Winter Lost

He’d been privileged to serve for a few months under a staff sergeant who was gifted at team building. He’d put together a highly efficient crack team and managed to make them happy to serve under their idiot captain who should have been shot—and eventually was, amazingly enough by the enemy.

At the time, Adam hadn’t realized those lessons would be just about the most valuable things he learned from being in the army.

Which was why he intended to let them sort some things out on their own while he was gone. He knew his wolves. They understood what their pack had taken on and why it was important, necessary, not to fail. And if they were going to not fail, they would need every wolf. Without Adam, they would have to find a way to work together. He wished he could be a fly on the wall to witness it instead of running around New Mexico trying to figure out what happened on one hand and playing politics on the other.

“What was the job, the one you should have done, that you let Post do?” asked Adam.

“You were there,” growled Darryl.

“I can’t read minds,” Adam growled right back. “I want to know what you think. Post did a lot of things. Answer the question.”

“He broke up the fight between Mary Jo and George,” Darryl said.

“What were you doing instead?” Adam asked, though of course he knew. That wasn’t the point.

There was a pause while Darryl decided if he was going to let Adam lead. The length of the pause told Adam that it was a close-run thing.

“Guarding Zack,” Darryl said, but went on more quickly, as if he were arguing with Adam, “I could have stopped Mary Jo and George before it got violent. They would have obeyed me.”

That was true. Sherwood had been forced to tear into them hard enough that both still had open wounds until they had shifted back to human, well after the hunt was over.

“Werewolves are dangerous,” Adam said. “Being a werewolf is dangerous.”

“My job is to protect our pack, even from each other,” Darryl said.

“Yes,” agreed Adam. “You protected Zack. Our heart.”

Darryl growled. “No one was going to hurt Zack.”

“Even with the moon’s call riding them?” They both knew the answer to that. No, Zack hadn’t been safe from harm before Darryl had made him safe.

“Zack is a werewolf,” Darryl tried.

Adam let that hang in the air. Zack had come to them broken. Adam didn’t know what had happened to him, just that he’d bounced around from pack to pack for the better part of a decade until the Marrok had sent him to them. Their pack’s lone submissive wolf was healthier than he’d been when he’d joined them, but he wasn’t up to handling scuffles breaking out with him in the middle of them.

Darryl finally grunted acknowledgment.

“Zack needs to know we have his back,” Adam said. “Sherwood broke up that fight—and you kept Zack safe.” He let that sit a moment and added, “Protecting Zack was the most important job. That means you or me—not Post.”

“But,” Darryl said, “if I had stopped Mary Jo and George, they would not be hurt—and Zack would have been safe, too.”

“There was another fight brewing right behind Zack,” Adam said. “Honey and Luke. If you hadn’t been right where you were, Luke couldn’t have used you to put distance between him and Honey.”

Darryl grunted.

“I know you saw that,” Adam said.

At the beginning of the hunt, with the moon madness easing into their bones, it didn’t matter how close their human halves were. Before they started the hunt, sometimes all the werewolf wanted was blood.

“I did,” said Darryl, though he still sounded ruffled. Then he muttered—as much as anyone with a chest like Darryl’s could mutter—“I didn’t know if you saw it.”

There was the key. Darryl knew he’d done the right thing. He needed to know that Adam understood that, too.

“I saw you and Sherwood working together to keep the bloodshed down,” Adam told him. “You trusted Sherwood to do his job. He trusted you to do yours. I trusted both of you to keep Zack safe. We are pack.”

“Sherwood is strong,” Darryl said. “Dominant.”

“So are you,” Adam returned. “I can’t tell you how this will play out between the two of you.”

“And Warren.”

Evidently Darryl was through pretending that Warren wasn’t dominant enough to have been Adam’s second, if dominance alone had been the decider. Good. That meant Darryl would have to figure things out there, too.

Adam thought Warren had been correct to take the third position in the pack when he’d joined—though he and Adam knew Warren was more dominant than Darryl. Their pack was, as Mercy put it, about half a century behind contemporary social norms. She’d usually add, “That means that you are about a century ahead of most packs.”