I am dreaming of Mason… or am I?
He is rampaging through the woods, besetted and buffeted by his passions: love, duty, loyalty, logic—every emotion is like a harpoon with a huge ship anchor chain welded to it, each one drawing Mason's heart in its own direction. And I imagine that some of those chains are attached to me, to Lauren, and to members of his family.
'Mason?' I call.
Particularly strongest of these chains are my false mate bond and Lauren's true one.
Mason's smoking red eyes query the darkness and find me. 'Claire?' He asks. 'What…?'
'Where…?' I answer instead, looking across the trees standing like sentinels of hurt and pain in the dark.
Somehow, my Olligrander senses are not working. So maybe this is a dream. But Mason's pain is real. For I, who do not have a prior true bond, my false mate bond is physically painless; perhaps unlike for Mason whose bonds with Lauren and me are warring like the rivals they are.
The embers ebb in Mason's eyes. With cold blue eyes, where once were red suns, he stares at me. I am in my pyjamas set, but he is in black trousers, and a sheen of sweat covers his upper body. 'White,' Mason just observes, comprehending.
I have been getting a lot of White lately.
'What you are doing is not safe,' Mason spits. Before he practically lunges at me.
I exhale as I suddenly sit up from bed, soaked in perspiration. Something is on my head. When I take it away, it turns out to be a damp Mr Cuddly.
White, Mason had said. I had really not been dreaming, I realize. As with Lauren, I had reached out for Mason's mind—but unconsciously in my dreams, and had successfully, telepathically connected.
It is starkly dark in my room. Mom must have come in and turned off the lamp while I was away from the room in my own bed, mind-hopping across miles. I switch to infrared vision.
Stepping quietly into the corridor between rooms, I head towards the kitchen, where mom has some beef stowed away in the fridge for the weekend. Two days away, that is.
All the beef slides down my guilty gullet as I ponder on everything. And mom will have allthe beef she wants with me in the morning, that's sure.
***
After school that afternoon, dad is in the garage working on a beat-up car from the '70s. It is his off-day, and he probably wants to catch up with hisbeauty, as he calls it.
I am his number one fan and assistant mechanic for getting the car fixed; because, ever since I could babble, he's been working on that car; and I dream of getting his current SUV when he fixes Bumblebee.
Why mom does not get that spark of jealousy when he spends time with hisbeauty as compared to when he spends time with me beats me.
I watch dad for a few minutes as I lean against the frame of the garage door which leads into the house. He reaches for a tool in his open weathered toolbox, and I am instantly there to hand it to him.
He squeals in shock, knocking the back of his head against the car hood, the hood prop rod coming unhooked. 'Claire!'
I catch the hood before it catches him on the head in its fall. 'Clumsy dad,' I comment.
He chuckles, mussing his hair badly as he massages his scalp at the back. 'You sneaked up on me,' he protests.
'I just handed you the tool you wanted!'
'Without making a sound, Claire!' he laughs, looking red. 'How did you even do it?' He glances around the car to stare at my feet. Iam wearing heels.
I shrug.
He oomphs and, re-hooking the support rod, bends over the car's guts. He dips a hand into a particularly dirty part, fiddling.
'Will it ever start?'
He glances at me, thoughtful for my question. A shadow of doubt crests over his thoughtfulness, only to recede. 'It will,' he says with conviction.
'How is that?' I probe. I indicate the car, 'It looks like a long-dead decepticon you fished from the bottom of a lake.' I eventually said it: not Bumblebee, but a Decepticon.
Dad looks bemused. He goes on to sermonize, 'I believe in this long-dead decepticon, Claire, as you call her. Where others have given up, I haven't. And if I never do, she will sputter to life one day.' He adds, 'And transform.'
Somehow, our talk of Transformers reminds me that moment of werewolves; shape shifters both of them. And maybe like his beauty, dad would never give up on me.
And neither would Dean or Vanessa…
I become alpha.
***
The wind is subdued and hushed this evening as we stand, the whole pack, on the cliff where we often meet and which overlooks a suicidal drop; metres down to craggy rocks and a measly river.
Dean stands before us. He has the look of both having aged a century in a month and having shed that century. My breath hitches in my throat: a part of Dean appears to have walked with Vanessa in her final moments. All the way.
While I stare at Dean, I realize that, in spite of all the signs of loss, he looks fulfilled, done, content with life; wanting nothing more.
That alone is painful to see. The lycans could have him now and he wouldn't resist. The only thing keeping him going is fulfilling the wish he shares with Vanessa: making me alpha, that is.
It's a simple process really, but Dean gives one final alpha address in the Voice of Command that only alphas have. The Voice etches his words in our marrows.
Then he bows to me. It is a clear struggle: Dean has alphahood encoded somewhere among his genes, being an Elderwood. But with his teeth gritted, fangs gleaming, he manages to collapse to his knees and keep the posture. It is really happening, I realize in fear. My heart skips a beat; then the next, the one after, and the one after.
'My Alpha,' he says to the Voice of Command, in his Alpha Voice, same as—her memories being witness—Vanessa once did when she made Dean her alpha.
The only description I have for it is that the world pauses. And explodes.
***
'I challenge the alpha,' Troy says.
'No,' I gasp, shaken from my dissociation with reality. My powers and senses are swelling distractingly like a spark in an oil field. Why is the world suddenly so bloody red?
Dean frowns in displeasure at the unseasonableness, but nods. It is well within a beta's rights to challenge a weak, incompetent or selfish alpha. Or a new one who has not yet acclimated to her powers.
Troy is like a wet blanket on the ceremony of my alphahood.
And if he really wants to be alpha, his second best opportunity is the next second: every second that passes for me is a second layer of authority and power added to the last.
I feel like a clumsy, newborn calf experiencing the world for the first time when I duel Troy to defend my new alphahood.
Before I know it, he swings a fist. I draw back. And restrain him in a melee of his own thoughts as he tries to lunge.
Holding an aghast look in his eyes, he slowly falls on all fours before me, his mind trapped in a loop as I continue to make it a closedsystem, shut off from every external perception or sensation.
'Thank you for not hurting him,' Alicia whispers into my weedy curls as she embraces me afterwards. I nod.
Will, Phil and Martha, members of Dean's pack, come to congratulate me.
'You practically flexed on him. Without no ado or drama or ceremony,' Alicia laughs. She looks satisfied with the outcome of everything, despite.
So does Dean.
I am alpha.