Brothersong recap

Carter Bennett leaves Green Creek alone to follow Gavin, travelling without pack bonds in a way that steadily wears a wolf down. He finds him, and the two are caught by hunters who trap and cage wolves; they escape together, and Gavin, who has spent years unable to hold human form, begins to be a man again. On the road back, Carter learns how much of his family's history his father kept from him, including what was done to Gavin and how the Bennett line is bound up with Robert Livingstone's ruin. In Green Creek the pack has to accept Livingstone's son among them, hardest of all for Gordo. Livingstone's plan finally comes into the open, and the pack meets it together. He is killed, the threat that has hung over the Bennetts across four books ends with him, and Carter and Gavin become mates. The pack closes the series intact and at home: Ox and Joe as alphas, Gordo and Mark, Kelly and Robbie, Carter and Gavin, with Green Creek finally safe.

Previously: Ox Matheson was taken in as a boy by the Bennett werewolves of Green Creek, Oregon, and claimed by their youngest son Joe. When the rogue alpha Richard Collins killed Thomas Bennett, Joe inherited his power and left with his brothers Carter and Kelly and the pack witch Gordo Livingstone to hunt Richard; Ox held together everyone who stayed and became an alpha himself. Richard was killed in Green Creek, at the cost of Ox's mother's life, and a traitor inside the wolf leadership was exposed. Ox and Joe now lead the pack as mates. Gordo's father, Robert Livingstone, a witch stripped of his magic and exiled by Thomas decades ago, proved to be alive and carrying stolen alpha power. He sent Omegas against Green Creek, escaped Gordo, and took Robbie Fontaine, erasing every memory Robbie had of the pack. The Bennetts went into the leadership's seat at Caswell and brought Robbie home, and his memories returned; he and Kelly are mates, and Gordo and Mark are mates. In the course of it the pack met Gavin, a wolf who could not take human form, who turned out to be Robert Livingstone's son and Gordo's half-brother. Gavin left Green Creek, and Carter went after him alone.

Carter Bennett is on the road, chasing a trail that keeps going cold. He has left Green Creek without telling anyone what he intended and without his alphas, and being cut off from his pack bonds does to a wolf exactly what everyone warned him it would: it wears at his control and at his sense of himself, a little more each week. He hides how bad it is getting, from his family on the phone and from himself. Along the way he thinks about what it has meant to be the eldest Bennett brother, the one who makes the jokes so that nobody has to look at how frightened everyone is, and how comprehensively that has stopped working. He is looking for Gavin, who left because being Robert Livingstone's son inside Gordo Livingstone's pack had no comfortable shape, and Carter is not able to explain, even to himself, why he could not let that stand.

Carter finds Gavin, and almost immediately both of them are taken. Hunters, humans who trap and cage wolves and treat them as animals or as merchandise, have them, and Carter learns how much organization stands behind an operation the packs have preferred not to look at. He and Gavin get out together, and being locked up alongside each other forces a bluntness neither has managed before. Gavin has spent years unable to hold human form, and his shape and his speech both come back to him unevenly; what he says when he can speak is direct, unsoftened and frequently more honest than Carter is ready for. They start moving west, hunted, on foot and by whatever they can beg or take, with Carter's isolation from his pack getting steadily more dangerous.

On the way back Carter finds out how much of his own family's history was withheld from him. His father Thomas made decisions decades ago whose consequences the pack is still paying: what was done to Robert Livingstone and why, what became of Livingstone's other son, and how far the Bennett line's power and Livingstone's ruin are bound together. Carter has to hold those revelations without an alpha to steady him, and he is angry in a way he has never allowed himself to be about his father, his brothers and his own habit of absorbing everything so no one else has to. Gavin, who has been the object of most of these decisions rather than a party to them, is the person Carter says it to. What is between them stops being deniable.

Carter and Gavin reach Green Creek, and the reunion is not simple: the pack is relieved, furious and wary all at once, and having Robert Livingstone's son living in the house is hardest of all on Gordo, whose entire life has been built against his father. Elizabeth, Ox and Joe make room anyway. What the pack has learned about the hunters, and what Carter has learned about his father, both have to be put in front of everyone, and the wolf leadership in Caswell under Michelle Hughes proves to be neither able nor especially willing to help. Robert Livingstone's purpose finally comes into the open, and it is bigger than revenge on the Bennetts. The pack stops waiting to be attacked and starts preparing to end it.

The confrontation with Robert Livingstone comes, and he is everything the pack feared: a witch with alpha power, Omegas at his command, and a willingness to use his own sons against each other. The fighting is costly and the pack meets it as one, wolves, witch and humans together, with Ox and Joe leading and Gordo and Gavin each forced to face what their father is directly. Carter, who has spent the book believing he is the one the family can most afford to lose, ends up in the middle of it.

Robert Livingstone is killed, and the threat that has hung over Green Creek since before Carter was born ends with him; the Omegas and the machinery he built do not outlast him. The pack survives, and afterward it does the slow work of burying what needs burying and repairing what can be repaired. Carter and Gavin become mates, and Carter finally stops being only the brother who holds everyone else up. Gavin, who was his father's creation and then his father's abandoned son, is a Bennett wolf because the pack chooses him. Green Creek is safe, the leadership in Caswell no longer holds any authority over the Bennetts, and the secrets Thomas Bennett kept have been dealt with rather than handed down again. The series closes with the whole pack at home, paired off and whole, looking forward.

Robert Livingstone is killed and the long threat to Green Creek ends with him. The Bennett pack fights him together, wolves, witch and humans, and what he built collapses once he is gone. Carter comes out of it with the thing he had never allowed himself to want: he stops being only the loud brother holding everyone else up, and he and Gavin are mates. Gavin, who spent years unable to hold human form and longer than that being nothing but his father's son, is a Bennett wolf by the pack's choice rather than by anyone's tolerance. The pack ends the series whole and at home in Green Creek: Ox and Joe as its alphas, Gordo and Mark, Kelly and Robbie, Carter and Gavin, Elizabeth at the centre of the house, and the humans of the garage as much a part of it as the wolves. The secrets Thomas Bennett kept are out and dealt with rather than inherited by another generation, the wolf leadership no longer has any hold over the pack, and the book closes looking forward rather than back.