Eight

Mircea

I couldn’t focus for the rest of the meeting. Not after what the White Wolf had said. Not after each word shook me to the core and made me shut down. I hadn’t personally attended a Hunt in years, I simply didn’t want to watch the bloodshed of hundreds of wolves stuck in their animal forms. Especially when each Hunter wore their scent-inhibitors.

I stared into the back of my father’s head for the couple of hours until the meeting closed. I had hoped that the prolonged eye contact would have made him look at me at least once, but his head never moved. He had stared at the White Wolf for the entire meeting, and she had stared right back.

“I announce this meeting closed, we shall begin discussions tomorrow. Agendas will be handed out in a few hours when they are finalised.” Ianthe announced, and everyone immediately stood up from the table. That was when I took my eyes away from my father and locked onto the White Wolf’s bistre irises. She had never given her name…

With the meeting officially over, I could speak again.

“White Wolf, you never gave us your name.” I said, and all movement in the room stopped as she stared at me. Her eyes flashed amber for half a second, but it wasn’t a threat. It was anger.

“Wouldn’t that humanise me?” She asked rhetorically. “Wouldn’t knowing my name make me more like you? Make it harder to ignore the rights me and my people should have?” She asked.

“It would.” I replied simply, knowing that this was me visibly standing up to my father in front of all of the most important leaders in the world. She eyed me carefully, turning to briefly look at her Third who we also didn’t know the name of. Or her other adviser, who I assumed was her Second.

He nodded at her briefly, so she turned back to us.

“My Third is Jackson, my Second here is Marcy and my name is Vali.” She said, I nodded in reply.

“I look forward to working with you,” I said. All I could do was ignore the glare that my father was giving me. The plan he had asked me to make… I wouldn’t be sharing it with him. Not unless he could tell me that only wolves were in the Hunts.

I knew when he lied.

Vali nodded in response with a disbelieving look on her face before taking her papers and leaving the room, seeming to want to escape the politics of it all. I didn’t blame her, it was the hardest part. And if you got it wrong there was no chance of recovery.

No one else said a word as everyone else left the room, and my father didn’t speak until we were in our accommodation, the French Lord’s manor.

“Mircea, what the fuck was that?” He asked me, clearly not even able to form a calm sentence he was that angry. Good. I needed him off balance.

“Could ask you the same thing.” I replied, Kang-Dae interjected into the conversation before I let my fangs grow and my eyes turn red. I was glad for it, because if I had my father would have seen it as a challenge. I wasn’t entirely convinced I could beat him just yet.

“I think acting in good graces with the White Wolf is a good idea.” Kang-Dae said, turning my father’s fury away from me for a moment. He was stalling for me, allowing me to come up with a story for this. A twist to make my actions seem reasonable.

“How the fuck would working with that animal be of benefit to us?” My father asked.

Your kind aren’t welcome here. His words from the meeting flashed through my memory. The Summit is no place for animals.

“Because if she does have this evidence, we are fucked,” I said. My father’s eyes locked onto mine. Lean into it. This is the only way to get him to fall for this. Maybe I could use this. “You need to tell me now whether it’s true or not, because if we have any hope of getting through this…” I trailed off. My father had been the Vampire King for the better part of five hundred years, his reign couldn’t go past that half a century, so preparing me for the crown was necessary. Part of that had been allowing me to help solve political issues.

“And befriending her would help, how?”

“You’re not telling me what I need to hear, is what she said true or not? Have there been others involved in the Hunts?” I asked, staring him in the eyes. I needed to see any kind of response possible from him.

“How would that thing help?” The lack of an answer, the way he kept avoiding it was an answer in itself.

“That wolf is our ticket to not going to war with the entire supernatural world.” I said, his eyes narrowed at me.

“We haven’t done anything wrong. The Hunts have been around for millennia, it was an approved ritual to control the wolf numbers-”

“That doesn’t matter anymore.” I cut my father off once more. Knowing what the White Wolf had said during the meeting, that this was the first one since the peace treaty was signed where a wolf was present, it made all of his argument invalid. “What matters is what everyone is going to think when the White Wolf shows that you have been abusing the Hunts.”

“The Hunts are our right,” he said. Almost like I couldn’t argue the point, like his word was final and that nothing else mattered on the point. But so many things did. If the census that the wolves had been taking over the last few years, for the exact purpose of showing how detrimental the Hunts were, were accurate then we had killed thirteen-thousand wolves over the span of six years. That was more than two-thousand a year. How did we even manage holding that many at once? And killing them all? On top of the other races that we had involved as well?

“Not anymore.” I told him. “Friending the White Wolf will show we are wanting to make amends. Move forward and change.”

“We don’t need to change. And that’s final,” he said. I finally looked away from him, realising that there wasn’t anything else that I could do to convince him. “What was your plan for if the White Wolf came?” He asked me, I shook my head.

“You know, my plan was fairly based on you not having killed other races during the Hunts. I thought that having the standards that low… it wasn’t even a fucking thought that you would have…” I took a breath. My father couldn’t shout at me, not while we were in someone else’s home with an unknown amount of people in unknown positions throughout. He couldn’t threaten to kill me, couldn’t hit me or attack me with Kang-Dae in the room. Because what was more important than him displaying his power? Keeping the facade. If even a crack showed then our standing could be called into question.

I had to squeeze my hands into fists to let out some of my energy, my anger.

“I’ll come back when the agenda arrives. Until then, I’m going to be anywhere but here.” I said before walking out of the room. There wasn’t really anywhere that I planned on going, I just knew that I couldn’t be in that room anymore.

My feet carried me into the forest that surrounded the mansion.

And from there I knew everything was going to change.