The Walls of Jericho

Games

“Where’d you learn to play backgammon, Jericho?” Channing asks once we’ve finished in the kitchen. He shoves the coffee table in the cottage’s great room against one wall to clear a space for us to sit on the floor with the board in between us while I retrieve the game from the shelf nearby.

“You know how some families have a game they all just play? Like they all play rummy. Or they play football. Since it was just me and my parents, and a lot of time my dad was working, we used to play backgammon.”

I neglect to tell him that my mom taught me how to play when I was four years old.

I also forget to mention that we didn’t just ‘play’ backgammon. It wasn’t something we did when the weather was bad and we couldn’t do stuff together outside. It wasn’t something we did when we were bored. Or on the weekly requisite family game night.

Oh no.

Not in my family.

In my family’s house, the backgammon board was always set up and ready. It had its own special table and chairs in a place of honor in the family room where the light was good and the distractions were minimized. I remember sneaking down the hallway long after bedtime to watch my parents play against each other. To listen to them poke fun and talk s**t, to watch them laugh and kiss after a particularly good game.  

But I especially loved to watch the games my dad played against his best friend, Valko. They’d drink beer and talk over the game board, and the games would get rowdy and competitive, with a lot of swearing and laughter.

In my family’s house, backgammon was a teaching tool. An academic lesson in strategy, in skill. An object lesson in the perils of arrogance and the value of humility.

It was the high stakes, winner-take-all, competitive sport in my family’s household.

By five, I was negotiating my way out of chores and misbehavior consequences by beating one of my parents at backgammon. By seven, I’d read every book I could find at the library, at the local bookstores, and online on the game. I looked forward to practice games against online players and took notes on the games I played with computer opponents.

I take a seat opposite him, with my back leaned up against one sofa the same way he is against the other. “What about you?”

“My dad was always big into tactical games—chess, risk, backgammon—and strategy sports, like wushu and fencing. Especially after he became Alpha,” Channing replies, watching as I set up the board between us, then start placing the pips, or game pieces, in the proper starting postions.

“You played with your dad then?”

“Not if I could help it.” Shifting a little, he extends his long legs to one side of the board, crossing them at the ankles. “He sucked to play games with. He was super competitive and could be kind of egotistical. I liked to play with my mom. When she took time away from the clinic. Then it was fun. Just us, one on one. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was her way of training me too.”

When the pieces are all set up, I drop the two dice into the dice cup and hand it to him. “Doesn’t sound all that fun if everything was training.”

He grins one of his mega-watt smiles. “Some practicing is fun, babydoll,” he purrs, then rattles the cup and dumps the dice onto the board to see who gets the first turn. “Playing stuff like cribbage and backgammon with my mom was a way to get to know her, to understand her as an opponent and a person. It was intimate. A way into each other. That was the part she wanted me to learn. That and some damn humility.”

“Humility?” I arch a brow, collecting the dice and the cup from him. “Sounds like you and your dad had a thing or two in common.”

My total on the dice is less than his, so I hand him the cup and the dice and we start the game.

“One or two, but not the one she was trying to teach me,” he rolls the dice and makes his first moves. “My dad was the kind that thought that humility came from being beaten into submission. He saw it as a weakness or a failure. My mom wanted me to understand it was a matter of my view of myself matching the way other people viewed me. If people didn’t see me—as a man, as worker, as a leader—the same way I saw myself, then I was living in a fantasy world. The bigger the discrepancy, the more extreme the fantasy.”

Huh. Sounds like it’s going to be another one of those learning moments. We both wait a few turns to get the backgammon game moving before the ‘talk’ we need to have gets started. Since he appears to be content waiting me out, I take the initiative, finish my turn and throw out my first question.

“Why do you struggle so much with accepting that the dragon isn’t what you think he is?” Collecting the dice, I drop them in the cup and hand them to him.

“Same reason I do with everything else anyone just tells me to believe. It’s your perception that dragons have the potential for good. My experience—my reality—doesn’t reflect that.” He rolls the dice and considers his moves. “Or it doesn’t reflect that long term.”

“What do you mean ‘long term’?”

“I mean that maybe you’re right about this dragon,” he replies. “So let’s say we wolves leave him alone, he breeds and fathers a few more of them. In another fifteen hundred years, our descendants are dealing with the same devastation and destruction, just from a different generation of dragon.”

“You can’t know that,” I huff, taking the dice from him as he finishes his turn. “In fact, of the two of us, I’m the one with the gift of prophecy, not you.”

Channing grins one of those patient, sort of adoring smiles of his that make me feel melty inside. “We’re just talking, Jericho. Okay? Take it easy on my ego.”

I snort. “Fat chance. All I’m saying is the dragons deserve the same fair evaluation that you want and expect from me about the wolves. I know you think Cadmus was bad because he was a dragon—.”

“No,” he counters quickly, “I think his benefit to the communities around him—both wolf and human—wasn’t worth the problems he wrought. The linen mills and the shipbuilding might have brought industrialization, trade, jobs. But it also brought pollution and corruption, both in-fighting and external conflicts and hazardous work that he did nothing to combat or correct. And before you get started, that’s not different with this present dragon. The way he’s using his current resources has widened the rift between north and south Crossroads, something I think he did so he could flush you out. You’ve had your say about the wolves, Jericho. I know you don’t think I do, but I hear. I listen. I have things I need to do to live up to the expectations I hold for the dragons too. And I will do those things. You can’t guarantee me the same of the dragon.”

I take a moment to process what he’s said and finish my turn. “It’s not the same, Channing. When I made you see the failings of the werewolves, you made a to-do list—a plan to right the werewolf wrongdoings. When you see the failings of the dragons, you condemn them, not just to death, but to extinction. Where’s that fall in your balance of beneficial versus malevolent?”

There’s a tension in his jaw as he rolls the dice, then he makes a play that knocks me behind several pips bearing off in the game. Not that I’m worried. The mere fact that he’s playing more aggressively is only a silent admission that he knows I’m right.

“What if I could guarantee it?” I ask after a few more turns and a tense silence.

“Guarantee what?” There’s nothing in Channing’s voice that sounds the least bit flexible or accommodating.

“That the dragon can live up to werewolf expectations for overall ‘goodness’.”

“Only the dragon can do that.”

“That’s not what you think about the werewolves.”

The spark of alpha glow is in his eyes when he meets mine again, and I can feel my magic flare up to meet it. “The werewolves follow an Alpha. Me. The dragon doesn’t.”

“What if he’d follow your Luna?”

“No.” He shakes his head, rolling the dice. “That’s not a game I’m playing. You’re what he wants. And you’re my mate. I’m not giving you up and I’m not sharing.”

“I didn’t suggest that you should,” I counter. “What I asked was: would you still hunt him if he was subservient to your Luna? If he would abide the same way the wolves do with you as their Alpha, but with me?”

“That’s cold, Jericho,” he says, handing me the dice after his turn. “How is it any better that you’d subjugate him with magic or unfulfilled promises than it is that we kill him? If you ask me, by comparison with your option, dying would be the mercy.”

“You’re putting words in my mouth. I don’t have to subdue him—.”

His eyes flick to mine, pinning me. “So you know him.”

“Don’t try to use that as a justification for your anger. I told you that.”

“You told me you knew where he was,” he retorts, a snarl pulling his lip as I roll doubles and put myself back in the game. “That’s not the same as knowing who he is.”

Sometimes playing this game makes me feel like I was dealt and double dose of good fortune. Not often, but sometimes. “I’ll do you one better. I know what he is, and I accept it.”

Channing’s brows draw together and he frowns. “What do you mean ‘what’ he is? He’s a dragon—.”

“No, beefcake,” I reply gently, handing him the dice. “He’s a wolf. A wolf with a recessive shifted form. A wolf with a residual of magic.”

“He is not a wolf—.”

“He is though. That’s what you saw at the Dark Hedges. Babies above, babies below and a unicorn Luna caught in the middle.”

“What I saw was the past!” Channing rolls doubles on the dice, effectively giving himself four moves according to the game rules.

By the time he starts moving his third pip, I know how he intends to win this game. I can track the moves he’s planned out in his head. I can see his strategy and appreciate his skill. But I also have secret strategies that I use to win games. “What you saw was the always, Channing. Exactly like she said. She didn’t know if there were any more mages who would come.”

 “That was because the mages were hunted!”

“No, that’s how you interpreted it. It could just as easily have meant that you’d destroyed all the dragons, but that’s not what you saw.”

A new awareness spreads over his countenance and he looks down at the game board, realizing suddenly how I’ve curbed him. His shoulders relax and his breathing steadies. “Rebecca didn’t just want Ferdi to challenge me so her family would be alpha again,” he admits, confirming the suspicion that’s been growing in me for some time. “That’s why she's constantly under guard.”

“She leads the splinter cell?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you agree when I asked you to let her out?”

Channing sighs. “Because you told me you were going to kill the dragon. The end result is the same. If the last dragon is dead, then no more werewolf females are taken as dragon mates. If the last mage is dead, no werewolf females are taken as dragon mates. Now, you’ve changed your tune. I can’t fight a war on both fronts. I don’t know how deep into Avernus that faction goes.”

I take the dice from his hand and roll for my turn. “But werewolf females weren’t taken as a dragon mate. They were taken as a werewolf mate. Their civil war forced them to the edge of extinction. When they broke the pact and resurfaced looking for mates, with each successive generation, they’re less and less dragon and more and more wolf.”

“Werewolves don’t care, Jericho. Not about the dragons, not about the mages. But I care,” he says softly. “I care about my mate, and if it’s a matter of choice, I’m not choosing him.”

“He’s a wolf too.”

“I don’t care,” he says, rolling the dice for his turn. “He’s not my mate.” It takes barely a second before he makes his last moves. “I win. Now tell me where the dragon is.”

I shake my head slowly. “That’s not what we were playing for.”