CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE || THIERRY #2
“I still don’t understand why the witch couldn’t just hocus-pocus the vampire back to her. Or at least give us an exact location. The warlock in my pack can cast locator spells.”
“She tried,” I reminded him. “The best she could do was a general area.” He’d been right there when she’d done her casting, which made his question almost as annoying as searching Seattle’s massive shipping yard for a feral newborn vampire. “Her magic’s being blocked somehow.”
“Hmm.”
“What?” I demanded.
“What if this is part of her spell?” Jeremy gestured vaguely around us. “What if that’s how Quinn got free in the first place? Poppy and Simone had no idea what caused the chain to break. What if her own magic is blocking her from being able to find him?” He paused. “I doubt much else could.”
“What makes you think that?”
He shrugged. “Well, the night we met, I felt a weird compulsion to start running north. I didn’t question it, since I was spending most of my time as a wolf, and instinct kind of takes over everything else. But it was strange. It stopped after you and I met.”
Surprise flickered through me. “I felt a compulsion as well.”
“Maybe Poppy’s spell doesn’t manifest your fated mate. Instead, it guides you to them,” Jeremy mused. When I glanced at him, he’d gone thoughtful. “Which means this is probably all a domino effect for Quinn to meet his fated mate. It’s all a part of her spell.”
“That’s quite the intuitive leap.”
“Even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I’ve been on the brunt of it before,” he said dryly. “The compulsion’s pretty hard to ignore.”
If he was right, that would have explained the broken chains binding Quinn. Her magic had done it. It also explained why Poppy’s locator spell fizzled. Her own magic was blocking any attempts to find Quinn too soon.
“Or maybe it didn’t work,” I said.
“No. I watched it happen,” Jeremy said, shaking his head. “It worked. Him getting away from us? It’s probably part of fate’s plan for him. He’s a newborn vampire. Between you and Simone, he shouldn’t have been able to get very far before you caught him.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. I hadn’t picked up even a trace of his scent. By the time I reached the back door, he’d just… vanished.
“There’s no maybe about it,” Jeremy countered.
“He’s a ravenous vampire with no conscience in downtown Seattle.
We should be following a trail of bodies.
Instead, he comes here”—he gestured to the deserted shipping yard—“when he could have been halfway to Canada by now. Which, in my mind, means we’re supposed to find him.
But not yet. Not until the time is right. ”
I scowled, but mostly out of habit. Still, I was surprised by how quickly he’d put the pieces together. If he was right. Which he might not have been.
“You said you spent most of your time in wolf form,” I said after we checked two more containers and found them empty.
Jeremy grimaced. “You caught that, huh?”
“Your pack doesn’t want you around?”
He sighed, then gave in. “They’d tell you they do,” he said, carefully avoiding my gaze. “And I’m sure they want me back so I can be their alpha again.”
“Wait.” I stopped dead. “Be alpha again? Haven’t you been one all along?”
He looked like he wished the ground would swallow him whole. With visible effort, he met my eyes. “After what happened with James, after what I tried to do to him—what I forced my pack to do—I left.”
“They turned on you?”
He barked a humorless laugh. “No. Not even close. They were ready to forgive me. I hadn’t gone through with it, after all. And I know they care about me. But I couldn’t… stay. They were all so concerned. I couldn’t stand it.”
“Oh,” I said.
And suddenly, what he was saying made sense—an awful sort of sense.
Because hadn’t I done the same thing, without ever leaving at all?
Any time someone I cared about looked at me with concern, wanting to fix me, wasn’t my instinct to shove them away with as much force as I could muster?
Their concern was just a reminder of how broken I truly was.
Jeremy had reacted almost the same way I would have, in his shoes. Except he probably didn’t have it in him to shove the people he loved away with words—so he’d left them instead.
“I spent the last year in the woods. I was in wolf form as often as I could be. It was simpler that way.”
“But you came to Seattle…”
“For the council session,” Jeremy said. “Half my pack left when it was clear I had no intention of being their alpha anymore. And now Crescent Springs is undefended. The only reason I came to Seattle was to ask for backup, because the pack thinks the bleeds are going to start again soon.”
“Right,” I said, vaguely startled by the reminder of what had pushed us together in the first place. Nathaniel had made his helping me a condition of Jeremy securing the backup for his pack. But I hadn’t realized he was doing it for people he couldn’t even bear to be around.
We weren’t so different. Not at all.
“Monsters could come through,” Jeremy said. “I had no choice. I’m selfish and I’m a dick, but I’m not someone who can turn his back and let the people I love get slaughtered.”
“By things like what we saw in the dream last night,” I said, horror flooding me at the memory. “Things like that are what come through the bleeds.”
“Exactly like that.” Jeremy gave a thin smile.
“Wolves don’t just howl at the moon, Thierry.
We’re guardians of places where the veil is thin.
That’s what we’re supposed to be. Our calling is to defend the rest of the world from monsters that shouldn’t be in our reality.
That’s why we exist in the first place.” He let out a long breath.
“And I think they’re right—I can feel how unstable the veil is getting.
The bleeds will start again soon, if they haven’t already. The pack is going to need an alpha.”
“They’ve got an alpha!” I snapped, suddenly not liking where this was going. Not one bit.
“I can’t be what they need me to be,” Jeremy said quietly. “I can’t pretend I’m okay when I’m not. Losing Ian did something to me, Thierry. It put a darkness inside me that I can’t ignore. And the pack deserves better than me. They deserve someone who will lead them properly.”
“Okay, fine. Step down, then! Surely someone else in the pack wants a turn at playing leader!”
I hated the note of fear in my own voice.
“It doesn’t work like that.” He met my eyes for an instant before looking away. “You know, I really wish Quinten would just attack us. It’s the least he could do after putting us through all this trouble.”
“How does it work?” I asked, ignoring that last part. “You can’t just step down? Resign and say ‘no more’?”
“No,” he replied softly. “I really can’t. Either I die and it passes to my second-in-command, or someone else in the pack has to challenge me for alpha and win against me.”
“Okay, so arm-wrestle them and lose!” My voice was rising in a way I didn’t particularly like. “Or play a game of poker and fold!”
“Thierry.” His voice carried quiet reproach. “It’s not that sort of contest. We have to shift into wolf form and fight for dominance. Whoever wins gets to be alpha.”
“But you lot are still aware of who you are when you’re wolves,” I said slowly, trying not to process what he was actually saying. “It doesn’t need to be a fight to the death.”
“You’re right. Technically. But it usually is.
” A shadow crossed his face. He met my gaze, and I saw the regret there, as though he knew he was scaring me and hated it.
“When we’re in wolf form, instinct takes over.
Doubly so when we’re fighting. And we’ll do anything to defend ourselves. Even kill a friend.”
“So don’t fight, then!” I said, as though it were obvious. “Suck it up and be there for them!”
Jeremy swallowed. “When I go back, Reed—my second-in-command—is going to fight me. I ordered him to. Wolves have to obey their alpha. It’s a type of compulsion.”
“So why come to Rookwood, then?” I demanded, unable to keep the betrayal from my voice. “Why even try to get to know me at all, if you’re just going to run off and get yourself killed later?”
Before Jeremy could answer, a shadow dropped from the towering stack of shipping crates above us.
Quinn hit him in a blur, knocking him flat. I lunged forward, but I was too late. Quinn wrenched Jeremy’s head sideways and sank his fangs deep into my wolf’s pulsing jugular.