Aden glanced up at the climbing wall while Remi nodded, his hands braced on his hips. “Your lightness gave you an advantage,” the alpha said.
“But,” Aden responded, “she also thought strategically.” That was what made Zaira such a good commander; her capacity to look at the bigger picture and plan accordingly. “If you trace her path, you’ll see she achieved maximum distance with each move.”
The four of them discussed the climb further for several minutes, during which a number of other packmates joined them, before Zaira left to have a shower. Aden wanted to order her to see Finn to make sure she hadn’t torn any of her newly healed injuries, but he held his silence since they had an audience. If, once they were alone, he discovered she hadn’t been to the healer, he’d rectify that immediately.
“I went out earlier to gauge the weather,” Remi said to him once everyone else had dispersed, but his eyes were on the climbing frame where Jojo played with several other cubs. “Storm’s looking like it’ll hold through tonight at least.” He didn’t interfere when a child tumbled off into a fall, but did stride over and wipe away the child’s tears as he lifted the boy to his feet again.
The child ran off to play again a bare minute after.
When Remi returned to Aden, Aden took a risk. “I need to learn how to do what you do.” If he was going to create a real family from the dangerous and the rejected and the scarred, he had to be more than a leader who understood politics and how to keep his people safe.
He had to be an alpha.
That there was a difference between the two, he’d only started to understand since being in RainFire. “I need to learn how to be alpha of a pack.”
Remi’s eyes turned yellow-green, a leopard watching him out of a human face. “Two things make an alpha—one is an inborn dominance and a primal drive to protect. You already have that.” His lips quirked slightly. “That’s why the leopard keeps trying to outstare you and why you have to force yourself to look away.”
Aden hadn’t realized Remi had picked up on the latter. “What’s the second thing?”
“Guidance that instills you with a bone-deep knowledge,” Remi told him. “When cubs have the scent of an alpha about them, we keep an eye on them and teach them how to be a good alpha by example and through gentle nudges, until by the time those cubs become aware of their alpha tendencies, they have the right skill set. Though,” he added dryly, “a refresher course is needed for those of us who figure things out a little later.”
“I know how to hold a group together. I also have the strength to do it.” He’d been created to be a tool of revolution, his DNA changed in ways that had had an unpredictable effect, the end result so unique that Marjorie and Naoshi still believed him to be only a low-level telepath.
Aden had never told them the truth; he’d told only five people, and those five people he’d trust at his back without question: Vasic, Zaira, coolheaded sniper and trainer Cristabel, rock-steady telepath Amin, and deadly Axl, who many in the squad had considered Ming’s right-hand man, but whose loyalty had always been Aden’s. Only one other person knew. Walker Lauren had figured it out while Aden had been a child in his classroom. The telepath, who must now be in his early-to-mid forties, was the only other person Aden had ever met whose base telepathic abilities worked anything similarly to his own.
“What I don’t understand,” he said to Remi, “is how to make the group into a family.” Given the violent abilities of those who became Arrows, the squad would always be a military unit that specialized in teaching its members how to harness their strength so that strength didn’t spin out of control, but it didn’t have to be only that.
Remi blew out a breath as the two of them walked to watch a juvenile attempt a less aggressive climbing wall. “Family is what connects us. I don’t know that I can break it down.” He rubbed at his jaw, his stubble scraping his fingers. “What ties you to your men and women?”
“Loyalty.”
“Good foundation.” The RainFire alpha folded his arms. “I guess family is about people knowing you’ll be there even when they can’t pull their weight because they’re sick or hurt or just plain tired. Family’s there even when you stuff up and do everything wrong.”
Remi glanced at a pair of cubs who were playing with a ball nearby. “Doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t have a place in the pack, or responsibility—that’s important, too, that everyone has a role to play. No one’s disposable.”
He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply when one of the cubs swiped at the other, and the cubs immediately separated. “It just means that when you screw up,” Remi added, “you don’t lose your place in the family. You might get a reaming, might be punished, but you’ll always have a home where you’re loved and where you feel safe.”
That made sense to Aden. The problem, of course, was that he was dealing with people badly damaged on every level—the adults who had to become the families of the current generation of Arrow children had never had any kind of warmth or family in their own lives.
As for the children themselves, each knew he or she wasn’t wanted by his or her biological family. Many had been declared dead on their family trees, but Aden decided then and there that there was no rule that said Arrows couldn’t be placed on a new family tree. A created tree, within a family of Arrows who understood what it was to inadvertently hurt someone with their abilities.