Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Marcus
I run through the woods, my mind racing, four legs pumping against the forest ground.
The graves. My brother.
I push forward, anger and bewilderment moving through me. It’s not possible. Adrian must be wrong.
I reach the edge of my territory and see Adrian standing in front of four gravestones. He hands me a pair of pants as I shift back into human form, his expression grim. I don’t even look at the garment as I tug it on, my eyes focused on the piled dirt.
The graves are empty. At least the two that he just dug up are. My father and Daniel’s.
“Who?” I snarl. “Who was it? Where are they?”
“I don’t know, Marcus.” Adrian sounds strained. “I thought I was mistaken when I dug up a portion of the grave. And then I had to dig up the whole thing. I checked Daniel’s first and your father’s.”
“Hannah?” I look toward my sister-in-law’s grave, my face pale, and Adrian shakes his head.
“Your mother and her are undisturbed. I removed a small portion of the grave to check.” He looks nauseous as he says it. Disturbing a shifter’s resting place is akin to disturbing their spirit.
I force my attention on the two empty graves, and a hot wave of grief and anger washes over me. “How long ago do you think—?”
“Years.” Adrian crouches on the other side. “The soil was settled back. Grass grew over both of them. Whoever did this did it a long time ago and let the ground heal.”
I sit back in the dirt. For a second I can’t do anything but breathe. My thoughts are a tangled mess. So all this time I’ve been coming to the empty graves of my family members.
As my emotions rise within me, I tamp them down. This isn’t the time to get worked up. I need to focus on this situation. I force the grief and rage somewhere deep inside.
“Why take them?” I grit out. “What possible reason—?”
“The wolfsbane,” Adrian says suddenly, and I freeze.
I meet his gaze, and his jaw is clenched. “You said that wolfsbane leaves its mark, right? For anyone who knows what to look for, it’s evidence.”
I purse my lips. Bastards. They knew I’d come looking at some point, so they got rid of the bodies.
“This is proof, isn’t it?” Adrian persists. “They were trying to hide evidence that wolfsbane was used against two alphas of this pack.”
“Maybe,” I murmur. “But something isn’t adding up. If they are going after alphas, my uncle might be a target as well. We’ll have to talk to him.”
“I don’t think he would make an easy target.” Adrian frowns. “He has a lot more security than your father or Daniel ever chose to have. He’s surrounded himself with people he trusts. But he could still be a potential target.”
“Someone was able to get close enough to both my father and my brother to poison them. One of our own. And since we know the hunters have access to wolfsbane, we know they are involved.” It’s hard to connect dots right now when all my wolf wants to do is track down those who desecrated my family’s graves.
“But destabilizing the leadership of a shifter pack is not without its own consequences, and the hunters know that. Without an alpha, a pack is more prone to increasing violence and producing more rogues. Why would hunters do that?”
I can’t figure it out.
It’s like there’s something I’m not seeing, something that’s so obvious, but my mind keeps side-stepping it.
“They didn’t take Hannah or your mother because they weren’t being poisoned then.” Adrian looks at me cautiously.
“Without the bodies, we have no proof of the poisoning, Adrian,” I point out heavily. “This is all speculation at this point.”
“Speculation that makes sense.” Adrian scowls.
“The knowledge that wolfsbane can be detected is something only alphas are taught. How would hunters know anything about it?” The question is bothering me.
“By testing it.” My friend looks furious.
“The same way they were able to use it as a slow-acting poison, learning how much and how often, then sooner or later they’d learn what it leaves behind.
” He looks at the graves. “They’d know to clean up after themselves.
If they believe our kind knows about the existence of wolfsbane, it can spark another war between us and the hunters.
We have to discuss this with your uncle.
” Adrian studies me. “The bodies of two alphas are missing, Marcus. We can’t just—”
“You’re right.” I agree heavily. “I’ll talk to him. Alone. Gather all the information, I need it substantial in hand. Send me everything tonight.”
He holds my eyes a long beat and then nods. “I’ll put the dirt back.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Leave it as it is. You go.”
Adrian looks at me a beat longer, then sighs and walks off into the trees.
I stay. I can’t make my legs walk away from the two open holes, so I sit back down in the grass between them, and with nobody here to see, I put my head in my hands. My father and my brother, somewhere I can’t find them.
A branch shifts on the far side of the clearing, low and careful, a foot set down by something that doesn’t want to be heard.
My head comes up. The wind turns a breath later, laying his scent across the graves, gun oil over cold sweat.
I have him before he’s out of the trees.
I’ve smelled him twice on the edges of my land, and I saw him once through a windshield, thirty yards from Jessa’s building.
Kylan. The man who runs the hunters in this county.
I don’t think. I’m across the graves and on him before he clears the last tree.
He throws an arm up, and I smash it aside. My knuckles crack across his jaw, snapping his head around, and he grunts as I drag him back by the coat for the next one.
“You bastard.” I hit him again, and he nearly dodges it. He’s fast for a human, but it’s useless. I want him bleeding over my brother’s empty grave.
He gets one back, a punch off my temple I don’t feel. Does he think he stands a chance against an alpha-born?
“You dug up my family.” I bury both fists in his coat and drive him off his feet, straight back into a headstone. The stone cracks against his spine, the breath goes out of him in a grunt, and he laughs at me through it.
“Where are they?!” I snarl into his face. “Where did you put them?”
He grins at me with blood in his teeth. His hand moves at his hip.
I see the blade too late. It comes up short and quick, dragging across my ribs, a shallow line, nothing a cut that size has any right to be. Then it hits.
Fire pours out of the wound and into me, faster than anything should move through a body.
My legs go loose under my own weight. I stagger off him and catch myself on a headstone.
The cut is nothing. It’s four inches, shallow, dropping me anyway.
I know the taste in the back of my throat. I know what’s on that blade.
Wolfsbane.
My phone starts screaming in the grass. Bella’s ringtone, the one I set so I’d never miss her, going off ten feet away while I stand here with poison spreading under my skin. I can’t get to it. I can barely stand.
There’s no time. The wolfsbane is eating outward from the cut, and if it reaches deep enough, I’m finished. I let the claws come into my right hand, four blades pushing out through human skin, and I set them against my own ribs below the cut. I tear the flesh out.
It comes away in a wet fistful, the poisoned meat and the skin over it.
I throw it in the dirt, and the pain takes my vision for a second.
Blood sheets down my hip. But the fire stops climbing.
It’ll grow back. I’ve seen worse close over in a night.
Right now, I’m bleeding out over my brother’s grave with one hand shifted and my legs shaking. Kylan is laughing.
“Look at that.” He pushes off the headstone, wiping his mouth, watching me hold my own side together. “Alpha-born, and a scratch nearly did it.”
“I’ll kill you.” I take one step toward him and go down on a knee.
He backs toward the trees, taking his time now that I can’t follow. The blade goes back into his coat. “You’re going to pay for what you did,” he says. “And I’m only just getting started.”
“What I did?” I spit blood into the grass. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“You will.” He steps over Daniel’s empty grave, the same as he’d step over a log. “Go home, Steele. While there’s still a home to go to.”
Then he’s gone into the dark, and Bella’s ringtone has stopped. My phone is in the grass where I dropped it. Four missed calls stacked up while Kylan had me, all of them hers, and under them a voice message. Panting, I watch my flesh knit together slowly and listen to the voice note,
Bella is whispering, fast, her voice frightened, and I can hear loud voices from somewhere deeper in the house. “Uncle Marcus, where are you?! Sloane’s here, and she’s trying to hurt Jessa! And Mia’s acting strange. Come home!”
I hear the sound of something crashing in the distance, and then she cries out, “Mia, no!”
The line goes dead.
Fuck!
Ignoring the pain in my side, I let the shift wash over me.
Running on all fours, I cut through the woods.
My side burns, and I can feel my blood drip on the forest ground even as the wound slowly heals.
My heart pounding, I try to move faster.
If Sloane decides to kill Jessa or maim her badly, my uncle will protect her.
Even if I lash out, the damage will be done.
I can feel a faint flicker inside me, a fear that’s not entirely my own. Before I can figure out what that is or where it came from, my wolf charges forward, ignoring the severity of our injury, desperate to get back to our family.
I clear my own tree line, and the scents hit me at once. Cole is here. Sloane’s is all over the lawn, sour and gone stale, so she left a while back. Underneath both, I taste Jessa’s blood, and my legs pump faster.
Some flicker of awareness tells me to shift back. She doesn’t know yet. Stumbling to a halt, I force the change back into my human form and rush through the kitchen entrance before coming to a halt.