Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

rhythm, and that was
     hard, but not as hard as it should have been.
    He was Leidolf. He knew that in his heart now. Literally. He was Leidolf, and Nokolai
     did not command him unless he allowed it.
    Isen was playing a dangerous game tonight.
    “Bill Peterson,” a voice called from the left.
    “On duty,” Pete said firmly. “Excused.”
    Rule’s nostrils were flared, open to the night. The air was soft and cool and thick
     with scent—dust and skin, sage and grass, fear and anger, a whiff of menstrual blood
     from a young woman nearby. Most of all, it was heavy with the massed scent of lupi.
    Nokolai. That was the strongest smell, the scent of clan reassuring even now. But
     Leidolf as well, a scent carrying so many of the same notes, yet arranged to a different
     tune. That smell, too, contented him, where it used to wake his nape to bristles.
     Also Laban. A musky lot, Laban. And Vochi. Quiet, unthreatening Vochi. Leidolf, Laban,
     Vochi…each was clumped up together not far from the center of the field.
    Nokolai Clanhome was crowded these days.
    “Josh Krugman,” another voice called. “And Celia Thompson.”
    “On duty,” Pete replied loudly, his voice crossing the response from the woman standing
     near Cullen saying the same thing. “Excused,” they both said, one right after the
     other.
    In normal times, most lupi did not live at their clanhomes. Nearby, yes, if they could,
     but lupi had to earn a living just as humans did, which for most of them meant living
     elsewhere. Some worked at Clanhome, either as guards or for the nursery or at the
     clan’s construction firm. Others owned their own small businesses elsewhere or worked
     for human employers or companies. But a large number worked at companies owned by
     the clan in the three coastal states that comprised Nokolai’s territory.
    This was unusual. Until the Supreme Court stopped the government from administering
     the drug gado to any lupi it caught, Rule’s people hadn’t dared live together in large
     numbers. Most clanhomes couldn’t house even half their clan’s members, and clans hadn’t
     considered it safe to have too many of their members working at the same place.
    Nokolai was different because of Isen…and Vochi.
    Isen had known for a long time that lupi couldn’t continue to live secretly. The world
     had changed too much. He’d planned for the day they came out into the open; he’d worked
     with Wythe clan to make that happen, using the country’s legal system. Even before
     that, though, he’d been preparing. First he’d created a pretext for gathering forty
     or fifty clan to him—the fiction that Clanhome housed a religious cult. In addition
     to the homes here, he’d built dormitory-type housing for “visiting brethren.” After
     Nokolai went public, he’d added a second dormitory and additional houses.
    Nokolai could, at need and with some crowding, house their entire clan.
    Even so, and even now, not all Nokolai lived here. Many remained scattered in California,
     Oregon, and Washington, keeping their ears perked and their eyes open. That was both
     strategy and necessity. War was expensive. Nokolai was a wealthy clan, but even it
     couldn’t afford to fully support all of its members for a long stretch. Not when a
     large chunk of that wealth came from the businesses it owned, where its people worked.
    The decision to operate businesses that employed clanhad been Isen’s. But he couldn’t have implemented it without Vochi’s help.
    Vochi had always been a small clan, suffering even more than most from the limited
     fertility common to those of the Blood. It had always thrown too many submissives,
     too few fighters. Add to that a peculiar interest in accumulating wealth, and Vochi
     could have been the skinny kid in glasses getting picked on by the jocks…or, during
     times of clan strife, the skinny white guy who got caught on the wrong turf when the
     Crips and the Bloods were slugging it out.
    Vochi knew this. They’d first submitted to Nokolai sixteen hundred years ago. Nokolai
     had defended Vochi ever since, and Vochi had done much in return for Nokolai. They
     were the reason Nokolai was the wealthiest clan—their acumen and, more recently, Isen’s
     understanding that money meant power in the human world. And for better or worse,
     that was the world lupi lived in.
    In, but not of. They had much in common with humans, but they were not human. The
     clans could not be run the way