A man who hadn’t deserved to die.
THE CHURCH WAS VERY quiet inside, despite the several hundred people already in the building. A piano stood, untouched, by an empty choir stage. The seats were mostly full, and the empty ones rapidly filed around us as we slid into chairs in the back row.
It was a plain building, inside as well as out, but well maintained and sturdy. My quick eyeball suggested that extra chairs had been added, wrapping around the normal pews, allowing space for probably around six hundred people.
By five minutes after we’d sat down, every seat was full. A handful of people leaned against the back wall, but they were the final stragglers. There weren’t six hundred supernaturals in the city, period, but there were apparently at least a few dozen humans who’d known who Tarvers Tenerim actually was.
Most of the attendees were shifters—there were probably less than a dozen shifters in the city who weren’t there—but a fair number of fae and other inhumans filed out the rest of the chairs.
The shuffling slowed and eventually stopped as people either found seats or comfortable leaning places for the fifty or so people who there just weren’t seats for. Almost before the movement stopped, the priest, clad in his black-and-white vestments, strode confidently toward the podium at the front of the church.
A closed casket rested just in front of the podium, a picture of Tarvers in his prime set upon it. The priest looked around at everyone and said a short benediction in Latin that went right over my head.
“Welcome,” he said finally in a language I understood. “We have all come here today to honor and celebrate the life of an amazing man, who lived a life of service for over three hundred years.”
He then launched into a sermon on public service. For a speech given by a Catholic priest, it was light on the religious symbolism and lacked even one parable from the Bible—probably in consideration to the fact that many of the shifters and almost all of the fae and other inhumans were the literal definition of pagans—unsaved and uninclined to be saved by the stories of a mortal man when we had the very real Powers to look to for salvation.
For all that he started with a sermon, the service was short. It was also very clear that the priest had known Tarvers. He spoke to the man’s virtues—many—and vices—anger, pride—and then passed the podium to the old Alpha’s sons.
The two men, both carrying the bulk and menace of werebears, stood side by side at the podium and spoke, in voices that broke with every sentence, of growing up the children of a man who’d seen a city rise from nothing. They spoke of being raised to be shifters by the greatest shifter of all.
In there, subtly, although I doubt anyone missed it, was the announcement that the older brother—Michael—would succeed Tarvers as Alpha Tenerim. From the quiet sigh that Mary swallowed beside me, I took it that even that hadn’t been certain. I squeezed her hand, knowing without even looking that she was quietly weeping as the sons continued to speak about their father.
I don’t think there were many people in the hall that weren’t crying to one extent or another. There was tension in the church—everyone knew what would follow the service—but at this moment, we mourned one of the greatest of our own.
The speeches done, the two brothers each took one end of the casket and slowly carried it from the church. We all followed them out into the chill and snowy air, row by row, in quiet grief.
It was possibly the quietest group of people of that size I’ve ever seen, and I was silent with them as we made it out into the small graveyard behind the church. There, I stood at the back of the crowd, barely able to see as Tarvers Tenerim was slowly lowered into the earth of the city he’d seen grow from nothing to a major center.
His sons took up shovels, and the other Alphas joined them. The crowd of over six hundred watched in silence as nine men slowly and carefully, for all the massive strength and speed available to them, filled in the grave.
Finally, the priest sprinkled water over the grave and spoke some more Latin I thought I recognized as the last rites.
His task done, the priest bowed to the Alphas and withdrew into the Church. The entire mood of the crowd shifted as he did so, and the tension ratcheted up a notch. Wordlessly, the eight Alphas walked in a group, leaving Tarvers’s younger son kneeling by his father’s grave until he joined the rest of the crowd.
We followed the Alphas to find a pair of large marquee tents had been set up to create a huge assembly hall. Propane heaters occupied each corner, but they didn’t look nearly large enough to provide the comfortable warmth that filled the tents. I suspected the small beaver-fur fetishes hung above each heater had more to do with it. There was Power at work.
A long table was set up at the front of the table, and the eight Alphas each took a seat. I recognized Enli, the old Native American cougar shifter, Michael Tenerim—and Darius Fontaine. The others were familiar by face but not by name.
I was about to try and grab another back row set of seats, but Holly took charge as we entered the tent. “Follow me,” she ordered in a whisper, and confidently strode right up the center of the hall to take a front row seat, directly across from Darius Fontaine. The young Fontaine deer shifter met her Alpha’s gaze calmly, daring him to challenge her, to admit that he’d tried to have her killed.
He didn’t take the bait, turning away to glance around the room as Enli stood, gesturing for people to hurry up and sit.
We’d shed a hundred or so people—most of the fae and other non-shifters who really didn’t have a say or interest in the shifter election. Sitting at the front now, I saw Lord Oberis also in the front row, in one of the corners. He looked concerned, but that was likely due to the lack of both Talus and Laurie, though when he caught sight of me, the old fae looked somewhat relieved—probably presuming, correctly, that if I was there, Talus must be okay.
“Everyone here knows who I am,” Enli said as the rustling continued. The old Alpha spoke quietly, but the entire tent heard him and quieted down. “We are gathered here to remember Tarvers Tenerim,” he continued, “which does not stop because he is buried.
“But,” Enli said with a deep sigh, “we must also now choose his successor. Today, here, of the Alphas of Calgary, we must choose a new Speaker, to lead us and to speak for us to the Covenants of this city.”
A rumbling of noise and argument almost immediately erupted from the crowd, people shouting the names of Clans and Alphas they supported or would refuse to see elected. Several of the Alphas at the head table got in on the shouting as well, with one Alpha I didn’t recognize banging on the table in a vain attempt to be recognized and heard.
“Silence,” Enli bellowed, and I think the sheer shock of the kindly old native Grandfather shouting quelled the shifter Clans to silence.
“The custom is and has always been that the Alphas select one from among their number,” he reminded everyone, his voice instantly calm and soft again. “If you have an opinion here, you should have raised it with your Alpha before now.”
The chair beside me scraped across the grass, and I quietly shifted so I could readily reach the gun under my jacket as Holly stood. Few among the shifters had the gumption to interrupt Grandfather while he was speaking, and her presumption kept the inevitable shouting down.
“There is something I have to say before you vote,” she said quietly, but the silence in the tent allowed her to be heard. “An Alpha has acted against his Clan and broken his oaths.”