Chapter 18 Dakota
Dakota
Ihad never felt more useless in my entire life as the moment that we realized the house was on fire.
I was a mage, super powerful and able to fell werewolves with a single thought .
. . except that I knew how to start a fire, but I had no idea how to stop one.
It seemed like it would simply be the opposite of starting a fire, but when I tried that, the result was a dimming of the flames, but they didn’t go out.
And the moment I stopped concentrating on it, they went right back to their previous height.
We didn’t have time for me to play with spells.
I had to do something. The blond guy who’d warned about Grant rushed right past me into the side door, like running into fires was just something people did.
In the moment, I figured helping him was my best bet, so I concentrated on the flames in that part of the house, made them as low as I could, spending every bit of effort I could on it.
When he burst out of the door a few moments later carrying Maia, I was doubly grateful I’d done so.
That was everyone, I thought, repeating my previous head count. Everyone out of the house. Everyone safe.
As safe as they could be with an enemy pack hanging around.
Blond guy was coughing from smoke inhalation, his voice raspy as he assured Jax that Maia was alive, but before I could go try to help him, Grant stalked up and snarled at him. “Where is Giselle?”
Giselle? The monster who’d tried to force Gillian to sleep with a guy who could have been her grandfather?
The blond guy coughed some more while Grant screeched at him about how he was supposed to protect Giselle, and finally he looked up and shook his head. “Dead. She was trapped when center wall fell down. I didn’t get to her.”
Now, maybe it was the fact that we’d been working with a lot of fae lately. Or maybe it was the fact that I, myself had been looking for loopholes in laws that I could slide through.
But that was an interesting way of putting things, wasn’t it? Not “I couldn’t get to her.” No. “I didn’t get to her.”
Those were very different things.
Grant had a meltdown right there in the middle of the group, screeching about how Giselle was the only loyal one of the bunch, and then he marched off.
I turned to Jax, but he wasn’t paying any attention at all, too busy assuring himself that his pack was safe and accounted for, counting everyone over and over while cradling Maia to his chest. Behind him, Seth stood, looking tortured.
He and Maia had a . . . a thing happening. He had to feel like utter dirt.
Still, Jax had broken off the attack to come save pack members. What did it mean for the challenge?
“It will happen on the next full moon,” the blonde woman I’d noticed before whispered, having come up behind me without me noticing. “The challenge.”
I turned to look at her, frowning. “Not just continued now?”
She shook her head. “An external threat to the packs involved takes precedence until all danger has passed. An easy escape, don’t you think?”
Of course.
Grant had arranged for the fire to happen, as a backup in case he’d bitten off more than he could chew. And in having to fight Jax, he certainly had. Now, he’d been given another month to come up with a better plan.
“We owe your son one,” I told her. When she met my eye with a lifted brow, I tipped my head toward Maia. “He saved a member of our pack.”
She smiled at that and inclined her head to me. “And perhaps in saving your Maia instead of that monster Giselle, he saved many other members of our pack in the same moment.”
“I’ve got a better point, if Grant is offended,” I said, letting myself fall back in the grass, ignoring the fact that I might be doing permanent damage to my suit.
It was going to take a miracle to save it from smoke damage anyway.
She turned and looked at me, one brow lifted, waiting.
“There was no reason Giselle should have been in our house. She shouldn’t have been in there to save to begin with. So what was she up to?”
We both knew what she’d been doing.
She’d been starting a fucking fire. Maybe it’d gotten ahead of her and she’d been trapped in it herself, but I wasn’t taking credit for that because of one little spell.
It was so things went a little bad—you threw out some LEGOs on the floor, and you stepped on one.
Presumably, Giselle wouldn’t have gotten trapped in a flaming building if she hadn’t committed arson.
Instead of pointing that Giselle’s culpability, though, the blonde woman nodded, like she was considering my words and agreeing with them.
“This is a question we should ask Grant, I think, if he has questions about no one saving her. How could we have known where she was, when she was not where she should be?”
“Exactly,” I agreed. Then I frowned at my bad manners and turned toward her, brushing my hand off on my slacks. “I’m Dakota, by the way.”
She laughed, and it was beautiful. Musical, almost. “Everyone knows you, witchwolf. Control of you is half of why Grant is here. I am Ekaterina.”
“It’s nice to meet you Ekaterina. You should know that if by some fluke of rule fuckery Grant manages to take control of my pack, I’ll kill him.
Pack laws be damned. I won’t ever work for him.
” I met her eyes as I said it, and neither of us so much as flinched.
She nodded, and I thought there was something pleased in her.
“You may call me Katya,” she said. “And Grant has forgotten that not all wolves follow. Some of us would like not to, but do not yet have the power to stop. You? You do not need anyone to follow. You do not need a pack, or wolves, or help. He forgets that not everyone is controllable, because he has too long been among followers.”
“What power does someone need to stop him? Couldn’t they just challenge him the way Jax challenged his brother?”
She looked at me for a long time after I said it, but just as I was starting to think maybe it was a silly question and somehow I should already know the answer, she nodded and looked away, toward her pack members.
Then she started speaking. “It is not always so easy. Your alpha, he is a strong man who saw injustice and had to fix it. Some of us have been raised to think that injustice is the way of things.” She looked over at the man I was almost certain was her son, and gave a little smile.
“Sometimes, what we need is to see a strong alpha who refuses injustice, to realize this is a choice that can be made.”
Us. Jax. She meant that seeing the Crescent pack might help her son stop following Grant.
That very moment, he was staring at Grant, who was having a tantrum about how important Giselle had been, and how the young wolf was a failure to his entire pack for allowing a member to come to harm.
In the middle of his rant, the man turned his back on him, coming over to stand in front of us. “You are well, Mother?”
“I am fine, Aleks. This is Dakota. He is witchwolf. Very nice young man.”
Aleks nodded to me, then gave a tiny little smirk as he looked up and met Jax’s eye, then looked back at me, and winked.
Brazen asshole.
I kinda liked him.
He held a hand out to first his mother, then me, helping us up off the ground.
Jax, of course, couldn’t let that be, and came up to wrap his arms around me from behind, marking his territory like a dog pissing on my legs.
Somewhere behind me, Kosuke muttered something about damned disgusting dogs.
I smiled. “Thank you for saving Maia, Aleks. She’s a cherished part of our pack, and we appreciate it. ”
He inclined his head and shoulders. “I would never see an innocent hurt in pack power games.” Then he paused, glanced over his shoulder and said, “Any who would, should perhaps not be in charge of a pack.”
“Damned right,” Jax agreed. I wasn’t sure if he knew exactly the conversation he was having, but the exclamation lit something in Aleks’s eyes as he took his mother’s arm and turned away from us.