A low growl bubbled from me. He nodded, let go of Leif, and stood. Leif jumped to his feet but froze at Raul’s side. His gaze shifted from Raul to me and back to Raul. The two were more than just pack members, they had been friends since high school. They’d shared the limelight as two of our football teams brightest stars back in their day seven years ago. That made me more than a little suspicious. I leveled my glare on Leif. One problem at a time. My power slipped out past my defenses and I let it. It crackled across Leif like super-charged static electricity. He winced.
Leif held my gaze for all of half a second before dropping his eyes to the ground. His shoulders sagged.
“You understand now?” I asked him.
He nodded. It wasn’t enough, not considering the audience that had gathered.
“What is it you understand?” I pressed.
“That I can’t beat you.” He swallowed hard. “That no one can. That I shouldn’t have tried. I’m sorry, Uppskera,” he said in a suitably humble tone.
I nodded. “Good. Leave us.” I turned to the small audience gathered. “Show’s over, folks. Go home.” I put more than a little command into that last bit. The last thing I wanted was to have an audience for the next part.
People turned and started to leave, Raul among them. “Not you,” I told him.
He stopped and turned to me with a curious look. His lack of fear made me feel a bit less like a monster while raising the hackles of my alpha side at the same time.
I waited for the others to get out of hearing range. “Did you send him?”
His eyes shot open wide. “Of course not. I’d never disrespect you with such an idiotic move. He acted without my knowledge.”
The surprise on his supermodel face seemed genuine enough. I wasn’t charmed by him for one minute, though. That perfect, wavy chin-length brown hair, those captivating amber eyes, they may have charmed the seeker in the beginning, but not me. Not ever me. He had been the one to bite in Sonya Michaelson without asking her permission. That idiot move had started everything. Sonya’s awakening as the seeker had triggered my own awakening as the reaper.
“This is all your fault.”
He flinched. “I know. I’m truly sorry for what I did. But I didn’t do it for the reason everyone thinks.”
I tried not to roll my eyes, I really did. “Really? Then why did you bite some innocent woman in against her will and condemn both of us to this fate?” The arctic tone of my voice, or maybe it was the words themselves, made him flinch again. It was quite satisfying to see the pain flash across his face.
The slight bump of his Adam’s apple worked before he spoke. “Bain had something over me. He blackmailed me into doing it.”
The words hit me like a freight train. Bain, alpha of the Draupnir pack, the man who killed his own brother to take control of the pack, who had kicked Vidar and a score of other wolves out when they had failed to swear allegiance, had his claws in this. If Raul could be believed.
Anger moved my legs a step closer. Though he flinched from the bite of my power, Raul didn’t cower or step back. It made me wonder how powerful he really was. “How did he know about the seeker?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but he did. He knew about you too. But I wasn’t going to just let him have her. And I was going to ask her permission to bite her in. Things just got pushed up, and I couldn’t.” He swallowed hard and squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment. “But I knew her family history, I talked to her about what she wanted in life. I thought she would say yes. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d thought she’d say no,” he answered in a steady voice free of fear.
“You bit her in with the intention of her being a potential mate so she’d have a choice and wouldn’t go straight to Bain’s pack.”
He nodded. “But Bain found out. He made my sister his co-alpha to punish me.”
“Why didn’t you say all this at your trial?”
His gaze darted about the empty park before returning to me. “Because there’s more going on here than just Bain wanting the seeker in his pack. I’m sure of it. I just don’t know what. If I exposed him, no one would believe me and I would have risked not being able to find out.”
Understanding dawned, as did a new and surprising respect for Raul. “That’s why you accepted your sentence of being a kennari so easily, because it would keep you here in Hemlock Hollow.”
“Yes. I have to figure out what’s going on and stop it before anyone else gets hurt.” The determination in his tone, the defiance in his eyes and stance, it spoke of the wolf he could become. I liked it.
“I’m going after Calder. Keep me posted.” I started back toward the parking lot.
“I will. But Ayra…”
I looked back over my shoulder at him through a veil of white-blond hair.
“Be careful. Your brother is dangerous,” he said.
A grunt came from me. “I know that better than anyone.”
My gaze fixed on Vidar waiting back at my motorcycle. He leaned against it, arms crossed over his broad, chiseled chest. I hated how he casually touched my things, like he had a right to. After how he’d left me four years ago he had no rights to anything that had to do with me. How many nights had I lain awake, barely able to breathe from missing him? I wanted to kick his ass to the curb—literally—and leave him right there without looking back. Just like he’d done to me. And I would have, if I didn’t need someone who knew Calder so well and who I knew would have my back. It wasn’t like I could ask Elí. Not only because he was out of the state either. While he was a fighter, he didn’t have it in him to kill anything, not even a spider. And killing would have to be done before this was over.
I tried to pretend Vidar wasn’t there, looking like a dark, gorgeous god leaning on my motorcycle as I dug out my keys. It was wrong that someone I was so pissed at could look so good.
As I approached, he touched my arm. Heat and comfort spread from his hand deep down into me. “That was intense. How are you?” he asked in a hushed voice. The hidden meaning beneath his words came through loud and clear.
He’d seen me beating Corey, and he’d seen what I’d been about to do to him. He was afraid I was losing my grip on my temper. And I was. In fact, the desire to pummel someone still raged through me. He would do nicely if he kept pushing.
“I’m fine,” I snapped.
He flinched almost imperceptibly; a twitch of his right cheek and a tightening of the skin around his eyes. His hand withdrew from my arm, leaving me feeling cold and empty, but vindicated. If I hadn’t known him for so long I might have missed the pain in his eyes. All that hard muscle and a simple tone of voice had hurt him. Something pinched inside me at knowing I had hurt him. But he had hurt me infinitely more.
He beamed a gorgeous smile at me. “Don’t get me wrong, they had it coming. Those jerks have always been low-level villains. You were amazing, by the way. Is it wrong that I was imagining sound effects as I walked up?”
A smile tried to crack through my carefully placed stoic expression. “I see Iceland didn’t take the comic book geek out of you,” I said.
He puffed his hard chest out. “Nothing has the power to do that.”
The memories that brought up were too much to handle at the moment: the two of us sitting in a tree, reading the latest edition of our favorite comics, lying on the cool grass staring at the stars together, comparing favorite superheroes. My chest tightened. I started the bike.
“Do you need a ride?” I offered, praying to Odin that he didn’t. I hadn’t meant to ask him. It had just slipped out. Memories were one thing, but him pressed behind me on my bike was another altogether. That would break me.
He thrust his head in the direction of a silver truck. “Nope, got my truck. I’ll follow you.”
I nodded and put my helmet on before he could see the emotion scribbled all over my face. Inviting him along had been a bad idea, a moment of weakness that would rear up and bite me in the ass. What had I been thinking? Looking over tha
t tall, dark body through the safety of my mirrored helmet visor made it pretty clear I hadn’t been thinking at all. I’d been feeling, something I hadn’t let myself do for the four years he’d been gone.
I turned the throttle and sped away from him and our looming audience.
Chapter Four
In obscurity lies our survival.
~Uppskera Journals
Ayra
It looked like a rainbow had exploded on my tiny front lawn, flooding it with flowers and packages of every type and color. The heady smell of dying foliage and melting chocolate wasn’t altogether bad. But it wasn’t good, either. The sight made me cringe. Already the dumpster out back brimmed with a similar haul that I had cleaned up only last night. Where I was going to put all this, I had no idea. The worst part was, half of it probably wasn’t recyclable and would end up in a dump somewhere. Foil gift bags, plastic packaging around chocolates or candy, things my kind should have known better than to buy. But even varúlfur were forgetting the impact they could have on the world. Such a waste.
As I draped my helmet over the handlebars of my BMW S1000RR, Vidar’s silver long-bed Dodge truck pulled up in my gravel drive. His long legs practically reached the ground when he swung out of the thing. He swallowed hard, wide-eyed gaze locked on either the mess in my front lawn, or the two-room hunting cabin I called home. I couldn’t be sure which. Either way, it made me want to crawl back inside my helmet and hide. The cabin was a far cry from the three-thousand-square-foot home I’d grown up in. But I’d take it any day over that sprawling prison. Green paint peeled away from the weathered wood siding, and one corner of the metal roof over the porch sagged. Vidar’s expression remained neutral as he looked it all over.
“You’re living in the Johnsons’ old hunting shack,” he observed.
“Yeah, though they haven’t let me pay rent since my uppskera powers awoke.” The depths to which that irked me showed in my tone.
Vidar swallowed hard, eyes narrowing as they turned to me. “Renting it?”
I nodded, head held high as I strode through the bright boxes, bags, and flowers. Hovel though it was, I would not be ashamed of my home. “Since I left home at eighteen.”
“You’ve lived here two years?” he asked in a strangled voice.
Boxes and bags crunched as he rushed to follow me and failed miserably at maneuvering his way through the mess. “You didn’t mention that in your letters.”
One shoulder lifted in a half shrug. “Didn’t seem relevant, especially considering you didn’t mention much of anything in your infrequent letters.”
He grabbed my hand and, damn it, but I couldn’t help flinching. The encounter with my father was too fresh.
“Was it that bad at home?” he all but whispered.
Flashes of horrible memories hit me: the frequent slaps from both Mother and Father over nothing, the insults from all three of my family members, constant harassing over being so thin and frail, Mother taking my uppskera journals and books on weather and storms away when I didn’t work out enough or eat enough, my brother beating me bloody and bruised in the guise of combat training. Being of the uppskera bloodline, they had wanted to “prepare” me in case the power awoke in me. The required reading of the journals throughout my childhood had actually been one part I hadn’t minded. Once they figured that out, they used it against me like everything else.
“Yeah, it was that bad,” I admitted in a hard voice as I tore my hand free of his grasp.
“Oh, Ayra.” The pain and helplessness in those two words made me ache.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want his pity. People who reject the pity of others have always puzzled me. I’ve had such a shortage of it in my life that I understand the value it holds. At least they feel something gentle toward me. Despite how mad I was at Vidar, my first instinct to him in pain was to try and put a stop to it. That in itself made me angry. He didn’t deserve me hurting for him. I’d done enough hurting because of him. The shine of moisture in his eyes nearly stole my words. Fingers twitching with the desire to reach for him, I folded my arms beneath my breasts.
“Don’t. Not now. Not after all this time.”
He flinched both from my words and the bite of my rising power. The next part poured out before I could stop it. “I wanted you to train at the temple as much as you wanted to join it. It was your dream since you were six. Dreams are meant to be followed. When you were chosen over your two older brothers I was so excited for you…” I had to pause to swallow the lump in my throat before I could go on. “You monks are the protectors of our ways, the chosen men and women of Odin. I get that. But you disappeared, Vidar.”
He took hold of my shoulders in a gentle grip, his brows scrunching together. “I am sorry. I had to. It was the only way the temple would train me. What letters I was able to send, I had to sneak out, and then I worried they would get ahold of them somehow and read them.”
I refused to give him a response. He didn’t deserve one.
He went on in, speaking fast and desperate. “But listen, you are a protector of our kind too. Your parents, your brother, they should have treated you that way. If others in Hemlock Hollow had known, they never would have let them be cruel to you.”
The anger in his eyes was too much. It worked at the edges of my own, trying to feed it. I stepped back so his hand fell away from my shoulders.
“You know how they were. They didn’t want anyone else to steal me away and use me for their own gains. Then my power wouldn’t benefit them. And I didn’t want people to treat me differently, to fear me. They would have if they’d known I had the uppskera mark. I didn’t want this.” I gestured to my front yard.
He looked down at the flowers and packages around his feet. “These are all gifts,” he observed.
“Bribes,” I corrected. “Attempts to get me to join their packs.”
Understanding dawned in Vidar’s pretty eyes. “You didn’t choose a pack when you turned eighteen,” he said, not sounding at all surprised.
As he shouldn’t. Though I was born into the Arnoddr pack of Hemlock Hollow, that didn’t automatically make me one of them. Not until I had been old enough to choose two years ago. It wasn’t a bad pack. Isak was a good alpha and his mother Iona a benevolent stand-in while he searched for a mate. I liked Isak a lot. He was more of a father to me than my own ever was, always so kind and encouraging. But that had been before he knew what I was. If I went back to the pack now people would treat me differently, he would treat me differently. That was the last thing I wanted.
I turned away from Vidar and worked my way through the packages on my tiny porch. These ones were brown shipping boxes, half a dozen of them, gifts sent from Elí. He sent several a week, things for the wedding mostly. I cringed and hoped Vidar didn’t notice who they were from. Not that I should care. I opened my front door. “They didn’t know what I was then. Staying wouldn’t have been fair to them, or the other packs.”
His soft steps sounded behind me on the hardwood floors of my little shack. “The pack with the uppskera in it would be the most powerful pack in existence,” he observed.
Pausing for a moment to let my werewolf sight kick in and combat the gloomy room, I hung my keys on the little rack beside the door. The scents of cat and the diluted lemon cleaner I liked to use lingered in the air. But considering this was the first time I’d had Vidar in my home, I was glad I’d cleaned recently. Not that it took much. With only a butcher block bar top that served as both my kitchen counter space and my table, a single plush chair tucked into the nook by the window, and my bookshelves, there wasn’t much to the room.
A questioning meow came from the back room, followed by the patter of tiny paws. My one-eared, orange-striped cat jogged into the room. Well, he wasn’t one-eared exactly, but a big enough chunk of his right ear was missing that most would consider him so. He jumped up on the coffee table and rubbed at my hand. The moment he saw Vidar he puffed up like he’d been put in the dryer on a fluff cycle. A hor
rible yowl issued from between his bared teeth.
“It’s all right, Heimdallr. Vidar is a…friend,” I said.
Vidar’s eyes widened, but he smiled and relaxed. “You named your cat after the guardian of the Bifröst. I like it.”
“He watches over my place, so it seemed fitting. I found him here when I moved in.”
He laughed. “Of course you did. You’ve always had a knack for finding and taking in stray cats. It’s still a marvel to see,” he said in a bit of a shocked tone.
“He took me in. And just because we have canine in us doesn’t mean we can’t get along with cats,” I said.
Vidar reached a hand toward Heimdallr, who hissed, leaped down, and took off into the kitchen.
“Tell that to him,” Vidar said with a laugh.
Two steps took me to the door that led into my bedroom. Shame tried to rise up in me at Vidar seeing my place, but I forced it down, mostly. From the bedroom closet I took a backpack. When I moved to the dresser and began filling it, Vidar followed me in. Left with no other choice, he sat on my bed. It was that or get ran over as I worked my way around the tiny room gathering what I needed. Hands clasped before him, back rigid, he looked terribly uncomfortable, as if he hadn’t been on my bed a million times when we were kids. But those biceps bulging from beneath the royal-blue sleeves of his clingy shirt and the way he took up half of my twin bed just sitting there, reminded me that neither of us were kids anymore.
The stirring in my lower abdomen also reminded me that I’d always seen him differently than he saw me. That rekindled my anger with him. He wasn’t here for me. He was here for the uppskera. The way he smiled at the framed print of a dragon from one of our mutually favorite books as kids almost soothed that anger. His smile grew as his gaze took in the bookshelves lining every wall of the tiny room.
“I like what you’ve done with the place. Reminds me of the Cabin of Dreams,” he said.
He knew just what to say to dig under my skin like a tick. I snorted. “Maybe a portion of one room in it. But thanks.”
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