Wolf Ridge- Complete Series

by Jayne Hawke

  “You upset a lot of witches,” the cougar growled.

  “And killed prominent hunters,” the witch seethed.

  “I am trying to get Cole back. One of your councilmen,” I growled.

  The witch rolled her eyes. I snarled at her.

  “That is not the matter we are discussing here. You have caused a great deal of trouble to many people. You are becoming far more of a nuisance than you are worth. You will come into the custody of the council, and we will discuss how your guardian nature can be used in a beneficial manner.”

  Briar pressed against my thigh. I swatted her nose to make her move back. No good came from allowing her to bite one of them.

  I took another step forward, pushing the cougar to step back.

  “No.”

  The witch flushed red with pure rage. I crossed my arms and stood my ground.

  “I am neither a toy, nor a tool to be used at your discretion. I am a person, and I do what I must to keep my people safe. I couldn’t give less of a damn what you think of me, or the trouble I have caused you. A garou is currently being held by a very dangerous witch.” I turned my attention to the witch. “A witch that the witch community did absolutely nothing to stop or control. Apophis witches are dangerous by their very nature, and yet I have seen no signs of you and your council trying to stop him.”

  “That is entirely irrelevant.”

  “No. It is very relevant. You do not get to come to my home and threaten to put me in a cage when you do not do your jobs. Guardians exist to keep the supernatural beings safe. The council is supposed to keep their people safe, and yet, from where I’m standing, you’re far more interested in lining your own pockets and keeping your own petty power. So, I repeat: No.”

  The cougar snarled.

  “How dare you! You arrogant little child.”

  I bared my teeth at him.

  “I might be new to being a shifter, but I was chosen as a guardian for a reason. We stand separate to created bodies such as your worthless council. And I will not be cowed by your worthless politics.”

  “You are a fool with no grasp on how this world works. Girl,” the cougar spat.

  “Do you really think that you can kill prominent, powerful hunters and have no consequences?” the witch sneered.

  For a brief moment there, I really had. There hadn’t been much time to really think about it.

  “Forget about Cole Loxwood. There will be other good-looking garou out there. If you really want to protect your precious garou, then you need to understand the position you have put them in,” the cougar said.

  “The Apophis witch is a far bigger threat than some hunters,” Sky said from behind me.

  “Forget about the Apophis witch. They are nothing and will be dealt with when the time’s right,” the witch said coolly.

  “I am a Morrigan witch and I have been tasked with removing the Apophis witch,” Sky returned.

  The witch before me paled a little.

  “And is your coven on board with this?”

  Sky stood a little taller and said nothing.

  “I thought as much. Your coven has the good sense to know how this world works. Be good little girls and stop playing with things you can’t possibly begin to grasp.”

  “I am a Ma’at witch, and my lady has tasked me with removing the scourge from this world. The Apophis witch is the top of my list, but I will be coming for you soon,” Amy said coldly.

  I’d never heard such venom from the usually bubbly little witch. It caught me off guard. She had moved Briar out of the way and stepped up next to me, standing tall and strong as her cold gaze made the councilmen step back.

  “You cannot threaten me,” the witch said quietly.

  Amy smiled coldly.

  “It was a promise.”

  13

  “Someone fill me in on what just happened,” Adam said.

  Sky sighed and Amy went to make coffee.

  “The council is corrupt, and I believe they’re siding with the Apophis witch, and possibly the hunters too. The Apophis witch has sunk his claws far deeper into the political landscape than I first realised. It means we’re on our own here,” Sky said.

  “Are you ok, Amy?” I asked.

  She smiled brightly at me.

  “Peachy. I’m feeling better than I have done in ages. Ma’at has given me something I can really sink my teeth into.”

  “So, we can’t trust the council? What will happen with the hunters?” Adam asked.

  “No. We can’t trust the council, and I don’t know about the hunters. We should have scared them enough to have a little breathing room, but there will likely be a big retaliation. Rosalyn’s going to have her work cut out for her as a guardian over the next few months,” Sky said.

  Adam’s brows furrowed.

  “You know we’ll have your back,” he said to me.

  I nodded and smiled, trying not to think about it. One thing at a time.

  “Cole isn’t corrupt,” I said firmly when Briar gave me a searching look.

  “No. He’s not. I believe he’s been trying to fight it from the inside,” Amy said.

  I relaxed a little having the confirmation. Of course, I’d wanted to believe he was innocent and good, but I’d been tricked into trusting Valentin. My taste in men was clearly imperfect.

  “There’s a chance that the witches and council will be trying to stop us from finding Cole,” Sky said.

  “How do we work around that?” I asked.

  My wolf side was itching for a fight. Tearing a few throats out might get them to talk.

  “Carefully,” Amy said firmly.

  I wrinkled my nose. That sounded slow.

  My phone began ringing with Cole’s ringtone. I raced to it, my heart in my throat.

  “Hello?”

  “Rosalyn, how good to hear your voice,” Natasha purred.

  I bit back a snarl and began pacing around the room.

  “Cole is a wonderful lover. I suppose you haven’t found out yet, and now you never will.”

  I exhaled slowly, refusing to rise to her bait. Silence stretched between us while I tried to listen for some clue where they might be.

  “It won’t be too long now until I kill him. Liam has promised me everything Cole should have given me and more.”

  Liam? That must have been the Apophis witch. Maybe that was a clue that we needed.

  “Poor little fallen princess,” I taunted.

  “Everything was stolen from me! I should have been on the council presiding over garou and helping move our kind into a brighter future. Instead, I was stuck begging for scraps. Cole Loxwood did that to me.”

  “From what I understand, your family did that to themselves.”

  “We were a proud and beautiful bloodline. We were pure and strong.”

  “And yet here you are.”

  “How dare you speak to me like that, you pathetic little turned? I will tear the mantle of guardian from you and take my people into a beautiful future.”

  “How original,” I said drily.

  Still there was nothing. Not a single sound besides her obnoxious voice. She must have been using magic to hide the background sound.

  She hung up on me. I threw the phone onto the couch.

  “The Apophis witch is called Liam. That’s all I have,” I growled.

  “No background noise?” Amy asked.

  “Not a sound. Absolute silence.”

  Amy pursed her lips.

  “That means another witch was there. Apophis’s magic is chaos, silence doesn’t fit into that.”

  Fantastic, just what we needed.

  “We can look into Liam, though. People are creatures of habit. There might be some clues about places he went, places he might have taken Cole.”

  I focused on that. We were getting closer. I had to believe that.

  14

  WE ORDERED AN OBSCENE amount of takeaway and settled down in front of our laptops, trying to dig out what information we co
uld. Adam had managed to find a couple of obscure books and brought them home to try and crack the book I’d stolen. The damn thing just wouldn’t re-form into words. I’d tried battering it with my guardian magic, but it remained moving squiggles.

  Briar sat next to me as we looked through the Grim trying to track down anyone who might have known this Liam before he went rogue.

  “Apophis witches aren’t born. They’re highly illegal. That means he was in a normal coven before he turned,” Amy said.

  Sky was pacing around the back yard glaring at her phone as though she could make it catch fire with her mind.

  The fact there wasn’t an entire coven of Apophis witches out there gave me some comfort. The world couldn’t handle the solitary witch we had, it certainly couldn’t survive an entire coven of them.

  “His goal will be to plunge the world into darkness and chaos right?” Briar asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Amy passed me some pad thai, and I ate some distractedly while figuring out how best to sweet talk the witch I had in PMs into letting me see some of the lower-level witch stuff on the Grim. Amy had been put on a temporary ban since the library incident, which was all over the Grim.

  Once again I had to deal with seeing memes of myself all over the site. At least I looked pretty badass in most of them. A number of them had me in Indiana-Jones-style situations outrunning boulders and such. I could live with that.

  Word was that a few more people had tried to steal books from the library since. They’d had to increase security measures.

  The question everyone was asking was why I’d been allowed to keep the book rather than having some awful arcane punishment meted out. No one had an answer, and that just added more pressure to my future.

  The witch I had in PMs suddenly vanished and took my hopes of getting into the witch section of the Grim with him. Liam was nothing more than a profile picture on the wider site, which gave us nothing. We needed to understand what his life was like, which coven he’d come from.

  No one was talking to Amy, and Sky was busy tracking down leads from another direction. Rolling my jaw, I tried not to let the frustration get to me.

  Sky came in and dropped into her preferred armchair with some sweet and sour chicken in her hands.

  “So, I have bad news.”

  I gave her my full focus, needing to hear this.

  “The witch, Liam, has been turned for longer than we feared. This ritual will allow him to become the avatar of Apophis. Cole’s going to be sacrificed in three days if we can’t get to him soon. The ritual itself is huge. They’re going to need a big clean space, and a good deal of desert sand, ideally from Egypt. He’s becoming the avatar for the god, which means he needs ties to where the god came from. Egypt has a lot of sand; sand’s easy, particularly given Apophis is chaos. If this were Bast, maybe they’d look into an Egyptian cat. Anyway. I think if we can track that shipment of sand, we’ll be onto something. Unfortunately, it appears that Liam has been gathering sycophants and allies. We were right about the council. He has a lot of them in his pocket, so they’re likely to be getting in our way. There are whispers that he also has some fae and, potentially, entire covens on his side. I don’t know how the covens work, given they have their own gods.” Sky held her hands up. “I’m just passing on what I found out.”

  Three days was doable. We’d find him before then.

  “I’ll see if Ma’at will shine any light on this,” Amy said.

  “Adam and I can ask around about any weird sand shipments,” Briar said.

  “Tell me exactly what type of space we’re looking for, and I’ll compile a list,” I said.

  Sky nodded and smiled. There was a slight dullness to her that I hadn’t seen before.

  “We’re going to win this battle,” I said firmly.

  “It’s your dual situation, isn’t it?” Amy asked.

  “Yes.”

  Briar and Adam looked between each other.

  “It is becoming difficult,” Sky said softly.

  “Why do you deny him?” Amy asked.

  “Because she is all I know. All that I am.”

  Amy nodded, satisfied.

  “We’ll go and get some of those brownies everyone loves,” Adam said with a smile.

  I had to admit a sugar hit sounded really good, particularly given we had some long nights ahead of us.

  Rolling my shoulders, I opened up a document and waited for the witches to tell me exactly what I was looking for. We were one step closer to getting Cole.

  “Open air. Lots of space. The ground floor of this house or bigger. Sand. Blood. Supernatural blood,” Sky said.

  “Close to population or far away?” I asked.

  “Far away. He’s ballsy, but this is a long ritual. I think it’ll take a couple of hours. It’s incredibly difficult becoming the avatar of a god.”

  Well, that narrowed it down to abandoned barns and old houses. That was good. I could work with that.

  I lost myself to the work of finding suitable places. Beginning in my territory, I slowly spiralled out, finding more and more potential places as I went. We had no idea how far they’d travelled, but we would.

  “He’ll have chosen somewhere with meaning,” Amy said.

  “Rituals are very personal. He’ll be somewhere he’s familiar with, somewhere safe,” Sky added.

  Chewing on my bottom lip, I widened my search into Liam. We were going to crack this. He had to have left some thread somewhere. We just needed to yank on it.

  15

  Adam and Briar were at their work. Briar had tried to call in sick, but Amy had sent her packing. I’d been serious about not letting this mess interfere with their long-term prospects.

  I handed Sky the last of the Pop-Tarts and a cup of coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in. She gave me a wan smile, and I took the seat opposite her and waited. She had gradually lost her spark and shrunk back into herself. Never before had I seen her quite so run down and quiet. She was a force to be reckoned with, a raging inferno. Yet there she was hunched over as she nibbled on the Pop-Tarts. I was worried about my friend. Something was clearly eating at her.

  “Set and the Morrigan are both trying to stake a claim on me. That means that my magic is spotty where the Morrigan doesn’t have a full grip on me. It also means that my head is a swirling mess because I have two gods trying to push their thoughts in there, and I barely have enough space for my own thoughts most of the time.” Sky sighed. “This is almost unheard of. I think I’m supposed to be honoured, but I’m just exhausted and irritated that I’m not at my best. The Morrigan is all I’ve ever known. Set is a huge risk; he would mean going solitary, and there would be a black mark against me. He feels right, though. All I’ve ever known is the Morrigan. What if I’m just looking for a change?”

  She looked up at me.

  “You don’t have to make the decision yet, right? So you can get a feel for Set and think through the pros and cons?”

  Sky nodded.

  “Don’t rush into this,” Amy said, coming to squeeze Sky’s shoulder.

  “We’ll be here for you. Whatever you decide,” I said.

  Sky relaxed a little and looked more like her usual vibrant self.

  “This will be an awesome story to tell in a few days no matter the outcome, right? Just think of all the free drinks I’ll get,” Sky said with a smile.

  We laughed. It lacked the energy of a real laugh, but it was something.

  I couldn’t imagine being caught between two gods the way Sky was. It sounded agonising and difficult. From what I understood, the gods had a huge impact on how a witch lived their life and on their magic. They crept into every facet of their being.

  Sky knocked back her coffee, and I winced. It was still very hot.

  “I need to pull myself together and focus. I’m going to bang some heads together and find out which coven Liam came from,” she said as she stood.

  “She means literally banging heads together, do
esn’t she?” Amy asked.

  “She does,” I confirmed.

  “We don’t have time to play nice and, you have to admit, it feels really good to hear their skulls connect and crunch like that.”

  “I’m more of a throat-tearing kind of girl,” I said.

  Sky nodded.

  “I can understand that.”

  With that, she turned and left the kitchen. Amy shook her head and pushed her notebook in front of me.

  “Try and focus on these symbols. I think they’ll help you dig deep and find more of your guardian magic. Enough to break through the stolen book’s protections.”

  I looked down at the feathery sketches and frowned. When I looked at them, something shifted within me. It was as though my magic writhed and woke up a little, somewhere between my spine and my heart. I’d thought of it as being less physical and more spiritual before.

  “So, I just look at them?”

  “Focus on them. Meditate on them.”

  “Have I mentioned how bad I am at meditation?”

  Amy smiled.

  “Now you’re going to learn.”

  I groaned.

  16

  I GLARED AT THOSE SYMBOLS until my head felt as though it were splitting in two. Amy hadn’t told me what I was waiting for, but to me it felt as though it hadn’t happened. I leaned back in my chair and dragged my fingers through my hair trying to think of something more practical to be doing with my time.

  Amy dropped the stolen book in front of me. Her expression was one of a mother with her eyes full of expectation. I opened the book to a random page and looked at the ever-moving squiggles.

  Something changed within me. The writhing sensation turned into something less concerning. Slowly the squiggles transformed into words. Real English words that I could understand.

  I looked up to tell Amy, but they were back to dancing lines when I looked down again.

  “It takes effort and practise,” Amy said.

  I ground my teeth and tried to dig out whatever I’d done the time before. This book could be the clue and information that we really needed.