Chapter 9
Tabby
We spend the night in that cottage before waking with the dawn.
I am sore.
And scared.
I haven’t been scared before. It’s a new feeling. I don’t much care for it. I am scared of Skor. I am terrified of the power he holds. It is greater than mine. Mine is rough and vicious and quick. His is refined and deep and dangerous.
I am also intrigued.
“I can feel you looking at me,” he says without opening his eyes. “Planning something?”
I sit up, pulling my clothes on. I want to feel somewhat protected.
Apparently I can’t do that magically or physically, but maybe superficial clothing will help.
I am wondering if he intends to keep me for himself.
He hasn’t said so specifically, but there’s something about the way he is so intensely controlling that makes me wonder if I might be more of a prisoner than a mate.
Blam!
The door slams open.
“There you are!”
Krall is deeply displeased, and for once, I am glad to see him. He doesn’t like magic. Skor’s powers have to be a secret from him, or he’d be complaining about them too.
“He can do magic!” I shout, jumping up and running toward Krall. “He can do even more magic than I can! He took me here! He made me come here and then he made me mate with him using his magic.”
“She’s hysterical,” Skor yawns. “She’d run off from the train, so I tracked her out here. Found this place for shelter. I think she needs a good long sleep. She’s starting to imagine things.”
“Liar! You’re a liar! He put me in a salt circle!”
Krall and Thorn look concerned, but not about the magic.
“Why did you leave so little trace for us to follow? You could have scented along the way. We wouldn’t have been far behind you,” Krall says, wrapping one arm around me, pulling me up against his body in a way he probably doesn’t know I am finding necessarily protective.
“No trail for you means no trail for anyone else,” Skor says. “I thought the train people might give chase. And I knew you would be able to find us, sooner or later.”
“He wanted me on my own so he could violate me and steal my powers,” I say. “He took control of my body. He used me like a puppet!”
Krall
I am relieved to have found our mate again. She appears to be safe, but highly distressed, and that I am not happy about. However, the last time I saw her, she was leaving me to be arrested for abusing her, so I am aware that she happily plays situations to her advantage.
What she doesn’t know, what she can’t know, is that I’ve had my suspicions about Skor dabbling in witchcraft for quite some time. He keeps it quiet, of course. He’d have to. It’s highly forbidden in our family. He’d be cut off from the pack if he were caught.
“It’s going to be alright,” I say, comforting Tabby. She is clinging to me like a baby possum holding onto its mother. Another sign she has been through quite an ordeal since we last saw her. Skor is not an easy or kind mate to have, she has discovered.
“Is it true?” Thorn steps in behind me.
“Is what true?” Skor says.
“Did you use magic on her?”
“Of course not.”
“Liar!” Tabby sobs. “He’s a more powerful magician than I am.”
“If that were true, I would have defended us on the first night when we were almost all devoured by a series of ever-increasing horrors,” he says.
“You didn’t have to. I did it for you. You let me show my gifts, while you hid yours. You’re awful! You’re terrible! You’re the worst!”
“She needs rest,” Skor insists.
“There’s no time to rest,” I reply. “We need to move on. We drew attention to ourselves on the train, and the decoupling has been tied to us as well, not to mention the reports of human trafficking. We’ll have to get a car. Thorn, you can handle that. Skor and I will stay with Tabby.”
“I don’t want to leave her with him,” Thorn says. “She’s terrified of him. Make him go.”
“I’ll go,” Skor says. “If it makes everyone happy. I’ll run to the next town, hire a car, and be back before dark.”
“Good,” I say. “That sounds like a plan. We will stay here.”
Skor gets up, makes himself ready, and leaves. Tabby stays by my side until she is sure he has gone.
“He really did do magic,” she says. “I’m not lying about that.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. I am aware that we need to maintain something of a united front when it comes to her, but I also have to ensure that she feels believed.
“You are very powerful,” I tell her. “Perhaps there was some interplay…”
“He’s a fucking dark wizard,” she says. “I swear it on my undead mother.”
“That is something we will talk about when the time is right.”
She looks me in the face. “You already know,” she says. “You already know, but you don’t want to know, so you don’t want to acknowledge it, you just want me to be quiet about it. But he used it on me.”
“In what way?”
“He made me…” she blushes. “He made me mate with him.”
“Did you not want to?”
“I was… I had no choice.”
“Choice is a funny thing with you, isn’t it,” I say, remembering very well how she claimed to be abducted not twelve hours ago. “Are you ours because you want to be, or are you ours because you had to be?”
“Had to be,” she says swiftly. “I have to uphold the honor of my tribe, but you were never supposed to survive, and I was supposed to go back and have pups for our pack. I ruined it by helping you to live.”
“Do you really wish to be rid of us? Do you feel no mate bond?”
I see her blush deepen, and I know she absolutely does feel it. We have all mated so frequently and so intensely that even our initial mutual reluctance is starting to feel like a far-off thing.
“Would you not have mated with him if he had not used power?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. The point is, he does have power, and that’s not allowed.”
“You sound like a pup tattling on a playmate,” I tell her, my voice holding some affection.
“And you sound like an old man who doesn’t want to admit to himself that his values are being undermined by the brother he’s sharing a mate with because there weren’t enough mates for you all to have one each.”
“She’s not wrong,” Thorn adds. “I’ve had my suspicions for a while.”
“Skor’s business is his own business. He doesn’t do magic in front of us.”
“He did magic on me, though.”
“And he won’t again,” I promise her. “I will talk to him.”
“He will,” she says. “You won’t be able to stop him. I bet he could make you not even know it was happening.”
“We will talk about this when he returns.”
Tabby
We won’t, I bet.
Krall doesn’t want to deal with Skor’s magic use. Thorn looks uncomfortable. I am… concerned. I knew I was at the mercy of stronger alpha males. I did not know that my magic wouldn’t be able to save me.
The urge to run is back, and stronger than ever. I have to get away from Skor before he assumes near total control of me, and maybe the others as well. But maybe they’ll listen if I just keep telling them.
“He could put us all in a salt circle,” I tell him. “You have no idea the power he wields.”
“Krall…” Thorn lifts his voice. “She might be right.”
“She might be,” Krall admits.
“He didn’t want you to find us right away. He wanted his time with me to prove that I was helpless. And I was.”
“Witchcraft is banned in our pack because many years ago, strong lineages almost took over the human clan and the wolf pack in our lands. It was a threat to the existence and freedom of wolf and man alike. But magic is in the blood, and not all of it was shed. There’s those who still carry seeds of the potency in them.
It’s not their fault. But using it? Especially to take control of others?
That’s against all our laws. If that’s what he’s doing… ” Krall trails off.
“It’s what he did.”
“We’ll talk about it when he returns,” Krall says. “And we’ll talk about your behavior too, back on the train, when you turned us in to the humans, betraying not just us, but our kind.”
“What?”
“You were given to us. You belong to us. You know it. You are not being abducted.”
“That’s news to me,” I mutter.
“You,” Krall says, “are due a proper punishment.”
“Oh, my gods, why?”
“Because of what you did on the train,” he replies. “You turned humans against us. You almost caused us to have to reveal ourselves.”
“That’s your fault, though.”
“Not the time to argue with me, Tabby. We should be on our way right now, but you have been tantruming and acting like a spoiled little whelp. So instead, we are in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. And we are waiting for a car. And you are not sorry for what you almost did. Not at all. If anything, you want to be protected from the consequences of your actions with Skor. Whatever happened to you, whatever he did, it was the result of your actions.”
“No,” Thorn interjects. “Stop. Now. You can’t blame her for what he did, and you can’t blame her for the train. If she doesn’t like you, she doesn’t like you. Get over it. Maybe you’re not likable. Maybe you keep forcing her into situations she doesn’t want to be in.”
Thank god one of these males is on my side. Thorn gets it. He’s part of the problem, but he might actually get this.
“Quiet,” Krall snaps. “If she doesn’t accept she’s our mate, then what is the point of any of this?”
“Exactly!” Thorn says. “If you make her hate us, what’s the point?”
Krall pauses for a moment, then lets out a breath I don’t think any of us knew he was holding.
“I want you to be happy,” he says to me.
“Bad news,” I say.
“Yes. I’ve gathered you’re not thrilled. Is it me? Which of us do you not want?”
With the question posed so boldly and bluntly, I can’t pretend not to know the answer. I fumble for a second, my face blushing as the answer immediately leaps to mind, and I know that saying it won’t make any sense.
“I want all of you,” I mumble. “Just not like this…”
“Not like this how?”
“Not with all the rules and the…”