“Like you could,” I said to him.
He shrugged. “What can I say, I’m a sensitive New Age werewolf.”
Caleb didn’t even flicker a smile. Did he ever?
“To answer your question,” he said, leaning back and tucking his hands in his pockets. “It’s safer this way. We have a network, havens,
rules. These islands have been through a lot of turmoil the last hundred years or so, and our forefathers decided we’d get a lot further working together than not. This way we don’t have to depend on the vampires for protection, the way the wolves in Europe do. London stays an open city, with no one scrabbling for territory around it.”
“Did you have to fight for the spot, or did you draw straws?” Ben asked.
He chuckled. “The way I see it, if you have to fight to be alpha, you’re doing it wrong. Better if you can scare the piss out of the buggers without layin’ a hand on ’em.”
It was all I could do not to roll over and show him my belly. An alpha after my own heart.
I glanced at Ben. “Can you imagine if we tried to do some kind of United Packs of America thing back home? We’d get laughed at.”
“At best,” he said.
“You lot don’t need it,” Caleb explained. “You have lots of wide-open spaces and no history of entrenched feudalism. You don’t like the locals you just go somewhere else. Am I right?”
I remembered my own flight from my first pack. I’d had the freedom to be a lone wolf with relative ease. “You don’t get too many lone wolves here, then?”
“Oh, occasionally. As long as they keep the peace, I leave ’em be.”
“If I’d known who to contact, I’d have asked permission to enter your territory, if that’s what you’re here to talk to me about.”
“If I’d said no, would you have stayed out?”
“I’d already bought the plane tickets.”
He smiled like he’d won a point. “Lucky for you that’s not what I’m here about.”
“Oh?”
“Where do you stand?” he said. His tone made the question very large indeed.
“On my own two feet?” I suggested. Ben snorted a laugh.
“Regarding the vampires,” Caleb answered, not missing a beat. “The vampires here, in Europe, in your own country. Do you serve them?”
People kept asking me that. Kept making assumptions. “No,” I said. “I’m friends with some of them. But I protect my pack. That’s all.”
“You sure about that? It’s rare, for a territory’s wolves to be so … independent.”
“I think I know what you’re really asking,” I said. “I met some of the vampires of Europe last night. And some of their wolves. I didn’t like what I saw.”
“You’ve never seen wolves as slaves, you mean.”
“No,” I said. “Not like that.”
“It’s been that way for centuries on the Continent,” Caleb said. “It’s different, here. The arrangement Ned and I have is unusual.”
“What arrangement is that?”
“We leave each other alone.”
“The European vampires don’t like either one of you because of that.”