Sucking in a breath as I loaded the arrow, I positioned myself, I found my body fell into the natural balance that came after years of practicing shooting the damn thing at the carnivals I’d worked at, and I waited.
I had no alternative but to do that.
I had no idea where the sound came from, which direction or from what. There were no clues. It seemed to blanket the clearing where I stood, making the shadows seem darker, longer. Harder. Denser.
Hearing the rushing of feet, I grunted, taking note of the heavy tread of a creature running, and as I whipped around, I released the bow.
The cackle came to a halt mid screech, and I felt the atmosphere lighten.
As my arrow settled into the creature’s hide, my heart stopped pounding, and I was released from wherever the hell I was, whenever the hell I was, and allowed to drift away.
When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by my mates once more. They’d cleaned up, but a few flecks of blood remained on them. Maybe invisible to the human eye, but not to mine, and not to my nose.
While the odor should have been muted by the soap they’d used, I could smell the council on their bodies. Three clashing scents should have diminished the stench, but it remained pungent.
And I knew why.
Death. That was what I smelled.
Industrial-grade soap wouldn’t wash that away immediately…
I savored life.
Unafraid though I was to protect myself, to sow death where it was required, I celebrated creation in all its guises, abhorring destruction.
I moved a hand down to my stomach, relieved to feel my child’s reassuring kick against my palm, but even as the scent of death filled my nostrils and that wicked dream resonated in my mind, when I drifted off again, I slept the morning through. And, waking up to an empty bed, I forgot about the nightmare.
That was my first mistake.
Because the council attack was just the beginning, and we were nowhere close to the end.
Two
Austin
Seven months later
“We need help with him.”
Laughing as I watched Berry playing with her twin pups, nipping at their ears when they started to piss her off by getting in her face, I switched focus and turned to my mate and shook my head. “What kind of help? Who can help a kid like him? He’s just freaky.”
She sniffed at me. “Just like the other kids, when you were young, would call you freaks?”
My lips twitched at that. “No, babe. They called us abominations.” At her wince, I laughed. “Yeah, big difference.”
“Austin,” she groaned, rubbing her forehead with a tired sigh. “Don’t make me smile. I already want to kill everyone in your year who was mean to you.”
“Think we should tell her it wasn’t just the wolves in our year?”
“Nah,” I sent to Ethan. “I figure she knows that—”
“I do now,” she grumbled, surprising me because she was getting good about maintaining the roadblocks between us so that we had some semblance of privacy.
And my wording was right on the nose too. We had no say in it. We couldn’t control how much she could hear or if she could hear anything at all.
It was all on her.
I didn’t mind because she was very respectful, and I figured, she wanted to hear our thoughts less than we actually wanted her to know what we were thinking all the time.
Ethan reached over and squeezed her shoulder before he rested a hand at the back of Knight’s head where he was feeding.
Watching our son gnaw on her tit was actually quite amusing. She was already supplementing breast milk with formula, and I knew she resented it.
If ever there was a woman who’d been born to be a mother, it was her.
She settled into it with an ease that surprised me, because I wasn’t finding fatherhood so easy.
I loved my son, and I loved the bonds between us, but damn, he cried a lot. And he shit himself—a lot. And that was nothing to the diapers and having to take a whole store worth of crap with us whenever we went anywhere.
Babies needed a lot of work, and I felt bad because Ethan and Eli didn’t seem to mind. Me? I was just surprised by all the heavy frickin’ lifting.
Almost like he read my mind, he squawked, grumbling around Sabina’s nipple in a way that was beyond cute.
That was his one saving grace.
He was beautiful.
Had Eli’s coloring, but Sabina’s tawny skin.
But he was cute as fuck as well.
When he grabbed a hold of your finger, he grabbed a fucking hold. His little nails, those soft milk ones, dug in like they were claws.
He’d look straight into my eyes, even though he knew what I was to him, even though I knew he sensed what I was—alpha to my core—and he’d hold that stare.
I knew I sounded nuts. Babies pretty much shit and ate, right?
Well, not Knight. Okay, he did plenty of that stuff too, but he was just turbocharged.
“Seth needs help.”
“We need fucking help,” Ethan muttered, and she arched a brow at him.
Ethan didn’t curse all that much, so when he did, it packed more of a punch than when I did. I tended to swear like a sailor, and Sabina’s inner monologue was as much of a fishwife as me.
“He’s just a boy—”
“He’s a creep.”
A few days after Knight’s birth, when we’d been tasked with offering Sabina’s placenta in the totem circle, a male had contacted Eli, telling him that his mate had cheated on him because she was pregnant.
Until now, females only birthed one pup. That was it. We’d been taught that to have more than one child was bad, not just for our eco-system, but almost like it was morally wrong to have more than one child.
What helped propagate that theory was that even though mated pairs couldn’t use condoms, thanks to the knot that appeared during sex, no one ever gave birth to more than one pup.
Unless they were twins like Ethan and me, and we were reviled for simply being plural.
So ever since that night, when the male, Leon Yardley, had beaten his mate for ‘cheating on him,’ even though that was a technical impossibility, Maribel Yardley had been living with us, as well as her son. Seth.
Seth the freak.
I knew it was mean to call him that, but the little shit was weird as hell.
I’d never actually caught him doing this, but he was just the sort of sicko who’d pull off the wings of butterflies, or get an almost dead fly and place it under a magnifying glass, just so that he could watch the sun burn it.
Yeah, he was a serial killer in the making, and he was living with us in the packhouse… Who said leaders didn’t have it easy?
“He needs help,” Sabina repeated.
“What kind of help?” I retorted, like I’d been retorting ever since she’d started this conversation over breakfast.
“Someone like Lara.”
The words were measured, but I narrowed my eyes on her because they were too measured.
We’d been looking for her sisters for a while, ever since we’d found out that her brother, the fucker who’d transformed her by accident, was alpha type. When a wolf child—those who were born humans and were transformed by an alpha’s bite—was made, the resulting shifter was always weaker than one who was born.
It was natural selection. Made sense.
That was why Sabina and her brother, Cyrilo, made zero sense.
They were supposed to be weaker than us, they weren’t supposed to have the powers they had. Which meant her lineage was special for some reason. That meant her sister, Lara, was likely just as special as her siblings.
All we’d found thus far was that her other sister, Jana, had died in tragic circumstances at a lake near her parents’ caravan when she was sixteen. The authorities believed it was suicide. We’d also learned that her mother was alive, but her father had passed away.
We’d sent people around, trying to discern the whereabouts
of Lara, the remaining sibling, but so far, no joy. I had a feeling the mother knew something she wasn’t willing to share, but what were we supposed to do?
Have our mother-in-law tortured?
“What can she do?” Ethan queried, warily. “What makes you think she could help?”
“She’s an empath. Maybe she’d be able to untangle whatever the hell is wrong with him. He certainly needs more help than a regular shrink could provide.” She shivered. “At least, I have to hope he isn’t un-fixable.”
“I’m just glad you admit he’s a freak.”
She sniffed. “There’s no avoiding that, is there? He even looks weird.” She pulled a face. “And I hate saying that, I really do. I was always picked on and bullied, so I’d never want him to think we were ostracizing him, but he’s just…” Her words waned, and she winced. “Well, he’s just Seth, isn’t he?”
“Adjective, adverb, and noun. All in one,” Ethan confirmed, but though he was teasing, there was no matching smirk. He spoke the truth, and nothing but the truth.
Broodingly, I tapped my chin. “You really think she’d be able to help?”
“I don’t see why not. I figure it’s funny how Cyrilo and I were both granted certain abilities…she must be the same, surely. Maybe what we always just thought was the Roma blood was something more. Something extra.”
I knew Sabina saw auras, and that helped her in her role as omega. From what Eli had told me about his mother’s powers—Merinda was the omega before Sabina—she’d never seen the pack’s energy in colors. Not like Sabina.
According to her, all three of her mates, and now Knight, were represented with bold hues in her mind.
As a whole, the pack was a blur of light, but when she focused on them, on the individual, she could pick up things from them that were related to her ability.
I was, I’d admit, curious about what her sister could bring to the table, not just for Seth, but for the pack as a whole if we brought her to the community and she stuck around to be near her sister.
“Need to double up efforts to find her,” I muttered to Ethan, who merely nodded as he picked up a piece of toast and began to gnaw on it.
“What are your plans for today?” I asked her brightly, deciding it was best to change the subject.
When we’d come downstairs and had found Seth making one of the maids cry, well, that had prompted a whole other kind of conversation to the one I wanted to have.
Seth was only nine, and he was nowhere close to being ready to shift. Daniel, on the other hand, the neighboring pack’s former alpha’s son who we’d adopted, was already a shifter, and his dominance flared up from time to time.
But he never made the staff cry.
The maid wouldn’t tell us what he’d said, but whatever it was, it had made her run off weeping when we’d chastised him.
A nine-year-old shouldn’t have that kind of ability, but maybe that was just the sign of the times.
Maybe kids had more power than they’d ever had before, and maybe they shouldn’t.
Maybe we shouldn’t be giving them as much sway as we always did.
“What do you mean?” Sabina rasped, and I grimaced at the realization she’d plucked thoughts from my brain again.
Her wince told me she was sorry, but fuck, she didn’t have to be, I just wished it wasn’t so difficult to keep things separate.
A little plot of space in my own head would be real nice sometimes.
I reached up, feeling crabby when it wasn’t her fault, and, rubbing the back of my neck, muttered, “Kids are revered in the pack.”
“You’d never know with how you were treated,” she groused, which turned my frown upside down and made me laugh because I loved how protective she was of us.
No one had ever been like that before, but here she was, coming in like a wrecking ball and destroying any and all walls we could put up between her and us.
What a fucking woman.
“Maybe not, but on the whole, they are.”
“I guess it makes sense. Only one kid all the time, I guess they’re spoiled.”
“That’s one way to phrase it,” Ethan said dryly.
“Children should always be protected and guarded, but equally, they have lessons to learn.” I shrugged. “In my opinion, that’s hard when the only discipline comes from the pack itself and not the family.”
Her eyes narrowed at that. “What do you mean?”
“Parents don’t discipline their kids. Surely you’ve seen that?”
She shook her head. “No. When?”
“Why do you think we always have kids traipsing in and out of the packhouse?”
Her mouth dropped open. “They’re here for Eli to punish?” she sputtered. “How the hell didn’t I know that?”
Her sharp tone had Knight grumbling and slapping her boob with a tiny fist in annoyance.
Regardless of the conversation, I had to laugh at that because you couldn’t exactly reprimand a newborn for being a spoiled brat, could you? The timing was just too perfect though.
Still, when her lips twitched as well, the three of us—even misery guts, Ethan, joined in with the smiling. It was a wonder his fucking face didn’t crack. Miserable shit.
“I thought you’d figured it out by now.”
She shook her head. “You know I spend as little time in his office as possible.”
I did, but I wasn’t sure why. Tipping my head to the side, I asked, “Because you don’t like the vibes in there?”
She hitched a shoulder. “It’s not my place.”
My brows rose. “Why isn’t it? Of course it’s your place. It’s where he’s based. Where we rule the pack.”
“I’m not supposed to rule it in that way. My job is to nurture and to guide. My place is the totem.”
Her words were soft, gentle. Whispered on a soft breeze to reach my ears.
As strange as the thought was, it was true nonetheless.
Ethan narrowed his eyes at her too and asked, “Is that why you always want to sleep out there?”
She nodded. “It’s different now though.”
“You mean, now Knight’s not in your belly?”
Sabina hummed. “It was more imperative then, like an urge? If I didn’t spend at least some point of the day in the circle, I felt odd. Not a good odd, either.”
A tender smile curved her lips as she traced her fingers over Knight’s head. The touch had him cooing, and I had to admit, when he did stuff like that and didn’t manage to piss all over me, he was adorable. And together? The pair of them just melted my fucking heart. I hadn’t known it was possible to feel this way until her, but with Knight, it was just amplified a hundred times more.
Her gaze caught mine, amusement lighting her eyes up from the inside out, and when she whispered, “Thank you, mate,” I blushed.
Crap. She’d heard.
“I love you.”
I swallowed. “I love you too.”
I knew she was telling me that she loved me even though I didn’t think the sun rose and fell on our little shit machine, and I’d admit to feeling a tad more at ease.
I loved Knight, of course I did. I just was ready for him to be potty trained.
Her lips twitched once more, before she said, “I thought they just brought their kids along to see him because, I don’t know, they couldn’t get a babysitter or something.” Her nose crinkled. “That sounds so dumb now I say it out loud. But after, they always hang out with the staff, so I just assumed…”
Ethan snorted. “Chores are a part of their punishment.”
She blinked. “Huh.”
The early days of her reign as omega, had brought great change for the pack. No longer was the totem the only place where gatherings occurred. We’d tried using the local diner, but with our people coming to learn how accessible we were willing to be for them, it just hadn’t worked out. So now, the packhouse was open to all members of the community, dealing with any issues that cropped up—be they small or large—
at any time of the day or goddamn night.
That was why we were getting strangers trudging around the front vestibule at crazy o’clock.
Before, Eli’s father, Paul, had managed the children in the totem, where parents only brought them along to a pack meeting if they were in trouble. Now, it was like a kindergarten.
I’d never realized how little I liked kids until the change in pack governance—what a time to learn, huh?
“From what we’ve heard about Seth’s father, Leon, he didn’t find it hard to punish his mate, did he? So why wouldn’t he discipline Seth?”
“It’s different.”
She arched a brow. “Is it? Really? Both mates and children are gifts from the Mother, aren’t they?”
“Depends on your temperament,” I teased, loving when she laughed.
“Go on, explain,” she encouraged though.
I simply shrugged. “Parents are scared to discipline their children now, but it’s not working out so well.”
“You keep on replying to me with answers that require more questions.”
Her complaint had me smirking at her. “Isn’t that how a conversation works?”
“That’s a dialogue,” Ethan said dryly, prompting me to flip the bird his way.
When he just snorted, then reached for Knight, who’d finished sucking his mother’s tit off, and started to burp him, I shook my head.
I figured my paternal gene would kick in when the little dude was maybe four?
Thanking the Mother for my brothers, who could pick up the slack when I fell short, while still feeling pretty fucking guilty, I muttered, “Kids are getting more and more powerful each generation.”
Nodding his agreement, Ethan continued, “We don’t know why, but it’s true. There weren’t always so many beta-types in the pack. With more betas, that’s great, because it means the upper management of the pack is dealt with. Eventually, they’ll take on council roles, and if not that, then they’ll be able to help the pack out with the businesses we own and things like that.
“But parents dote on their kids, and it just means they’re spoiled all the time.”
“You can dote on your child without spoiling them,” she pointed out.
Moon Child: A PNR Shifter Romance (The Year of the Wolf Book 2) Page 3