Chapter Twenty-Four
Darius…
It’s late afternoon by the time we enter Arcadia, and the setting sun is just starting to turn the sky shades of orange and red. The lights are on in the stores along Main Street. Everything seems picturesque and perfect, but the hair on the back of my neck is standing on end.
Effie and I walk hand in hand for another block, tension strangling the air between us.
Yes, I know I shouldn’t be holding her hand considering the fact that I have to send her away, but I can’t seem to help myself.
She tugs my hand at the same time that she jerks her chin toward the window of an apartment above the general store.
I get a quick glimpse of a pack member before the curtains are yanked shut.
Then I glance toward the park at the end of Main Street, where only a few days before we’d had a pack barbecue. There’s a crowd of people there, but unlike the other day, no one is laughing or talking to one another. Instead, they’re all standing in an eerie silence, watching Effie and me approach.
It’s a mix of Aetos pack members and more of the werewolves with the same neck tattoos as the ones who tried to jump us in the clearing. I scan the faces, but Aunt Artemis isn’t here, and that sets off warning sirens. My wolf surges to the surface in a heated rush, and my vision tinges with red.
It would feel so good to let him go free, for real this time, not just as a test like in the woods.
All the rage, all the frustration, all the want would explode out of me powered by my wildness in a violent shift from man to wolf.
What is the point in fighting it? I can protect my pack. I can protect Effie. I can have my way.
I could always have my way.
No one could stop me.
The truth of that—or at least the bone-deep belief that it is true—is what stops me in my tracks, because I know what that leads to. I refuse to be the kind of alpha my dad and my grandmother were.
So I tighten my hold on my wolf’s leash until I’m holding on with a white-knuckled grip. The swirling electric rush of my wildness recedes just enough that I can see clearly again.
Effie, stopped next to me, tightens her grasp on my hand. “How much trouble are we in here?”
I don’t have to think twice about the answer. “A lot.”
In addition to the Council werewolves, everyone in the group is tied to Nikos. My number two, however, is nowhere to be seen. I scan the area once again looking for him, and that’s when I spot Atlas knocked out cold and trussed up with thick rope next to a park bench.
Looks like Nikos got sick of having a go at me only in the shadows and has decided the straight-ahead-at-full-blast approach is a winning plan. He’s wrong, but he’ll find that out shortly—and painfully—just as soon as I make sure Aunt Artemis is safe.
“Oh shit,” Effie says under her breath, obviously taking in the scene and coming to the same conclusion that I have. “What’s the plan?”
“You getting behind me, staying safe, and getting out of here as soon as you can.” Beyond that, I don’t have much beyond kicking everyone’s ass.
Effie looks up at me with that stubborn half smile of hers and shakes her head as she tells me, “That’s not going to happen, Darius.”
I open my mouth to argue (as if she’d ever change her stubborn mind) when Nikos finally makes his appearance, stepping out of the crowd.
He struts over to the middle of the street, opening his arms to us as if he’s the alpha and it’s his place to greet pack members who’ve completed the gauntlet race.
I sweep Effie behind me with one arm, keeping my attention focused on Nikos and forcing myself to stay loose so that when he launches his attack, I’ll be ready.
“We were beginning to doubt you’d make it back,” he says. He has a smug grin on his face, but there is no missing the disappointment in his tone.
“Is that why you sent your friends to meet us out there?” Effie asks, stepping forward next to me, getting right into the middle of things despite my telling her to stay back.
Of all the stubborn and impulsive—
Honeysuckle becomes heavy in the air, jerking my thoughts to a halt. That’s when I notice Effie’s hands. They’re clasped behind her back, but she’s waving them in a series of patterned movements—almost like she’s punching in numbers on a cell phone.
I don’t know what she’s up to, but I plan on getting everything under control before she gets a chance to unleash her magic.
“Oh, I didn’t send them out into the woods.” Nikos pivots, looking back at the people gathered around the gazebo. “He did.”
There’s movement in the part of the gazebo that’s half-hidden from the light, and a man dressed all in black steps from the shadow. A trio of werewolves who don’t belong to the Aetos pack flank him as he walks out to the steps at the front.
Yeah, he’s not getting any closer to Effie than that unless he goes through me first.
I move up so I’m shoulder to shoulder with Effie, angling my body to block Nikos’s sight line to Atlas, who is starting to move.
It’ll take him a few minutes, but the rope is no challenge for him, which they should have guessed, since it probably took three people to knock him out.
Yet again, Nikos isn’t thinking ahead; he’s only reacting.
Effie stops whatever behind-the-back spell she was working and twines her fingers with mine before saying in a bored tone, “Hello, Kyle.”
The man in black flinches and seems flustered for a second before he recovers and goes back to looking down his nose at us from the top of the stairs. “It’s Formido, Effie.”
Effie looks over at me and rolls her eyes with all the disgusted drama of a teenage girl, and then turns back to Kyle. “Since when?”
He puffs his chest and says importantly, “Since I was named an obsidian member of the Council’s board.”
The air around us takes the scent of a ham sandwich that’s been left out too long in the summer sun, and suddenly the gazebo is awash in a light brighter than the bulbs strung along its parameter ever could be.
“Nice party trick,” I say while counting the number of steps it would take to get to Nikos so I could coldcock him and then close in on the dipshit formerly known as Kyle.
I’m about to make my move when one of his werewolf guards steps to the side, revealing Aunt Artemis encircled by a glowing rope with her mouth sealed shut by magic.
She’s not struggling or trying to shout through her closed lips, but she is radiating ice-cold fury.
It’s in the hard set of her jaw and the way she’s looking at the back of Kyle’s head like she already knows which brick she’s going to use to slam into it.
She’s tiny and so old no one is really sure of her age, and yeah, maybe Effie is right, and she’s a little witchy, but she is also a woman not to be crossed.
She has the look of someone who has been waiting decades for her revenge, and the Council’s werewolf guards must be picking up on it, because they’re starting to look warily at her as if Artemis is not a tied-up old lady but a solid threat.
That means my timeline for action just got tighter. My wolf starts to pull at the leash I’m holding on to. Letting go again is the last thing I should be doing. Losing myself to my wolf goes against everything I’ve been fighting for.
“And yet, you know it’s what has to happen,” my wolf says in my head. “You’re stronger with me. We can take him. We can take all of them.”
My palm burns as if the leather leash I’m holding tight around my wolf in my mind really is being pulled hard—desperately, even. Kyle, however, is clueless of the danger as he walks down the gazebo’s steps, coming to a stop beside Nikos.
“The Council,” he says with a sneer, “was promised something.”
I scoff. “I never promised you shit.”
“Oh, but Nikos did,” Kyle continues, brushing away some silver wolf fur from his shirt. “He promised us The Liber Umbrarum and a Sherwood. We can make good use of both. I’ll take her now and bring your aunt as a hostage until the spell book is in my possession.”
I squeeze Effie’s hand to reassure her if she has any doubts that this man will not be taking her anywhere. “That’s not going to happen.”
“A pity,” he says, his eyes as cold as the river in February. “The only decision, then, is which one will die first, Artemis or the Sherwood bitch.”
“The pack or the witch, make your choice,” Nikos says like the toady he is, unable to come up with an original thought.
“Neither,” I say without hesitation, never so sure of something in my life.
It’s a fool’s choice. Even if I did give one of them up, the Council wouldn’t be satisfied and Nikos would see it as a weakness—not that I ever would.
I’d die first, and the odds are that I will.
Even if Atlas wakes up in time, Artemis gets free, Effie works her magic, and I fight like I never have before.
Four against several dozen is shitty odds.
“But you aren’t just four,” my wolf growls.
The Council witch waves his right hand, and a ten-foot brick wall forms around us, cutting off any means of escape.
He snaps the fingers of his left hand, and the temperature goes from a cool fall evening when shifting is easy to a blistering heat that makes it difficult for most werewolves to take their wolf form.
Then he shrugs as the scent of slow-rotting ham becomes nearly overwhelming and a torrential downpour starts, turning the ground in the park into a muddy mess almost immediately, making taking a run at him highly difficult at best.
“Unfortunately for them, ‘neither’ is not an option,” Kyle says as he raises his arms, “so I’ll choose for you.”
Then he turns toward Effie and sends a blast of foul-smelling magic her way in the same instant that I let go of the leash and free my wolf completely.