There was another small pack nearby, standing a few feet apart from Gregorio's people. "Yosef of the Silver Brook Pack," Stark said, and Deirdre shook hands with yet another intimidating shifter.
He didn't try to crush her hand.
"I've never seen a phoenix before," he said.
"You never will again," Stark said. "Deirdre Tombs is one of a kind." He was still speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear, making sure they all knew that she was special and powerful.
Powerful, but secondary to Stark.
In the following five minutes, Deirdre met a dozen terrifying shifters who looked to Stark as their leader, rather than Rylie Gresham. They were scarred and broken and vicious, and they were willing to follow the one man who was even more vicious than they were. Because if Stark took over, he'd return the control to them.
As Deirdre surveyed the leaders of the packs, she thought that they kind of had a point.
These people deserved power. Gregorio had a pack of two besides himself; Yosef had three others. Gianna from Virginia was a panther who had brought along a cousin of hers.
It looked right, these ordinary shifters standing with families that they had brought together. In another world, in another time, all of them would have been regarded as Alphas. They would never be able to control many other shifters the way that Rylie did, but they were still leaders.
But not in Rylie Gresham's government. Not as far as the Office of Preternatural Affairs cared.
"It's good to see you all here," Stark said once they'd greeted all of the packs. "I've tried to contact you all recently. The responding silence concerned me. I almost believed that many of you had been killed. Imagine my surprise when I found out that you were instead waiting for me to be killed."
"Can you blame us?" Yosef asked. "You've got the gods-damned unseelie out for your head. And the bounty is staggering."
"A million dollars and a gift from the unseelie queen," said Yosef's Beta, a short woman with long brown hair named Amira.
"Which gaean faction is the most powerful?" Stark asked.
The leaders exchanged looks, but nobody spoke.
"Shifters," Deirdre said.
"Sure, the Gresham shifters are the strongest faction," Yosef said. "If you want to join up with them."
"All shifters," Stark said. "Rylie Gresham only gained political dominance because shifters are powerful. But we're powerful without her. The sidhe are weaker than us. Why would anyone want gifts from the supposed queen of the unseelie?"
Yosef gave a high-pitched laugh that sounded like a yip. "They're less numerous, but not weaker."
He was too mouthy, and testing the boundaries of Stark's dominance. It annoyed Deirdre enough to take action without needing to be told. She seized the werewolf by the collar. "Is that what you think?"
Her fist flamed.
He yelped and leaped out of her grasp. Her fire blew more powerfully than she'd intended-Yosef's whole jacket caught. He flung it to the floor and stomped on it.
Deirdre kept her face calm, pretending she'd intended to set him on fire.
Her stomach churned with unease.
Stark didn't smile, but she could see the approval in his eyes. The room was so quiet. "Shifters are the most powerful of the gaean factions. The sidhe are nothing against us. If you thought that the unseelie queen could kill me-and if you think a favor from her is better than having my approval-then you should tell me now."
Threat lingered in the silence after his sentence.
Yosef didn't rise to take the bait. He sealed his mouth and stood back, rubbing his neck where Deirdre had scorched him.
When nobody spoke, Stark went on.
"Some of you are sheltering survivors from the asylum. I owe you for that. You're forgiven for turning away when I tried to contact you. The rest..." Stark's narrowed eyes skimmed over the crowd. "Gregorio, you didn't take any of the asylum shifters."
"I had to think of my people first," he said.
Stark's gun was aimed in a heartbeat.
He squeezed the trigger.
The sour stink of silver whipped through the air. The sound of his gun was so loud in the enclosed space that Deirdre couldn't help but flinch.
Gregorio tried to run, to his credit. His reflexes were amazing.
But not amazing enough.
He dropped with a hole in his chest the size of Deirdre's fist.
Stark aimed at Gregorio's Beta. "Handel?"
"Everyone here is my people," Handel said. There was only the slightest quaver in his voice. "I think of everyone first."
"Congratulations," Stark said. "You're now in charge of the Whitewater Pack." He set his gun on the table in front of him. "By now, you've all heard of the election that Rylie Gresham is conducting."
"What's the word on that?" Yosef asked, surprisingly calm. "We've seen the news about the election. Everyone's talking about it. Except you-you've been real quiet about the whole thing."
Stark surveyed his allies coolly. "What do you think of the situation?" He pointed to Gianna. "Tell me your thoughts."
Gianna looked understandably nervous, considering that she was being addressed by a man who had just shot an ally to make a point.
"It seems like a diversion to me. In my opinion." Her words were stilted. She kept her eyes fixed to Stark's feet as she spoke, as though afraid to show even the slightest hint of defiance. Everything in her posture screamed submission. "The government is up to something. I wouldn't be surprised if the OPA is just trying to get us to collect in public places so we can be killed more easily."
"That's stupid," Deirdre started to say, but a look from Stark stopped her.
She shut her mouth.
"We are beasts of the forest and mountain and desert," Stark said. "We aren't ruled by votes or electoral colleges or politicians. We're ruled by instincts and our individual packs. That's the way it's meant to be. We won't settle for less."
The shifters in the back of the room stirred, making sounds of assent.
Deirdre clenched her jaw, forcing herself to remain silent.
"By participating in this system they've set up, I'd be giving complicit approval to a perverse bureaucracy." He slammed his fists on the table. "We won't settle for that!"
The sounds of assent were becoming cheers.
Stark was amazing to watch. He was pure, unbridled confidence, raw and magnetizing.
He lowered his voice, forcing the others to quiet down to hear him.
"If Rylie Gresham puts a puppet in her place as Alpha, I'll kill that Alpha, too."
The pack erupted into cheers.
Fists thrust into the air. People howled.
This was what rebellion looked like, roaring and angry and thirsty for blood. And only Deirdre remained silent.
-XIII-.
Deirdre's quiet dissent didn't go unnoticed. She should have known it wouldn't.
Stark made her leave the basement by telling her that he wanted help opening the lethe storage closet. But he jumped her the instant she stepped into the hallway, out of sight from the larger group.
He slammed her into the wall. His elbow dug into her throat. His knee pressed into her thigh.
At this point, she wasn't surprised. Deirdre wasn't even sure she was afraid.
"Whose side are you on, Tombs?" he asked.
Tombs. He'd gone into the Middle Worlds to save her, kissed her senseless, and kept her as Beta despite her betrayal. Yet still she was only Tombs to him.
"I'm on my side," she said. "I've always been on my side."
The door opened. Lucifer stepped into the hallway.
Stark released Deirdre.
"I thought you might like help opening the storage closet," the vampire said. He smoothed his hands over his hair as he strolled toward them, slicking his dark locks back.
"You don't trust me to give you a fair share?" Stark asked.
"I would never dream of mistrusting you, Everton," Lucifer said.
"How could you? I mean, he's such a friendly guy," Deirdre said, rubbing her sore throat.
Stark shot a look at her. "Don't push it, Tombs."
"Don't push me," she said. "And don't forget which one of us can incinerate people with a touch, huh? Let's go find this storage closet."
She strode up the hallway, leaving the men behind her.
Deirdre's hearing seemed to be improving now that she'd shapeshifted once. At any other time, she didn't think she would have heard Lucifer whispering to Stark. "Are you sure you can handle this bird you've hatched?"
"Not at all," Stark said. He sounded kind of pleased.
The promise in his voice made chills ripple down her spine.
Chadwick's storage closet wasn't a closet so much as a vault, reinforced with magic and steel in much the same way that the cell upstairs was. Deirdre hung back, letting Stark inspect the runes that protected the drugs within.
Stark took a few minutes to read the runes that bordered the door, smashed his fist through two of them, and then forced the lock open easily.
"I'll look for other traps," Lucifer said.
The vampire vanished inside.
"How do you always know how to do that?" Deirdre asked, hanging beside Stark. "You did the same thing at the detention center when we freed Vidya, and you knew how to use Brother Marshall's staff thing, and...how?"
"Rhiannon was a witch before Genesis," Stark said. "She taught me a lot."
"You can't cast magic, can you? How much could she really teach you?"
"I know enough to deconstruct it. You don't need to know the full language of runes to figure spells out. Witches are showy. They want to demonstrate their skill. They'll always put the most complicated elements of the spell front and center, and complication signifies importance. It gets easy the more often you break their spells down."
Lucifer poked his head out the door. "You guys should see this."
"Is it a trap?" Deirdre asked.
"That would depend upon how strong your willpower is."
She stepped inside. The storage closet was much deeper than Deirdre would have guessed from the outside-a long, lightless hall of shelves that glowed a dim shade of blue.
She'd never seen so much lethe in her life. She'd never seen even a thousandth of that much lethe before.
There had to be millions of cubes weighing down those shelves, nestled in foam egg crates. It must have been enough lethe to drug every shifter in the country.
Deirdre hadn't realized that she was aching for a hit until she saw all those dimly glowing cubes. She hadn't taken anything in far too long. Her whole body longed for that lethe, for the buzz of having it injected into her veins, for the euphoria that would follow.
It was a trap all right.
Stark elbowed past her to head into the rear of the room. She probably should have helped him carry the drugs out, but all she could do was stare, slack-jawed. "Where did all of this come from?"
Lucifer tossed a cube in the air and caught it. "Genesis left some weird things behind, like hospitals filled with rare prescription drugs, libraries with too many books, and military depots with more guns than should have been produced. Little centralized pockets of supplies, sort of. As though someone had prepared stockpiles."
"I know." Deirdre had been stuck in one of those well-stocked hospitals, like many new gaean children had been.
"There were also stockpiles of lethe in some areas. Why?" He spread his hands wide in a questioning gesture. "Nobody knows."
"I'm sure it was to make certain a new generation of children could get as high as the ones before Genesis did," she said. "Blessed be the dead gods, for they were so damn thoughtful."