Witch of the Wolves

Chapter Forty-One

F ORTY - O NE

“The passage is in the basement,” Augustus whispers as we run down the hall.

Augustus and Julius are in the lead. Bishop and I are at the back, making sure no one falls behind. He has one hand firmly wrapped around mine, which isn’t the easiest way to run down a hall, but I can tell there’s no way he’s letting go.

I have my free hand over my nose and mouth, struggling to breathe without inhaling the smoke.

I can barely see, between the swirling smoke and my burning eyes.

I know I should put a wet cloth over my nose or get down on the floor and crawl, but there’s no time for that.

It isn’t just the fire we’re outrunning.

Marjorie managed to stall whoever came after the sorcerer, but shouts already sound outside, as they realize it’s taking too long for us to dive out windows and doors, fleeing the fire.

“Cover all the exits!” someone shouts. “Every window. Every door. Surround the house.”

Augustus opens the basement door, and we usher the others through.

Bishop and I are last. He’s in front of me, making sure Felix navigated the stairs successfully in wolf form. A whoosh behind me, and smoke billows in, as if a door has opened. I wheel, just as a hand closes on my shoulder.

My fingers fly up in a knockback, but there’s no one there to hit. Bishop has finally let go of my hand… because both of his are pinning a huge figure to the wall.

“Running?” a voice rumbles, and the smoke clears enough for me to make out the younger Cain. Harry’s face is awash with blood, one eye already swollen shut, one arm hanging uselessly, as if dislocated.

“Fucking coward,” he snarls at Bishop. “Taking your bitch mate and running, tail between your legs.”

Bishop doesn’t say a word. He just throws Harry aside and pushes me through the basement door… where I smack face-first into Julius.

“What’s going on?” Julius says as he squeezes past me. Then he sees Harry.

“You saved your cousin?” Harry says to Bishop. “Of course you did. He murdered my father. You murdered our Alpha. Now you both run, as fast as you can, while Trevelyan burns.”

Oliver pushes through and gets between Julius and Harry.

“You know Julius didn’t kill your father.

You know Bishop won a fair challenge fight.

You know we have all fought as long as we can fight before Bishop needed to put the Pack—what’s left of it—first. You have a brain in that head, Harry.

You know all this. Now you can come with us, or you can stay and die. ”

Julius’s low growl says which he’d prefer, and for a second, the dark look in Bishop’s eyes agrees. Then Bishop remembers who he is. The Alpha. And Harry is still a Pack member, entitled to his protection.

“Yes,” he says, his voice brittle. “Come or stay. It’s your choice. But if you lay a hand on Cordelia again—”

“Don’t threaten me.”

“Then don’t touch her. ”

“Come on,” Oliver says. “All of you. Or the Albion Pack is going to be wiped out bickering on their basement stairs.”

Bishop nods abruptly and nudges me through the door. He follows, the others up ahead. Harry just stands there, and I think that’s his answer, but then the door clicks shut behind us, and I hear his footsteps following.

Not what I want. Not at all. But Harry is Pack until either he or Bishop decides otherwise, and he hasn’t done anything to deserve banishment. Not yet.

Below, Ann whisper-hisses for us to be quiet. If we’re escaping through the basement, we can’t thunder down the steps, letting everyone know where we went.

We slow and then reach the metal door. Once we’re all through, Bishop closes the door and pulls down a heavy latch. As we turn, a high-pitched whimper comes from up ahead.

“Shh,” Ann says. “Don’t look.”

I hurry past Oliver to see Ann tugging Tabitha along, Felix nudging her with his muzzle. One of the other men says “My gods,” and another curses. Then they all move swiftly, following Augustus, urging them from up ahead.

Bishop catches up and tries to block my left side, herding me along.

That’s where Tabitha had been looking, and I don’t have time to wonder why before the stench of blood hits.

I look over and see the cell where I’d been held.

Bishop tries again to block my view, not looking himself, as if that smell tells him everything.

“What the hell?” Harry whispers.

And then I see it. Reginald. Or what remains of him. He’s been… tortured. That’s the word, I guess, but what I see isn’t torture. It’s sadism and it’s rage, and it’s a dozen times worse than any corpse upstairs.

“Silas,” Julius mutters. “That was your precious Alpha, Harry. That’s what he did to an old man who betrayed him.”

Initially, Silas would have tortured him for the truth, like he’d done with Felix. But then he tortured Reginald for the betrayal. Killed him slowly and horribly.

I don’t care what the elderly advisor did to me. I think he believed he was doing the right thing, for his Pack and maybe even for me. Yes, he’d betrayed the Pack—likely for money—but that didn’t deserve the horrors my father inflicted on him. Nothing could.

Harry pauses at that cell door, looking in, his eyes distant, as if processing. When Bishop tells him we need to go, he growls but obeys.

We move quicker after that, everyone silent after what we just witnessed, the reminder of what their Alpha—my father—truly was.

My father.

My grandmother.

This is what I come from. I squeeze my eyes shut and picture Lenora instead, picture my mother, picture Flora—the woman I knew as my grandmother. They were all Levines, and they weren’t Beryl. They fled from her. I’m sure of that.

I look over at Oliver and nod to myself. My uncle is a good man, the opposite of my father. Silas’s mother was, by all accounts, a good woman, and no one calls his father “good” but he was decent in his way.

I am not my grandmother. I am not my father. I get to choose who I am and who I will become.

I get to choose.

Augustus leads us through a hidden door that has even Oliver cursing, amazed he’d never known it was there, when he’d lived at Trevelyan all his life. I understand why he didn’t know. I can’t imagine Pack children running around down here for fun. Not with that cell nearby.

We go through the hidden door into a darkness so black that no amount of night vision will help. But a light spell will. I cast it, and Tabitha gives a little squeak of delight as I guide the ball ahead of us, illuminating our way.

The dirt tunnel stinks of mold and neglect.

I wonder how long it’s been since anyone used it.

Was it the Alpha’s secret escape route? Something Reginald failed to tell Silas, in hopes he needed his own escape?

I imagine Reginald in the cell, tortured by Silas, thinking of this tunnel only a few dozen feet away.

If he could get to it, he’d be free. But he couldn’t get to it.

The tunnel seems to go on forever. Then a solid wall of dirt appears in front of us. We all stop, glancing about in confusion. Bishop looks up and grunts. There’s a hatch… twenty feet over our heads.

“I don’t suppose the blueprints mentioned a rope?” Julius says as he squints up. “Stairs?”

I move my light to the wall, where recessed spots seem to form a ladder.

“And the witch to the rescue,” Julius says. “I was about to ask for a levitation spell, but this’ll do.”

“Not for Harry,” I say. “You’ll need to fix his shoulder first. And Felix will need to transform back.”

“No time,” Bishop says. “Felix, start climbing and I’ll boost you from below. Harry—”

“You don’t want me touching your mate?” the young man says. “Then don’t touch me either. I’ll manage.”

It isn’t easy, but Bishop’s right. There’s no time for Felix to transform. As for Harry, while that dislocated shoulder could be fixed in seconds, we can’t risk the scream.

Felix gets out first, scrambling as Bishop boosts him. Then Bishop hops back down, earning a grumbled “You couldn’t just keep going?” from Julius.

“And leave his helpless mate to fend for herself?” Ann says. “Perish the thought.”

We exchange an eye roll, and Julius chuckles, but Bishop ignores us.

“Julius?” he says. “Oliver? Go next and scout. Make sure it’s safe while I get the others up.”

They obey, and once Oliver calls “clear,” Bishop sends Tabitha up, and then Ann, followed by the rest of the Pack. We’re last.

When I reach for the makeshift ladder, Bishop tugs me back to him. Then he holds me tight, nose buried in my hair, inhaling deeply.

“You’re all right, yes?” he says against my hair. “As well as you can be?”

“I am.” I swallow. “I—I didn’t even get a chance to congratulate you, to tell you how proud I was of you, how happy I was to see you become Alpha and then…”

His mouth comes to mine in a crushing kiss that I meet in kind, both of us pouring our confusion and our grief and our fury into that kiss. When it breaks, he holds my face in both hands.

“If anything had happened to you…”

He doesn’t finish that, only kissing me again, pushing me up against the ladder until I’m straddling him, feeling him pushed against me, hot and urgent, and I want to give in to that, just for a moment, let the pleasure wash everything else away, for me, but most of all for him, and yet I can hear the others above us, and I break the kiss.

“Best not let them see their new Alpha taking his new mate against a ladder,” I say.

He gives a low ragged chuckle. “Perhaps not. You deserve better than a ladder.”

“I don’t think that’s the concern. We are mid-escape. But yes, a ladder isn’t a lamppost. You need to hold out for a lamppost.”

A louder laugh, as if taking refuge in a moment of relief, and then he rolls his shoulders, hefts me onto the ladder and prods me up… though not before pressing against my backside and making me wish we really did have a few more minutes.

Damn him.

We climb out to find the wolves are milling about scanning the area, making sure it’s safe. It’s dusk now, the sun dropping fast, and I peer around the clearing. We’re in the forest, deep forest it looks like, but there’s a small spot here where the trees don’t grow.

I find Julius and cast a quick healing spell on his wounds. Then I’m going to speak to Ann when Bishop catches my hand, alarm on his face, as if I’d vanished forever. He pulls me over, and I see what he was doing.

Watching Trevelyan burn.

Watching his home burn.

The seat of the Albion Pack. His Pack. Going up in flames.

“You’ll come back,” I whisper.

He nods.

“The Pack is the wolves, right?” I say. “Not the building?”

Another nod.

“I don’t even think they can burn it down,” I say. “It’s stone.”

He tugs me closer and kisses the top of my head as I lean against him.

“I’ll fix this,” he says. Then he goes quiet. “I keep saying that, don’t I? And I don’t fix anything.”

My hand tightens on his. “You promised me freedom, and I’m free.”

Another kiss to my hair. “You are. I hope you know that. A piece of paper changes nothing.”

“I know.” I lean into him. “You promised me freedom, and you promised the Pack freedom and you promised the maids freedom. You followed through. This is…” My voice catches as I look at the burning house. “It’s nothing you could have foreseen in a million years.”

“I didn’t know anything about Silas’s deal with your grandmother.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t know she existed. I didn’t know your family had a cabal.” Another pause. “I keep racking my brain, and all I can find are little snippets and whispers that could be about them.”

“I can’t even find those, and I’ve been part of the London supernatural community for nearly a decade. I can only think that the Levine Cabal must be from somewhere else. If my mother and aunt fled, they wouldn’t stay in the same city—or even country.”

“We’ll get answers.”

Behind us, Julius fixes Harry’s relocated shoulder, with more force than necessary, judging by the curses. I hear Oliver talking to Augustus, offering his sympathy on Charlie’s death.

“It happened so fast,” Augustus whispers. “I was so glad we both survived and then… he didn’t.”

My heart clenches, and I remember Charlie and Miles and Jacques and all the others. And Claude. Most of all, I remember Claude.

“Felix.” I turn to look for the young wolf, but he’s nowhere in sight. I step away from Bishop and raise my voice. “Felix?”

Bishop wheels fast, his gaze scanning the darkening forest. “Where’s Felix?”

“Took off that way,” Harry says, pointing. “I saw him running when I got up here.”

“What?” Julius says. “You saw Felix leave, and you didn’t say anything?”

Harry shrugs. “His choice. Must have decided he didn’t want to follow the Alpha who got his father killed.”

Julius bears down on him. “Bishop didn’t get Claude—”

“Enough,” Bishop says. “Felix wouldn’t leave. If he ran off, he must have seen something.”

Tabitha signs madly.

“Horses?” Bishop says. “What about the…?”

He turns slowly, and lets out a vicious curse. I follow his gaze and gasp. In the distance, there’s a second fiery glow against the dusk.

“The stables,” I whisper. “They set fire to the stables.”

“And didn’t let out the horses first,” Julius says, his voice brittle with anger. “Felix must have seen it. Or heard the horses…” He glances toward Tabitha and doesn’t say the rest.

Heard the horses screaming.

“I’ll get him,” Bishop says. “Everyone else, continue on that way.” He points.

“Head to the back of the property, by the pond. If a few of you could transform, that would be wise, in case we encounter trouble. Who can transform quickest? Oliver?” He says a couple of other names, two of the older werewolves I don’t know.

“ I’ll get Felix,” Julius says. “You stay with—”

A crackle of undergrowth. I spin, hands raised in a spell as Felix runs out. He stinks of smoke, with one ear singed, and he’s panting, but with an air of satisfaction that tells me he did what he set out to do. Freed the horses.

Tabitha throws her arms around him, and he tolerates it for five seconds before wriggling free.

Bishop lays a hand on Felix’s head. “Good lad. Now, you can transform back or stay like that. Some of us will be—”

Hooves. The pound of hooves. We all look up as two horses burst from the woods.

Julius laughs. “Of course you two would follow him.” He glances at me. “Can you ride?”

I’m startled for a moment. Then I nod.

“Hope you don’t need a saddle.” He looks at Bishop. “Might I suggest everyone who can transform does that? And the ladies can ride?”

“We need to reach the edge of the property first,” Bishop says.

“Felix?” Julius says. “Lead the way, and let’s hope the horses follow.”