Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(122)
“Willingness to fight,” Ben said, trying not to sound belligerent as he tried to work out what Adam wanted from him. “Difficulty with authority.” He jerked his gaze up to his Alpha, who looked a little amused at Ben’s realization about how that last one sounded. “Most authority.”
“Anyone who hasn’t proved that he deserves respect,” Adam said tactfully.
“If they can’t thrash me, they are prey,” Ben said, trying to stretch the rule that had been forcibly explained to him when he’d become a werewolf into a shape that Adam would find acceptable.
Adam looked at him. “Okay. Are you my prey?”
Ben stood up abruptly and stalked to the window, his back to his Alpha because he didn’t have an expression he wanted to show him. “I’ve been a werewolf for long enough that I shouldn’t always feel like a bloody beginner.” Adam didn’t say anything, so Ben finally muttered, “I hope I am not prey to you.” Silence continued, somehow disapproving.
“Do you feel like my prey?” Adam asked, his voice quiet and a little hurt.
Ben threw away what he knew and tried to go with what he felt—which was difficult for him because facts had never failed him the way emotions had. “No.” That was right. “No.” Adam put all of his abilities, physical and mental, to protecting the pack from anything that would hurt them.
“Someone should write a book about how to be a werewolf,” Mercy, Adam’s mate, said, sailing in with a plate of brownies, which she set down on the table with a thunk and the burnt motor-oil smell that was a part of her. It used to irritate him—and now it irritated him that he associated the smell with pack and safety. “I sometimes feel like I know more about being a werewolf than all of you combined.” She sat next to Adam and looked up at Ben.
He’d asked for a minute alone with Adam, which she apparently thought she’d given them. He opened his mouth to ask her to leave, but when he spoke, it was to Adam. “So you think I’m looking at Mel as if she were part of my pack? That I’m feeling protective of that sniveling little—” He swallowed the descriptor that came to mind. “Annoying wimpy chit.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” agreed Adam. “The reason you are not more dominant has more to do with the other wolves than with you. Part of submitting to a more dominant wolf is the belief that they will protect you better than you can protect yourself. They don’t believe you’ll protect them, so they won’t yield to you.”
Ben turned back to the window and absorbed the information like a blow. He didn’t care how dominant he was, he didn’t, though he disliked obeying other wolves intensely.
Adam’s orders were the single exception because Adam would never hurt him or allow him to be hurt outside of the discipline needed to keep peace within the pack. Which sort of drove Adam’s previous point about what really made a dominant wolf right home, didn’t it?
Ben opened his mouth to swear, then closed it again.
“I didn’t know how much the willingness to protect the others beneath a wolf in the pack structure affected the position of a dominant wolf until you came to our pack,” Adam offered gently. “Until then, I was pretty convinced that dominance was about who was the better or more aggressive fighter. You are as willing as Darryl is when it comes to taking on an opponent, and not half-bad in a fight—and still Darryl is much, much more dominant because the other wolves trust him to take care of them.”
“Have a brownie, Ben,” Mercy said prosaically. “And congratulations.”
Ben turned around and dropped into an overstuffed chair with a sigh, taking a brownie almost as an afterthought. “Congratulations on what?”
“Your new upward mobility in the pack structure,” Mercy said. “They’ll figure out that you’ve changed pretty soon.”
Adam met his eyes and smiled. Ben felt better suddenly, and it wasn’t Mercy’s congratulations or the brownie that did it, but the respect in his Alpha’s face. He remembered what Adam had told him a while ago. It might be taking a long time to get out from under what the Old Man had done to him, but he had time, didn’t he? A wolf’s immortality was a gift for him to use wisely or poorly.
He finished the brownie, thanked Adam for his time, and headed back home, feeling like himself again. No. Better than that. He fed his better self a nice dinner, watched a little telly, and took himself off to bed with a smile on his face.
• • •
He’d dreamed about him that night. Woke up with the sound of his mother’s voice in his ears. “Benjamin, your father wants you to see him in the study.”
Ben sat up, so certain he’d heard her voice that he was in a cold sweat, his heart beating like a bass drum in a marching band. Hard on the realization that he’d been dreaming was the knowledge that the wolf wanted out.
He managed not to change—just barely managed. But the struggle left him with a headache and the temper of an asp that accompanied him all the way to work. He answered Mel’s cheery good morning with a growl and buried himself in his computer. He ignored lunch, which was stupid, because when Lorna Winkler came into his office without a word of warning, he emerged from coaxing a little more speed out of one of his database-monitoring programs hungry, and she smelled like food.