Chapter 16 #2
She wanted to protest. She wanted to bring that light back into his eyes, but she knew nothing about alpha wolves or packs.
As he pulled her further down the lane, she realized he might not be too sad if he lost the wolf, but she also understood instinctively that it would rip him apart.
One did not exist without the other. What were they going to do?
“Mateo, we need to head to the purple house. We need to get those books away from them.”
“We need to keep all of this from escalating. And you need to eat.”
“But –”
“Call me crazy, but the spell I saw in those books looked a lot like computer programming.”
“What?”
“It’s an instruction manual, right? For magic?
Say this, do that, apply pressure here. And if there’s one thing I know about computer programming, it’s that it’s a lot more complicated than the instruction manual.
So we’re going to eat, and then tonight, late at night, we can go steal those books, and you can tell me if there really is any way that any witch could do this. ”
“But—”
“Because the other thing it seems to me is that during all our wars and all of our fighting, no one else has succeeded in undoing it. That would’ve been the time to unmake us, right?”
She took a deep breath for the first time in hours.
The twins were hardly unique. A lot of witches hated werewolves.
In fact, most witches hated and feared werewolves.
That there were still a lot of werewolves running around was proof that undoing the spell was a lot harder than anyone thought.
Someone definitely would’ve done it already.
“You’re right.”
“I know. So come and eat some pasta, meet the pack.”
“Meet the pack. Mateo, what are we doing?” A thread of humor snaked through her terror. “Pasta, really?”
“Some stereotypes have a basis in fact.”
They came around a bend in the cliff, and Cat saw a car covered in stones and froze for a moment. “What happened to them?”
“Oh, you know, my other problem.”
“Erosion?”
He broke out laughing, and the sound shivered through her. “Erosion implies something was whole to begin with, so definitely not erosion. Competition?”
“Would you just talk English for like two seconds?”
“The other pack.”
Cat spun in a circle. She couldn’t help it. “The other pack came here?”
“You know about them?”
She thought of the wolves northeast of town with their homemade clothing and dead eyes. “They’re the source of most of the twins’ paranoia. That’s what all those weapons are for. They live in the woods northwest of town.”
“Do they not believe in clothing?” he asked.
Cat pinched the bridge of her nose. One thing was for sure with Mateo; she would never be bored. “Why on earth would you ask that?”
Then abruptly, it stopped being funny because the Koenig Pack believed in clothing; they just believed in making it themselves, along with all their food, shoes, and everything else.
You could tell that by looking at their rough-spun garments.
The only reason he would ask that question was if he saw them.
“Did they come here?” she asked. “Did they threaten you?”
“No. In the mountains.”
Her vision sparked, sending her magic shivering. “Did we leave somebody out there in the snow?”
“Cat, he was buried under the snow. There was no chance.”
She took that fact in. There had been another wolf in that avalanche. “There might’ve been a chance.”
“I’d already injured him.”
She slid away from him, shocked.
“After he attacked me! I was defending myself.”
“I’ve seen your wolf; you don’t have to defend yourself at all.”
“He was a werewolf, too, attacking me on neutral ground in the middle of a blizzard. He attacked me, Cat, and I was walking away. That’s how we got caught in an avalanche. I was walking away!”
She didn’t know what to think. She lived in a world of magic and werewolves, but until now, she used it to solve petty theft and peer into the future about what books might be popular to buy.
Yes, there were spikes in the lawn, but those had always been her biggest problem, not the wolves they were supposedly defending against. She thought it was overkill, paranoid, and a huge waste of energy.
But there were werewolves out there trying to kill each other.
“He wasn’t well, Cat. There are four packs in Manhattan. I’ve never been in a fight like that before.”
“What are we doing?” she whispered.
She’d barely made a sound, but he answered anyway. “I don’t know. I know there is no world in which we work. But can we solve the next problem?”
Oh yeah, her terrible, homicidal family. How did her life become this?
If they were to solve that problem together, she had to trust him. Could she do that? Did she have a choice?
She didn’t know about forever. Approaching his pack and calmly discussing dead wolves just highlighted for her how impossible this was, but she owed him that at least.
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
She went to turn around to head back down the mountain, but he shook his head. “That’s not the next problem.”
“What now?”
“Dinner.”
She supposed part of the reason she felt completely on edge was a lack of calories. After a long moment, she nodded once, and they walked past the rockfall. She didn’t know if she trusted him, but that wasn’t new. He said he’d been walking away from the fight. He had to have been walking away.
He made it around the cliff, and she saw a gigantic house up on a ridge. In the dying light of the sun, it seemed to glow.
“Holy shit,” she said. “There have to be at least thirty rooms in there.”
“I didn’t actually count, but probably.”
“There aren’t thirty wolves in there, are there?”
“No. There are… I don’t know. I lost count of who got on the plane.”
“Mateo!”
How could he understand the entire history of witches and shifters? How could he walk around with a brain like that and not be able to count the people living in his house?
“They’re going to love you,” he said.
“All unspecified numbers of them?”
“They’re going to be polite to you,” he said and sounded very growly.
She did not want to fear him. She didn’t want to fear any werewolf anymore.
“I believe you.”
She took another step forward, but he didn’t. “Do you want to? Don’t go along with me. Everyone goes along with me. It’s really hard to get people to tell me the truth.”
There was a way out. She could go. She’d warned him.
He definitely had the money, pack, and every other kind of power to do something about it.
She could walk away from this entire mess.
It felt like the Silver Spring valley was the center of the universe, but she knew it wasn’t.
She knew they were all insignificant and tiny, and she could start over anywhere.
She took a deep breath. “I like pasta.”