by May Dawson
“He and I have a truce,” he said easily, after a pause. “That’s a good start.”
“I love both you and Arthur,” I said, knowing the words would hurt him, but they needed to be said.
“You finally almost manage to say it,” he muttered, “and you fit my rival’s name into the sentence. Less satisfying than I had hoped for.”
“You want me to tell you that I love you?” I teased him, and the air between us felt lighter.
“It would be nice,” he said. “You know I love you. That I’m an idiot for you.”
My lips and eyebrows arched at once. “Are you?”
He nodded, lifting my hand to kiss my knuckles tenderly.
“Then let me heal you,” I said, my voice low and husky.
“You have other things on your mind,” he said. “I don’t want you to do this out of a sense of obligation—”
“I desperately need a distraction while we wait for Arthur,” I told him. “If you’re really at my service…”
He groaned. It felt as if some bizarre sense of honor he felt was warring with his desire.
I checked that my fingers weren’t pressing any fresh wounds and then gently tugged his bicep, trying to bring his face down toward me. “Please me,” I whispered, my voice low and rough.
Was it because I begged, or because he heard my desire, that he finally leaned forward and brushed his lips against mine?
I was careful not to hurt him as we traded kisses, but he seemed reckless. His fingers tightened around the back of my neck as his lips parted against mine. He kissed me like he was drinking me in.
I tried to find a safe place to put my hands. When I rested them on his waist, he inhaled sharply. The sound was ragged between his lips and mine, and then he kissed me without missing another beat. I let my hands dangle at my sides, guilt mixing with lust.
“It’s all right,” he promised me, taking my hands in his and guiding them to his shoulders. He kissed me again and again, and my lips parted against his.
But even as our tongues danced, as the low throb in my belly sang of my lust for him, my mind raced. Now that I had started this, I couldn’t imagine what I would do next. I was afraid I’d hurt him more.
I knelt abruptly, before he could protest the loss of my lips. With my knees on the uneven, rough stone floor, I drew him out of his pants.
His eyebrows lifted as he looked down at me. He looked as if he was going to protest, and before he could, I flicked my tongue against him and he inhaled sharply. This time, it had an entirely different sound than the pained sound a minute before.
“You have to promise me you’ll let me do this for you when this is all over.”
“I think I could put up with that,” I said, and his lips parted in a smile.
When I drew him into my mouth, his head fell back and his fingers tangled in my hair.
“You don’t have to do this,” he managed.
I paused, holding him in one hand. “I want to. Are you going to deny me?”
“You want to heal me?”
I looked up at him and shook his head. “That’s not the only reason. I want to make you happy like you make me happy.”
I liked the sense of being able to please him, to leave him breathless and weak for me. I took him into my mouth over and over again, and swirled his tip with my tongue. With each rhythmic thrust, he seemed to come slowly undone, his fingers tightening in my hair, his breath hitching.
He shattered in my mouth. The taste of him reminded me of the salty ocean water I’d braved. It reminded me of just how fierce I was.
I was a different person now than I had been six months ago. Although, that girl with her plans to save her sister and her struggle to survive had been fierce in her own way too. But I was stronger, braver, and freer now, with the love of these men.
His eyes were heavy lidded as I rose to my feet. My fingertips brushed his bicep as I looked over his shoulder. The scabs had faded to fresh, pink scars. Relief spiked in my chest.
“Thank you, Piper,” he murmured. “It amazes me that you can do that. You’re our miracle, you know that?”
“I don’t understand how,” I said.
“You’ve always been special,” he said. “But now that you’re unbound, no one knows what you could be. What you could do.”
“I’m just another shifter princess,” I said, frowning. “There may not be many of us, but I’m hardly the only one.”
“I’m quite sure you’re special,” he said.
“You’re biased.”
“That too.” He smiled, a smile that made his eyes crinkle at the corners. “But I’ve never heard of a princess being able to heal her pack.”
I was on the verge of denying I could do such a thing when I realized the proof was right there. I ran my fingers over his shoulders, and beneath my fingertips I felt the faint raised scars. Callum didn’t wince under my touch, the way he would have just minutes before. He looked into my face steadily, a small smile across his lips.
“We’ve been asking you to trust us,” he said. “Well, one more thing. Trust me that you’re special.”
I’d spent eighteen years being told I was nothing special.
Even with the truth under my fingertips, it was still hard to believe that everything Rippedthroat ever told me was a lie.
But Callum was looking at me steadily, his amber eyes filled with love and trust, so I promised.
“I’ll try.”
Chapter 28
Nick
The doors to the cells were open. There were bodies left behind, but they were witches, not wolves.
“We’ve got to move,” I said. The view gave me the itchy feeling that we’d have company soon, or that maybe we already had it. Maybe we were being watched. If I were a witch, I’d expect the pack to try to rescue their alpha.
Sebastian nodded. His eyes were tired, his face pale. We hadn’t slept since we’d gone on the run. “I know where we can go. There’s a cave near the ocean where my brother and I used to hide out. No one else knows about it.”
“Lead the way,” I said.
He stared at the scene beneath us for a second instead. The wind ruffled his red curls above his troubled face.
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” he said.
“Looking at corpses would probably make anyone feel that way,” I said, impatient to get away from here.
“It’s more than that,” he said.
We ducked through the orchard, picking our way across the fallen, rotted fruit. I stopped to snag an apple from the tree, which set its branches to shaking.
“We’ll hole up and get some rest,” he said. “We should be safe there. Then I’ll be able to think. We’ll figure out a plan B.”
I bit into the apple. I was hungry and exhausted after our time on the run. He was right. We needed rest, and we needed a plan.
“I have a feeling something’s wrong with my brother,” Sebastian said. He said it in a light tone. His rifle was still slung over his shoulder, and his hands were in his pockets. He looked like a guy out on a leisurely hunting trip.
But I wasn’t buying his tone or the relaxed posture.
“Something could be wrong with any of them.” I didn’t know what the hell I’d do without Piper or any of my pack mates. But I had to focus on what I could do. Not what I feared.
“Optimistic perspective,” Seb muttered. “But I think this is a twin thing.”
“A twin thing? That’s for real?”
He started to answer. In the distance, there was the faint rumble of an engine. I held up my hand. There weren’t a lot of trucks on the island, he’d told me—just a few that were necessary for crop work and transporting heavy loads up from the docks, shared by all the families in the pack—so that sound meant something was up.
Without hesitation, Seb slipped his rifle off his shoulder and dropped to his belly so he was hidden in the tall grass, and I dropped beside him. Together, the two of us low-crawled toward the sound.
; The truck rattled past us. I held my breath even though we were out of sight. It turned down the trail toward the cells.
Seb and I exchanged a look. Without speaking a word aloud, we headed back toward the edge of the orchard, where we’d be able to get a look.
The truck came to a stop. One witch, alone, slid out of the truck. He was a middle-aged man with a paunch, and he grumbled to himself angrily as he headed toward the cells. He paused there, then he walked across the tangled grass between the cells and the whipping post, his hand extended. Was he trying to track our pack, or was he doing something else?
Seb wet his upper lip with his tongue. “We could take him. He’s alone. The two of us…”
“You want to kill him?” I said it as coolly as I could. There were a lot of dead witches between us and our pack’s safety. Only a dozen witches controlled the mercenaries and the Shenandoah pack; every one we took out would count.
“Maybe he can tell us what Rippedthroat’s next move is.”
“Someone’s going to miss him,” I warned. “We need a plan.”
“We can’t take him with us,” he said. “I don’t know if the witches have some way to track each other.”
“So we get as much information from him as we can and then…” For some reason, the memory of the day I’d met Callum rose in my mind. When I walked out of high school and found a guy in a leather jacket leaning against my car with his hands in his pockets like he owned the thing, I’d felt a spike of annoyance.
But there’d been something familiar about him, and that was the only reason I’d agreed to hear him out at the diner down the street. Over coffee and burgers, Callum had told me this wild story about who he was, about who I was.
At the time, the possibility that he was telling the truth had seemed implausible but exciting.
I hadn’t known that the truth would change who I was into someone I’d never wanted to be.
But the witches would kill everyone in our pack. They’d kill Piper. They were the same ones who had murdered my parents. That man down there, with bowed shoulders as his hands hovered over the earth, might have been the same witch who cut down my mother and my father.
The coven would take everything away from me all over again, and they wouldn’t hesitate like I did.
“All right,” I said. “If we can take him down, we’ll see if we can get any information out of him.”
“We have to keep him from incanting.” Seb’s gaze was fixed on the man’s mumbling lips. “I know a spell to seal his lips. In theory.”
“In theory?” This didn’t seem like a great time for theories.
“I read about it…I’m not exactly able to practice. They’re forbidden arts,” Seb said. “Trust me.”
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here,” I muttered. We’d gotten to know each other pretty well over the past twenty-four hours of running, sneaking and hiding.
Seb’s face shifted, as if he was surprised by the admission.
“Fine,” I said. “You want me to go wolf and distract him? You do your spell.”
He hesitated. “You’ll keep it a secret?”
“I can’t imagine anyone’s going to hold magic against you under the circumstances,” I said, but he still looked nervous, so I said, “Sure. But another day, you need to tell me what the hell is wrong with your pack. What do they have against magic?”
“It will take another whole day to go through what’s wrong with my pack,” he muttered. “All right. Let’s do this.”
My teeth ground together as I tried to hold back the cries from the pain of shifting. We didn’t want to alert the witch.
The world went blurry, then sharpened again, the way it always did. Colors were brighter; smells both more intense and more interesting, more nuanced. The world felt more alive.
Being a wolf was addictive.
I scented the dank scent of dark magic in the air, sweet and rotten like dead things left too long. The rumble of a growl started low in my throat.
“Remember the plan.” Seb rested his hand on the back of my neck, as if he was oblivious to my rising blood-lust, and I knew him as a friend even though his words were faint in my ears. I had already forgotten what he’d just said. “Don’t kill him.”
Right, that.
I rocketed out of the bushes, charging downhill. The witch sensed me coming and looked up, his eyes wide. He flung his hands out toward me as his lips moved in a sudden, desperate incantation. His other hand reached for his gun on his belt.
I slammed into him. The two of us bowled over across the grass. He tried to roll away from me, but I pinned him to the ground.
When he locked his hands around my throat desperately, I reared back out of his grip. His hands fumbled for his holster, but it was empty; the gun was a glint of silver a few feet away from us.
My next strike was going to be his throat, but suddenly his lips were sealed together. He made desperate noises in the back of his throat as he stared up at me. He got a hand free and tried to tear at his mouth, but his lips wouldn’t part.
I scented the rich, hot-iron scent of blood even though I’d stopped my attack, a scent even stronger than the witch’s fear.
Sebastian was holding pressure on his bleeding palm.
“You can shift back,” he told me, reaching down to take the gun. He pressed his hand against his shirt, wincing, and raised the other hand to hold on the witch.
I growled and backed off, racing back to the woods. I was back in a second, yanking on my t-shirt as I walked.
“A blood magic?” My voice came out tight.
“They’re the most effective,” he said.
“And the darkest magics.”
“That’s why it’s our secret,” he said, as if his alpha—or mine—wouldn’t have questions about how we came by our information or about the gash in his hand.
Callum had no problem with magic, obviously—he was studying it obsessively, no matter how much he tried to hide it from the rest of us—but he wanted us to avoid it because of how dangerous it was considered by the other packs. Wolves were often outcast if they were discovered to be practicing anything but defensive counter-spells. Magic was poison.
Ignoring me, Sebastian pulled the witch to his feet. “I don’t want to see this thing used once more. I don’t think you do either. Why don’t we help each other out?”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about until he slammed the witch into the wooden cross.
It took me a second to come to life. Then I hurried to tighten the straps around the witch’s flailing wrists. The witch was still making desperate, unintelligible sounds.
Sebastian crossed in front of him so they could see eye-to-eye. “You compelled those mercenaries, didn’t you? They were just cannon fodder. It’s only fair if I compel you, isn’t it?”
Did he really know how to do that?
The witch strained to say something through his sealed lips, and his eyes bulged. I glanced toward the ridgeline, afraid that we would be surprised by help arriving for the witch. Part of me wanted to go up to the ridge to watch for company.
Part of me knew that was an excuse to avoid what was coming next.
The witch’s head jerked back and forth, as he struggled against the leather loops that tightened his wrists to the rough wood. Sebastian’s eyes sharpened, and he yanked the man’s collar to one side, pushing his jaw in the other direction. The man winced as his forehead cracked against the wood.
“Look at his tattoos,” Seb said, yanking the collar down further, so that one of the man’s buttons popped off his shirt. “I thought these were just a story.”
An elaborate series of pentagrams wound their way across his chest, but in between them were small circular tattoos with complicated crosses at their center. “What are they?”
“They’re killing marks,” Sebastian said. He rubbed one of the marks with his fingertips, and the witch tried to jerk away. “They brag about killing wolves like us. Celebrate it by tattooing their bodies.”
“I wonder if some of those marks are for my parents,” I said, and my voice came out flat.
“You’d like to add more of these, wouldn’t you?” Sebastian asked. He stepped back, letting his hand drop to one side. His tone was deceptively casual. “Are we supposed to have pity for you?”
I don’t know what the witch saw in our faces, but he was trying desperately to say something to us, and in his eyes I saw frightened promises.
“Lift the spell,” I said. “We’ll kill him if he tries anything. We can find another witch if we have to.”
Seb glanced at me, but his face didn’t betray any surprise.
He pressed his palm against the witch’s mouth, smearing blood across his lips. The witch’s lips burst open and his voice tumbled out eagerly.
“Let Sullivan have the girls and he’ll leave the rest of you alone. He doesn’t care about your pack—”
“Oh, we know,” I said.
“You’ll have to figure it out with Shenandoah pack,” he said desperately. “But we’ll leave here. We can’t wait to leave.”
Of course they couldn’t. Witches despises being in close proximity to wolves.
“Say we don’t want to give Rippedthroat exactly what he wants,” Seb said pleasantly. “What would you do if you were us?”
His blood was still a red smear on the man’s lips, and now it was on his teeth. “I don’t know,” he said wildly. “I’d just give up the girls and get out of here. You could always rescue them later. He would never hurt them.”
“He’s planning to take them both?” Seb asked.
“Yes. He promised the Shenandoah pack they could keep Maddie, but he doesn’t intend to keep that promise. He thinks they’ll be content in the end with your lands…”
Both our packs would be destroyed. Sebastian’s pack and mine. If any of us survived, we’d be lost without our land…and our girl.
“I heard about a spell once,” Seb said, “to block magic. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
With a spell to block magic, we could have a fighting chance against the witches. Maybe we could even get the Shenadoah pack on our side somehow. Then it would just be a matter of killing men with guns. The witches and their mercenaries weren’t frightening to us when they had no monsters on their side, no spells.