Okamihana began walking as though the explanation would be easier somewhere else.
Derpy followed her out of the clearing. Behind him, the chibis were still watching, their earlier excitement subdued by the expression on his face. He could feel the place where Pest’s crest had formed beneath his clothes. Another decision somebody had made for him. Another responsibility he had discovered only after it was already attached.
Now Hydra was supposed to be his mate.
He had offered her a game.
“During the festival, there are seven council elders you need to understand,” Okamihana said. “Each controls a part of it. Some will be more trouble than others.”
Derpy watched a petal turn beneath her heel.
“My husband, Varok, is the Shadow Alpha and a Primordial Elder. Your father’s father.” She glanced at him. “You will have dealings with him as well as with me.”
He kept walking.
“Elowen is the Great Mother. The Seventh Elder, and the intended Primordial Successor. Remember those titles when you meet her.”
He heard the words. He simply could not make himself care about them while the rest of her announcement was still sitting in his chest.
“Then there is Okamiharu Redwake, the Red Cannon Elder. Okamirika, the Moonfang Elder. Leo, the Elder Wolf Witch.”
The path widened ahead. Wolves moved between the trees, carrying things, speaking to one another, going about an afternoon that had apparently remained ordinary for them. A child hurried after an adult near the edge of the walkway.
Derpy wondered how many people here had already been told about him and Hydra.
“Giga is the Amazon Wolf Elder,” Okamihana continued. “Physical combat is her specialty. And Nervina Yellowthorn is the Fearbound Elder. Her guardian is Chicken Nuggit.”
She slowed when he failed to look up.
“My child, are you listening?”
“What does being your champion actually mean?” he asked. “Who I fight? What I win? What happens if I say no?”
“Those are the things I'm trying to teach you.”
“Then start there. You told me who I'm mating with before you told me what I agreed to enter.”
Derpy stopped.
For a moment, he stared at her as if he were trying to work out how she could still be talking about introductions.
“What the fuck?”
Okamihana’s ears shifted.
“Derpy.”
“You decided who I can mate with. Who my partner is going to be. You didn’t ask me.”
“I am explaining the situation.”
“You’re telling me the names of the people I’m supposed to deal with after you’ve already decided what I’m doing.” He took a breath, but it did nothing to ease the pressure under his ribs. “Who gave you the right?”
One of the passing wolves slowed.
Okamihana noticed. Derpy noticed her noticing, and somehow that made him angrier.
“Just who are you to make that decision for me?” he demanded. “Where do you get off sitting on your high horse and telling me who I belong with?”
“Lower your voice.”
“What’s wrong with you? You’ve seen who I’m traveling with.” His fingers curled. “Someone who bites me, who keeps herself under control by doing something you probably wouldn’t even understand. And you haven’t asked about any of it.”
He would not explain Revy’s private arrangements on a path full of strangers. He should not have to explain them to make his refusal count.
Okamihana turned to face him fully.
“Derpy, listen to me. These elders will not care whether you are traveling with someone. They will not care what arrangement you believe you already have. I’m trying to protect you.”
His horns flared.
Protect him by choosing for him. He could barely hear her over the electricity snapping around his wrists.
Nearby conversation faltered. The wolf who had slowed now stepped back, catching the child behind him by the shoulder. Farther along the path, another adult turned sharply toward the pressure gathering around Derpy.
“That wolf girl,” somebody whispered. “Is she challenging the Great One?”
Pink petals began circling Okamihana.
Derpy looked at them, and all he could think about was being driven into the training ground before he could finish a move. Being handed a book while he asked for room to breathe. Being told another lesson would begin before he could explain what had happened to him.
“I’m trying to protect you, Derpy,” she repeated.
Something crunched behind his shoulders.
His breath caught. Black blood struck the path as dragon wings forced their way out of his back.
A cry came from somewhere nearby.
Pain bent him forward. When he straightened, green light was gathering around his headphones and the black bands at his wrists.
“You promised to help me find them.” Haze slipped beneath his new wings. “Lewd. Lenora. My pets. I keep asking, and you keep giving me another lesson.”
His shadow shifted.
A pale ocean-blue book rose slowly beside him. Words formed across its cover while the green haze thickened.
Thalassa.
Okamihana’s gaze caught on the book, then returned to his wings.
The stranger’s warning came back with unwelcome clarity. In the future she remembered, his dragon side had returned days later. Whatever had brought it forward now had already made that warning unreliable.
This was sooner than she had expected.
The petals circling her drew closer. Across from her, Derpy looked less like somebody preparing a deliberate challenge than somebody struggling to contain several things at once.
A hooded figure moved along the edge of the path.
Derpy’s tail swept out before he had thought through what he was doing. It wrapped around the stranger and drew her toward him.
“I would rather mate with this person here than let you decide my life for me!”
The woman stiffened inside his grip.
“No. I’m not interested in that. Please let me go, fath—”
She broke off with a terrible cough.
The sound cut through his anger.
Derpy looked at her properly for the first time. At the way her hands had caught against his tail. At the pressure he was putting around somebody who had only been walking past.
He loosened his grip at once.
“I’m sorry.”
She stepped clear, one hand holding her hood in place as another cough shook her.
Derpy’s tail dropped.
Somebody else was coughing.
He turned toward the sound. An adult had pulled a child farther back from the path. Two wolves stood with their sleeves over their mouths, and another had bent forward, one hand braced on a knee.
The haze was around them.
His haze.
Derpy looked back at his grandmother, then down at the green mist drifting past his hands.
“What did I just do?”
Blight laughed in the background.
“You breathed poison in the White Tiger Kingdom, and now you’re emitting it in a god’s territory that isn’t yours. You’re a walking disaster.”
The words reached him through the coughing.
He had nearly unleashed a calamity on people who had only happened to be standing nearby.
His hands opened.
Lewd had used her book. He remembered watching her, remembered the way she worked with what gathered around her instead of simply letting it spill outward.
He tried to hold on to that memory.
His fingers changed.
Harpy claws extended where his hands had been. Derpy stared at them for only a moment before stepping toward the nearest coughing wolves.
They recoiled.
“I’m taking it back,” he said. “Just let me take it back.”
He held out both hands.
The mist shivered.
For a horrible breath, nothing else happened. Then a narrow strand turned toward him. Another followed, peeling away from the people beside the path and streaming into the space between his claws.
Derpy drew his hands closer together.
The haze gathered, folding into itself. He watched the edges of it, reaching for the wisps that tried to drift away, pulling until the air around the bystanders began to clear.
Some of them were still coughing.
He did not look away from what he was doing.
The mist compressed into a ball. Its surface tightened beneath his claws, turning hard as he closed his hands around it.
Derpy stared at the solid shape he had made.
This could be useful.
A shadow crossed his vision.
Before he could lift his head, everything went black.
He hit the ground beside the path.
Varok stood over him.
For a moment, the Shadow Alpha looked down at the white wolf lying at his feet. Then he raised his head toward his wife.
“What were you thinking?”
The remaining petals circled slowly around Okamihana’s robes.
“He was bringing it under control.”
“After releasing it.” Varok’s voice hardened. “I thought our goal was to bring him onto our side. Not let him unleash a disaster in our home.”
Okamihana glanced toward the bystanders. Several had retreated farther down the path. The ones who remained kept their distance from the unconscious boy, watching him as though he might rise and begin again.
“You act as if the whole area was infected,” she said. “A couple of people were injured.”
Varok stared at her.
“And this shows anyone thinking about scent-claiming him or putting den pressure on his companions that they should reconsider,” she continued. “They have now seen what they might be provoking.”
His tail stiffened behind him.
“It’s my job as alpha to make sure all wolves here are safe.”
“I know your job.”
“Then stop speaking as though this was a useful demonstration.”
Her ears angled back.
He pointed toward Derpy, his shadow stretching with the movement.
“This is a disaster waiting to happen. Just like our son and the war he caused all those years ago. Because of that.”
Okamihana followed the pointing shadow to her grandson.
“Be careful what you blame on him.”
“I am looking at what he just did.”
Varok’s attention shifted beyond her. The chibis had gathered nearby. With them stood two other figures, one a rabbit and the other a dragon. Their presence gave him no more comfort than the boy on the ground.
“And those things,” he said, gesturing toward them. “We don’t know what he’s capable of. We don’t know what any of them can do. But it’s dangerous.”
Okamihana’s petals stopped drifting outward.
“You act as though our son wasn’t like this. Always causing trouble. Never listening to a word we said.”
“And look where that got him. Banished from the clan.” Varok lowered his hand. “Now he’s on his way here to reclaim a place in it.”
“It doesn’t matter, husband.”
“It mattered enough when we had to deal with the consequences.”
“You took an oath when we met.”
Something in her tone made him fall silent.
Okamihana stepped closer, leaving Derpy between the edges of their shadows.
“To protect all wolves. Regardless of how they were made.”
Varok’s jaw tightened.
“That is part of the reason I gave you my divine blessing,” she said. “We share godhood through my divine authority. You remember that, don’t you?”
“I remember.”
“Then remember the rest. You were on the brink of death. I saved you.”
For a long moment, neither spoke.
The hooded stranger stood a little way off, a book held in one hand. Her other hand rested near her throat. She looked down, then sharply toward the two wolves.
“Excuse me.”
“Not now,” they said together.
She straightened.
“But it’s important.”
“We said not now.”
“My oath includes the wolves he poisoned,” Varok said. “You cannot invoke it for him and forget them.”
“He was clearing the poison when you struck him.”
The stranger’s grip tightened around the book.
“If either of you would look—”
“We are speaking,” Varok said.
“Yes,” she answered, irritation finally breaking through. “You’ve both made that very clear.”
That brought their attention around.
She pointed toward the place where Derpy had fallen.
“His white wolf form is gone.”
Okamihana looked down.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“You know,” a familiar voice said, “if you two hadn’t done this many years ago, most of your kin would still be alive today.”
Both wolves turned.
“Though my kind isn’t innocent either.”
Lunara stood where Derpy should have been.
Her short black hair framed her face, crimson cutting through the fringe and violet darkening the ends. Curved purple horns rose above it. Behind her, wide wings carried a scattering of light through their violet membranes, and a heavy scaled tail curved over the path.
She wore a fitted black halter corset and belted shorts, purple bands at her arms and wrists. One scaled forearm shifted as she rested a hand near her hip. Her red eyes moved from Okamihana to Varok with a familiarity that belonged to older arguments than this one.
The woman who had run away with their son.
The Dark Dragon Sovereign.
Petals lashed across the space between them.
Lunara jumped aside. Black and pink swept past her, cutting through the place her head had occupied a moment earlier.
“I’m not here to fight,” she said. “I’m here to support my son. Derpy.”
Okamihana sent another wave.
Lunara turned with it, her tail lifting clear as she moved.
“A dragon invading our territory,” Varok growled. “Unacceptable.”
His shadow surged behind him.
“And of all the dragons to come here, it has to be her. The one he had a child with.”
He moved before the last words had quite left his mouth.
Okamihana saw the light along the bands beneath Lunara’s manifested form.
“Varok, stop!”
His arm was already raised.
“She isn’t really here. It’s the bands he’s wearing.”
His hand stopped inches from Lunara’s back, the strike that would have reached her neck arrested at the last moment.
Lunara looked over her shoulder.
A dark smile formed on her face.
“Now that you’re listening,” she said, “I don’t appreciate you trying to mate my son with somebody he isn’t interested in.”
Varok withdrew his hand slowly.
“You have no idea what we are trying to prevent,” Okamihana said.
“And you appear to have no idea what you’re about to provoke.”
Lunara turned far enough to face them both. The petals remained close to Okamihana, but no new wave came.
“There are already women who bear his crest,” Lunara said. “Lewd. Lenora. Vambasta. Crysha.”
She let the names settle before continuing.
“Do you realize what will happen if you go through with forcing him to mate? You’ll trigger their crests. Then you’ll have a lot of angry women heading your way.”
The two wolves looked at one another.
Lunara saw it.
“You should have asked before deciding.”
“He is my champion,” Okamihana said.
“He is also my son. And neither of those things makes his answer disappear.”
For a moment, the word hung between them. Son. Grandson. Champion. None of those titles had made the boy on the ground any better able to refuse what was being done with him.
Lunara’s smile faded.
“Derpy is about to enter his adult dragon phase. That helps explain what's happening to his body. It doesn't excuse the poison, and it doesn't give you permission to bind Hydra to him.”
Okamihana glanced toward the bands again. The stranger’s warning had concerned his dragon side returning. Lunara was describing something more than another weapon for his training.
“He won’t say it,” Lunara continued, “but I’m bound to him. I can feel everything he does.”
Her wings shifted, their edges beginning to lose definition.
“He’s not just a wolf. He’s part dragon, too. You need to respect that side of him.”
Varok held her gaze.
“And if that side endangers the people here?”
“Then stop making decisions about it before you understand it.”
The violet light in her wings thinned. Through it, the ground beneath her was becoming visible.
“If you can’t respect his dragon side, things are going to get ugly,” she said. “And there may be more than a couple of poisoned people next time.”
Neither wolf answered before her form began to dissolve.
Her tail faded first at the tip. The wings followed, their scattered lights drawing inward. The outline of the white wolf returned beneath her as the last of Lunara’s presence slipped back into the bracelets.
Derpy lay where he had fallen, still unconscious.
Okamihana looked down at him. Beside her, Varok lowered the hand he had nearly used to take Lunara’s head.
This time, when the silence returned, neither of them broke it.
Varok kept his eyes on the boy’s breathing. He could tell the pack he had stopped a danger. Derpy had been clearing the poison when he struck; that part remained harder to explain.
Okamihana saw the direction of his gaze and said, “No more surprises. He wakes, and we speak.”
Varok did not answer. His shadow stayed close to his feet.