by CJ Cooke
I huffed out a laugh, it’s not like I could argue with her, she was right. I was setting myself up for a melt down, I knew I was. But apart from raging out of control to get it out of my system, this was the only way I could think of right now. If what Calli was saying was right, and I had no reason to doubt her, these things could kill us with just a touch. But we were still going to find a way to fight back. I wasn’t going to accept this, they’d hurt this pack over my cold dead body.
“I wonder why they’re so attracted to you?” Cassia’s voice came from the doorway.
Cassia limped inside, Hunter helping her walk, much to her annoyance from the look of it. He had some hard work there.
“Why do you think it’s me they’re attracted to?” Calli asked in a panic.
“The first one you saw was examining the wards, which are constructed from your magic, and then this was examining your truck which you’d just been in,” Cassia shrugged. “I could be wrong,” she pointed out.
“Calli isn’t shadow touched. It shouldn’t have any interest in her,” I told her. I could feel the panic starting to build again but did my best to crush it back down, at least for now. I’d break apart later, but for now, I needed to be present and sane enough to organise the pack.
“Surely, if it were after me, it would’ve attacked me at the store,” Calli pointed out.
“I didn’t say it was after you,” Cassia sighed as she slowly lowered herself into a chair. “I said it was attracted to you.”
“That’s just creepier,” Calli muttered with a shudder before she reached for Cassia’s hand. “I should be able to heal you more tonight. In fact, I think my magic is nearly back to normal levels, so I should be able to get you back to normal.”
“Thank god,” Hunter sighed as he dropped into his own seat once he was happy that Cassia was fine. “I can’t take much more of this.”
“You can’t take much more of this,” Cassia scoffed. “How do you think I feel? I have to suffer through the pain and indignity of it all.”
Calli opened her mouth to say something, but I quickly jumped in and pushed the book in front of Cassia that we’d found earlier.
“This is the first idea we had,” I said, quickly seeing Hunter’s grateful look out the corner of my eye. Yeah, he had a lot of hard work.
Cassia looked it over, being careful not to touch the actual book. “It’s not much, but it might be a start. Moonlight wardings such as these are normally used to dispel things like hexes or anything cast with malice,” she shrugged.
“The book talks about darkness, though,” Calli pointed out.
Cassia nodded thoughtfully, looking at the sketch more closely and tucking her hands behind her back. “I’d always thought the use of the word darkness was figurative, but maybe you’re right. If you are, this could change so much about what we assume about magic.”
Cassia looked up at the books in wonder, and I could already see the desire taking root to dive into them. We desperately needed someone else helping out with the research, especially someone with some form of experience, but she wasn’t able to even touch the books. Blake was busy with Jean now, and she was close to having the baby, so he didn’t dare leave her side. I’d just given Nash another job, and now that I thought about it, he was going to be pissed he was so close to research duty and taken away from it again.
Cassia was still staring down at the book laying open on the table muttering about change and perspective, and we just left her to it. She seemed kind of sad now that she was thinking about it and I, for one, didn’t want to take this small bit away from her.
“We need to talk about the Maverick situation,” Hunter said, turning to me. “Have you assessed the level of threat he poses to Calli?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you can step back from your absent bodyguard duties,” Calli laughed.
Hunter flushed in embarrassment, and to be honest, he should be embarrassed. Considering he’d been tasked as Calli’s guard by the Council, he hadn’t left Cassia’s side since we got back from the witch stronghold, and he was rarely with Calli. But I had to admit that when we needed him, when Kelly was waving her gun around, he was there. Maybe he was more aware of what was going on than we assumed.
“I may have been slightly reticent in my duties,” he admitted.
“Trust me, you do not want this one becoming your shadow,” Cassia muttered. “He nearly tried to make me pee in front of him the other day.”
Hunter just laughed, clearly not bothered about the whole thing but Calli looked horrified on Cassia’s behalf. Mental note, Calli was not a bathroom sharer kind of person.
“Maverick isn’t a threat,” Calli said as soon as she’d recovered, but she was still giving Hunter the side-eye like he needed to be watched.
“I disagree. He’s a spy for Councilman Stone, and his intentions will not be honourable.”
“He’s my mate. And whatever his father tried to get him to do is moot. He is going to become part of the pack, and he will be ours to protect,” Calli said, crossing her arms over her chest and staring Hunter down. He was in for it now, he’d rattled her protectiveness, and she wasn’t about to back down.
“He’ll never take the bond. You saw how he was before. He’ll find whatever excuse he needs to find to avoid it until he has an opportunity to retrieve you for his father. I’m just surprised he hasn’t made it yet,” Hunter said dismissively.
Calli looked like she was going to explode, and Cassia was sitting watching the two of them like it was the best thing she’d ever seen. I could see her reeling up to deliver whatever blow she had, and as she inhaled a deep breath, I almost winced on Hunter’s behalf.
“You’re wrong,” was all she said before she turned back to her book.
Cassia looked so disappointed, and I had to say, I was actually surprised she hadn’t reamed him for speaking out like he had.
“Maverick will be shifting with me tonight, and we’ll talk about him taking the bond the night after,” I said, putting an end to the conversation for now.
Even Hunter was looking at Calli curiously, but she continued to read, ignoring us all. Something was going on with her and Maverick, and I had a feeling it was because she knew a lot more about him than the rest of us. Perhaps because she was the only one of us that had made any effort to, that realisation immediately made me feel like shit. If he was a potential threat to the pack, I should be keeping a closer eye on him, and if he wasn’t, he was about to become a member of our pack, and we weren’t about ignoring our members. Fucking shit! Something else I was failing at. We needed to get our house in order.
I looked around the room and then sighed, albeit a little overly dramatically.
“Why isn’t there a pen around when you need one,” I huffed.
“That reminds me the desk is being delivered tomorrow morning. I could get the delivery address changed to here, and the rest of the furniture is coming in the afternoon. So we should be better set up in here by then. Cassia, at some point, I’d like to talk to you about some kind of magic education for the kids and, if you’re willing, for me as well. We have a lot of information to go through in relation to our current problems, and I’m learning some things from what I’m reading, but I can’t spend the time on it right now that I need to so I can properly understand it all,” Calli said, pulling out her phone and opening up the notes app. “I had a few ideas for the kids. Abby and perhaps Jacob are going to need specific tutoring, but I think it would help Coby to have some background knowledge as well, if this is going to become part of our lives.”
I was surprised she’d had time to even start thinking about stuff like that.
“When did you have the time to do this?” I asked in surprise, and Calli passed the phone across to me. It looked like she’d started to put a schedule together for a school schedule for the kids.
“I was thinking the other day that perhaps it would be better to homeschool the boys for a couple of years. Jacob i
s just coming into his wolf, and I suspect Coby will as well now. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea for them to be at school with the other children until they have it under control. I was putting some ideas together so I could come to you with a proper plan in place,” she shrugged.
“It'll be easier once the stuff for the library comes, and I think I’m going to order some kind of tablet system for in here and perhaps start getting some organisational system going, if you don’t mind?” Calli asked cautiously.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but the pack is getting bigger, and with all the issues we have at the moment, we need some kind of system to pool our information that everyone has access to. Not to mention, life in the house would just go a lot easier if we had something as simple as a group calendar so we can see where everyone is.”
I nodded in thought, she was definitely on to something. In fact, Nash had been nagging me about it for quite a while now.
“Okay, talk to Nash about it tomorrow and make sure that you take whatever you need for it out of the pack accounts.”
“Only if you let me actually contribute to the pack accounts,” she said, crossing her arms in defiance.
“I… Calli, you don’t need to do that.”
“All of the rest of the pack does. Don’t you all pool your finances?”
“Well, yes, but your situation is different. You’ve come to the pack with your own funds. It’s not like, for example, how it is with Hunter. He would have pooled his income with his last pack and just changes to doing that with us now that he’s part of our pack.”
“Well, now you're just punishing me for not having been in a pack before.”
“What! How am I punishing you?” I said in exasperation. I should’ve seen the warning signs for this before I started. This was not going to end well for me.
“Because you’re singling me out and treating me differently,” she said sullenly.
Now, Cassia and Hunter looked like they were about to pull out the popcorn while they watched the show.
“So, what do you propose to do?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“Let me transfer half of the money in my accounts into the pack account,” she said with a sly smile, and I felt like I’d just been backed into a corner and hadn’t even seen it coming. “The other half is Jacob’s, and he should be able to decide what he wants to do with it when he gets older.”
I nodded in thought, even though there was no way I’d let her do that and was just bluffing now.
“A quarter.” I bartered even though the suggestion made me want to throw up. Taking money from my mate didn’t feel right, not even a tiny bit.
“Forty per cent,” she came back with.
“Thirty, and that’s my final offer.” I felt like I was putting my foot down, but even I could see that Calli was getting what she wanted, and I’d lost this one.
“Done,” she said with a beaming smile on her face and held out her hand for me to shake.
As I did it, I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing something here. “Why do I feel like I just got played?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Calli said casually as she pulled her iPad out of seemingly nowhere and started to tap away. “What are your account numbers?”
I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and passed her the card for the pack account with a suspicious frown starting to pull across my face.
As Calli started to type the numbers in with a sly smile on her face, Cassia leant over with a wince to see what she was doing on the screen. Her eyes widened in surprise, and then she barked out a laugh before she grabbed her stomach in pain and straightened up, looking slightly green.
“You totally just got played,” she said with a tired laugh.
“You need to go back to bed,” Hunter said in concern.
She must have been feeling bad because she nodded in agreement.
“Do you mind if we take a couple of books with us, Calli?” Hunter asked.
“Erm, yeah sure,” Calli said looking confused.
Hunter shrugged. “Cassia’s going out of her mind. I know she can’t touch them but I figured I could turn the pages for her.”
Cassia looked like she was going to swoon at the suggestion. It seemed Hunter had found a way to the prickly witch’s heart.
“Of course,” Calli grinned.
Cassia pointed out a couple of books on the table to Hunter, and he grabbed them in one hand while he gently put an arm around her waist. She must’ve been feeling bad because she didn’t fight him, leaning heavily against his side.
“She doesn’t look good,” I murmured after they’d walked out of the room.
“No, but hopefully, she should be all healed up by this evening.”
“It’s not your fault, you know. You’ve done all you could, and without you, she’d be dead right now.”
Calli nodded slowly before she quietly added. “And without me, she would never have been in that situation in the first place.”
“We both know that she wasn’t in a good place. At least now she has a chance at a life with her mate by her side. Possibly, I’m still not entirely sure how she feels about that,” I laughed.
“She adores him,” Calli grinned, “She’d have killed him by now otherwise.”
It was funny because it was true.
Before I could say anything else, Nash’s voice echoed from the doorway, “Grey, why has 3.6 million dollars just been transferred into our accounts?”
I calmly turned to look at Calli, who was just grinning at me. “Are you kidding me right now?”
“Hey, you said thirty per cent, and that’s thirty per cent,” she shrugged.
“You’ve been sitting on twelve million all this time,” Nash gasped.
“I told you when I first met you that my parents had left us a lot of money. It’s not my fault you didn’t believe me.”
I squinted my eyes in annoyance at her. Rather than saying what I wanted to, I just growled at Nash.
“Nash, can you make time to speak with Calli about getting some systems in place to organise the pack.” I heard his inhale of breath, and before he even asked, I added on. “And yes, you can update the office computer equipment at the same time, but run it all past Calli tomorrow,” I added with an evil grin on my face as the thought struck me.
Nash ran out of the library with a squeal of excitement, and Calli giggled in amusement at his antics.
“Why do I get a feeling that was payback?” she laughed.
“Oh, you have no idea what you’re in for.”
“Honey! I’m hoooome!” Tanner’s voice sang from the front of the house and was quickly followed by a stampede of little feet.
“Why do I get the feeling that Tanner is going to be the favourite?” I retorted.
“If it makes you feel better, it’s only because he’s a big kid at heart,” Calli laughed. “When are we doing the pack meeting?” she asked, suddenly serious.
“In about half an hour, I just need to start getting a list of what we need to discuss together.”
Calli passed me her iPad with a smile, and we sat in the library in silence while she read and I worked through a series of points that would need to be addressed. She was right, we needed to get some kind of system in place, and the program she was currently running on her iPad was fairly easy to use.
39
Tanner
The only thing better than coming home to a stampede of pups would’ve been if Calli was here in my arms too.
“We nearly got shot today!” Jacob gasped as he pulled out of the group hug/puppy pile, currently squashing me on the floor.
Maverick rolled his eyes and went to walk past us but then froze in his steps at what Jacob added.
“Coby’s Mum was here, and she had a gun!”
My grip on Coby tightened slightly, and he kept holding onto me just as tightly.
“Hey, you okay, bud?” I asked, peering
down at the little boy who was squeezing me as hard as he could.
Coby’s head nodded against my shirt, but it wasn’t convincing at all.
“Where’s Calli? Is everyone okay?” Maverick quickly asked, and then a look of confusion seemed to cross his face.
It had been an interesting day today with my brother. It was almost like he had some kind of split personality going on. One moment he would be reluctantly trying to fit in and seemed to openly talk with me, and the next, he went back to his snarky, rude self. He was trying, and the fact he was making the effort meant a lot. If he could get past everything, I knew he’d be happy here. We were both getting a second chance, and I wasn’t going to let him go easily.
“She’s in the library,” Jacob told us.
Maverick looked at me almost like he was asking permission, and I nodded for him to go on ahead. I wanted to talk to Coby first anyway.
“Why don’t you two go and see if you can find out what we’re going to have for dinner? Then I’ll find a way to persuade Calli to let us have burgers instead,” I suggested. Abby and Jacob took off after Maverick at the usual top speed they seemed to travel to most places.
Once they were gone, I gently pulled Coby from my front, and we scooted across the floor to sit with our backs against the wall.
“That must have been pretty weird, seeing your mom acting like that,” I said gently.
He nodded, and his little face scrunched up in thought.
“I don’t want her to be my mom,” he admitted with a hitch in his voice. “I hate her,” he whispered.
“You know you never have to leave us, right?”
“She said she was going to tell the police.” He didn’t look at me while he spoke, and I knew he was getting himself ready for when he would be taken away. There was no way in hell I was going to let that happen, though.
“Coby, you are pack, and pack stays together, always. We won’t let her or any human police take you away from us. We’ll protect you, buddy. You’re family now. And as for your mom, I don’t know, bud. We were all obviously wrong about her, but deep down, she’s still your mom. Maybe when you’re older, you might want to revisit that,” I shrugged. I didn’t want him to feel like he had to choose between her and us. She couldn’t raise him, not with him being a shifter. But that didn’t mean if in the future he wanted to have some kind of relationship with her he couldn’t.