****
Keira’s heart pounded as she, Lachlan, William, Blake, and Floyd sped away from the scene of their most recent raid in the scent-blocked car that Noelle had contrived. She smiled to herself, worried and exhilarated, terrified and proud of what she and her clan-mates had done. “The fire was a stupid fucking idea,” Blake told Will as they put distance between themselves and the scene of their crime.
“It wasn’t exactly an idea,” Will said defensively, shifting in his seat. “It just kind of happened.”
“We can’t have things ‘just kind of happen,’” Lachlan told the others, glancing at them each in turn. His gaze lingered on Keira’s face and she looked back blandly, keeping her expression neutral until he looked away. There was an uneasy power dynamic going on between the members of their clan, and while Keira was not by any stretch interested in going for the Alpha, she wasn’t about to let Lachlan—or any of her clan-mates—push her to submit when she had no reason to. “We have to be more careful,” Lachlan added, turning his attention back onto the others.
“How can something like that be an accident, anyway?” Keira looked at Will. “I mean, you don’t accidentally light a match. You don’t accidentally drop it on the ground.” She crossed her arms over her chest as Floyd navigated the darkness. Keira could feel the tendrils of almost-thoughts from the rest of the members of her clan in the car with her; she could feel their excitement, the adrenaline pumping in their veins.
“It wasn’t a match or anything,” Will said sullenly. “I tried to do something with the breakers and the fire started that way.” Keira watched her clan-mate intently for a few moments in silence, trying her best to take in as much information from him as she could from the slightly telepathic bond they shared. From what she could tell, Will was being honest; at the very least, he believed what he was saying. It had been an accident.
“Then yeah, we need to be more careful,” Keira said, glancing at Lachlan. “It’s one thing to raid these assholes’ businesses, it’s another to get sloppy about it.” Keira hadn’t been entirely in favor of the raids herself—but once the clan had voted on it, she and the other four were the natural candidates for the job. All five of them were fast, difficult to trace—especially with the car that Noelle had worked over, masking the usual scent marks—and skilled.
“The wolves will keep the police out of it if they can,” Lachlan said thoughtfully. “But we can’t have any more fuckups like this. The goal is for them to know who’s raiding their businesses and that we’re serious about keeping them in check.” Keira pressed her lips together, looking around the car. She wasn’t actually sure what the true goal of the raids was; in the clan debate where it had been decided, it seemed to her that for the most part people just wanted to get back at the wolves, to get some kind of revenge.
The wolf pack and the panthers had been rivals since long before Keira had been born; she had grown up knowing that the wolves were untrustworthy, and that they looked out for their own—proud, overambitious and exclusionary. She had known by the time she had made her first transformation that if she encountered a wolf in the woods, she was likely going to be in for a fight—and that she should never be alone in the woods during the full moon, lest she find herself surrounded by the vicious jackals.
But why they had chosen to begin raiding the wolves’ businesses in the past few months, Keira had no idea; she had heard vague reports that one of the panthers’ homes had been raided by some of the wolves—but nobody in the clan seemed to know who it was who had been affected, or who hadn’t been affected. As soon as it starts to be about wolves, everyone has a grievance, Keira thought wryly as the car made its way back to the clan’s headquarters on the outskirts of town. She had to wonder: did the wolves feel the same way about the panthers? Keira knew that the wolves thought that the panthers were little more than scavengers, that they were not good enough to ally with—unlike the foxes or the bears that lived in Spring Lake, the wolves didn’t think anyone was truly good to ally with. But did the wolves have the same tendency to jump at shadows when it came to the topic of the panthers? Or were they so confident that they couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to crowd them out?
“What we need to do is something bigger,” Gary said, looking around the car. His hazel eyes almost glowed in the moonlight coming through the window. “These raids are for shit. All it’s doing is pissing the wolves off—we’re barely even hurting their profits. We need to really take one of them down.”
“Harold hasn’t called for it,” Lachlan said firmly, staring Gary down until the other man shrugged, dismissing his own idea. “If Harold tells us to amp things up, we’ll do it. But the council hasn’t approved anything other than raids.” Lachlan smiled slightly. “Maybe we can convince them to let us snatch a young’un or the Alpha’s wife or something.”
“What good would that do?” Keira rolled her eyes. “It’d just bring them after us harder. It’s enough right now that we’re hitting them back.” But hitting them back for what? Keira knew that it wasn’t—technically—her business to know the specifics. But she had to admit, privately and to herself, that she wasn’t altogether enthused about attacking the wolves when she wasn’t sure what they were attacking them for.