Chapter 37 Jax
Jax
It was the most bizarre experience of my life, standing in the lab at the Crescent Building, watching Dakota converse with someone I could neither see nor hear.
Kosuke led him through preparing a potion, and I was relieved, yet again, that I wasn’t a mage. No, I’d never really wanted that, but there were times it would’ve been nice not to have to prove my decency in any mixed supernatural company.
But the whole thing—casting, brewing potions, accounting for the movement of stars and the winds and who knew what else—felt needlessly complicated.
No wonder they were such assholes. They’d earned every drop of their arrogance in long hours spent learning this crap.
“Here,” Dakota handed me a cup when he was finished.
I arched a brow skeptically down at the dense, golden liquid. “It’ll wear off before the full moon?”
He nodded. “We’re just hedging our bets. No more interference from Grant until the actual day. You’ll just be . . . less likely to fall into misfortune. That’s all.”
Thing was, if Dakota had handed me a cup of mud and told me to drink it, I would’ve. And this—well, he’d clearly poured himself into the effort of making it.
I drank every drop.
As unpleasant as the viscous potion was to swallow down, afterward I felt . . . light. There was a bubbly certainty in my stomach that everything would be fine.
And for the next few weeks, they were. When Charles was driving us around San Francisco, we never hit traffic. All our contracts went off easily. When we ordered out food, it showed up early.
It was a bunch of little stuff, but it all stacked.
The day of the full moon, I couldn’t tell if that warm, certain confidence was due to lingering effects of the potion—a condition I wasn’t going to think too hard about, because I didn’t see a lot of sense concerning myself if the timing was slightly off or demanding more compliance with the law to myself than I applied to assholes and users—or if it was simply that when things went right and right and right, it was easier to believe that they would continue to do so.
We weren’t putting off the challenge again, no matter how convinced I was that Grant would try and pull something to get out of it. Everything on our end was falling into place, and I couldn’t take another season, another month, another minute of this shit hanging over us.
I’d half expected to see Kent on the other side. I’d braced for that final betrayal.
When we got to the lake, there wasn’t anyone on the other side at all.
Well, at least there wasn’t the lineup of snarling wolves at Grant’s back that I expected. Grant himself was nowhere to be seen.
But there was a figure on the ground, legs folded, hands braced hard on the ground, and an enormous gray wolf stood beside him.
Aleks.
I held out a hand to keep the others back. Most of the pack had insisted on coming, though I’d wanted to encourage them not to.
I didn’t know what kind of fight this would turn into, but by law, there was no scenario in which both our packs should fight each other. It was a challenge between Grant and me.
And still, they’d insisted on coming. They wanted to have my back, even if their presence was unnecessary.
I adored them for it, and I didn’t want them an inch closer to that snarling wolf behind Aleks than they needed to be.
This was wrong. The air carried the sharp, metallic scent of blood, and there were only the two of them where the Idaho pack ought to be. Where was Grant?
“Aleks?”
He looked up at me. His skin was pale, a sheen of sweat across his own face. His lip curled in pain, and his arm was wrapped around his middle.
Grant always went for the softest part he could get to, and I stared, horrified, at the dark red stain on Aleks’s shirt beneath his arm.
I had a sick, sharp stab of gratitude that we’d left Cash behind for this.
As I stepped closer, into the field of grass enclosed on three sides by trees, the enormous gray wolf bunched its shoulders and lowered himself toward the ground, growling.
Grant wasn’t nearly as big.
Fuck, I wasn’t sure I was as big as the wolf next to Aleks.
I held up my hands, palms out. “I’m just checking on him,” I told the wolf, whose mouth pulled back in a vicious snarl.
Aleks leaned hard against the wolf’s side, half, I thought, because he needed to, and half to give the wolf a reason to stay still.
“The trees,” Aleks rasped, his eyes hooded from blood loss.
Grant had done this to him. His alpha. It was the only reason Aleks was still bleeding, and it was the reason Grant deserved every ounce of retribution coming his way.
“Watch the—” Aleks hissed, glaring now.
That was all I heard until a heavy, furry weight crashed into me. My senses had been filled with blood, the horror of seeing another wolf hurt and not healing.
I’d let my guard down, and Grant had taken his chance.
“Jax!” Dakota shouted.
We tumbled into the dirt. My shoulder hit first, and Grant’s claws raked my chest. They mostly caught on my shirt, but a sharp sting dragged across my skin in their wake.
He snapped his jaws at me, and I scrambled back.
He lunged for me, and it was all I could do to roll away and twist to get my legs under me. My arms.
I shifted, and then it was an all-out brawl.
Grant threw himself at me with every ounce of his strength. I was bigger, and maybe the better fighter in a fair one, so he’d only had the element of surprise to help him, and he was quickly losing that.
He darted in low, and his jaws locked on my front right leg. My bones snapped, and I howled in protest. But snapping bones? Yeah, our whole bodies reformed every time we shifted. It hurt, but the second I grabbed his neck in my mouth, jerking him around, he had to loosen his bite to adjust.
My bones stitched back together as fast as he’d broken them, and I was furious.
I jumped through the air and came down hard. His grunt when he hit the ground carried all the air that was in his lungs, and I tore at him with tooth and claw.
But even then, with him trapped beneath me, I—
I didn’t go for his throat. Didn’t tear his belly apart.
It was a hard thing, to kill a werewolf, and even after everything, I didn’t—
I didn’t fucking want to. I wanted him to submit, to admit defeat, to leave us the fuck alone, just like with Reeve. I’d never had that killer instinct people thought alphas needed. I didn’t want his blood on my fangs, in my mouth, on my hands.
As much as I wanted to be in this case, I was never going to be the kind of man to kill anybody.
I hadn’t killed Reeve.
I hadn’t killed Jiro.
I couldn’t kill Grant now, and if I couldn’t do what was necessary to defend my pack, what kind of alpha was I really?
This was the world we’d come from, and I was no more suited to it today than I’d been when we left.