Chapter 14
LEANDER
“Be honest,” I said, my right eye twitching as Lainsz threw another dagger into the back of the front door to our stone cottage near the boundary. “Will you disown me if I use one of those damn knives to kill this prick?”
“Say it with me,” Verne, our small pack’s alpha, said without glancing up from where he was folding laundry, as if to rub in our faces just how much of an adult he was. As if that wasn’t enough, even his fucking underwear was ironed.
I groaned and parroted, “Maim, not murder. I know. But he’s being an annoying dick, and that should give me some leeway.”
“I’m bored,” Lainsz bit out, his accent a relic of his upbringing on Earth, where his parents worked as envoys between the four biggest packs here—North, South, East and West—and the secret wolves living among humans.
Before his entire family was murdered by the brutes from the academy on the hill overlooking our forest.
“You’re always bored,” Verne said, shooting him a look as Lainsz ripped the dagger from the door and moved back to throw it again.
I snatched the knife from his hand before he could make another hole in the door. “You should be grateful for being bored. What’s the alternative? Being attacked by leeches?”
“I dare them to attack,” Lainsz hissed, and the madman’s light blue eyes actually lit up.
As if he’d relish a gang of slayers finding the secret hideout where we observed them and collected intel for the good of our pack, our safety, and the future of our entire species.
“My claws have thirsted for blood all month.”
“Calm down, Freddie Kruger,” Verne remarked, throwing a white shirt at Lainsz’s head and ignoring the growl that filled the cottage from our perpetually grumpy pack member.
“Who’s that?” I asked. “Friend of yours?”
Lainsz snorted, and Verne gave him the alpha look. Secretly, I thought of it as the dad look because my dad gave me the exact same look that one time we went fishing and I threw the bait, line, and rod into the lake.1
Verne was about to launch into a lecture that was chiding, inspirational, and irritating all at once; I could sense it in the air. But he didn’t get more than a syllable out when a tremor went through the forest. Outside, the wind whispered, then began to shout with urgency.
We shared an alarmed look, and then we were all scrambling for the door, me pulling on my boots, half fastened as I stumbled out the door.
The wind hissed through branches, rattling the leaves until a few fluttered down around us. Verne raced ahead, his long legs eating up the distance as the forest urged us left—towards the boundary between wolf lands and that vile training camp.
If they had the nerve to mount an attack, or to send another orienteering group into our forest, we’d rip them apart. Well, Lainsz would rip them apart in a fit of rage; I doubt Verne and I would get close. He was feral when it came to the slayers.
“Over here,” Verne shouted, and I pushed my body faster, Lainsz grinning as he did the same, anticipating blood spilled.
When we caught up to Verne, he was crouching on the leaf-strewn floor, the moonlight filtering through the thinning trees at the edge of our lands silvering his dark hands as he lifted them helplessly.
His eyes were so wide, the whites dominating, and I skidded to a stop at the sight of that true, utter terror in his eyes.
There was a body broken on the ground beside him, and it didn’t take a genius to work out she must have fallen from the jagged edge of the hill above. Well, fallen or been pushed.
“Great,” Lainsz muttered. “A fucking body to dispose of.”
“Well,” I remarked, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re not bored now, are you?”