A Pack of Vows and Tears

by Olivia Wildenstein

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he growled.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” I snapped, my voice all at once tight and toneless.

  “What happened?” Eric asked, and I thought he was asking between Liam and me, but the bald elder was staring at Rodrigo.

  “Looks like he either missed the turn or went over on purpose.”

  He thinks Everest committed suicide? I opened my mouth wide but regretted it, because the air was laced with the acrid reek of death.

  “Cause of death?” Frank asked, traipsing down the steep flank beside August. The elder almost fell, but August caught his arm and steadied him.

  “A piece of metal went through his windpipe,” Lucas said. He was crouched as though searching for debris among the rock and tufts of dust-flecked grass, but I saw his nostrils flare. He was trying to catch scents.

  Bile lurched up my throat. I pressed my knuckles against my lips to keep them locked. Once I had my nausea under control, I said, “He didn’t kill himself.”

  All the men looked at me.

  “And you would know this how? Did you chat with him again?” Lucas asked.

  “Bite me, Lucas,” I growled at the same time as Rodrigo said, “Again?”

  Liam crossed his arms. “Why do you assume it wasn’t suicide?”

  More car doors slammed shut, and then two beefy blonds stepped in the beam of the truck and surfed down toward us.

  “Hey,” Matt called out, his voice gruff. When his gaze landed on me, his honeyed eyebrows quirked in bewilderment. He quickly moved his eyes toward the Jeep. I watched his expression, waited for it to turn pained, but there was no pain. Had he not cared about Everest? Had anyone cared about my cousin?

  No wonder Everest hated the pack.

  No wonder he screwed them over.

  Matt circled the capsized car, stopping next to the driver’s side. When he winced, a fresh wave of nausea softened my bones.

  Was Everest’s body still in there?

  “So you were telling us why Rodrigo was wrong about it being a suicide.” Liam’s voice blazed with cageyness.

  “He left me a voicemail about an hour ago.” I dug my phone out. “It sounds incriminating . . . Then again, you all think I’m a criminal already, so why am I even trying to defend myself?” I tapped on my phone’s screen with my fingers that seemed to have transformed into thumbs. It took me three attempts to get my passcode right.

  No one spoke.

  Scraping in another breath of death-tainted air, I held out my phone and played back the voicemail over speakerphone. Hearing Everest speak and knowing that he was gone was eerie.

  When the message ended, Matt said, “Someone was following him.”

  Lucas rose from his crouch. “It would explain the pieces of plastic we found on the road.” He turned to Rodrigo. “I know you said the taillight could’ve come off the Jeep when it went over, but it is more likely another car rammed into Everest’s.”

  Liam’s jaw clenched, unclenched, clenched again. “Check the road for skid marks, Matt.”

  Matt climbed back, sidestepping the two firefighters who were heaving the Jaws of Life down to the scene.

  “What did Everest put in your room?” Liam’s voice dragged my attention off the serrated tool.

  Lucas, who was still crouched, alternately scanned the tufts of dusty grass and my expression.

  “I don’t know. August and I turned it upside down, but didn’t find anything.”

  Liam’s already dark gaze blackened.

  While Rodrigo and one of his men cut open the driver’s door, the heat of a body spilled over my back, and then an arm went around my shoulders and twisted me around.

  “Don’t look,” August said.

  I didn’t fight him.

  “Why were you together, and why are your clothes and hair wet?” Liam growled.

  “I went for a run. A long run.” My words hit August’s solid chest. “I wasn’t planning on coming back. I might not have if August hadn’t retrieved me.” I wondered for a moment whether Liam would’ve even cared if I’d vanished forever. Keeping my eyes locked on one of the buttons on August’s shirt, I added, “Frank, Evelyn called. She said I could stay with you tonight.”

  Frank rubbed his hands against his jeans. “Yes. She’s waiting for you.”

  “I know you probably need to be here, but can you please take me to her?”

  “Sure.” He exchanged some quiet words with Eric before starting back up the steep incline.

  I disentangled myself from August and went after Frank, desirous to distance myself from this dark mountain that smacked of death and distrust.

  “I got something,” I heard Lucas bark over the sound of an approaching siren.

  Both Frank and I paused and glanced back down into the ditch. Something flat and black gleamed in his hands. A phone.

  “Is it Everest’s?” Frank called down.

  “It’s not turning on.”

  “Give it to Cole,” Liam said, his gaze rising to mine. “If there’s anything to retrieve on it, he’ll find it.”

  His accusation was so palpable that my expression turned to stone.

  Did Liam think I’d exchanged other messages with Everest? Did he think I’d colluded with him in stealing the Sillin?

  I shook my head and turned away.

  22

  My elbow was propped on the armrest in Frank’s car, and my head rested on my palm. “Was Jeb—was he informed that Everest . . . ” I couldn’t finish my sentence.

  “He called me for news. Said he was coming, but I told him to stay put. That I’d go to him.”

  Jeb had been doing so much better. Granted the improvement in his mood had been fueled by anger, but still.

  “You honestly didn’t send Everest that text message?” Frank asked after a beat.

  I hated that he didn’t trust me. Then again, it seemed like no one besides August trusted me. “I swear I didn’t. Whoever texted him did it remotely.”

  Frank sighed. “Did anyone have access to your phone last night?”

  “Liam did.” However angry I was with Liam, I knew he wouldn’t have sent a message from my phone.

  Frank knew it too. After a stretch of silence, he said, “You are your mother’s daughter.”

  I picked my head off my palm. Well, that came out of nowhere.

  “Maggie had so much spunk. Drove your dad crazy.” He returned his gaze to the road beyond the windshield, an emotion I couldn’t quite put my finger on eddying over his face. “Drove a lot of men crazy.”

  A lot of men? Geez, I hoped he hadn’t had a crush on her.

  He didn’t say a word the rest of the way to his secluded, two-story log cabin a couple miles away from Headquarters. I vaguely remembered going to Frank’s house with my parents when I was much younger—a lifetime ago.

  Before getting out of the car, he said, “Be patient with Liam. This is an adjustment period, not only for you, but for him too. Between the stolen Sillin and learning what it means to be an Alpha, he’s under a lot of stress.”

  I bristled. I couldn’t believe he was asking me to be patient.

  I was about to shut the door when he added, “And, Ness, be careful about pitting Liam against August. Boys, especially wolves, they’re territorial and jealous, and well, I’ve seen this pattern before, and even though the mated pair didn’t end up together, it caused a serious rift in the pack.”

  Whoa. Talk about another abrupt subject change. I took the opportunity to ask, “Who were they?”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. They’re all dead now.”

  “All of them?” And here I was certain he’d been part of the unfortunate love triangle.

  Frank set his gaze on the gloomy forest dipping beyond his house. “I should head to the inn. Jeb’s waiting.”

  Just as he said this, a voice I knew oh-so-well rang out in the night. “Querida?” Evelyn was standing by the front door, backlit by the soft glow of Frank’s living room. Her plush robe wa
s knotted tightly around her, and her black hair fluttered around her pale face.

  I shut the car door and strode into her open arms.

  When Frank drove away, she cocked an eyebrow. “Where is he going at this hour?”

  I sighed. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  She pulled me into the house, sat me at the wooden kitchen counter, and warmed water on the stovetop, but then she must’ve decided against making tea, because she dumped the contents, grabbed the carton of milk from the fridge door, and poured some inside the deep sauce pan. While it warmed, she wrapped her hands around my clammy ones.

  “Tell me everything.”

  And so I did. Well, almost everything. I didn’t tell her about the confrontation back at Tracy’s. It would just make her resent the pack. When I was done with my account, the milk had bubbled over the sides of the pan and hit the flames, making them sizzle. She jolted toward the stove, spun off the gas, and stood there, lips mashed together. After a while, she plucked a wooden spoon from a terracotta jug and skimmed the skin off the warmed milk before dividing it between two mugs.

  As she set them on the counter, she took her seat next to me again. I cupped the warm ceramic and lifted it to my mouth, singeing my lips and tongue. I plopped the mug back down, and milk splashed over the rim. Instead of cleaning it up, I dragged my fingertip through the spilled liquid and drew circles over the wood.

  “You think Aidan is behind all of this?” Her black eyes glazed over as though she were remembering another time—probably the time when she was married to the man.

  “He’s the only one who benefits from Everest’s death.” Unless my cousin was wanted dead for what he’d hidden in my room.

  Blinking away the haze, she got up to get a kitchen towel to clean the spilled milk. “Someone needs to put an end to that man’s life.”

  “If he dies, his lawyers will release information about the pack to the public.”

  “I heard. Frank told me.” She dabbed the sides of my mug until no trace of the overflow remained. “I have never hated anyone like I hate this man. He is a cancer. Do you know how many times I have dreamed of ending his life?” Her breathing increased in tempo, and her cheeks flooded with color.

  I caught her hand, the one clutching the towel with which she kept wiping down the countertop even though it was clean. “Promise me you won’t get involved.”

  She lifted her gaze to my face.

  The resolve in her expression quickened my pulse. “Promise me.”

  After a long moment, she exhaled a slow breath. “He should not be allowed to live.”

  “I agree. Now agree that you will stay away from him. Because if anything happens to you . . . ” My voice broke then, and in turn, it broke her doggedness.

  The same way her features had hardened, they softened. And then she was pulling me against her. “I promise you, querida, that I will not put myself in harm’s way, but you promise me the same thing.”

  I swallowed. I didn’t want to make Evelyn a promise I had no desire to keep.

  “Ness . . . ”

  “Fine. I’ll stay away from him.”

  For now.

  23

  The following morning, after a brief night of sleep in one of the two twin beds set up in Frank’s guest room—I suspected it was the room his grandson used when he visited because it smelled like boy and was plastered with superhero movie posters—I dressed in yesterday’s clothes and went out into the kitchen for coffee.

  Frank and Evelyn were already up, sitting on the couch, talking in hushed tones. The deep circles beneath Frank’s eyes told me his night had been longer than mine.

  “There is coffee in the kitchen, querida,” Evelyn said.

  I went to serve myself, watching as they resumed their quiet conversation.

  “How’s Jeb?” I ventured after a bit.

  Frank rubbed his jaw that was coated in white stubble. “Not too good. Eric took your uncle back to his place last night so he and Lucy could talk. There was a lot of yelling apparently. And a lot of crying.”

  I took a careful sip of coffee. “What’s going to happen now?”

  “We’ll bury Everest on pack Headquarters tonight.”

  I stared into the murky depths of my coffee feeling a familiar burn beneath my lids. No tears fell, though.

  “They found yellow paint on one of the Jeep’s side mirrors.”

  My gaze bounded onto the elder.

  “Probably transferred from the car that pushed his off the road. It’s a solid lead, because it’s not a common color.” He studied the vase full of wildflowers on his wooden coffee table.

  “Does Aidan own a yellow car?” I asked, wending my way around the kitchen countertop toward the open living room with its peaked timber ceiling and swooping antler chandelier. I wondered if Frank had crafted the light fixture himself from collected stag horns.

  “Aidan Michaels is in the hospital.”

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t pay someone to do it.”

  “Perhaps, but Lucas picked up on a foreign smell out there.” Frank raised his wary eyes to mine. “I think we might be dealing with Creeks.”

  His admission hit my ears like shattered ceramic. I actually looked down to check I hadn’t dropped the mug. It was still clutched in my white-knuckled fingers. “Lucas scented foreign wolves on Liam’s property yesterday. Were they Creeks too?”

  “Creeks?” Evelyn asked.

  Frank scraped both his hands down the length of his face and sighed, setting his gaze on the bow window across from me. For a long moment, he looked at the rolling hill dappled in long blades of sun-burnished grass and wildflowers that matched the ones in the vase.

  “The Creek Pack,” Frank explained, “was once the smallest pack, and then in one bloody night, they brought the largest pack to their knees.”

  Evelyn tightened her grip on the couch’s armrest. “Dios mío,” she murmured.

  My body had turned so cold that I was afraid to move, afraid my limbs might just chip away like icicles. “Did you warn Julian?”

  Frank looked back at me. “Liam’s meeting with him later today. He’ll try to negotiate a firm alliance.”

  Considering how much both packs antagonized each other, I sensed this outcome was momentous. Had the Pines and Boulders ever worked together?

  “Why would the Creeks murder Everest?” I asked after a long moment.

  “Liam believes it has to do with the Sillin,” Frank said. “We did another sweep of your bedroom. We didn’t find anything, and we’re hoping no one—no Creek—got to it before us.”

  While Evelyn asked what Sillin was, and Frank explained it to her, I tried to puzzle out under what my cousin could’ve hidden the pills. If it was the pills we were talking about.

  Later in the morning, Evelyn and I stopped by the new apartment I was supposed to call home from now on. We cleaned the place, made up the beds, and unpacked my clothes. All the while she repeated that she wasn’t happy about the arrangement, that my uncle was unfit to care for me, that I should stay with Frank and her. Her unhappiness increased when my uncle dropped by the apartment with a mammoth suitcase and several cardboard boxes close to bursting.

  While he unpacked, he talked almost manically, never once mentioning Everest’s name. It was as though he hadn’t processed his son’s death. I asked how Lucy was doing, which won me a pointed look followed by a sour retort.

  “She killed our son by covering up for him. I don’t give a rat’s ass how she’s doing.”

  When Frank drove Evelyn and me to Headquarters that evening, there were so many parked cars that they spilled onto the road. Every Boulder and their family had come. As we approached the body wrapped in a white sheet, my heart tripped. I felt like I was seeing my father’s body all over again. He, also, had been enveloped in white. Werewolves weren’t buried in caskets; they were placed in the ground with nothing but a sheet around them, so the earth could reclaim them.

  For a moment, I wondered if
the sheet that cocooned my cousin came from the inn, and then I drove that inane thought out of my mind.

  A raucous whimper pierced the still air—Lucy.

  I hadn’t seen her since the day she’d held Evelyn hostage.

  My senses sharpened at the sight of my aunt’s kneeling figure. I could hear the tears tracking down her milky-white cheeks, the beats of her heart pumping blood through her organs, the sweat dripping into the waistband of her black slacks.

  Evelyn squeezed my arm, which drove back my sudden urge to sink my fangs into my aunt’s throat. And then Isobel and Nelson were suddenly in front of me. Where he simply nodded, face tight with grief, Isobel palmed my cheek and caught the fingers I’d balled into a fist at my side.

  On the other side of the shallow hole stood Liam, flanked by Lucas and Matt. All three had their hands linked solemnly in front of them and their heads bent. I watched Liam although he didn’t watch me. He stared at the hole.

  Did it remind him of his father’s burial?

  Would he have afforded Everest a funeral had my cousin died at the Alpha’s hands?

  Liam must’ve felt the weight of my stare because he lifted his eyes to mine. They were so very dark and rimmed with red. Had he cried or was it just the mark of fatigue? Probably fatigue. Why would Liam cry over someone he’d loathed?

  Ness? His unwelcome voice prickled my skull.

  I lowered my gaze to my uncle, who was pressing his palm against the swathed remains of his son.

  Please look at me.

  I didn’t.

  Please, baby. Look at me.

  Baby? That got my attention. I glared at him.

  I deserve that.

  He deserved so much worse than a glare.

  I deduced from his apologetic demeanor that Cole had uncovered something from Everest’s phone.

  Eric started with the ritualistic singing that accompanied our people’s departure from this world, so Liam didn’t try to communicate with me again. I didn’t shed a single tear as Everest was lowered into the dug-out hole. I didn’t whimper as his remains were filmed with soil. I didn’t make a single sound while the dirt rained down on the pale linen. I watched with dry eyes and a dry throat until the very last scoop fell over him, and then I watched as Jeb patted the soft mound as though tucking his son in for the very last time.