Ashlee had never seen anyone who looked like Tristan’s aunt.
Tristan’s Auntie put her hands on her hips. “So, you gave us quite a fright last night.
The injury wouldn’t have been so bad if your body wasn’t already under a tremendous amount of strain from lack of nourishment.”
“I know, I haven’t been eating. But I will from now on.” Ashlee had been listening to the same speech from her mother for months but it seemed more important to listen to Auntie. With all of her bright colored clothes and her long crazy hair, she still came across as incredibly intimidating.
“Right. So let’s have a look at you, Ashlee. And by the way, I have a name, despite this one’s preference to call me Auntie. It’s Clarinda. And after I tend to you, I’m going to teach you to do what I can do so that my sister and I can finally kill ourselves.”
Chapter Five
Tristan stood in the council chambers and listened to Michael’s plans to capture and ultimately eliminate their father. It was good to be back with his twenty-eight pack mates.
He would always be closest with his brothers, but he’d known the others his whole life and cared about each of them. He knew he should care about the decisions they made but he couldn’t focus on anything other than Ashlee’s gorgeous body. More than anyone else in the room he had reason to want his father destroyed. But he couldn’t help but think that, in a truly perverse way, he owed his patriarch a great debt.
If he hadn’t been trapped in his wolf form and placed in the zoo, he would never have found his mate.
Not that he intended to stay out of the mission to eliminate his father—he just wasn’t all that interested in planning and plotting at the moment. He sighed and looked at his watch again for the fifth time in five minutes. Ashlee was with the Aunts, who were trying to teach her how to harness her inner energy, something Tristan couldn’t help her with. The pack might be male-dominated in its hierarchy, but the females could do amazing things their Y-chromosome counterparts couldn’t even imagine.
“I don’t think I want a mate if she’ll make me stare off into space, heartsick like a fifteen-year-old kid.” Theo’s remark snapped Tristan back into the present. Twenty-eight pairs of annoyed eyes bored into him.
Tristan hoped his voice sounded apologetic, but he doubted it. “I’m sorry, did I miss something?”
Michael snorted. “You mean other than the last six months?’
Tristan rolled his eyes. “Other than that, yes.”
“I asked you what you thought about the assault plan.”
“I think whatever plan my Alpha comes up with is the right one for our pack.”
“That’s just the thing, Trip. As the only member of this pack with a mate, we feel that perhaps it is a sign from the fates that you should take over as Alpha. I’ve never officially been made our leader and maybe that’s because it’s always supposed to have belonged to you.”
Tristan gawked at Michael. “You’ll do anything to deny you’re our Alpha, won’t you?”
Michael opened his mouth and Tristan knew he was about to argue his point.
Internally, Tristan braced for the encounter, expecting the argument to affect him badly.
It had always made him a little ill to argue with his father. Their wolf sides hated any confrontation with the Alpha. But when Michael spoke, the sick feeling Tristan had anticipated never arose.
“I’m your big brother, Tristan. I’ll always be that. But let’s face it; I got this job by default because I was born first. I don’t have the skills to lead. I didn’t even have a clue how to find you when you went missing. It took Rex to track you down.”
Next to Michael Azriel laughed. “Wanna be Alpha, Rex?”
“Nope. I’m not the Alpha.” Rex crossed his arms over his chest and stared at Tristan.
In fact all of the eyes in the room were on him. Why the hell was everyone staring at him?
He cleared his throat. “Michael, when Dad did what he did, the job fell to you. You are the oldest. Our natural born leader.”
Michael shook his head. “Dad wasn’t the first born, Tristan.” Michael’s eyes bored into Tristan’s. He’d never seen his brother struggle for words like this before. “He was the third son.”
“And look how fabulous that turned out. Maybe it should have been the first born instead of our clinically insane father.”
Tristan heard grumbles behind him, but he didn’t turn around to see what they muttered about.
“You’re not Dad—and when you were gone…we were lost.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Now they were just starting to piss him off. If Michael had a point, he needed to get to it.
“I’m not the Alpha. I know it. My wolf knows it. Everyone here knows it.”
“You’re just nervous because you don’t want to be like Dad. You were born to do it.”
Gabriel laughed, a cold hard sound, and stepped next to Michael. “What other reason should Michael be Alpha, Tristan, other than his birth order? Do you really think he’s Alpha? Look inside of you, what do you see?” Gabriel dropped his eyes after he made that speech in a gesture of submission. Tristan whirled around and stared at his fellow pack-mates. Not one of them would meet his eyes. He had no idea what was going on but he was going to put an end to it now.
He opened his mouth to speak, to tell them they were all nuts and that anyone who didn’t support Michael was as good as treasonous, but any attempt to argue was forgotten as a grey and black wolf plowed into the group. Although no one would dare to complain, Cullen’s arrival made the already tense situation worse. The white light that always accompanied the shift surrounded Cullen for a moment before his body stretched into his formidable human form. Tristan watched as Cullen strode to the back of the room and put on a pair of sweat pants and a tee shirt that were always stored there.
Cullen Murphy, the oldest living wolf-shifter in their pack, stood just under six feet talclass="underline" smaller than the Royals, but what he lacked in height he made up for in strength and power. Tristan always thought Cullen resembled a bulldozer. He could knock into any potential enemy, hard, and in one swift movement, be done with them.
When Tristan had been a child, Cullen had been so terrifying Tristan had behaved at every pack meeting just so Cullen wouldn’t turn his haunted gaze on him. Cullen had been his father’s closest advisor. There were many in the pack that mistrusted him, and felt he still worked for their former Alpha. But Tristan didn’t share that view. Although Cullen looked thirty years old like the rest of the unmated pack, his eyes were ancient.
He’d been as betrayed as the rest of them.
“Much as I love these little discussions where the Royal Six argue like small children over the Alpha position, we have bigger problems.” Cullen’s gravel-filled voice was a trigger for Tristan. Just one second of listening to it and Tristan wasn’t a man with nearly a century under his belt, but a terrified kid of five who had snuck out to watch the pack perform death rites on a member whose wife had passed on. Tristan closed his eyes for a moment in respect to the memory.
Michael stood silently for a moment in front of Cullen. “And what would the more important matters be? Perhaps you’d like to be Alpha? Too bad your blood doesn’t hold the requisite magic to live endlessly after finding your mate, or we’d all be thrilled to pass the job on to you.”
Cullen raised one eyebrow—which, Tristan realized, was akin to other people rolling their eyes. “Please don’t mistake my interest in this pack’s survival with a desire to take over your position, my interim-Alpha.” Tristan tried not to smile. It was hard to dress down Michael but Cullen did it every time he showed up.