Ravensong recap

Months after Richard Collins's death, Gordo Livingstone is the Bennett pack's witch again, serving Ox and Joe in a Green Creek that is quiet but not safe. The story moves between the present and Gordo's past: his childhood as the son of Robert Livingstone, the pack's witch, whose hunger for power cost Gordo his family and ended with Thomas Bennett stripping his magic and exiling him; the years Gordo spent abandoned when the Bennetts moved away; and the three years on the road hunting Richard Collins with Joe, Carter and Kelly. In the present, feral Omegas begin appearing around Green Creek in impossible numbers, and Gordo's father proves to be alive, carrying stolen alpha power and making them. Gordo finally stops holding Mark Bennett at arm's length, and the two become mates. When Livingstone moves on Green Creek the pack fights him off, but he escapes and takes Robbie Fontaine with him, stripping Robbie's memory of the pack entirely and leaving the Bennetts with one of their own turned into a stranger.

Previously, in Wolfsong: Ox Matheson grew up in Green Creek, Oregon, abandoned by his father and convinced he would never amount to much, until the Bennett family moved into the house at the end of his road. Their youngest son Joe, silent for years after being taken and hurt as a child, spoke to Ox at once and claimed him. The Bennetts were werewolves, Thomas Bennett was their alpha, and Ox was given a place in the pack. Gordo Livingstone, Ox's employer at the garage, turned out to be the pack's witch, bitterly estranged from the family. When the rogue alpha Richard Collins came for the Bennetts, Thomas was killed; his power passed to Joe, who left with Carter, Kelly and Gordo to hunt Richard down, leaving Ox behind. Over three years Ox held together everyone who remained and became an alpha himself. When the hunters returned and Richard finally came to Green Creek, the reunited pack killed him and exposed Osmond, the leadership's envoy, as his accomplice. Ox's mother died in the fighting. Ox and Joe now lead the Bennett pack together as mates and as two alphas, with Gordo as their witch.

Green Creek is quiet in the months after Richard Collins's death, and Gordo hates how much he has let himself settle into it. He runs the garage, holds the wards around the territory, and serves Ox and Joe as the pack's witch, while refusing to let Mark Bennett any closer than he has to. The narrative moves back and forth between the present and Gordo's past. In the past, Gordo is a boy in a house with a father whose ambition has already begun to eat everything around it: Robert Livingstone, the Bennett pack's witch, who wanted power no witch is supposed to hold. Thomas Bennett stripped that power out of him and cast him out, and Gordo, still a teenager, took his father's place as pack witch. In the present, the first sign that the peace is false arrives: feral wolves are turning up near Green Creek, and there are far too many of them for it to be chance.

The feral wolves are Omegas, wolves severed from a pack and an alpha and hollowed out by it, and they keep coming. Gordo and the pack hunt and put down what crosses the wards, and it becomes clear that somebody is making them and pointing them at Green Creek. That somebody is Gordo's father. Robert Livingstone is alive, no longer merely a stripped witch, and he is carrying alpha power inside himself, an impossible combination that leaves the pack with no precedent for how to fight him. The flashbacks fill in the years the Bennetts were away: after Thomas moved the pack out of Green Creek, Gordo was left behind, a young witch with no pack, and that abandonment set into the man he became. It also explains Mark, who was Gordo's before the pack left and who has never accepted the ending Gordo insists on.

Green Creek's problem becomes the wolf leadership's problem, and Michelle Hughes, the alpha of all, makes it plain she has no intention of committing much to a pack she does not control. Robbie, still the leadership's link to the Bennetts, is caught between his loyalty to Caswell and the pack that has become his family, and his position grows steadily less tenable. The road years surface in Gordo's memory in more detail: three years of motels, dead ends and Omegas, with Joe alpha and grieving, Carter and Kelly wearing themselves down, and Gordo holding the four of them together while pretending he was only there for the hunt. In the present, Gordo stops being able to keep Mark at a distance, and the two of them begin, cautiously, to be honest with each other.

Robert Livingstone makes contact with his son directly. He wants Gordo, not just the territory, and he offers him a version of the past in which Gordo was the one wronged by the Bennetts, which is close enough to true to be dangerous. Gordo has to decide how much of his own history he is going to let his father narrate. The pack fortifies Green Creek, and Gordo strengthens the wards, knowing they will not be enough against a man carrying both magic and alpha power. Gordo and Mark become mates, and Gordo finally admits, to Mark and to himself, that he stopped being able to leave a long time ago. The pack is whole and braced, and Livingstone is coming.

Livingstone attacks Green Creek, throwing his Omegas at the wards and the pack. The fighting is heavy and Gordo faces his father directly, using the magic his father gave him against the man he took it from. The pack holds the territory. Gordo comes out of the confrontation understanding how much of his life his father engineered, and understanding equally that the choice of what to do with that is his own. But Livingstone survives and escapes, his stolen power intact, and the pack learns that holding the ground is not the same as winning.

The cost of the attack becomes clear only after it is over: Robbie Fontaine is gone, taken by Robert Livingstone. Livingstone strips his memory, cutting out Green Creek, the Bennetts, Kelly and everything that made Robbie theirs, and leaves him believing he belongs to the leadership in Caswell. The pack knows roughly where he is and cannot reach him, and Kelly in particular is left with a mate who no longer knows him. Green Creek itself survives. Gordo ends the book mated to Mark, no longer waiting for the Bennetts to abandon him, and no longer able to pretend that his father is somebody else's problem. The pack is intact, warded and led by Ox and Joe, with one of its own in enemy hands and a witch carrying alpha power still at large.

Robert Livingstone is not stopped. The pack survives his assault on Green Creek and drives off the Omegas he sent, but he escapes with his stolen power intact, and worse, he takes Robbie Fontaine with him. Robbie's memories of Green Creek, of the Bennetts and of Kelly are stripped out of him by Livingstone's magic, leaving him a wolf who believes he belongs to the leadership in Caswell and who no longer knows the people who love him. The pack knows roughly where he is and cannot simply go and get him. What Gordo gains, he gains for himself: he stops refusing Mark Bennett, accepts what he is to him, and stops treating the pack as something that will inevitably discard him again. He also stops pretending his father is somebody else's problem. The Bennett pack closes the book intact, mated and warded, with Ox and Joe as its alphas and Gordo as its witch, but with one of its own in enemy hands and a witch carrying alpha power still loose.