Chapter 7
The first thing Ryde was aware of when he woke was that Dominique was snuggled against him with her head resting on his chest. He knew something strange had happened between him and Dominique after they mated and marked each other. The true mate connection that he’d expected was there, but whatever becoming a vampire’s mate did for him, it bound them even tighter together.
He brushed a lock of her golden hair off her shoulder and ran his finger over her soft skin. She wiggled against him as she came awake, rubbing her cheek on his chest.
With a glance at the clock, he realized they’d fallen asleep for several hours. It was now nearly 5 a.m. “Damn it.”
She sat up and looked down at him. “What’s wrong?”
“I told Bri I’d come talk to her, but we passed out. I hope she fell asleep and isn’t awake and worried about us.”
“You can go talk to her.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
She arched a brow. “I’m not going to leave again.”
“It’s not that. We’re mated now, and my pack will be able to smell the bonding scent on me.”
“Is that why you smell so good?”
“Yes. It’s unmistakable to our kind. Anyone I ran into would know immediately that I was mated, and they’d ask questions. I want to avoid anyone outing me as mated until we call for the pack meeting.”
“How are you going to do that without announcing the meeting in person?”
He picked his phone off the nightstand, typed out a quick text to his second-in-command, and then frowned. “I can’t have a meeting right now. It’s 5 a.m.”
She smiled. “When your day is actually night, 5 a.m. is like the evening.”
“Are you hungry?”
“For food? Yes. For blood? No.”
“I wasn’t asking about blood.”
She rolled her eyes. “I have a feeling you have a lot of preconceived notions about me. I’m just letting you know that I don’t need blood right now. I will tomorrow, though. I’ll need a bottle of the manufactured blood, Sanguine.”
“I don’t exactly keep that in my fridge. Could you feed from me?”
“Yes, but I won’t. You’re going to be fighting for our mating. You need all your blood in your body.”
“How much do you drink a day?”
“A bottle a day, give or take. If I’m eating real food regularly, I need less blood.”
“I’m immortal now?”
“Yes.”
“Will I need to drink blood?”
“We’ll have to play it by ear. I’m not exactly sure how much you’ll need, but I seem to remember hearing that a hybrid drinks less than a natural vampire, so maybe once every few days. You could try Sanguine.”
He mulled it over. There was a lot they needed to discuss and learn about each other. His immortality was going to take some getting used to.
“Could you bite Bri?”
“Why would I do that?” Her eyes went wide and she pulled away slightly.
“To make her immortal.”
She relaxed and smiled gently. “Sorry, no. Only true mates can share immortality. Otherwise, there would be vampires who would go around changing everyone into immortals. That would be crazy.”
“Humans think vampires can change people.”
She shrugged. “Humans are often idiots.”
With a snort, he agreed. “I just realized that I’m not aging anymore, but she will be.”
“Maybe her true mate will be a vampire.”
He didn’t really want to think about his daughter dating. He’d worry about it when she was at least thirty. Maybe forty. He hadn’t decided yet.
“I’m going to call for a pack meeting an hour after sundown.” He sent Finn a message, asking him to ensure that every house within the pack was present for the meeting that would take place behind the alpha’s home. Then he sent a message to the household staff and gave them the day off. There were a few people who worked late into the evening cleaning, but they would be gone by now.
“The house should be clear now,” he said. “Let’s go check on Bri and get something to eat. I’m pretty hungry myself.”
He handed her the shirt she’d had on, then tugged his jeans on. She dressed quickly, giving a disappointed look to the bed. “I wasn’t expecting to leave so soon.”
“Me, either. You’ll want to talk to your sister, too.”
“Yeah.”
“My office is on the first floor. Let’s go.”
He took her hand and left the room, walking down the hallway toward the stairwell. “This has always been the alpha’s home. Our pack has been around for a few hundred years in this territory.”
“Was your father alpha before you?”
“No. He could’ve been, but he was injured as a youngster and couldn’t run fast in his shift. He was big and fierce, and would’ve made an excellent alpha, but wolves are funny about leaders who are injured like that, so he settled for being a guard to the old alpha. He fought in the war and died, so he never got to see me be alpha, but I know he’d be proud of me.”
Except for how far off course he’d gotten with Bri. He felt like an utter jackass.
“My sister killed the former mistress of the city. I’ve been her advisor for years. She likes to make me mete out punishments on her behalf, which always makes me feel like we’re in the stone ages.”
“Why does she do that?”
Dominique was feisty as hell, but he couldn’t picture her being a judge and executioner.
“I’m not really sure. The advisor position is always one that has a lot of responsibility, but the mistress or master determines just how much power that position has.”
“If you carry out her orders, she must trust you.”
“Yeah. I’m not sure who she’ll pick to succeed me.”
She chewed on her bottom lip, and he stopped and drew her close. “What is it?”
“I’m just worried. About your pack accepting me. What my sister will do. Being a mom.”
“I think that last one worries you a lot more than the others.”
She made a face. “Which is absurd because your daughter can’t kill me, but a pack of wolves definitely could. I should be worried about everything but this family situation right now, but all I can think about is that I wish I had a present for her.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It seems like a good thing to do. Give a kid a present.”
“She’s just happy you’re here.”
“The question is… are you?”
“I am now, my sweet vampire mate.”
She smiled, some of the tension leaving her. He could feel her emotions through their connection as true mates and he was glad that she wasn’t as worried as she’d been. They were facing a lot of hurdles in their mating, but his daughter had cast a spell on his behalf for Dominique. Bri liking her was already a given.
“She told me you were her friend.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.”
When they reached the second floor, he opened her bedroom door and stepped inside. Bri was asleep, sitting up in bed with her arm around her stuffed wolf. It looked like she’d attempted to stay up but hadn’t been able to. Dominique moved silently to the bed and drew the covers up a little higher on Bri, then leaned over and kissed her forehead.
Bri woke up just enough to hug her.
“I thought I dreamed about you,” she whispered, still half-asleep.
“Nope, I’m real.”
“You’ll be here when I wake up?”
“Sure, love.”
Bri smiled and yawned, rolling to her side and still holding Dominique’s hand. With her free hand, Dominique smoothed the hair away from Bri’s face and smiled down at her with a look that was pure maternal affection.
The sight made his heart clench. It seemed very easy for Dominique, when he’d been struggling for years with balancing his daughter’s needs and his position as alpha. And he’d clearly been failing if she’d felt it necessary to bring in reinforcements. Watching his new mate and his daughter bond so quickly made jealousy rear inside him, but he tamped the emotion down. He wasn’t used to being envious of anything, and now wasn’t the time for any strange, unwanted emotions.
“Let’s get dinner, or breakfast, or whatever meal you want to call it,” he murmured. “Then we’ll call your sister.”
Dominique tucked Bri’s hand under the blanket and smiled, then turned her attention to him. “If we must.”
“There are a lot of things I’d insist on, but leaving the bedroom for a phone call isn’t one of them.”
They moved down to the first floor. “All pack meetings are held here. On the full moon, we have hunting parties that the entire pack shows up for. I have a council of elders that I seek guidance from, and my high-ranked males keep the pack in line and help me enforce the laws.”
“Yours is the biggest pack in the area?”
“On the East Coast, yes. There’s one pack close to our size led by an alpha named Rodrick. He occasionally tries to come in and take over, but we’ve always sent him packing.”
“It must be hard to keep track of all the people.”
“The head of each house is responsible for their own family, and they all report directly to me with any grievances or issues. Sometimes I feel like all I do is listen to my pack complain about things. Dumb, irrelevant issues that have zero to do with sustaining our borders, continuing our species, and keeping our people safe.”
She hummed. “My sister feels like that, too.”
“I think all leaders have similar issues. Someone is messing with our borders right now, testing the security and causing trouble.”
“Who?”
He hesitated and then opted to be straight with her. “I believe it was another pack trying to cause trouble. But my first thought was a vampire.”
“Why?”
“Because vampires snatch shifters and bleed them dry.”
Her brows rose so high he was surprised they stayed on her head. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m very serious, Dominique. When I was a kid, I saw the bodies of the wolves dropped by the vampires on the border of our territory. There wasn’t a drop of blood in them.”
She shook her head. “I remember when that happened, but it wasn’t as if our people went out of their way to catch wolves. There was a group of young vampires training outside the wall. They were still in our territory and not in the neutral zone, and they were attacked by the wolves. The vampires defended themselves but were too young to control the bloodlust. When they killed the wolves, they drank their blood, then were too frightened to tell anyone in authority, so they dumped them in the woods just outside the neutral zone.”
“You’re telling me it was an accident?”
“Yeah. My cousin was one of them. He confessed to my uncle and was punished by the mistress of the city, along with the other boys. If I remember correctly, she reached out to your former alpha, but he was too mad to listen.”
He frowned. “That started the war.”
“I know. Your alpha saw it as a shot across the bow, but it was an accident. The better question was why wolves were in our territory, but no one ever asked that or cared to find out. Everyone was just trying to be safe.”
Running his hands through his hair, he looked at her for a quiet moment and then shook his head. “Let’s go to the office. I want to check something out.”
He led her from the foyer to the office. One wall held shelves of books related to their pack and history, and he slid his finger along the spines until he found the one about the start of the war. “Packs have a historian, usually one of the elders. Do vampires have one?”
“Yes. When a new mistress or master takes over, the books from the previous leader are put away and a new set is started. The only people who know all that’s occurred are the historians themselves. My sister never cared to learn about the history of our people or coven, which is why she’ll probably end up repeating history and getting staked on the throne like the previous mistress.”
He opened the book and turned the pages until he found the information on the start of the war. He remembered it vividly – he’d been young and very affected by the loss of their pack members. When the alpha had called for war against the vampires, he’d cheered his father on as he’d prepared to go to battle. When he’d died, Ryde had always considered it a hero’s death, but now he wondered if the whole damn thing could have been avoided.
“It says the wolves were killed in an unprovoked attack, their bodies drained of blood and dumped in our territory.”
“Is the historian who wrote it still around?” she asked, leaning over to read the page.
He inhaled her sweet scent. “No. He died of wounds from a hunt when he tangled with a natural bear and lost. After the war, another wolf stepped up to take over, but you can see there’s a gap here from when the wolves were killed to when the battle started.”
“Was it left out intentionally?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”
“This is the start of a new chapter for your people, though, right? Do you know of any other packs with a vampire for their alpha female?”
He grinned. “Nope. We’d be the first.”
“And most awesome.”
“After we eat and you call your sister, I’ll send for Tella. She’s the oldest person in our pack. She’d understand what happened.”
“Why wouldn’t she be the historian?”
“It’s a male’s role.”
“Well,” she said, tapping the page, “your males are messing up, so maybe you should let a female take over for a while.”
He nodded and closed the book, then he gave her a tour of the rest of the first floor, from the grand dining room that had at one time been used to host pack dinners, to the theater room where he watched football on the weekends. There were quarters on the other side of the kitchen for staff, but they all had their own homes and families and were now empty.
“I need to know what your weaknesses are so I can help keep you safe,” he said as he opened the fridge, pulled out a few containers, and set them on the center island.
“Excuse me?”
He glanced up. “Does sunlight burn you or kill you? We could install some kind of light-blocking shutters so you can move around the house during the day. And what about silver or holy water?”
“I’m not used to just telling people my weaknesses.”
“I won’t be using them against you, but I need to know what they are. I’ll tell you mine.”
“Okay, as long as we’re both sharing. Sunlight burns my skin, and if I was kept outside for too long it would eventually kill me. A stake to the heart, but I’m pretty sure mortals would be killed by having some sharp stick poked in their chest, too. And silver doesn’t bother me, or holy water. Those are urban legends.”
“Decapitation for shifters, but like you said, it’s pretty standard for any creature to die if their head is gone. Injuries from silver are ones we can’t heal. I saw a male get stabbed with a silver-bladed knife, and they had to cut the whole wound out before he could heal. If it had pierced his heart, it wouldn’t have been possible to heal because they would’ve killed him trying to save him.”
“So no silver jewelry. Got it.”
“Right, and no days at the beach or sharp objects.”
They ate sandwiches piled high with roasted chicken and talked about their families. After cleaning up, they returned to his office, where she used the video app on his laptop to call her sister. He stayed just out of sight of the camera so he was near enough to be supportive but far enough away to not incite any problems.
While she waited for the call to go through, he mulled over what he’d learned. Was it possible that the war had happened because of a misunderstanding? Had lives been lost because the former alpha had refused to talk to the vampire leader?
He couldn’t imagine being so closed-minded as to refuse to listen to someone trying to explain such a volatile issue, but he could admit that he would’ve most likely acted the same way. If wolves were killed by vampires the way they had been, he’d have struck first and never bothered to ask questions. Now that he had Dominique in his life, his views on what was important were changing.
But he realized that he should’ve already had different views because of Bri.