Page 110 of Feral Werewolves
“And then they decide if men can live in them or not,” she said.
Suddenly, I realized why I was such an idiot. I slammed my palm into my forehead.
“What?” she said.
“You,” I said. “You’rethe leader.”
She laughed. “Um… okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “Because you have three wolf mates to enforce everything you fucking say, including me, who everyone’s afraid of.”
She surveyed me. “But it’d really be you, though? You’djust be making me your puppet or whatever.”
“I don’t want to be the leader atall,” I said. “No, no, you run everything, and there should be a woman in every house, a woman who makes all the decisions for each house.”
“Well,” she said, “it sort of helps a little, I guess. Because Lazarus and I were talking about the power differential, how the men are always going to be stronger than the women, no matter what.”
“Yes,” I said, grinning. “Exactly. So, give the women the decision-making power.”
“What about Noah? Does Noah get a house?”
“Tithes,” I said. “Give the former tithes the power, regardless of gender.”
“But it’saboutgender,” she said. “It just is.”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Or maybe it really is just about strength. And power. Because we use each other the same, regardless of whether we’re men or women, when everything’s about threat. We need… connections. Real connections here. Love. And families. And babies. And a fucking community.”
She kissed my cheekbone. “It won’t be that simple.”
I shrugged. “True. Nothing ever is.”
26
kestrel
IT WAS Astupid idea, and I could have told Paladin that. If he’d asked me before he did it, I would have told him not to go through with it.
However, he did it anyway.
He went to all of the unattached women and told them to go and pick out a house for themselves and to go to him or Clementine if they couldn’t work out any conflicts that they had between themselves.
And then he told the wolves that they got to live in a house at the will of the woman who lived there. He said that if he heard they were using force or coercion, he would take it upon himself to make them sorry.
There was practically a damned mutiny right then. They hated it, and they hated him, and they refused to do it, so he told them to get out of the subdivision and come back when they could get on board with the new way of doing shit.
Then he let Red and Griff out, told them what he was doing, and said that if there were houses left, Madrigal and Noah could each have one, but it was up to them who lived in the house.
Red thought it was batshit insane, just like I did, but Griff thought it was brilliant. He got all excited and shook Paladin’s hand and said he should have done this himself and babbled a whole bunch about everything.
After that, I was stunned to see that half of the men had not actually left the subdivision, but were, instead, going to talk to women who now had houses, and the women were letting them in.
The other men did leave, which confused me, because I would have figured they’d just fight. Of course, they were all weirdly frightened of Paladin, something that I guessed I hadn’t quite understood. They also seemed to believe that Paladin could shift into a wolf at will, not just at the moon, which wasn’t true, but Paladin was not disabusing them of this notion.
Anyway, after that, we all went back to the farmhouse.
I said that the guys were going to be organizing and they’d come and fight us here.
Paladin said thatwasa possibility, but he didn’t seem particularly worried about it.
