“Pardon me,” Austin said, the rest of the room not paying Nessa’s comment any attention, “but they’ve been lulling you to sleep, alpha, while they set up their weapons in your backyard.”
The heaviness in the air intensified with Austin’s words, but I didn’t dare look Kingsley’s way lest I randomly get worked up again and make a show of myself. All the power being thrown around made me feel…aggressive.
Instead I watched Tristan slowly look Nessa’s way, his bearing loose and easy and his eyes clear and open, glowing brightly.
“Obviously so,” Tristan murmured. “Or why would he have repeated himself, much more slowly the second time, as though he wanted me to get every detail?”
Nessa’s eyebrows drew together and her face flushed just a little, three parts anger, one part…
something else.
Sebastian had been intensely frustrated that he’d slept through the mage’s mutterings, thinking (probably correctly) that what the mage was saying would make more sense to him and Nessa than to Tristan. He’d calmed down after seeing Tristan’s notes. They really were very thorough.
Nessa hadn’t said a peep about the situation. She’d listened silently to Austin’s account of the night, looked at the notes Tristan had handed over, and then spent the rest of the morning seemingly lost in thought. When asked what she was thinking about, she’d shaken her head and bounced back to life.
“I don’t like your tone, Austin,” Kingsley replied, his gush of magic pulling my focus back to him.
“Nor your implication that we’ve been asleep out here, twiddling our thumbs.” He pointed at the projector. “We’ve cataloged every instance since the patterns began to emerge. We’ve doubled our defenses and worked day and night to protect our families and our homes. Some of us have been wounded, and we lost a good man, all while battling a force the likes of which we’ve never faced before. In case you’ve forgotten, we don’t have the ability to see through magical potions. Nor have we found a mage who somehow has secret information. But we’ve been doing this for months. So before you come in here with your swagger, thinking you know all, why don’t you get on a team for once and work with us, not against us?”
Austin’s power surged and his gaze heated.
This was less about two leaders trying to compromise and more about two brothers struggling to work out their issues on a public stage. That was all well and good, but it was not the time for this confrontation.
“If you think—”
“We haven’t forgotten,” I said loudly, moving away from Austin a little and putting out my hands, not wanting to seem like I was solely on his side. “We definitely have not forgotten, alpha. Austin is expressing his frustration badly, not at you or your people, but at the situation. At our— all of our—
helplessness against this magical tyrant. But we’re here to fill in some gaps. Before we captured that mage last night, we didn’t know any more than you guys. We’ve been flying blind—that’s the problem.
So let’s talk about what we know and come up with a plan to find out what we don’t. The blame game is a waste of time.”
I didn’t break my gaze from Kingsley’s, but softened it so that it wouldn’t seem dominating.
Sometimes leadership took an iron will, and sometimes it took the patience and finesse of a kindergarten teacher. The trick was knowing when to use which tactic.
After a moment, Kingsley nodded but didn’t comment. Austin nodded as well—a truce. The floor was mine.
“Tristan,” I said, “why don’t you go over, in all the detail you have, what that mage shared with you? That’ll help us all get on the same page. Then, Sebastian, I’d like to hear all you know from your spy network about what Momar might have in store for us. I’d also like to remind everyone here today that Sebastian and Nessa will be tortured and killed if they are caught by the enemy. They usually battle people like Momar from the shadows. Most people battle him that way, and we know why based on what’s happened to other packs. Stick your neck out, meet the axe. That’s how it works. So before we go discounting our mages because they happen to have the same magic as the enemy, let’s instead use their knowledge to help us all stay alive, okay? Let’s not lose any more men or women.”
Tristan started by recounting the situation in which the mage had died and then waited to see if there were any questions. None were asked, so he took the pages of notes back from Austin and recounted what was there, stopping a couple of times to add things he’d remembered that didn’t make it onto paper. After finishing, he returned the notes to Austin and lifted his eyebrows, silently asking for questions.
Kingsley was looking at the projector, though, the slide with the dates of the attacks. Someone else was filling in the time stamps provided by Tristan, some exact and some guesses.
The whole time Nessa stared at Tristan thoughtfully, suspiciously, and for the first time I found myself tilting my head at the situation as well. Those were some very detailed notes. I hadn’t gotten anything half so detailed when I used the nightmare spell. It was like Tristan had cracked the guy’s skull open and looked inside.
Then again, Tristan’s subject had already been muttering about things, asking for some sort of deal to get out of his predicament, and that was before the bit with Edgar and Mr. Tom. It made sense that things might go a bit more smoothly without all the mayhem.
I pushed away the niggling feeling that something was amiss to focus on the situation at hand. I would ask Austin for his thoughts later.
Kingsley swore, his whole countenance brimming with anger. He turned to look out the window.
“I’d thought they were testing our defenses in the beginning,” he said. “For a while they changed it up enough that it seemed like they were feeling us out. But when the instances stopped evolving, and didn’t escalate…”
Austin nodded slowly. “They surely were testing you in the beginning. And then, once they had the lay of the land, they used those instances as distractions.”
There was a tone to his voice that hinted at you should’ve known that.
Before Kingsley could react, Sebastian stepped forward, the normal guy dealing with shifters and not the powerful mage with his shiny watch. “Do you know what else you did? You took away their sense of urgency. Austin…Steele. Austin? I’m confused about what I’m supposed to be calling him, but that guy”—he pointed at Austin—“said they’d lulled you to sleep. That’s not even remotely true.
Sorry al—Austin. Steele.”
“Use Austin here,” Austin said.
“Thank you. Anyway, Alpha Kingsley, you said you doubled your defenses. You worked long hours. You drove away their distractions and ran around and secured the perimeter, right?”
Kingsley didn’t answer right away, probably not liking the “ran around” part.
“Yes,” he finally said.