Iron Oracle

by Merry Ravenell

  Iron Oracle

  Merry Ravenell

  9 Swords

  Iron Oracle

  Copyright © 2018 by Merry Ravenell

  All rights reserved.

  Iron Oracle is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For E, V, T, & S

  Contents

  Before

  Weed Whacking

  This Won’t Go Well

  Accusations, Stated And Implied

  A Simple Pen

  A Glimpse

  Between

  Her Servant

  The Bell

  Clinch

  Flint Was Right

  SableFur: Interlude

  Not So Fast

  MarchMoon: Currency

  In/Sane

  Boss Encounter

  Gabel: Run, Fight, Die

  Ready Or Not, Here I Come...

  The First Test

  The Grove: Meeting

  Gabel: The Enemy of My Enemy Is...

  Hix : Excuse Me Sir, What’s In The Trunk?

  The Second Test

  Demented Easter Bunny

  Death Phase

  Courtship Masquerade

  Catch a Luna By The Tail

  Gabel: Burn It

  Peeping Wolf

  A Dangerous Meeting of Minds

  Flint’s Song Redux

  The Grove: Sing Of Love

  Back of Beyond

  There And Back... Again

  One Thread Cut

  Lucas : End, Beginning, Middle... In That Order

  Stand Up

  The Blood of an Alpha

  No Sand Remains

  All Must Believe

  Starlight Falls

  About the Author

  Also By Merry Ravenell

  Appendix

  Before

  My fingernails dug more red marks into his flesh, pulling up layers of skin.

  His grip tightened, his tongue hot and rough against mine. The scratching, raw pain in his flesh coursed through the Bond, transmuting to pleasure as it reached me.

  He was dark, hot, storming Tides. The Bond wrapped us up and smothered both of us, together.

  And I wasn’t afraid.

  Beads of blood welled up from his skin afterwards.

  “Buttercup,” he pressed his index finger to one of the freshest gashes, pulled up a fingertip and the blood created a shallow stain between the ridges of his fingerprint, “you almost are cruel with those claws.”

  “Should I restrain myself?”

  “You should try harder.” His voice was husky. He pulled me back down into the blankets, lips seeking mine.

  It was too easy to want him.

  Now my reserve had no excuse, my hesitation pointless. I should have cast it all off and embraced everything between us, but...

  “Old habits die hard,” he whispered.

  We had taken the vows, I knew his secrets, it was possible I knew more about him than he knew about himself, yet, I couldn’t quite let go of the ledge I dangled from.

  He didn’t care. “You’ll trust me one day, buttercup.”

  One day.

  He was the Moon’s Dark Comet, and served Her anger.

  I was an Oracle, and the Balance-Keeper, the point on which light and dark turned.

  Complete trust and faith were for fools.

  Weed Whacking

  My first official act as Luna would be an execution.

  Gardenia waited in the basement.

  Gabel went with me, but only to observe. The discipline of she-wolves was my concern now, and one Gabel was very glad to hand over to me. He didn’t know what to do with a female who needed rough handling. It seemed unfathomable to him that females could behave just as badly as males.

  Hix didn’t care about handling anyone roughly, so he’d shackled Gardenia in the basement. She slumped against the concrete wall. Shackles held her hands above her head. She trembled on her knees from the burning agony of the silver bars inset on the skin-side of the leather shackles.

  The leather was as much a torment as the silver. The silver prevented shifting, but (in theory) you could still chew through the shackles. The moment the silver components were (unavoidably) ingested made things so much worse.

  It also provided a way for a wolf to kill themselves. A dignified option given to those who didn’t need to be kept around for questioning or spectacle, but for whom death was still a certainty.

  Hix had given Gardenia the option of ending her life herself, at her choosing. How appropriately Hix.

  Gardenia had apparently not realized the severity of her situation.

  Her skin was translucent and blue-tinged, her eyes haloed in purple darkness, bruises forming on tender flesh as the silver poison caused tiny capillaries and blood vessels to rupture.

  What a damn waste.

  She could have been so much more. Even now she was still full of fight, and wouldn’t quit, even with silver eating away at her cardiovascular system and poisoning her brain.

  Her gaze moved to Gabel, then back to me.

  “This is the end,” I told her.

  She looked at Gabel again. This time she didn’t look away.

  Gabel said nothing.

  Gardenia believed she could have had Gabel. She believed she had been denied.

  “It’s over,” I repeated.

  She tore her gaze away from Gabel. She hissed like a pit viper.

  In a weird way, I admired her. Flint had been right about the courage of females: a male would have broken by now and probably gobbled down that silver (or at least been begging for forgiveness), but not Gardenia. I understood. I’d fought the Bond and punished my body just to punish Gabel. It hadn’t mattered how much it’d hurt. It had mattered that it had hurt, and it had been a pain of my own choosing, and no one else’s.

  But I hadn’t been willing to die for any of it. Death was the ultimate price for a failed grasp at power, and I wouldn’t have accepted failure. I also hadn’t intended to succeed.

  Gardenia? She had failed.

  She could have amassed her own power and prestige without trying to siphon it off a male. I had even offered her prestige on a platter if she’d played along with the decoy story. Not good enough for her.

  “I gave you every chance,” I told her. “You had the chance to help this pack by playing along with the story that you were a decoy to tease out traitors. You chose to chase power with the maw between your legs.”

  She hissed. “Fuck you, Luna. I know how Gabel touched me, and how his cock felt inside me.”

  Did she think I’d eventually believe this story? “He never touched you. He used you, and if you had any quality, you’d have realized he was never going to touch you, and you were just his pawn.”

  “That’s hilarious coming from you considering he used you worst of all. Have you forgiven him now that you have him?” She giggled to herself.

  I couldn’t forgive Gabel for what he’d done. I may have taken the vows, but everything that had happened in the beginning still sat uneasily within me. “I will never forgive him.”

  She curled her lips at me. “And I’ll make sure you think about it all the damn time.”

  “Good luck with that. You won’t be here. You’re a rabid bitch and too dangerous to let live.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and the blue tinge under them deepened as her pulse
increased and her blood pressure shot up, causing the leaky vessels to deteriorate faster. “You can’t execute me. I’m pregnant.”

  A smack of shock and horror hit me. The last thing I wanted to deal with was Platinum’s little pup-spawn. She’d make a lot of noise about it having been sired by Gabel, or Hix, or Flint, or whatever other male’s name seemed most advantageous at the time.

  Then I composed myself. I was Luna now, and this was IronMoon, so I needed to set the tone on this sort of nonsense. “So what? You think I want your little pup-spawn around?”

  “You wouldn’t execute a pregnant female.” She managed to toss her head even though the motion rattled her shackles.

  No, I probably wouldn’t, but she wasn’t pregnant. “How stupid do you think I am? You aren’t pregnant. All that silver would have caused a miscarriage.”

  Silver attacked our brains and cardiovascular systems. Placentas dissolved, and the bleeding began within hours, but the pup was usually dead before then. The silver passed through the cord from the mother. Very occasionally an older, larger pup close to term could survive if the exposure was small, and the pup was delivered promptly.

  Gardenia hadn’t gotten a fatal dose of silver from the shackles, but she was bruising. If there had been a pregnancy it should have been smeared everywhere by now.

  She scowled at me and hissed a third time.

  I turned and walked to the large, floor-to-ceiling cabinets lining the wall under the stairs. One contained cleaning supplies. The others contained implements that caused a shudder to go through my system.

  The Moon saw none of this. Oh, She was aware of what transpired down here in this bleach-white hell, but She didn’t care.

  I chose a leather collar, thick and sturdy, with large silver plates sewn all along on the inside. Many of the things in the cabinets had some horrific arcane purpose, but this item was straightforward. Unlike restraint collars with small plates, or the spiked collars Gabel had used on the runners, this one’s leather was fully lined with silver plates.

  Gabel watched Gardenia without sympathy or even moving, seeming not to breathe. Sensing my gaze, he turned his head towards me, ocean eyes calm.

  The stiff leather of the collar pressed into my palms. I could just have Gabel do it with swift, practiced claws. He expected me to ask him.

  This was between the bitch and I, and I was the Luna of IronMoon.

  I’d prove to myself I could do this.

  “I’ll never grovel to you,” Gardenia spat at me.

  “Didn’t I tell you we’re past that now? You seem to think it’s just another punishment for you to endure, another pack going to throw you out, and you’ll go somewhere else, like you always have.”

  She snarled, lips curling with a feral grin. “There are opportunities out there.”

  I stepped over the shallow lip into the basin of the holding pen. She tugged against her shackles, the silver burning into her wrists and she hissed as her skin burned. I told her, “This isn’t your punishment. This is your execution.”

  Her blue eyes widened in horror. She yanked at the chains again. “You—you—”

  I sprang forward and smashed my knee into her face. Her head snapped back and bashed into the concrete wall. Blood splattered me and the white wall from her broken nose, and she slumped, dazed, against her chains. I hooked the collar around the back of her neck, and quickly slid the end through the buckle, tightening it to a snug, gagging squeeze as she clawed out of her fog. Blood gushed out of her mouth and nose, staining my hands and wrists, splattering my dress further.

  The silver plates met the soft skin of her neck and sizzled. She jerked and thrashed, then gagged once.

  I stepped out of her reach.

  Her hands tried to claw at the collar but the shackles only allowed enough slack for her fingertips to scratch at the leather.

  I forced myself to watch her flailing. “This is how you die. Alone. No one knowing. No one caring. No announcement. No decree. No public reckoning. No spectacle. Just this collar and nothing else. I’ll tell Cook in private once you’re dead.”

  She screeched, “You can’t do this!”

  For Gardenia there couldn’t be a worse punishment than dying alone and powerless, robbed of even the ability to scream obscenities and lies as she died. Alone, forgotten, the pack not asking nor caring... that was punishment for any wolf. Even her. Especially her.

  She screeched again, fingertips scratching at the latigo, tears bubbling out of her eyes, and the bruising spreading in a blue spiderweb as the stress collapsed more of her blood vessels.

  In her weakened state the larger silver plates of the collar would cause fatal bleeding soon. She’d be in a fog within half an hour, and dead within a day at most. She wouldn’t be aware for most of it. Some might say she deserved to suffer horribly, but suffering would have given her a leather strap to bite down on, a chain to throw herself again. Simply being stopped, without an audience was the real punishment for her.

  “He’ll never love you. He’ll always think of me,” she gasped.

  The cold, cruel resolve within me didn’t hesitate or second guess or even pay her any mind.

  Gabel turned and went to the steps.

  I gave Gardenia one last, distant look.

  So this was how it ended for her: trying to scratch at the collar, her gaze pleading with Gabel’s back to turn around, acknowledge her, stop me.

  I followed Gabel up the stairs, and didn’t look back.

  “Buttercup.” Gabel came into my workroom. “What are you doing here?”

  I looked up from my place slumped against the wall by the windows. “Sitting.”

  He crouched down next to me, elbows on his knees.

  I had done it, without hesitation, feeling, or remorse. My hands hadn’t even had the decency to shake. I had a sore spot on my knee from where I had broken her nose, and I didn’t care. She was probably down there right now, the Hounds on their way for her, and I didn’t care.

  I cared that I didn’t care.

  Gabel said, “You didn’t flinch when it counted, buttercup.”

  I hated Gardenia. She was ruin encased in flesh, and I was still crying. “Don’t tell me it gets easier, Gabel.”

  “I’ve never found it difficult, so I won’t say that. You did what had to be done.”

  “It’s that it had to be done at all! That stupid bloodsucker!”

  “Is that what’s upsetting you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I didn’t hesitate.”

  “This is a good thing.”

  “And we still have her mess to deal with,” I said bitterly, and I looked away from him.

  “She’s gone now,” Gabel pointed out.

  Yes, yes she was. Her memory would linger for a few years, a weapon too powerful for our enemies to resist. Gabel of IronMoon, the wolf who killed those who broke promises, had himself engaged in some unthinkable discretion with Gardenia.

  It would have been better if he actually had. Because then it’d be the truth. Simple. Clean. Easy to understand. No one would ever believe the truth. The truth was worse.

  He swore to me he’d never touched her. I could imagine how he might have lured her with looks, the force of his presence, the sound of his voice, whatever words he’d used to convince Gardenia there was something, something there, all the while his goal being to goad me into a jealous rage.

  Just to prove to me he could. Just to feel the Bond punish him so he could refuse to obey.

  “You should have just fucked her,” I said.

  Gabel asked, “Would it make you feel better if you thought I’d done it out of lust?”

  “Lust beats petty malevolence. That petty malevolence will haunt me, us, and this pack for the rest of our lives. The truth is so much worse than the lie everyone half-believes.”

  Gabel cocked his head to the side. “It’s a little late to hate me, buttercup. But you can be aggravated as long as you like. You are Luna now. You have won.”

>   A stupid, pointless fight I hadn’t been able to prevent from going to this final conclusion. “No comment on how I should just be able to deal with it, Gabel?”

  “You did deal with it.”

  “And it was a stupid reason to spill blood.”

  “Stupid is one of the best reasons. There is too much stupid.”

  “Then I should cut off your balls for causing it.”

  “Check and mate, buttercup. But I learned the error of my ways. She kept right on with her doomed ambitions.”

  Good point.

  Gabel shifted on the balls of his feet. “Gardenia no longer merits thought, not that she ever merited much at all. But what does merit thought is I have not heard from MarchMoon about their dead Alpha yet.”

  This Won’t Go Well

  At our mating, Gabel had given the MarchMoon Beta two days to re-affirm loyalty or deliver a writ of war. It was now several days later.

  “I will have to tell Hix to get ready,” Gabel said matter-of-factly. “If they think silence will confuse the issue, they’re wrong.”

  “It’s probably just cowardice,” I muttered. The MarchMoon weren’t going to declare loyalty, and they weren’t going to declare war. “Did they surrender outright before?”

  “No, had to bloody them up. More than a little. It was a good fight.”