. Ever since I reunited the packs, you two have shared a rank. You switch back and forth less and less these days, more often you're just both third ranked. If we were real wolves the two of you would just have a bloody and brutal fight to determine who ranked who. But we're not, so perhaps this is just a more judicious way for you to deal with it."
Paul had to admit that his alpha had a point. "I think, that our fighting before had a lot to do with that actually. She was always right there. I could tell that all she needed was a little more time and she may take my rank and it made me aggressive. Maybe... maybe a bit too aggressive. Oh fuck, I know it made me too aggressive, but after we started fully sharing a rank, it just became easier. Instead of being angry with her all the time, it made me more drawn to her."
"Do you think that sharing a rank has bound you two up together? Like imprinting?"
Paul's eyes widened. "No, not a chance. She's not my imprint and telling her to fuck off if I think it's what needs to happen doesn't make me want to go slit my wrists in some sort of bizarre mind fuck thing. As far as being connected? Well... I just get her better now, I trust her. My wolf and her's understand each other and we're not in competition anymore. Neither of us is going to go up any further in rank unless Sam dies or retires, so why worry? We've settled. It's fine."
Jake sipped his coffee and watched Paul, then he dropped the bomb everyone was thinking and no one was saying. "Then you haven't imprinted... yet."
For a second Paul looked furious, but then it passed and he tilted his neck to the side to demonstrate to Jake that he wasn't testing his boundaries.
"It always comes back to that doesn't it? And before Seth and Ingrid happened I would have just stayed away from her. I know you all think I'm some sort of complete asshole who could give a shit less who he hurts, but it isn't true. Leah and I were part of the same group. I was damn good friends with her and Sam, I know how in love they were and I know that nothing short of the brain hijack that is imprinting could have made him leave her. I remember what she was like... and how none of us made it any better. I wouldn't have risked doing it to her a second time. I'm not that cruel. No matter what you all think of me."
Jake made a deep soothing sound in his chest and it helped diffuse the tension. "You've changed Paul, no one is going to deny that. You used to be an unrepentant dick. Well, you still are a dick, but you pick your battles now. You toned it down, you don't attack people for no reason anymore. You're right, you've settled. But thinking of you as the wolf we all have to watch is an old habit that is dying hard. If it's any consolation, it's an image that's dying hard for Leah too."
Then he caught Paul's eyes and held them. "But none of that takes away from the fact that you haven't imprinted and that none of us think Leah can go through being abandoned a second time and survive in any meaningful sort of way."
"Not every woman is Emily. Ingrid isn't." Paul blurted out.
And for a few minutes no one said anything. Imprinting was the sacred cow of the Quiluette, a bond so mythologized, so bound up in the storytelling traditions of their people that no one questioned it. And so for the most part, no one questioned the imprints themselves. It felt like being disloyal to their culture, their heritage, to do so.
"You're really going to go there?" Jake asked.
"Someone ought to. Look, Emily knew what she was doing when she decided to have Sam as her lover, as her mate. We can all pretend that she didn't, but she did. She knew he was engaged, she knew he was in love with Leah and she made her choices and now she has to live with them. But not every woman is Emily Young... or Dagmar Jarlsson either. Look at Ingrid! She decided that being Seth's mate was the wrong choice... and they're friends. That's all they are and you know as well as I do that she's not ever going to change her mind about that. So, if I imprint... I can tell whoever it is that I have a mate... and hopefully she'll make the same choices as Ingrid. Not every woman is going to make the same wrong choice Jake. I have to believe that they won't, that people are better than we want to give them credit for... I have to."
Jake placed the coffee cup on the table between them. Then he began to rotate it in a circle as he stared in at the liquid. "Did it ever cross yours or Leah's minds that maybe Emily made the choices she did because Sam tore half her face off? That maybe being with Sam is better than trying to find someone who will look past the fact that half her face is disfigured?"
Paul sighed. "Of course it has. And even though their situation sucks... that does pretty much sum up why I think she did it in the end. But what the hell is Dagmar's excuse? How can anyone defend that? If that had been Sam and Leah... would you all have been so hard up for Emily's muffins if Sam had left his wife and his own kids flat for her?"
"There is no way to defend the actions of Ingrid's step-mother and no, I don't think any of us would have been able to support Sam and Emily if their situation had been the same. As for Emily, maybe our sympathy for her has far less to do with the fact that she's Sam's imprint and far more to do with the fact that she's a living, breathing reminder of what we can do to the people around us. How soft they are, how vulnerable. We owe her Paul, if for nothing else than because she may be the only way to remind ourselves that we can and do... do wrong." Jake said.
"We live in a world where we are put up on a pedestal by the council. We can do no wrong in their eyes. That's a very corruptible way to live your life Paul. Emily is one of the only ways we have that we can measure how far we are from the gods the council likes to insist that we have become." He took a deep breath and then his voice took on a deeper tone, a more controlling one. "I won't stand in the way of you being with Leah, but if you imprint and the woman chooses you, you make a clean break. Don't you dare drag her through the mud again. And you will stay the hell away from her till she figures out what she wants to do. And if that's retiring to get as far from us as she can, you will not get in the way of that. Am I understood?"
Paul bowed his head. "Understood."
"Good. Now just one last thing. Why the hell are you so pissed, besides the fact that you're worried about her going into the situation without you?"
Paul held his alpha's gaze and let him see the insecure fear in his eyes. "She's going with him. Emily won't be there. I finally get her to take a chance on me and now she's going to be spending all her time away from me, away from our pack and with... him."
Jake didn't say a word. What could he have really said anyway?
XXX XXX XXX XXX
Ingrid was at 30,000 feet and was telling Fenris, G-d and anyone else who might be listening that she was oh so grateful that Magnus had decided to just charter a damn plane for them. Only one wolf from the La Push pack had flown before and the rest of them were not happy. They were all a bit too young as wolves to be able to calm their more primal selves into realizing they were perfectly safe. Leah's eyes were closed and she had told everyone that she had no intention of opening them till they landed. Sam was clenching his armrests so hard that Ingrid was positive he was going to owe the crew new ones. Seth had finally stopped hyperventilating and was now attempting to take deep calming breaths.
Quil, on the other hand, was flipping through the book he had brought with him for his in-flight entertainment. He had flown with his grandfather twice before, both times had been to Washington D.C., to lobby for some improvement to the tribe. So flying didn't really bother him the way it appeared to bother everyone else. Eventually after the inflight meal of... well... he thought it was chicken, but since he had to chew it into submission just to swallow, he wasn't sure, he eventually closed his book and looked out the window.
He had seen Claire's parents before he had left. It had been... enlightening.
The Penning's house was small but cozy. They had three daughters and while it was crowded, the house felt comfortable in the way that a place where everyone is loved and mostly only good things have happened can feel. It was a place that his wolf approved of for the raising of Claire. Hell the human side of Quil approved of it too.
James and Maryanne Penning were sitting at the kitchen table and gestured for him to join them. As usual James Penning cut right to the heart of the matter.
"We heard about your altercation with Emily. Thank you Quil... it means a lot to us that you were willing to stand up to pressure to... shape the bond in a way that benefits you, but not necessarily her."
Quil took a deep breath. "I won't say that there isn't a pull, there is. But... I want what's best for her and what's best for her is to be a little girl and do the things that little girls do. If some other people can't understand that, so be it."
He frowned and looked at both of them, a bit of a lost expression on his face. "I don't know why I imprinted on her. I wish that I hadn't, but I have and I can't undo it. So, the best I can do for her is to protect her interests... especially when they run counter to mine."
Maryanne reached out and took his hand. "Maybe, what you're doing, helping her to have her own life, is exactly what is best for you. Someday... you will make an excellent father. I just... I just..."
Quil gave her a sad smile and squeezed her hand. "You just hope that it's not with Claire. I get it."
James and Maryanne nodded and then Maryanne went upstairs to go to bed. James stayed in the kitchen with Quil and got the two of them beers.
"Be straight with me Quil. If you don't survive this, what's the risk to my Claire?"
Quil took a long pull from the bottle, then another. "As far as we know, none. The stories all seem to say that it's the other way around. That we die if they do. Otherwise... look, James, we die a lot and if that meant we took out our imprints... all the lines would have died out a long time ago. If I get killed over there, Claire will be fine."
James sighed. "You're right you know. I don't want you with Claire, not now and not when she's 30 either. But you have always done right by this family Quil and I won't forget that. You could have taken her away, could have muscled in on our family and taken over our place with her. And you didn't."
Quil just said "And I'm not going to."
For an hour or two he and James talked hockey. Then James went inside to bed and Quil went home to pack. Was it wrong that he was happy to get away from his imprint for a while? What did that say about him? And did it really matter since it was his life, her life, he was dealing with?
Quil kept staring out at the clouds as the plane passed over them. He refused to tell anyone, but he felt trapped. Trapped in his pack, trapped with a little girl who deserved so much more than to have this life forced down her throat when she was too young to say no. He never thought about it when phased and he never spoke of it. Not to his grandfather, not to Jake and Emby, or the trio as they were still called, not to anyone, not even Claire's parents for the most part. Though James and Maryanne seemed to be far more perceptive about him than even his own pack. They seemed to know, and last night... it was like they had given him permission to feel however he needed to feel about it. That they shared his doubts and his fears. He still didn't know what he was going to do, but at least he knew they had Claire's best interests in mind too. At least they seemed to know who he was, who he really was.
Eventually he went back to reading. They were going to be flying for quite a while, so the 'Collected Works of James Ellroy' should last him a while.
XXX XXX XXX XXX
Leah still had her eyes closed and her arms crossed over her belly. She was sitting across from Sam and even though she was mostly past what had happened between them, she still often felt the urge to protect her soft spots around him. Like if she left herself open to Sam, he would hurt her again, so she covered her belly and refused to look at him. For now.
Sam noticed. He always noticed. And as usual, it always made him feel like a failure of a man.
However, Leah wasn't thinking about him right now. For once her mind had decided to go to memories of Paul when trapped in close quarters with Sam... instead of memories of her ex-fiance.
When they got back to her apartment Paul began pacing and tugging at the back of his hair. "I don't like it Lee. You're going someplace rotten with packs we don't know and vampires as far as the eye can see! You can't take Jake and... I can't go with you."
Leah walked over to him and bumped his hip with her own. "Hey, have a little faith in me. Everything will be okay. We're not going there to fight their winter war thing. We're just there to back Ingrid's play at the Gather. Mostly we'll sit, or whatever, near her and if any of us talk it'll be Sam."
Paul blew a forceful breath through his teeth and slid his arm around her waist. "Yeah... Sam. I'm not exactly thrilled about that either ya know."
She frowned at him. "Sam is in love with Emily, Paul. Holy Mother Fate isn't going to make him change his mind now. It's been nearly six years since it happened... it's over. If... if it hadn't ended the way it had, maybe I would be friends with Sam. But it didn't, and how it ended, why it ended... THAT'S what had me so wounded for so many years. That fact that it was actually over was something that I came to terms with faster than anything else that happened back then."
Paul's hand came up and began to play with the hair on the back of her head. Leah's hair was short now, like everyone else's. Personally he thought it did nothing to diminish her beauty. In fact it emphasized her eyes a little bit. But in a small and somewhat petty way, he hated that Sam would always be the only man who ever got to touch that long hair she had had. He knew it was petty, but he was too dominant of a wolf not to see it as a slight piece of competition for the female.
"I know. And I know that things aren't going to change I just." He stopped and turned her to face him. "I'm not him Leah. I don't want you spending all this time with him and coming back thinking I'm going to be your next Sam Uley. Because if it happens, and it may never happen, I'm not going to do things the way he did. Your brother and Ingrid proved that there's more than one way to deal with an imprint."
Leah just smiled slyly at him. "I know you're not him Paul."
Then she reached up, tugged his head down to her and kissed him till she needed to break for air. "Who knows how long I'll be gone. I don't want to spend this whole night talking."
He chuckled a bit and it was a rich, deep sound. The sort of sound a confident man makes when he's sure of the outcome. "I didn't either."
The first time they had been together had been hard and fast. All skin and teeth, like their wolves had been battling to get in on the act. In fact half the noises they had made had been extremely wolfish and both of them had been left lying on the forest floor, panting and somewhat bruised after it was over. Their relationship was new, very new. True, Paul had been interested in her for some time and true, Leah had been pondering the notion of Paul for almost as long, but it was still so very new.
This time Paul wanted to make it last, go slower. He wanted to touch every inch of her skin because he had to. Not out of some romantic notion, but because he didn't know when he would see Leah again, so he had to make this last and he needed to remember it. He knew she wasn't leaving for years, but as his claim on her was in it's infancy and frankly, very fragile, it was like he wanted to mingle her scent with his as best he could before he let her leave.
He drew her to her room, her bed. A place that Sam had never gone. Leah had saved to buy a new bedroom set once she'd moved. She did not want to sleep in a bed that contained memories of being loved by a man who abandoned her.
This time their touches lingered, their moans were more drawn out. This time Paul played her body like he was trying to get her voice to a perfect pitch. This time Leah didn't try to leave her mark, she just wanted to press herself closer. This time they were paying more attention.
When he finally got her to where she was soaked in her own wetness, where she she was no longer articulate in her cries, he eased slowly into her. His length practically twitching as he finally brought this exercise in sexual desperation to a close. His pace was, slower, more measured than it had been before. It was like he wanted to watch Leah in a slow burn rather than a conflagration.
She arched up at him, wrapped her legs around his waist and her eyes stayed open for a long time. Watching each other, it was extremely intimate, and maybe almost a little too intense. Neither one was sure whose eyes closed first. Eventually Paul's head dropped to her neck, her hair, and when he came it was a loud and long groan into that neck. Leah pulled him into her a bit tighter, crying out the only coherent thing she had said for a while. His name.
He pulled her down to him and tucked the thin blanket around them. Paul had never been the type to worry about bodily fluids or anything else when it came to sex.
"You better come back to me in one piece."
She smiled up at him. "Never thought about doing anything else."
Leah's eyes finally opened when the plane hit a bit of turbulence. She found Sam's eyes still on her and out of reflex, her arms tightened around her belly. His eyes winced, like the gesture hurt him a little bit.
Then his own hands gripped the armrests of his seat even tighter as the plane rocked again. She took a deep breath, took another one and then placed her hands on her legs, then on her own armrests. It was so very small a gesture, just the tiniest of olive branches. But Sam saw it for what it was and nodded and gave her a small smile, he stopped looking quite so stoic for just a moment.
When the plane lurched again and Seth let out a litany of swears in both English and Quiluette, Ingrid took mercy on all of them. "Hey, look, you guys must have a ton of questions... so why don't you ask me before you phase on a plane and create a whole new set of problems."
Seth nodded and he and Sam both tried to get their wits about them and look like competent men while Leah cleared her throat and turned to face Ingrid. Eventually it was Seth who spoke first.
"How many people will be there?" he asked.
"Each alpha of the 13 subservient packs will be there. They'll leave their betas guarding their territories, so the only betas there will be my brother and Sam. Along with the alphas, there will be whoever they bring with them, usually either the third or fourth ranked. Possibly their bolverk if she's better at this sort of thing. I represent the wolfblooded and the humans, normally I wouldn't represent the humans, that would be the bolverk of the Jarl Pack's job... but since this Gather has been convened about my step-mother and by default, my father as well... I automatically become the voice for all non-shifting members of the Fenrir, not just the wolfblooded. In addition, since Magnus called this Gather, every single member of our pack will be there as well. So... quite a lot of people." Ingrid replied.
"What can we expect to happen?" Sam asked next.
"In all honesty, I don't know. Dagmar's incompetence caused the death of a lot of innocent people and she has to pay for that. She's had years to learn her job and she's never really put in the effort. As the alphas arrive they'll be told the exact nature of her crimes. If she were a wolf or wolfblooded, she would either be exiled for the rest of her life or, if the crime is bad enough, executed."
"You execute people?" Quil sounded a bit shocked.
"Of course we do. We police our own and punish the crimes of our own as we see fit. The human justice system is completely ill equipped to deal with most of us and now that we live as secretly as we can, having human courts settle our disputes is out of the question. If a crime is judged to merit it, the punishment is death."
"But she's an imprint." said Sam.
"Exactly. And a fully human one at that. If I know my twin, and I do, he will suggest to the 13 that they demand that our father repudiate her, strip her of her bolverk status and exile her from any and all contact with the pack. If he refuses, then... after this show of utter incompetence, they'll demand he step down and retire. Either way, my father is being punished for allowing this to have happened."
"Okay, I understand why having him repudiate her is a punishment for him as well, but stepping down and retiring? Then they get to live happily ever after... don't they?" Seth was obviously slightly confused.
Ingrid ran a hand down her face. "Remember when I said that our people do things differently? Well, we don't retire. We fight for our people till we die. Once a wolf phases, it's a lifetime position in the pack. For wolfblooded we remain in the packs till we become too old to be of any help anymore. For wolves... it's till the day they die. To retire, unless there is some major extenuating circumstance is seen as dishonorable and a bit cowardly."
"That makes sense, or at least it does if you take into account your unique circumstances." Sam said.
"Really? Because it sounds depressing to me." replied Quil.
"Think about it." Leah took up the thread of Sam's thoughts. "Like I said when we first met Ingrid, we go dormant. We've never faced a constant threat to our tribe's safety and well being. The Fenrir do, every single year they spend about half of it fighting a war. All things being equal, having wolves retire whenever they want to would be catastrophic for them."
"All things being equal?" Quil asked.
"Deaths." Sam said. "They would, almost by default, have a much higher death rate than we do. They can't let people retire. That would leave them with numbers too small to fight the threat and the vampires would win."
"Also training." Leah continued. "Between deaths and new phases... they need a constant wolf presence to maintain stability in the pack. Not just for a military presence, but for training."
"You're both right." Ingrid said. "This is also a bit rare for a Gather. Alphas rarely, if ever, imprint, so I can't think of the last time a Gather was called in regards to a situation such as this."
Now it was Sam's turn to look confused. "What do you mean alphas don't imprint?"
"They just don't." Ingrid said. "Look, too many imprints in a pack is a tactical disaster. Because that's too many wolves who just can't fully get their heads in the game. The imprint splits a wolf's focus, and you all know that. Now, depending on the support system in play in a pack, that effect can be mitigated. But an imprinted alpha? I can't think of a time when that didn't go wrong in some way in our history. Alphas have to be able to view the big picture at all times. They have to do what's best for everyone and not just cater to one person. They have to be able to make the hard choices and the harder sacrifices. An imprint completely gets in the way of that for an alpha. And so, including my father... I can only think of two other times in our entire recorded history that an alpha has imprinted and both of those times didn't go so well for our people either."
"I imprinted." Sam said. He sort of let it just drop right on the conversational pile as it were.
"I'm not going to even touch whether or not that's had a good effect on your pack with a ten foot pole. But I don't have to. You're not an alpha, so you imprinting isn't anywhere near as big of a deal." she replied.
"But I was an alpha when I imprinted on Emily."
"In a way, yes you were. You were alpha in that you were the most dominant wolf phased at the time, so all the other wolves responded to that. Betas can and do hold a pack together for years if an alpha isn't available to lead. But that doesn't make them an alpha, it makes them a damn good beta. If you were an alpha than you would still be an alpha. Once Jake was ready to take his position fully, you became the beta you were meant to be, that you always were. If you were an alpha, you would have held onto the pack you had and that would have been that. You were never an alpha, you were a beta doing his job."
Sam just stared at her. "Come again?"
"You're a beta, you were born to be a beta and from what I can tell, you're amazing at the job. It's no small thing to be a beta. Packs do not function without them. So... yeah. You were never an alpha, it's how it works, You either are an alpha or you're not. Once you are, you can never not be one."
Leah looked skeptical. "Then how did he stay in control of half the pack when we split for a year?"
"Your alpha, your real one, still wasn't ready. Not for the full responsibility. So Sam was needed to do what betas do best. Support their alpha. Sam was strong enough to hold onto what Jake couldn't at the time. Once Jake was fully ready, how long did it take Sam to fall into the beta role?"
"Nearly instantaneously." Sam said
"There you go. You have been a beta since the day you phased. Therefore you imprinting on Emily isn't some sort of odd abberation, it's normal."
Seth decided that this was verging into territory that Leah didn't need to be hearing. "This is great and all. But, not what we're flying to Oslo for. Ing, what happens if your father steps down and retires?"
"Magnus becomes alpha of the pack and Jarl of the Fenrir." she said.
"How do you know, what if he isn't an alpha?" Seth asked.
"He's the oldest son, the only son, my father's only shifting child. It's how our line works Seth, it's how it always works. Magnus will succeed Gunnar because... it's never not happened that way. Magnus will become Jarl, Dagonet will become beta. When Magnus' first son phases, he will bump Dagonet and become beta. No one knows why it happens like this. Just that it always has. If I was a wolf, I would be expected to become my brother's beta till his son was ready." She sounded like she was talking about the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. A total given that was never questioned.
"It can't always be that easy." Quil said.
"From the first pack to now, never once has the line been broken. Who becomes Jarl after the old one dies may be the only thing in our lives that's easy to figure out."
"What if he won't do either?" Sam's voice was very serious. "It's a worst case scenario, but what if he won't repudiate her, which I doubt he will because she's his imprint, and he also refuses to step down and allow Magnus to take over?"
Ingrid looked out the window for a few minutes. "Then it gets complicated. We're in war season, a battle for control in the lead pack would not be good right now. I can only imagine Freya's response to that."
"Freya?" Seth asked.
"Freya is the eldest Fenrir. She's so old that she has no idea what her actual age is. To give you some context, the hall where the Jarl pack resides was built 800 years ago. Freya was considered ancient even back then. She's alpha of the second pack and the only wolf more dominant than she is, is the Jarl."
"She's an alpha?" Leah seemed to have forgotten her fear of flying and was leaning towards Ingrid looking both confused and excited. "I thought... I mean... can females actually be alphas?"
Sam, Seth and Quil looked equally shocked. They all knew now that Leah was not the sole she-wolf in the world, just one of a sisterhood that, while smaller then her male kin, was powerful and respected. But a female alpha? Ingrid had never mentioned that females were capable of that rank, she had merely said that depending on size most packs had 3 to 5 female wolves. Never once had the phrase 'female alpha' exited her lips.
Ingrid smiled at Leah, real affection on her face. "As far as we know, and we know a lot, Freya is the only one of her kind. The only female wolf alpha known to exist, to have ever existed. No other female that we know of has ever held that rank before or since. You used to think of yourself as a freak of nature Leah, you're not... but Freya may very well be."
The she-wolf sat back in her seat, her mind obviously taking in a great deal. In the space of so little time she had gone from being a freak, to one of a decently sized minority, to having one of her kind be an alpha. She would never be able to look at herself in the same, self-deprecating way again. And for all that knew Leah, that was a good thing.
Ingrid continued. "There's been tension between Freya and my father since he abandoned my mother. That tension got worse when Dagmar seemed to be utterly unable to take her place in the pack and in the nation. If the worst case comes to pass, she and Magnus will have a lot of very quick decisions to make. The entirety of the Fenrir will look to the two of them before they make up their own minds."
She got up and grabbed a soda from the snack tray and popped it open. "But hopefully it won't come to that. Hopefully he'll just retire."
"Why was their tension when he accepted his imprint?" Sam asked. In his defense, he had never been taught that there was another way, that there could ever be another way.
Seth looked at him like he was an idiot. "Oh, I don't know Sam, maybe because he kicked his wife and two kids out of their home? Because he abandoned his family? Fuck... let's just say it, because he acted like your father."
No one said a damn thing. Ingrid looked a bit sad, Sam looked both ashamed and angry, Seth looked a bit self righteous, Leah looked sad and angry and Quil looked like he wanted to be anywhere but where he was.
"Maybe we could keep Joshua Uley out of things Seth?" Quil was just trying to settle things down.
"No Quil, it needed to be said and if no one else was going to, I am." Seth's voice was harsh and rebuking.
Seth outranked Quil and the way he spoke to him was unlike how Seth normally treated the few wolves he outranked. It was meant to put Quil in his place. And it worked. Quil lowered his eyes and stopped talking. He was not going to challenge Seth's rank under normal circumstances and he was especially not going to do so at 30,000 feet in a small airplane.
Ingrid cleared her throat. "We do not consider the imprint bond to be a sacred tie between soulmates Sam. The Fenrir believe it to be purely biological, not magic. As such, how each imprinted wolf decides to pursue that bond is considered to be a purely individual decision. Not all of them become romantic in nature. My father was married with two children when he imprinted, it is not, and never has been, considered honorable to do what he did to us. Ever since he made that choice, there are many that follow him out of necessity rather than love. Dagmar herself has never been well liked for the choices she made and she may be the least popular bolverk we've ever had. This has been coming for a long time Sam... sixteen years to be precise."
Ingrid kept answering the questions that Leah, Seth and Quil had. But Sam was quiet, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes, deep in thought. Leah and Ingrid weren't the only ones who had drawn the parallels between Gunner's imprint situation and his. Sam didn't talk about it, but he thought about it.
He had been engaged, he'd had to leave his fiance so that he could be with his imprint. It was what Emily wanted, what the council wanted, hell it had even been what Harry Clear water had wanted... and that part had always made Sam wonder. Why did Harry want him to break his own daughter's heart? Everyone thought that it was easy for him after he broke up with Leah... it wasn't. How do you ask the woman that you love, because deep down, underneath all of it he had still loved her, had still been in love with her, for the ring you gave her, back? How do you then turn around and offer it to her cousin and sister figure? No, it had not been easy and when he was completely honest with himself, if he could undo it all... he would. Seth was not the only person who compared himself with his father, Sam did too. And he was pretty sure that imprinting had made him more Joshua Uley's son than anything else ever had.
But like Leah, he had thought that what he had done was as bad as it could possibly have gotten. He never even thought about what it would have been like if he had imprinted on Emily after the wedding. What if Leah had been his wife? What if they had had children? What would everyone have said then? Would things be different now, or would he still be on a plane to Oslo, Norway with a Leah Clearwater who felt the need to make sure that even vulnerable parts of her body were covered around him? A Leah Clearwater who knew as certainly as she knew that her favorite color was green, that he would hurt her, that he could do nothing but hurt her.
The only solace he got from thoughts like these was in his imprint. Whatever else the bond was, it was a pretty good medicant for the rigors of life. Depressed? Focus on the bond, it'll make you feel better. But in some ways, his bond was different, it was tinged with guilt, how could it not be? He had clawed through half of Emily's face. He hadn't meant to, he had just... everything had felt like it was collapsing in on him. He'd lost his scholarship, the career he had wanted, Leah, pretty much all the friends he had had, everything. And half of him was hanging on every word Emily said and the other half of him was screaming that he just needed OUT.
He could still remember that day, he could still remember thinking that he needed out, that he needed air, that everything was too close. What he couldn't remember was what, exactly, had made him phase. What he did remember was the blood on the floor and the bits of skin in his claws. What he also remembered was the overlay of his mother on the floor after his father had hit her so hard she went spinning and hit her head hard enough bleed on that same floor. After he did that there was nothing else he could or even would do. He had hurt her, he had hurt his imprint. He had abandoned the woman he loved and become something his mother, if she were still alive, would be ashamed of. He was his father's son. So he stayed, and he loved Emily with everything he had to give. What else was he supposed to do?
Unfortunately, that didn't mean that life in the Uley-Young household was easy.
"I don't understand why Jake can't go!" Emily was pacing back in forth in the bedroom, her entire body telegraphing how upset she was.
"Because the Fenrir would see it possibly as an act of war or aggression. There are four of us and 14 packs of them. It wouldn't go well." Sam was trying to make his voice as calm and gentle as he could. He hated to see Emily so worried or upset.
She abruptly sat on the bed and threw her hands up in the air. "What about Paul? He's the third... or fourth, I can't keep track anymore. Why can't he do it? Why does it have to be YOU?"
Sam sat next to her and smiled. "Honey, have you met Paul? Can you honestly imagine him in any sort of situation where extreme tack and forethought are required... and him NOT screw it up?"
"Maybe I just don't care then. Maybe I'm selfish and think that you should stay here, stay here with me and worry about the rez and let Jake and Seth and Ingrid figure all this out. IT'S NOT OUR PROBLEM!"
She got back up and paced again.
Sam sighed and went back to packing his suitcase. "It is our problem Emily. Ingrid is Seth's imprint and this involves her very deeply and that means it involves Seth... which makes it our problem. Besides... would allies really be such a bad thing?"
"Ingrid isn't even pack, you and Jake talk about that all the time. And she doesn't even want to be Seth's imprint, she rejects the gift that she's given and you all just want to fall all over yourselves to help her? Well forgive me if I don't really care that much about what happens to her or her family or her pack. NOT when I have to send my fiance halfway around the WORLD for who knows how long!"
Sam turned her around and put his hands on her shoulders. "Ingrid may not be my favorite person in the world, but I still care what happens to her. She can be an abrasive know-it-all, but she's still a good person, she still tries as hard as she can to do the right thing. You know that and you know you don't mean what you just said."
Emily looked up at him. "Yes I do Sam, I meant every word, and I still don't want you to go. Don't go."
He dropped his hands and sighed again, then he closed the suitcase. "I have to go Emily, I don't have a choice. So please... I don't want my last conversation with you before I leave to be a fight. Please?"
She refused to turn around, not when he put his suitcase in Paul's truck and not when he went back upstairs to kiss her goodbye. She was angry at him and nothing he said was going to change that.
Was it wrong of him, after all that he had done to her, to think that was unfair?
"Hey... wake up! We're about to land."
Sam snapped his eyes open as Quil yelled over to him. He hadn't been asleep, had he really been thinking about all of that for that long?
Then the plane was landing and Ingrid and Quil suddenly had three, terrified and nearly hyperventilating shape shifters on their hands. It was not a fun landing, Not. At. All.
XXX XXX XXX XXX
"We're going back by boat! I am not doing that again!" Ingrid was wide eyed and grabbing her luggage at one of the carousels in Oslo Lufthavn airport.
"I'm sorry, I really didn't mean to..."
"What Leah, you really didn't mean to scream bloody murder for no reason?" Ingrid sounded stressed and pissed.
"Ingrid it's" Sam didn't get to finish.
"Sam whatever you are going to say is completely overshadowed by the fact that you ripped one of your armrests right the hell off your seat and accidentally threw it!" She yanked her suitcase off the lumbering carousel like it weighed nothing.
"Yeah... thanks for that by the way Sam." Quil glared at his beta through a swiftly healing black eye from when said armrest had slammed into his face.
Seth gave a quiet laugh and then shut the hell up when Ingrid glared at him. "What?"
"You were hyperventilating and praying... in TWO languages!" she nearly shrieked.
"We were NOT that bad!" he replied.
"YES! YOU WERE!" she and Quil yelled in unison.
As the five people made their way out of the baggage section of the airport a booming voice broke through the crowd.
"Ingrid! Over her! Kom her!"
Ingrid's face lit up and she immediately turned towards an enormous man and ran at him.
"I'm going to guess that's Magnus." Quil said.
"Yeah, that's him. She's missed him a lot." Seth said, smiling as he watched how happy his imprint was.
Magnus was... huge. He had a bit of facial scruff, and his hair was a bit longer then what the La Push wolves kept theirs. The man was built and looked like he was in his absolute prime of life. He also looked nearly overjoyed to see his twin sister.
He looked down at her and smiled as he swung her around in a circle. "Hei storesoster! Jeg savnet deg."
"Jeg ogsa." she replied.
Leah cocked her head and looked at her brother. "You have any idea what they just said?"
"Not a hot clue."
Ingrid tugged Magnus' head down so she could kiss his forehead. "Hey, I have some people to introduce you to."
Then she gestured to each Quiluette wolf, one at a time. "This is Samuel Uley, beta of the Quiluette pack, Leah Clearwater, the third and fourth ranked wolf of their pack... don't ask. This is Quil Atera Jr. their eighth ranked wolf."
Magnus nodded at each of them, then Ingrid gestured to Seth. "And this is Seth Clearwater, their seventh ranked wolf and the one who imprinted on me."
The blonde man looked over Seth like he was inspecting him, like he was trying to get his measure. "So you're the little man who helped make a lot of trouble."
Then he stepped closer to the younger man and loomed. Magnus was an intimidating presence, as large a man as Jacob and with the same undercurrent of intensity flowing right underneath his skin. Now they could understand what Ingrid was had said about the succession for Jarl. Magnus obviously had alpha potential. He was a beta now, but that was only because his father was still actively phasing. It was clear to everyone that he would be an alpha.
Seth looked up at him, and grinned, letting out one of his trademark laughs. "Hey man... you can't help who you imprint on."
Magnus looked bored, snorted quietly. "Yeah." Then he turned back towards his sister, plainly giving Seth his back. He couldn't have dismissed Seth more if he had gone out and tried.
Leah looked pissed as hell and was about to say something, when Sam grabbed her arm and pulled her back. "Don't. If you go over there and rescue Seth you will not only humiliate him, you will make sure that Magnus' impression of him is set as a little boy who needs his elders to rescue him."
"But... he's treating him like he's beneath his notice." she protested.
"He's testing your brother. It's up to Seth whether he passes or not." Sam replied. He knew exactly what Magnus was doing because he felt the urge to do the same thing whenever Leah would start dating a new guy after they broke up.
Seth frowned as Ingrid and Magnus walked to the car, both of them talking rapid fire and making a lot of the same motions with their hands. It was very obvious how connected they were, that they could read each other like books. And, annoyingly enough, finish each others sentences. In a way it was like watching an older and whiter Brady and Collin... if one of them had had boobs.
"So why isn't Nils here?" Ingrid asked. "We flew into his city, he usually sends one of his pack to handle this stuff.
"You're still technically an exile, so he can't acknowledge you in their territory. Not without a political shitstorm falling on his head. And right now their pack, like everyone else, is knee deep in vampires. With Johann up in our territory for the Gather, Nils just can't risk the potential fallout right now."
And with that they walked outside... into the night. Which made all the La Push wolves start to blink a bit, because it was 3 in the afternoon.
Quil whistled. "You weren't kidding when you said this was a vampire's wet dream. It's like this all winter?"
"It is." Magnus said. "And it's not much better through the autumn. The nights get longer and longer... until it's just night. But the other half of the year, the only vampires we see is the coven that lives here year round. So it's a trade off ultimately. No activity for half the year means that the other half is completely fucking insane."
As they walked to the van that was going to drive them the very long drive to Ingrid's pack's territory Sam, Leah, Seth and Quil began to feel something they had not felt for years now. Cold. They all jammed their hands into the winter coats that for the first time since phasing, they actually needed, stamping their feet to keep their toes warm.
"Holy shit it's cold!" said Leah.
"Welcome to the Eskimo lands of Europe Lee. And this isn't even as cold as it can get." Ingrid said with a grin.
Then they were in the van, the heat... when was the last time ANY of them had needed the heat on... was turned up and they were driving through Oslo. All of them looking out into the day that was a night and perhaps realizing just how far from home they truly were.
Magnus and Ingrid talked, mostly serious and, to their credit, always in English. They also seemed to be in a battle for the radio. Magnus liked classic rock and Ingrid seemed to like angry rage rock. Lovely. Sam often asked questions of Magnus and the beta seemed quite fascinated with the idea of urban packs. How they worked and how they hid.
"Urban packs actually have it a bit easier than the rural ones do." Magus said.
"How is that?" Sam asked. "They're surrounded by humans no matter where they look, how do they stay hidden?"
"Same way the vampires do. By using common sense, and by using the banality of humans to their advantage. Look... humans just plain don't believe in us, or vampires, or anything else but that which they learned was real in science class. Trust me, they can explain away an awful lot and anyone that tries to say that there is something more out there than what they realize, is just thought to be crazy. Unless one of us phases on some live news feed, humans are never going to believe we exist. We've hid from them for too long now."
He broke off to glare at his sister. "I am not going to listen to Pantera right now. How the hell can you listen to that shit?"
She flicked him. "The same way you listen to CCR and pretend that no one else is looking at you like you're crazy."
He shook his head and turned the radio station back to classic rock. "Urban packs are a little smaller and put a greater emphasis on recon work and surgical strikes. You can't have a full fledged battle in the middle of the main freeway off ramp into Oslo, so you use guerrilla warfare tactics instead. But make no mistake, they take the most casualties every year."
"Why?" Quil asked.
"Look around. A vampire can flit in and out of the crowd 24 hours a day, the food is all around them. They can take a meal, dump the body and it'll just be one more person that was murdered. To a modern vampire, a city is a place to disappear in. The woods are places to get lost and starve in." he said.
"Rural packs get mostly nomads, covens on their way to the cities and large towns. We use different and more... classic warfare tactics to fight. We're usually fighting vamps in transit, the urban packs are fighting them when they settle and go to ground. Still though, it's the same damn war." He pulled onto the freeway and soon Oslo was being put in their rear view mirror.
"For rural packs, it's harder to maintain the secrecy. Most of the villages around us know who and what we are, our families know and if we have a shot in hell of having the Sami do what we require of them every year, they have to know too."
"What are the Sami?" asked Leah.
"Our version of you guys. They're nomadic reindeer herders. As more and more people took up agriculture and then living in the cities, the ones who refused to give up the old ways eventually became the Sami. They live fully traditional lives in the north. And the north is where the rural packs of both this country and Sweden are."
"Anyway, we tend to live communally, in the old halls and manors that were built way back in the day. It's... far less of a subtle lifestyle than the way the urban packs live. So we're always at a higher risk of getting caught. But once again, we'd have to get caught in a pretty major fashion before more than crazy kook or two would believe it in the first place."
As Magnus and Ingrid explained a bit more of how things worked with the Fenrir, people began to fall asleep and soon Seth was the only one left awake. At that point the twins switched to Norwegian and Seth continued to stare out the window. His thoughts were not comfortable.
For one of the first times he began to realize that he had been skating as the pack's happy go lucky guy for a long time. Not the lowest ranked, but defiantly not very dominant. He was the happy one, the easy going one... the one who just eased through life with a smile on his face and a joke on his tongue. And he was starting to realize that that just wasn't enough anymore.
These people were at war, his imprint had spent her whole life either fighting or being very close to fighting. His pack was always prepared to lay down their lives for their tribe. The Fenrir were already laying down their lives. It was a sobering realization that he had never really had to be responsible for much because, in a way, it seemed that his pack and his family seemed to prefer him as the easy going one. At the age of 20 Seth liked to think of himself as a man, and in fits and starts he was beginning to make his way away from boyhood, but he wasn't there yet and Magnus had seen it as soon as he had looked at him. Maybe Magnus had seen though him?
Who he was wasn't enough anymore, he needed to become more. His imprint needed him to become more. Whatever it was she needed from him, whatever it was that he could always feel tugging on him through the bond, he wasn't strong enough to provide for her yet. He needed to change... and maybe that meant not being so easy going and carefree anymore. He had started when he had called off her father, when he had argued with Jared when the man had questioned what kind of imprinted wolf he was. But it wasn't enough... he was going to need to keep going down this road further if he wanted to be what Ingrid needed.
She might not be his mate, but she was very quickly becoming the best friend he had ever had. He damn well would become what she needed.
AN: I had a huge chunk more, but realized that this was honestly where the chapter ended. So, I decided to be a good editor and cut it from this chapter, but will be including it in the following chapter. I'm sorry that I was not able to do the 2 chapters I wanted to in November. But as my final semester in college winds down and motherhood continues at it's breakneck pace, I was just not able to. In three weeks I will be finished with my schooling... and will no longer have my attention pulled in so many directions.
Before I leave you, I'd like to wish everyone a belated Happy Thanksgiving. I hope everyone had a good one. For my non US readers... I hope you had a wonderful November.