The Last Shewolf Ch. 77-83

I was a little surprised by a few things other than Mitchell showing up at Adam's place, and they looked to be good things. Abaddon, my moody and serious Master at Arms, was openly playful and showing affection for Meghan, who was like a niece to me. They couldn't go more than a few seconds without being in contact with each other. Now that they had confessed their feelings for each other, their love was obvious to see. I was glad, he deserved a good woman, and Meghan was one of the best I'd ever met.

Snake was a little more shocking. For eighteen years, he had moped and pined after his lost love. Vivian had been an amazing shewolf, their love was intense, and her loss had almost destroyed him. Only now did I see some of the Snake I remembered coming out again, thanks to the little fireball sitting next to him. Mia was a riot. She knew what she wanted, said what she wanted, and did what she wanted. Mostly, she wanted Snake. I was glad this was a public place, because they looked at each other like they wanted to go at it right then.

Eve might have been embarrassed for her Dad, but she was also thrilled he was starting to live again. She was sitting across from Mia, getting to know his girlfriend as Snake was learning about his new son. Michael and I just looked at each other and shook our heads, love was in the air and we had nothing.

I pulled out my phone after eating; I had a bunch of phone messages and texts, but I'd only called back Netzach at our apartment building. One of the newer guys, he'd been left behind to oversee repairs to our buildings and answer the phone. It took me a while as we were waiting for our table to calm him down after he lost the Pack bond. I told him we'd be returning soon, and we'd figure it out.

Netzach was messaging me, telling me I had to call back Alpha Thurber of the North Carolina Pack, that it was 'extremely urgent' and he had been calling nonstop. "I have to step outside and make a call," I told the others as I stood. I walked out into the bright sunlight, finding a quiet spot at the edge of the parking lot I could talk without interruption. I never gave out my cell number, I had things routed through the duty person at our Pack House; I was old fashioned that way. My caller ID was blocked.

I dialed the number, he picked up immediately. "Dennis, it's Alpha Gabriel," I said.

"Thank Luna. Gabriel, has it happened with your Pack as well? Has Luna really done this to us?"

"Apparently so," I said. "I have no more Alpha influence, no Pack bond, no link. For some reason, Luna took it all away," I said.

"Wait, you have your wolf?"

"Yes, but no Pack. What happened to you?"

He didn't say anything for a second, there was a heavy sigh. "My wolf isn't there, Gabriel. All of our wolves are gone. We can't shift, communicate, I can't feel him. There's just nothing. We're fucking humans now."

My mind was reeling. "When did this happen?"

"Almost three hours ago. What happened?"

"Wow," I said. "This morning, the Promised One mated with her Fated Mate. The curse has been broken."

"AND A NEW CURSE WAS UNLEASHED," he thundered. "What have you done, Gabriel? What did my Pack do to deserve such a fate? We're NOTHING now."

"I don't know, Dennis." I couldn't believe it. "What about the other Packs?"

"I talked to Alphas in Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont and Maine," he said. "We all had the same story. Our wolves, our Packs, all gone. We're stumped, Gabriel. What do we do now?"

"I don't know. I'm going to call some of the other Packs in the Midwest and West, see what they know. I'll organize a videoconference call tomorrow, I'll text you the information," I told him. "I'm still away from base, I'll be out of touch until tonight."

"Set it up for 10 am Eastern time, I'll contact everyone east of the Mississippi and Europe. You take Russia and Canada along with the west. We need to figure this out, Gabriel. I need to know why, because if Eve screwed this all up by mating, we might have to stop that."

"YOU WON'T TOUCH HER," I thundered back.

"We'll see. 10 am, email me the videoconference data and I'll pass it along. Tomorrow, Gabriel." He hung up.

I quickly called Netzach back, telling him to set up a videoconference for the leaders and email them the information on how to join at nine tomorrow, since we were Central time. He said he'd take care of it. "Dennis said he and a number of other Alphas and their Packs have lost their wolves as well as their Pack bonds," I told him. "If any call, find out if that is the case and text me the results. Start calling on my behalf, invite them to join on the call. I'll be back late tonight."

"I'll take care of it, Alpha," he said.

"Gabriel," I said. "There are no more Alphas. Call me Gabriel." I hung up the phone and sat down on a boulder, trying to figure out what was going on. Michael walked up and sat next to me, he'd heard everything. I patted him on the back. "Everything has changed," I told my old friend.

"Not everything, Gabriel. Our friendship will not."

I nodded looking back at the restaurant where some of our group was starting to come out. "Did they send you to find me?"

"The waitress dropped off the check, so yeah," he said as we laughed. I got up and fished out my wallet. "I may not be Alpha, but at least I'm still needed," I said. "Gather them up by the bikes, we need to talk quickly before we leave." I walked back across the lot, going back in I used the restroom before going back to my place at the table. I handed our Pack credit card to the harried waitress, who with two busboys was cleaning the mass of plates from the table. "Thank you for the service, the food was excellent, Amy."

She smiled and thanked me as she took the card. I looked over at Adam and Eve. "I hate to do this to you, but I need to ask you both to return with us to St. Paul now. With what has happened with my Pack and others, we need to have Church tonight with the Northwoods Riders. In the morning, I have a conference call with the Alphas."

Eve looked disappointed. "We can't stay here?"

"We can return later, but this has to be done and I need everyone together for what I have to talk about. I can't leave enough men up here to protect you, and there's a new danger."

"Now what?"

"The other Packs didn't just lose their Pack links and their Alpha influence. They lost their wolves." The table suddenly got silent. "The Alpha I just spoke to, he blames it on these two mating. It wouldn't shock me if someone thought they'd get their wolf back if she was no longer mated to Adam and tried to kill him and take her."

"Fuck, it never ends," Snake said.

"We will go," Adam said as Eve held on to him. "We need to meet the family, and her safety is the most important thing. I will call my brother and let him know I'll be in the cities for a few days."

"I'll go with you," Mia said. "It won't be comfortable, but I don't want to be apart from you."

I looked at her, the bruises on her body were obvious and her arm was in a sling to rest it. "If you wish, we have some cars, you could ride back in one of them. I could get one of the guys to ride your Harley back, Snake."

He started to nod before she elbowed him. "No way. I'm not arriving to meet the members of his Club in a cage. I've got some good drugs, my ass will make it."

"Fine," Snake said, "But let me know if it gets too uncomfortable and we can swap for a while. We can even stop before the clubhouse so you're on my bike before we get there." He leaned down and kissed her. "It isn't the North Shore adventure you wanted, I'm sorry."

"Don't be, the last few days have been good, even though they had their ups and downs." She leaned in and kissed him again. "We get home, there will be a lot of ups and downs," she whispered. I laughed, Eve blushed and Snake just looked at here with a 'like you won't' smirk.

"You realize whispering is useless around wolves, right?" She shook her head. "I hope you two are having safe sex, unless you're trying to give me a pregnancy buddy," Eve said. Snake got a deer in the headlight look. "You are, right?"

"We haven't talked about..."

"Why I can't have children yet," Mia said. "I was going to tell you, I can't have them." She took his hand and looked at his face. "After my mother died of ovarian cancer, I was told I had a high risk of developing it as well due to family history and other risk factors. My husband didn't want children, and I was thirty-five, so I elected to have a risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy. It's a long way to say my ovaries and fallopian tubes are gone. Since we both had been in long-term relationships before a period of nothing, I wasn't worried about STD's."

"I'm sorry," Snake told her. "It's all right, I'm old and I have a wonderful daughter who just got mated and will give me beautiful grandchildren we can spoil."

"I'd like that," she said as they kissed again.

They needed time together. "Knights, we need to meet by the bikes," I said to those remaining. "We leave in ten minutes."

"Thanks for lunch, Gabriel. We'll be out in a few minutes." I got up and led my men outside. As we gathered around our motorcycles, I made it short and sweet. "Guys, there is no Pack, I'm no longer an Alpha. We are blessed in that we still have our wolves, other Packs have lost those as well. I don't know yet what our future is, but I do know that I can't compel you to stay with me. Your vow to protect the Promised One until she broke the curse is complete, your service to Luna is as well. If you wish to leave, to go back home, to do something else, you have my thanks and my blessing to do so. If you want to stay with me and figure out what we will do next, you may do that as well. I would just ask that if you want to leave, you do so now."

I looked around at my men, the ones I had recruited and led for up to two decades, and a smile crossed my face as they all smiled back at me. Not a one wanted to leave. "I do plan to get married," Abaddon said. "As long as you don't move away from the Riders, I'll stay with you," he said.

"Eve is still vulnerable," Azazel said. "The curse may be broken, but the future of our race still depends on them raising a new generation. I will make a new vow if I need to, but I will protect them with my life even now." The others nodded their heads. I knew why, protecting Eve gave us purpose and meaning, since we didn't have families of our own. Who knows, maybe we would find our own women, find our own happiness. Maybe we could have both.

"Thank you," I said. "Drain it if you have to, we leave in five. Club run to St. Paul, standard formation, we keep the humans and our protection in the middle and the cars trail us. Make sure you're carrying, and if you see any threats, you all know what to do."

Snake, Mia, Eve and Adam came out last, they had given us time to talk without interruption. "I talked to my brother, and Snake let Viper know we are coming. Ready to ride?"

"I'm always ready to ride," I said with a smile. "MOUNT UP!" Michael and I led everyone out of the lot, side by side, just like normal. Well, except Meghan was tucked in with Abaddon behind me, and Snake had Mia on his bike while Adam had Eve with him. I looked in my mirror and smiled. I bet that a year from now, we'd have a lot more couples on the ride.

Luna may have taken away my Pack and my Alpha, but she left me with loyal men and friends. That was even better.

Ch. 78

Eve's POV

I snuggled into Adam's broad back, my chin on his shoulder and my hands wrapping his waist as we pulled out of the parking lot. We were dead center in the column, on the shoulder side, with Azazel covering us on the left. We were right behind my father and his new (shocking) girlfriend Mia, and behind us was Abaddon and his equally shocking new girl, Meghan. I giggled a little as I thought about all the cover these new relationships would give me when we got back to the Clubhouse. Meghan looked happy, and I was glad she finally was able to act on her feelings.

Growing up with the Knights, I hadn't known any of them to be distracted by women. They always attracted attention when they rode with the Club, and many a woman at the party or bar went away disappointed when the handsome men turned them down. The rumor I'd heard was that they were a homosexual-only biker gang that made their money as male strippers.

I guess a bunch of werewolves on bikes who lived like warrior monks of Luna was too strange a truth, but it was. They were always there for me, sometimes more than I wanted, but I trusted them. The events of the past week had shown me the folly of not trusting them. Tucked into the formation, I felt as safe as I was.

"Are they always like this," Adam asked me over the Bluetooth-enabled earpiece I was wearing under my helmet. "Overprotective and paranoid?"

"Not always, but the threats from that Alpha and the changes, it makes them nervous. When they are nervous, they circle around me." I looked around, enjoying the view of the North Shore of Lake Superior. "I miss the Pack bond, it saved me before and it was SO convenient at times."

"Gabriel was your Alpha?"

"He had to be, my Dad and the Club are all human. I needed to be in his Pack so they could talk to me, feel when I was in danger. I've never known different until now. I can understand why the others are so upset, and then to lose your wolf?"

"That shocks me too. I don't know what Luna is thinking."

"Nothing shocks me anymore, Adam. My whole life I've been told I have this grand destiny, this purpose to find you and break the curse. You would think that everyone would be able to rally around the survival of our species, but at every turn the Alphas have taken the wrong path. Killing each other, sanctioning forced mating, wanting to capture me for their own or just because it would give them power to control me. I didn't want anything to do with them, and I was scared to death in Chicago."

"That's where they presented you to the unmated, right?"

"Yes. If I had been mated to one of them, especially an Alpha, I would have been taken back to his Pack and treated like a prize brood mare." I shook my head, shivering just thinking about it. "Instead, I go back to my mother's Pack and find you. If none of this had happened, we would have grown up together, found each other when I was of age. How different things would have been."

He drove without saying anything for a bit. "We were too young to change anything, and I'm glad it worked out this way. You had a Pack, I didn't, but now we have each other. The real question is what do we do now."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I work at a lumber mill, I live in my brother's house, and I refuse to live without you at my side. How about you?"

I laughed. "I live in a room on the upper floor of the Clubhouse, I don't have a job, and I make money doing custom artwork for motorcycles."

"I think we need to build a place of our own."

"I think so too. I'd like to build my grandparent's house again, to see it return to the glory of their time."

Gabriel's POV

If it was only us, we would have driven with maybe one stop, but it wasn't. I could tell Mia was having a tough time, and when we stopped south of Duluth, I had to do something. "Mia, you can barely move," I said to her as we made sure everyone had gas in the tank. "Why don't you lie down in the back of the Expedition for a while. We have plenty of room."

She looked at Snake, and he nodded his head. "It's time for your medication, and the next two hours is straight freeway," he said. "Please, take a nap, you'll feel better."

"You'll wake me so I can ride the rest of the way home?"

"We promise," I told her. She took the pills with a water and after kissing Snake, crawled into the back of the truck.

"She's taken the whole werewolf thing well," I said as I waited with Snake for everyone to be ready to leave again.

"Very well. I know it's been just a short time, but I know, you know? The first time I looked into her eyes I knew."

"I had that once," I said. "It's normal for a werewolf with his mate, the bond snaps in place and everything else works out. I'm happy for you, my friend. You deserve it." I looked over and saw Eve hand in hand with Adam as they came out of the Super America market. "I'm happy for them, too. Hang on, I need to try something."

I walked over to Adam as they were getting ready to get back on. "Adam, if you don't mind, I'd like to find out if this works." I got down on one knee, bowed my head and said, "I accept you as my Alpha and request to be in your Pack."

"What do I do?"

"You say, 'I accept you into my pack' and put your hand on my head," I said. He did, and nothing changed. "It didn't work," I told him.

"I'm not an Alpha, never wanted to be," Adam said as he climbed on his motorcycle, Eve behind him.

"I didn't feel it in you either, but I had to try. Now I know that Luna has taken away the Pack bond from everyone, it's not being restarted under you." I walked back to my motorcycle and started it up, everyone else was doing the same. We pulled back onto the road and onto I-35 south, not stopping until we were closer to the cities. As promised, at the rest stop we woke Mia up so she could ride the rest of the way on Snake's motorcycle. "We're going straight to the Clubhouse, once our charges are safe there, the Knights will meet at our place. We'll join the Riders for dinner and church," I said.

Snake had called ahead with our arrival time, and the entire Club turned out to greet us. Eve was hugged and congratulated as she introduced Adam to everyone. Kelly was thrilled with him, and even the injured Viper couldn't stay mad when he saw how happy she was. We left when they all went inside, back to our place. I gave everyone time to relax, then we met in the rec room. I had been making phone calls for an hour, checking in with allied Alphas and even some that weren't as friendly. "Boys, it's a whole new ballgame," I said. "Pack bonds are gone everywhere, even in Russia and Canada. Good Alphas are holding things together, but Alphas that ruled with fear and command have lost their men, even lost their own lives. I know of two Packs already where the senior leadership was turned on and killed by the men." There was shock at this, Alpha command wouldn't allow such a thing to happen before. "We are also hearing about high numbers of suicides and sudden deaths. Every other Pack, the men have lost their wolves as well."

"What does this mean," Muriel asked.

"I'm not sure, as you may have seen, even with our wolves the Pack and Alpha bonds are gone. The only bonds left are those that come from family, and the commitments we make to each other. I was thinking about the Northwoods Riders on the way down. We've always considered them to be like an allied Pack to us; similar structure and leadership, but theirs are elected and the club is run with voting and friendship."

"They are one big family," Abaddon said. "That's why they are so close, they treat each other like brothers and sisters, they even raise their young ones in cooperation."

"I think that is what Luna is doing here." It had been gnawing at me for a while. "We all know the Alpha Male thing doesn't happen in real wolf packs, they are family units. I always thought Luna gave us the bond and the link because our human side needed the structure, not our wolves. I guess we find out now."

"How?" Michael looked at me, I could see the wolf behind his eyes howling at the loss of the link.

"Meditation and prayer," I said. "We have an hour before Church with the Riders. I'd ask each of you to search your hearts and talk to your wolves about what to do next. We need Luna's guidance and wisdom, we're in all new territory here." With that, the guys filtered out. I went to the spot I normally go, a small garden area on the rooftop. Ignoring the sounds of traffic and the city, I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes, seeking out my wolf in my mind.