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“I’m proud of you, son.”
Stormwinder’s office door hung open, but he spoke with back turned so he could continue peering out the window at the shifters below. Taking his words as invitation, I padded over to join him.
In stark contrast to the way the pack had kept their distance when I was present, Blue-eyes and Junior Junior were now at the center of a swirling eddy of concerned relatives. But Stormwinder didn’t mention recent events. Instead, he turned at last and rested a fatherly hand on my shoulder as he elaborated.
“You brought peace to the Price and Gray clans without spilling a drop of blood. I’m impressed.”
“You don’t think I went too far?”
Stormwinder brushed off my concern without a word, leading me over to a pair of leather armchairs flanked by a wall of pretentious hardbacks. I half-expected him to offer a cigar or a snifter of brandy. But, instead, he slipped a thin tablet off the small table between us and turned the device around to face me.
“Meeshi, this is Hunter. Hunter, this is Meeshi.”
“Hello?” I hadn’t meant my word to be a question, but I was blind-sided by the third person being abruptly drawn into the conversation via video chat. She was middle-aged and overweight, with two or three folds of flesh below her original chin. But the sparkle in her eyes made me like her...despite not having a clue who in the hell she was.
“Don’t sit there gaping like a fish. Someone might toss a worm in,” Meeshi admonished me tartly. Then she smirked when I shut my mouth with a snap.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” I said at last. When in doubt, fall back on manners.
“Meeshi is your new secretary,” Stormwinder explained at last. I had a feeling he’d enjoyed watching me attempt to guess the woman’s identity without scent or other shifter clues to fall back on. Apparently I’d passed if I was being given a staff member of my very own.
“I’m the Tribunal’s secretary,” Meeshi corrected as primly as a school teacher. “And you have several items on your docket at the moment, Chief Stormwinder. Do you want to hear them now?”
Stormwinder hummed his assent and Meeshi began rattling off a long list of problems that made only a moderate amount of sense to me, the outsider. A new alpha was requesting approval of his territorial rights—“He’ll have to wait until All-Pack,” my boss replied gruffly. A young male wanted to leave his clan—“That’s a decision for his alpha to make, not me.”
But then the Tribunal secretary brought up an issue I felt qualified to consult upon and Stormwinder accepted my feedback with apparent pleasure. Before I knew what had happened, I was sprawled out in that uncomfortable chair like it was my bunk and Stormwinder had long since loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. The sounds of pack revelry had faded and the sky had darkened beyond the window panes, but we’d hashed through what appeared to be a week’s worth of business in a few short hours.
To my surprise, I realized I’d enjoyed every minute of it.
For the first time in over a week, I felt part of something bigger than myself. I was using my brain and stretching muscles I hadn’t even known I possessed.
Better yet, I hadn’t been required to hide my lupine nature behind a pseudo-human smile in the process.
So when Stormwinder asked me to stay over and travel with him the next day on Tribunal business, I put up only a token protest. “I don’t think your son appreciates me impinging upon his territory.”
“Chad?” Stormwinder asked, as if it wasn’t obvious who’d gotten his knickers in a twist during my previous visit. “He’ll get over it. I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble out of the pack either, not after laying down the law up north.”
I clenched my jaw, remembering what lack of trouble meant—males and females alike refusing to so much as meet my eye. But it had been a long day and I was bone tired.
I can always bunk somewhere else tomorrow, I promised myself.
So I accepted Stormwinder’s hospitality. And with it, I accepted the new role he was building for me within his shifter world.
