Chapter 16
That the alpha werewolf had a whole pack of wolves with him was a vague thought until she set foot in his territory.
Nothing happened when she crossed onto his land.
There were no witches with wards to keep people out, but why hadn’t she thought about the fact that he wouldn’t be alone?
She was still wearing a skirt and tights without any underwear, and the first coat she’d grabbed.
It was an outfit meant for lounging around the house, not tramping through the snow.
A growl lifted the hair on her arms, and she twisted to see a truly enormous wolf with a scarred muzzle materialize out of nothing.
They don’t need wards, she thought furiously as her hands automatically raised from her sides in a placating gesture.
She was not a force witch to send him flying, nor a potion witch with bottled death in her sleeves. All she could do was sometimes catch a vague glimpse of the future.
A minute ago would have been a superb time, she told her magic hopelessly.
“I come in peace?” she said, and he took a silent step toward her.
She clenched her thighs to keep from taking a step back.
A childhood spent in the woods had taught her not to give in to prey instincts around large carnivores, even if those large carnivores were attached to a human as smart as she was.
There was no humanity in this beast’s eyes.
It was even bigger than Mateo’s wolf, and she wondered if the man she loved was truly an alpha or if he would be helpless to stop it.
You’re not in love with him. What a ridiculous thought.
“I have to see Mateo,” she said
The wolf froze with one front paw off the ground and cocked its head.
“I have to warn him. I come with better than peace. I come with forewarning.”
The wolf growled again.
She forced her body into the lines of a dominant animal. “Stop growling. If you like being able to shift, you have to let me talk to Mateo right now.”
“Nico! What on earth?”
Her eyes flew up the road, but nobody was in sight.
“I could hear your fury from the house!” Mateo walked into view around the cliff the road was carved into and froze when he saw her.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” He looked so good, but she couldn’t be distracted by that. She was stalling. She was panicking and stalling.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. The words were neutral, a simple question, but she read disapproval in them. What had she been thinking, marching into a werewolf den? Well, hadn’t he just marched into the heart of her coven?
The wolf finally put its paw down, and her gaze whipped back to it.
“Sorry,” Mateo said. “This is Nico, who can stop growling anytime.”
The gigantic beast sneezed and then melted away, silently disappearing between two bushes.
“I came to warn you,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I came to warn you, because they’re going to do something truly crazy. They’re gathering the coven.”
With her every word, he took a few steps closer until he could get his hands on her shoulders. He ran his hands down her triceps and slowly back up again. “Breathe. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”
“I didn’t mean to come to your house. I mean, I obviously meant to come to your house because I came to your house, but I didn’t mean to make trouble with your wolves.”
“You haven’t. Nico was doing his job; he signaled to me, and now I’m here.”
Her babbling thoughts clicked to a stop at the bizarreness of that statement. “He signaled to you?”
He shrugged. “Close enough. Our wolves can talk. He’s guarding this half of the perimeter. There are a few more doing loops, but we’re all in contact.”
The wolves could talk to each other. She didn’t know why that freaked her out. Maybe it was more proof that they weren’t just an occasional animal. They had a kind of magic.
“Come on, you can meet the rest of them.”
She took one step, then froze like the wolf with one foot off the ground. “What?”
“I mean not the ones out on patrol, they’ll be so pissed about that, but—”
“Meet the pack?”
“Well, most of the pack is still in New York.”
“What are you going to tell them I am?”
He froze and pivoted back to her, looking abashed.
“Didn’t think of that, did you?” she asked and crossed her arms.
“I could always tell them you’re a Bible salesman.”
She laughed. “No problem. We sell Bibles. I can talk all day about bindings and editions and translations. Wait, what Bible do Catholics use?”
“Yeah, we’ve never been as militant about that as the protestants. I could always tell them you’re my lover.”
“Oh my god, you can hear for miles. That wolf is still in the woods!”
“Not miles.” He smiled. “He’s up the ridgeline by now. He didn’t hear me. I could just tell them you’re the local representative from the coven.”
“Please stop.”
“I could tell them—” He stopped talking, his eyes on the horizon, and she stopped breathing.
“What?”
“What are you to me?” He blinked a couple of times and focused back on her. “What would you like me to say?”
“I don’t have to meet anybody. I just came to warn you, though I don’t even know what you could do, short of open war, and I really don’t want to be the one who restarts the shifter wars.”
“The what?” His mouth fell open.
“The shifter wars?”
“You mean the magic wars?”
She burst out laughing. It wasn’t amusement, just stress relief. “That’s what you call them?”
“What are those two sweet little old ladies going to do?” he asked, and she gulped.
It was intense having all that focus on her. “Sweet?” Cat realized she was going a little insane.
“Terrifying? Psychotic?”
Right, the reason she was here. “They’re going to burn out the spell.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The spell to make shifters. Witches made shifters, and they’re going to take the spell that did it, and destroy it, like, retroactively so that there are no shifters.”
“Can they do that?”
“I have no idea!”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “Because that doesn’t sound like something they should be able to do.”
“Do you want to risk it?”
His hand dropped. “No, absolutely not. Okay, we have to stop them, obviously. How do we stop them?” His focus was gone again, off in the clouds, brainstorming. “Beyond the obvious way.”
What was the obvious way? She cringed. “No teeth!”
“No! Maybe. Only if we really have to.”
“Mateo!”
“We will stop them. You and I together will stop them. I just can’t get over the fact that we’re connected somehow.”
“Somehow?” She scoffed. “We’re completely connected. Our stories are intertwined, and apparently always have been.”
He snapped his fingers. “Somehow connected. That’s it.”
“What?”
“When I introduce you to the pack. We are somehow connected.”
“Are you going to tell them about the twins?” She thought of the wolf she had just seen. A predator like that could do a lot of damage.
Instead of answering, he tucked her against him and headed for the house.
“Mateo, what the hell are we doing?”
He took a deep breath and let it out. “Right now, we are walking in the woods. Then we’re going to meet some family, and then we’re going to stop your coven from committing half-mass murder.”
“Half mass murder?”
“Well, if they’re only killing the wolves, it’s half.”
She buried her head in his bicep. “What happened to my life? How could I be saying that about my family? How did we get here?”
He tilted her chin up so he could meet her eyes. “Blame is an emotion used to control other people. It is not useful in solving problems. We have to look them clear in the eye.”
“I can’t decide whether your employees love you or hate you.”
He blinked. “I assume it’s both on any given day. It’s hard to say because my wolf really doesn’t care at all.”
She realized he didn’t have any peers. He led his company and his pack, and there was absolutely no one he could really open up to. He could never trust when people opened up to him, either, because they could always be doing it to curry favor or hide mistakes.
“If you weren’t the alpha, what would you be?” she asked him.
“You mean if I were just a man?”
“Or a regular wolf, not at the top of anything?”
“Quantum computing is mostly a dead end.”
She blinked. “Okay, that took a turn.”
“But only mostly.”
“So you would work on quantum computing.”
She did not know how her computer worked. She had never considered it before. She wanted him to respect her, but this was so far outside her world that he was speaking gobbledygook.
“It’s amazing,” he said, and his eyes lit up like she’d never seen before. “All the complex, crazy things that you see online come down to ones and zeros. Everything a computer can do is a binary yes or no question.”
Something in her clenched. “That’s not just computers; that’s life. That’s my talent. It’s just a bunch of yes or no questions.”
“That’s so awesome.”
She smiled. “But a quantum computer is more than that?”
“Zeros and ones are hard-coded in regular computers, but with quantum computers, those zeros and ones aren’t. For most problems, it’s just going to add a bunch of extra expense and time because most decisions don’t need more uncertainty.”
She was shocked to realize she understood that perfectly. “Like nine times out of ten, you don’t need a divination which.”
“You’re a walking quantum computer,” he said with awe.
She knew he meant that as the highest compliment. “I don’t know what that means, but I’ll take it.”
“For colossal problems with big codes, they’re essential. What they could do in the realm of big numbers is spectacular because you basically multiply every possibility by an order of magnitude.”
“So why aren’t you doing that?” she asked at last.
The light in his eyes snuffed out so fast, it took her breath away. “Because I’m an alpha wolf. He would die without a pack.”