Chapter 20
B ronze had a fucking Black Friday receipt’s worth of items that had done nothing but follow his sluggish ass around for the two days and change that Clara wouldn’t speak to him. On a good day, it would have been hard not to take the spurning personally, but now, on the day the first game was due to take place, it was proving impossible.
Turned out, he had been right. Like the viper he’d pegged her for, the female sure as shit knew just when and how to wound. When she fired her parting shot at him and flung Polina’s name into the chaos of his confusion, it hadn’t just ignited his mental kindling. No, it’d obliterated his thoughts on a cosmic level, sending them to the furthest reaches of his past and present so there was no hope of collecting his sanity again.
All she’d left him with was the dim outlook of a future he’d momentarily lost sight of. Well, fuck that and the horse it rode in on, which was ironically the very creature that was clopping along outside the arched window he stared out of. Somewhere between his phone and celestial powers having left their letters of resignation, he’d begun to get wise to the fact that something was very, very off about how the lycans lived.
The window to Bronze’s dormitory faced south and overlooked a wide meadow flanked by densely packed forest. Not unusual. What was unusual was the well-trodden dirt paths that snaked from behind the keep and trailed in intersecting coils along the outskirts of the meadow into the tree line. He tracked a horse-drawn cart or two, which wouldn’t have been entirely unusual for a culture that didn’t use electricity, except for the cargo they carried: six thirty-two-gallon rubber garbage cans, a stack of mounted cardboard signs with arrowed phrases like Restrooms and VIP Seating , and a driver sporting a Boston Red Sox cap, stained utility pants, and a cigarette that needed to drop its ash two horse shits ago. The more Bronze spent time exploring the territory, the more he got the sense that the lycans lived in some bizarre twenty-four-seven Renaissance Faire, complete with ye olde functional privies and a whole lot of finger food.
Something was going on in that meadow, however, as more and more carts, supplies, and lycans were finding their way to its center. Bronze could only assume that was where the first game would take place.
Which would have been fucking great if Clara hadn’t left him sitting outside her door for two days twiddling his dick and offering up apologies for sins he hadn’t known he’d committed. Bronze let his eyelids fall closed and, for the millionth time, replayed their—was it even an argument?—so he could desperately search for some piece he’d missed. She’d meant to wound him. That much was clear. But why? Threatened animals always lashed out. Had he threatened her in some way?
When he’d woken that morning, his body had all the coordination of highway roadkill. It’d started when he got out of bed and promptly knocked the extinguished lantern off the small nightstand after he inadvertently flung his blanket too wide. Then there was the old-man bend-at-the-waist boot debacle that came with bodily groans no male who still had one foot out of the grave should ever make. The entire routine left him hobbling as if he’d just tried to power through one of Chrome’s He-Man weightlifting sessions and his muscles had gone on strike for being overworked without the promise of rest-related overtime pay. For some reason, his powers hadn’t regenerated overnight as they should have, which baffled him given the sheer amount of stone and cement walling off the place. There should have been more than enough metallic minerals and elements for his celestial power to draw from, for his metal to connect with, and yet his tank had been drained to E. The cold realization hadn’t quite carried to the rest of his awareness until he could no longer ignore the magnitude of his energy drain.
The last time he’d felt anything remotely close to a decent charge on his power was following the few hours of sleep he’d managed to snag back at the den the night before he and Clara set off for the lycan lands.
So, yeah, he hadn’t exactly been in the best of moods when Clara had come at him with that honor-bound warrior nonsense, especially after he’d lost a fair bit of sleep fuming over how Lord Raff and her father had pulled the wool over her eyes. It’d been clear from her quiet trembling during dinner that she hadn’t expected the maneuver. The change of play was a dirty power move that greatly altered the trajectory of Clara’s plan in the males’ favor, and like hell would Bronze stay silent while they trod all over her. He certainly didn’t have a reputation for keeping his mouth shut, so why start then?
But it was the morning after, when he’d seen Clara’s tense expression, with her white hair pulled back into a no-nonsense bun and a look of dogged disappointment playing across her features, that he realized just exactly how much she appreciated his outburst.
That was to say, she didn’t.
She needed him to come to her defense about as much as he needed to own a seventh motorcycle, but hell if he’d been able to keep from throwing himself in front of any hurt aimed at her.
And then it had all backfired somehow, with her launching the honor-bound-warrior missile straight for the part of him that had forgotten why he was even there in the first place. The pain of the blow was nothing compared to the little redirection number it did on him. Though it hurt—physically fucking hurt —to see her storm off like he was the enemy she sought to liberate her people from, it was the reminder he needed to turn his attention to those he could help.
His brothers. Malik’s memory. Polina.
Bronze turned his back on the scene outside the window and walked across the room to the notebook he had tucked away in his pack. The only good thing that had come from the past two days of Clara’s cold shoulder was the surveillance he’d been able to do around the property. The king’s keep wasn’t overly large, owing to the fact that the northeastern population of lycans was probably no bigger than the population of Aurora. The stone structure and its surrounding property reminded him a lot of a regional high school campus, stretching up to three stories max. Long tight hallways with neatly ordered and predictable bedroom doors made up the bulk of the perimeter, while the center of the structure held more of its meat and potatoes: annex, kitchen, receiving room, dining hall, armory, general common spaces . . . and two doors he’d never seen anyone go in or out of.
Winner winner chicken dinner.
He was willing to bet his brother Steel’s brand-new espresso maker that one of those doors housed the royal coffers, where the relic was most likely located.
Bronze consulted his notes one more time before flipping the notepad closed. After whatever the hell games he needed to play this morning, he’d start his search there.
A low resonant horn blow carried among the stones of the keep. A quick peek out the window revealed lycans herding toward the meadow in the manner of tailgaters filing into a stadium.
Shit. Guess it’s time.
Bronze suited up as best as he figured and marched out into the hallway—directly into the path of Lord Raff. The male’s meaty shoulder collided with Bronze’s collarbone. The resulting spin made a carousel of the stones around Bronze before he managed to throw a hand out and catch his balance.
The western lycan hadn’t stopped moving, hadn’t even stopped to look at who he’d just nearly clotheslined, and Bronze saw why. Lord Raff walked with the stature of a lion and the breadth of a bear. His was a slow-footed stride that encompassed an innate challenge of its own. Unmovable. Unshakable. Uninterested.
Unmatched.
Bronze bared his teeth and grabbed whatever handle from his weapons vest was closest, ready to let a cacophony of curses and his dirk fly at the back of the asshole’s head, when Clara’s startled voice stilled his movements.
“Bronze! What do you think you’re doing?”
Her loose waves and that half-corset/linen shirt number were back and barreling toward him at an alarming rate. Tawny eyes he hadn’t seen for days were blown wide with worry.
Huh? Was that worry for him ? After verbally cutting his balls off and beating him with the set?
“Firing off my shot, that’s what. Lord Asshole needs a lesson in manners.”
Then her eyes flew to the knife in his hand and carved out a connect-the-dots image that only stretched her features into a more alarming configuration. “Are those all your blades? Metal blades?”
He blinked. Then blinked again. “Um, yeah.”
Okay, it was his turn to be confused. Right on cue, as if to highlight his bewilderment, another horn blast bellowed throughout the stronghold. The last of the lycan latecomers scurried from doors and hallways, eager to grab a seat for whatever the hell waited for him on that field.
Man, he really hoped it wasn’t bears. His fondness for wildlife only went so far.
Then, like a magician frantically pulling scarves from a top hat, Clara began stripping Bronze of every weapon in sight and some not so in sight. When she came at his thigh holster with her fingers curled and her nails out front and center, he twisted away with a yelp and leaped back, making sure his junk was well out of clawing range.
“What the hell, Clara?”
“Off! Get it all off! Right now!”
“Okay, but tell me why first. Hey, easy.”
“Hide them. Melt them. Do whatever you must do to make sure no one but me sees them. If you’re caught with those weapons, they’ll kill you on sight.”
Once he’d finally managed to grab up her hands to prevent them from taking out more important bits, he urged as much calm as he could muster into his voice, even though a slight buzz of warning was beginning to work its way into his ears. “Let’s talk about this. You’ve seen me with my weapons before and never said anything. It was you , Clara, who chose me as your champion to compete and then refused to speak to me for two days, which we will have a discussion about once today’s competition is over. You’re not getting out of that so easily. But we’ll get to that. For now, why would someone try to kill me simply for being armed?”
“You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head back and forth.
Damn right he didn’t. “So make me. Talk. I don’t think there’s much time before I’m due out there.”
Clara’s eyes fell shut, and she sucked in a deep, labored breath that did as much to calm her down as it did him. Which was not at all. When she opened her eyes, they were lit with a stern awareness that told him whatever came out of her mouth next was something he most definitely did not want to hear.
“You already observed that there is no electricity here. That is because, as I tried to explain to you once before, certain things in the human lands don’t agree with our lycan makeup. Electricity is one of them. It affects our ability to shift and connect with our wolf, so we cannot live with it.”
Bronze gripped her hands a bit tighter, suddenly finding a great desire for something to anchor himself against. Even as the weight of his daggers and firearms pulled down on his straining muscles, which still struggled to support what only a few days ago had been like a second skin, a part of him knew what Clara was about to reveal.
Knew it and was conversely strangled by the implications of it.
“What else doesn’t agree with your kind?”
Clara’s eyes bore the subtle sheen of a female who was equal parts frightened for her sake and someone else’s. “Metal.”