Pack Ebon Red (The Seven Mates of Zara Wolf Book 1)

by C. M. Stunich

  “Vampires,” I agreed as I did my best to get a look at Faith's house from a distance.

  Everything seemed to be in order—the lights were on, Diya's car was in the driveway, and there were no outward signs that anything was amiss—but then … human blood. The smell was sharp and distinct and fresh.

  Without waiting for the Yukon to come to a complete stop, I threw my door open and jumped out. No sooner had my feet hit the ground than I was on my back and my breath was being knocked out of me by the force with which I'd hit the road. Concrete cracked and I choked on blood just before a hand clamped down around my throat.

  I heard the SUV squeal to a stop, but I didn't need to wait for any of the boys to fight a vampire off for me; I could do it myself.

  My fingers found the wooden knife and swung it up and into the shoulder of the girl who had me pinned down. I would've stabbed her straight through the heart if she hadn't slapped my hand away with the force of a Mack Truck.

  Blood spurted out and splattered across my face, red and black liquid that smelled way too much like a fruit salad for comfort. That heavy copper stink was there, too, but god, I could choke on the smell of mint and apples.

  The girl released me and I managed to throw her off, glad that I'd decided to wear the leather pants, boots, and jacket tonight. There's a reason motorcycle enthusiasts wear leather; it makes the sting of cement hurt so much less.

  “Fuck, I hate wolves,” she howled, stumbling and pressing her fingers against the still spurting wound. I thought I might've hit her brachial artery, the one that runs up the arm that doctors use to check blood pressure. I must've hit something with the amount of liquid that was gushing from the wound. “I'm going to tear your goddamn throat out.”

  Before she could take a single step toward me, a wolf the size of a small pony crashed into her and knocked the vampire girl to the ground, clamping his massive jaws around her pale throat. Without a second's hesitation, he crushed it and shook her body like she was an elk or a deer. He was so dark I could barely see him, black on black on black … with violet eyes. Che Nocturne even moved like he was made of shadows, dropping the vampire's body to the cement.

  Of course, that didn't mean she was dead. Yet. I'd figure out what to do with her later. For now, she wasn't much of a threat.

  'Don't kill any of them just yet,' I said as I realized most of the boys were engaged in fights of their own. 'Incapacitate them until we can figure out what's going on.'

  I said that just in time to stop Montgomery from using his wooden sword to stake a dark haired Blood kid through the heart; he adjusted the thrust of his weapon and stabbed him in just about the same place I'd hit the girl.

  Only one of the vampires in the group was undead, so that was the one I focused on. She was currently locked in a scuffle with Jax—who was also now in wolf form—red blood staining his glorious gold-white pelt. I noticed one silver knife protruding from the wound as he latched onto her right arm and dislodged another from her grip.

  'The undead one, Che,' I said and he snarled as his claws tore across the pavement, his massive body launching and hitting the silver-haired vampire in the side. The collision was awful to watch, like two semitrucks crashing into one another—only one was in motion and one was parked. The woman crumpled to the ground, but so did Che, his body flipping up and over her head before he crashed to the pavement on his side.

  I didn't hesitate, closing the distance between us in a split second and sliding to my knees so that I was level with her when I came in with the knife.

  Her silver eyes flashed with rage, but I thrust the wooden blade up and under her ribs before she could grab me or worse—bite me—and buried it deep into her heart. Black blood bubbled up around the wound just before she slumped to the side. I let her take the knife with her; if I took it out, she'd just heal and come at me again.

  Rising to my feet, I pulled the silver knife from Jax's wound and put my palm over it to help staunch the bleeding. That's when I felt it, that earthy wind swirling around me, making my bloodred hair flutter around my face. Cool energy seemed to pour from my palm and then Jax was lurching away from me and whipping his muzzle around to lick at the bloodied wound.

  It wasn't there anymore.

  'What the hell?!' he asked, snapping his jaws in frustration and shaking out his coat, sending bright red drops of blood everywhere. His fur was still wet with it, and there was a small spot where the hair would need to grow back, but when I stepped forward and ran my finger across his skin, it was whole. A little puckered and pink maybe, but the wound was definitely closed. 'You just healed me,' he threw out in an accusatory fashion as I stepped back and tried to blink past my shock.

  We weren't out of the woods just yet.

  I'd have to wait until later to deal with yet another surge of strange magic.

  “They're all down and out,” Nic said from behind me as I noticed a charcoal gray wolf with amber undertones move over to Che. He used his head to push the sleek black body over.

  “Is he breathing?” I asked Tidus as I jogged over and met Silas and Montgomery by Che's side.

  'He's breathing,' he told me as I dropped to my knees and put both hands on the Alpha-Son of Pack Violet Shadow. As soon as I touched him, there it was again, that musky scent, like wet earth and decaying leaves. It swirled around us in a cool breeze and filtered through my fingers.

  A moment later and he was swinging his head up and around to lick at my hands.

  “What the hell, Zara?” Nic whispered as I glanced over my shoulder and met his startled gaze.

  “I don't know,” I said, my voice just as hollow. But excited, too. Something was happening, something that was awakening the old magic of the packs. It wasn't as important as Faith though, not even close. “Three of you come with me; the rest will stay here and drag the bodies into Faith's backyard,” I commanded as I rose to my feet and looked around the quiet suburban neighborhood. How nobody had heard the fight and come running was a shock. And when I listened carefully, I didn't hear any sirens either.

  “You can thank me later,” a voice breathed from the shadows, raising all of my alarm bells.

  I spun around as quick as I could, heart thundering, my fingers going for the iron knife on my belt.

  “Don't even bother with that,” said the fae girl as she stepped out of the darkness between two houses and smiled at me with wicked sharp lips carved into an elfin face. Her skin was the lavender-purple cloak of dusk against the mountains, her sloe-eyes surveying the bodies strewn across the ground with a certain amount of disgust. “Glamour,” she explained, lifting up a small glass bottle and then tossing it at my feet. It shattered into tiny little pieces that reflected back the light of the full moon. “I used it to hide the fight from the Sightless.”

  Sightless—another derogatory term for humans. They sort of earned that one though because honestly, how could they not see that it wasn't just their species that ruled the earth? Honestly, if the Numinous—the non-human, non-animal species of the world—ever stopped fighting with one another, I wasn't sure there'd even be any humans left. The only thing they had on us—or on vampires, fae, witches, demons, angels, whatever—was that they could breed and breed and breed.

  “You're lucky there was only one undead,” she said, her voice like an icy river. I watched her with narrowed eyes as she moved into the center of the road, pausing next to the pale haired vampire girl with the crushed throat. “And that they were all so young. If they'd had an Ageless with them, you'd all be dead.” The fae girl paused to look up at the night sky, the silver moonlight playing across her alien features. She was beautiful, but sharp, like she'd been shaped from stone. All of her features were right, but there was just something about her that was scary. “I'm sure having the full moon at your backs didn't hurt.”

  “What do you want?” I asked, the smell of human blood cutting through the strong scent of vampire. Someone was bleeding and I needed to get in there and make sure it wasn't Faith. �
��This doesn't concern you.”

  “Doesn't it?” she asked, ink black hair billowing around her face, the translucent folds of her dress getting caught on her slender calves. I could see right through it, to the patch of dark hair above her thighs, the round spots of her nipples, the shadow of her belly button. When she turned, the small pair of indigo wings between her shoulder blades caught the light from a nearby porch. “Whether we like it or not, the court recognizes your peoples' connection to the earth. Without the wolves, everything comes undone.” Her eyes flashed and she gritted white-white teeth at me. “Everything.”

  “As much as I'd love to stand here and figure out what the hell you're talking about,” I said, my heart pounding, chest heaving, “I need to get inside that house.” I threw a finger out to indicate the blue and white two-story house where Faith had lived since I'd met her, on the first day of sixth grade.

  The faerie threw her head back and laughed, the sound like claws raking down my spine. Beside me, several of the boys gave warning growls.

  “Go. Rescue the human. Kill the vampires. I don't care.”

  The girl dropped her chin and then reached into an opaque pocket sewn into the side of her dress, producing a small purple and white mushroom.

  The last thing in the world I wanted to do was take it.

  “The Unseelie Court extends their helping hand,” she said, holding it out to me. “If I were the next Alpha of Pack Ebon Red, I would take it. Unless, of course, you fancy fighting Coven Triad and Ironbound at the same time.”

  She dropped the mushroom on the ground and several others sprouted up in a circle around it.

  Without another word, the girl stepped forward and into the faerie ring, dropping out of sight.

  When I approached the hole in the pavement, I could see all the way through it and down, down, down to … somewhere. I didn't know where the hole went and I didn't want to find out.

  Bending low, I plucked a mushroom and tucked it inside my jacket pocket. As soon as I'd picked it, the hole closed up with a sickening popping sound, like a knife puncturing flesh.

  “Gather up the rest of these,” I instructed the boys, “and let's get this done.”

  Crap.

  Crap, crap, crap.

  I didn't have enough on my plate? Now I had to deal with the fae on top of everything else?

  What. The. Hell. Was going on here?

  Nic, Silas, and surprisingly, Tidus, fell in with me as I ran toward Faith's place, my leather motorcycle boots loud against the pavement. On the plus side, the faerie girl had unwittingly answered at least one of my questions. The vampires I was dealing with were, in fact, Ironbound. Now, I knew the fae hated that Blood Kingdom with a vengeance. The name Ironbound was a throwback to the days when their members would round up fae and bind them with, obviously, iron. So even if she really was offering up the Unseelie Court's help (which I was doubtful of), there were ulterior motives at work here.

  The front door was open when we climbed the single porch step … and the living room was spattered with blood.

  I clamped my hand over my mouth as my skin rippled with chills and my stomach clenched with nausea. The room was washed in red, glistening pink entrails spread across the floor like sleeping snakes. I knew from the smell whose bodies were torn apart and scattered from the dining room to the kitchen and all the way into the living room.

  Notch and Mila, Faith's dogs.

  “This isn't good,” I said, starting to panic, “this is not fucking good.”

  I took off toward the stairs and out of habit, let Nic head up them first. As my guard, that'd been his job. I'd never liked it, but I'd allowed it because that was what everyone had expected me to do, let him risk his life for mine. I didn't have to do that anymore.

  It was too late to stop him though, so I just followed after with Silas behind me and Tidus holding up the rear.

  “Faith?” I called, knowing that if there were vamps hiding in here, they'd already know we were coming. “Faith!”

  No answer.

  She wasn't here. Her scent was everywhere but faint enough that I knew it was just residual.

  The stink of human blood however, drew us straight to Diya's room.

  Nic kicked open the door and we both froze, eyes locked onto the still form of Faith's mom. Her normally red-brown skin was pale and ashy, almost gray. And there was a syringe sticking out of one arm, still half-filled with vampire blood. Someone—probably one of the Ironbound we'd locked down outside—had quite literally ripped her throat out. The bed was just one big, red pool of blood.

  With my eyes still locked on the body of my friend's mother, I answered the buzzing phone in my pocket.

  “Faith,” I said carefully, neutrally.

  “Hey,” she said, far too cheerful and upbeat for me to believe she'd seen any of this. “I kept texting you, but you never answered. And, um, I don't mean to pry, but Avita posted a selfie of her with your grandma at some outdoor party thing? Are you back already?”

  “Where are you?” I asked, backing out of the room and putting my body against the wall. I closed my eyes for a moment, but the stench of so much blood was making me feel sick.

  “At your place.” Another pause. “Um, is your mom remodeling Nic's room or something? Because I went in there to borrow a book and it was, like, total chaos.”

  “You said you were worried,” I told her, trying not to freak-out. “You said you were scared.”

  “Oh,” she said and then sniffled slightly. “Yeah. My mom was … she didn't look so good, Zara. When I confronted her about the drugs, she went completely insane and started screaming at me. I barricaded myself in my room for a while and she was just … pounding and pounding on the door.” Faith sighed, clearly stressed-out. “As soon as she stopped, I called an Uber and had them take me to your place. You were right. I shouldn't have gone home without Dad there to back me up.”

  I almost sobbed with a mixture of relief … and melancholy.

  Finding out her mother was dead would … god, it would just kill Faith. And those dogs, she loved them like they were her kids. What was I doing to do? How was I going to tell her? And how the fuck were we going to clean this all up before someone else stumbled across it?

  “Zara,” Nic said, his voice wobbly and laced with fear. “You might want to get in here.”

  “I have to go. Do not leave that house without me, okay? I'll give you a ride to see Owen tomorrow.”

  “Geez. Okay, Mom. What's wrong with you? You sound a little weird.”

  “I have to go. Talk to you later.”

  I hung up before she could get another word out.

  Opening my eyes, I swung around the corner … and found Faith's mom starting to stand up.

  Shit.

  “She's a vampire?” Silas asked, but he sounded unsure.

  “No,” I said, this awful, sick feeling in my stomach. “She's a revenant. Stop her!” I screamed as the woman I'd once known lurched up from the bed into a crouching position. She didn't bother to tear the syringe from her arm, and her eyes … they were completely inhuman. When a person is taking steps to become a vampire (a ridiculously stupid process that almost never turns out well), and those steps are not followed exactly, this is what happens. Diya had been killed in the middle of the change and now, her undead body was like a net for restless spirits. The real Diya was already dead, her soul gone, bound for the next life.

  Tidus lunged at the bloody bed, but he wasn't quick enough—the revenant leapt through the window and crashed in a sea of shattered glass to the pavement below. She didn't make it ten steps before a wooden sword severed her head from her shoulders.

  But it wasn't Montgomery that was wielding it; it was another vampire.

  As soon as I stepped outside, I knew that I was looking at the Crown Aurora Blood Queen. There was no doubt about it in my mind.

  She stood next to a gleaming black limo, her pale fingers dancing across the roof, her red-red lips twisted into an awful mimicr
y of a smile.

  “Zara Wolf of Ebon Red,” I said, because how else was I supposed to greet an undead queen?

  “Aurora Blood of Crown Aurora,” she replied easily, tilting her head to the side. A sea of white-blonde hair cascaded over her shoulder, her pale blue eyes locked onto my face. I tore my gaze from hers to check on my new mates. We'd been Bonded for all of two hours and this is the crap I was putting them through? I counted seven of them gathered around me, standing just in front of the SUV that had been pulled carefully into the driveway.

  I looked back at the queen and the pile of vampire bodies at her feet. She'd rounded up and killed all the Ironbound vamps that we'd disabled, removed their hearts and their heads so the living vampires wouldn't come back as undead. The undead one was nowhere to be seen, just dust on the wind. Like every other species on the planet, vampires are born from a womb, alive and breathing and warm to the touch. Unlike every other species, when they die, they come back as an undead killing machine. It takes a hell of a lot more to get rid of an undead vampire than it does a living one.

  “Did we stumble on a turf war?” I asked carefully, fully aware that if she wanted to, Aurora could kill me and all my mates without so much as breaking a sweat. Well, if she were still capable of breaking a sweat that is. “It seems that you've been taking quite a lot of Ironbound territory lately.”

  Aurora frowned at me, and the effect was instant; I felt chilled to the bone.

  “We're here because they killed a Convert,” she said, referring to Faith's mom. The sound of her voice was mellifluous, otherworldly and inviting. I scooted closer to Nic and curled my fingers through his. The grounding effect of his touch was instantaneous.

  'Get close,' I warned the boys, hoping the strength of Pack and of our recent Bonding would protect us from getting rolled—basically hypnotized by the older vampires, the Ageless (i.e. any vamp that was over a hundred years old).