5. Viktor
Viktor
The raccoon started following me around.
I didn’t think it was because I’d fed him once—Leo fed him all the damn time—but still, every time I turned around, there he was, near at hand.
He wasn’t mixing us up. Animals struggled less with the differences between my twin and me—they steered clear of me, and flocked to him like he was some kind of cartoon character.
If I hadn’t known Drew was just a creature who couldn’t possibly understand what was going on, I’d have said he looked . . . worried. About me?
Well, fair enough. A witch had killed my wolf. I tried hard to be happy she hadn’t managed to hit Aleks with the spell, but that didn’t help when Aleks accidentally dropped most of a tree, and all I could do was fucking stand there and watch it happen. Dodge out of the way like a coward, even.
Altair the vampire came, and stayed, and it became more and more apparent that I was useless to my pack.
In the end, when Ivan arrived to threaten us all, I couldn’t even do the simple thing Altair asked, and kill him.
Yes, that had been for the best in the end, because not only had I been useless in protecting the pack, but I’d been completely wrong about him.
All vampires weren’t bad. Something I’d have known, and probably wouldn’t have even been a consideration, if I hadn’t been living in terror of my own sudden inability to protect my pack.
If Leo hadn’t managed what he had—something I still didn’t understand, turning into a half-wolf creature because his love had been threatened—then we’d have all likely died.
But that invasion by Ivan and the witches he’d made into his pets showed me something important that I hadn’t realized before.
It wasn’t over.
All wasn’t completely lost.
The moment the little redheaded witch had cringed away from Ivan landing on the top of the car, it had been as though the world had stopped spinning around me, because I could see him there.
Oh, not the terrified witchboy, cute and compelling though he might have been to someone he hadn’t come to threaten.
But my very own wolf, trapped inside of him.
The witch hadn’t killed him. She had only stolen him to stuff inside of some other witch, for gods only knew what purpose.
I’d barely been able to drag my attention away from staring at the boy to pay attention to Ivan, even as the vampire had recognized me and threatened my brother.
Yes, my attention was all on the fight when I had to stop Altair, his desperate plea to kill him before he hurt my brother, even as I could see in his eyes that the notion of hurting Leo was tearing holes in his soul.
How had I ever thought him anything like Ivan? Yes, I’d been able to smell his emotions, even if my blunted senses could no longer parse them the way I could with my wolf, but how could anyone look into Altair’s red-brown eyes and not see the sadness there?
Ivan probably didn’t even know what sadness was.
More than any time previously, I cursed Ivan in that moment. Forcing us to make such a choice, between Altair’s life and my brother’s. But then something had shifted in Altair’s eyes, even before Leo had snapped and turned into a monstrous half-man, and he’d stopped me.
I’d known, before Ivan even died, that something had changed inside Altair. Somehow, even with magical compulsion affecting him, he wouldn’t have hurt Leo. He had overcome magic and vampirism and centuries of torment, to fall in love with my brother, the purest soul I knew.
Well, with the possible exception of the damned raccoon. And maybe Cash.
Not Evie. Evie was too much like me, and whether he knew it yet or not, Aleks was training her as his protégé. The pack knew it, instinctively, and had started following her lead when he wasn’t around. I was proud of them for learning the way things would be, and so quickly.
It seemed wolf instincts weren’t dead and gone from them after all.
That, almost as much as anything else, bolstered me when I made my decision to retrieve my wolf.
Even if I failed, the pack was healing. They were learning how to be a real pack, a good pack.
To take care of each other and follow leaders rather than whatever bastard was most likely to abuse them if they refused.
But me? I was no use to them without my wolf.
And now that I knew he was still out there, there was no choice.
Not any more than there had been a choice about escaping by myself and leaving the others with the government back in Russia.
I’d had to get everyone out, because we didn’t leave our own in enemy hands.
Maybe they hadn’t been my pack properly, but that hadn’t changed anything.
We didn’t leave people behind, not ever.
So I wrote the note and left it sitting where they couldn’t miss it.
The witches have him, and I have to get him back. I can be no use to the pack without him.
-Viktor.
No reason to pack a bag, since it wasn’t a pleasure trip, or a long one. The witches’ compound on the outskirts of Boise was less than twenty miles away, and I could walk there and back easily, even without my wolf to help my endurance. I’d marched farther while less well-fed.
I once again slipped out my window, more careful this time when I landed on the ground.
Drew was sitting there at the edge of the trees watching, and turned to start walking alongside me as I went, like it was a lovely evening stroll we were taking in the middle of the night.
“You should stay here where it’s safe,” I told him, not that I expected him to understand or listen. “The witches are more monstrous than even I am. They stole my wolf, and I have to get him back.”
He looked up at me as we walked, and seemed to smile at me.
Damned fool raccoon was going to get hurt, trusting in monsters.
I sighed and tossed him a piece of dried meat from my pocket, which he snatched and started munching on without breaking stride along next to me, walking on three feet and using the fourth to hold his food.
It was a long walk, but not a terrible one, all things considered.
We stopped outside the witch compound, Drew cocking his head to one side, as though in consideration rather than fear. I sighed and motioned him back to the woods. “Stay. You’ll be safe here. No reason to go into danger.”
He seemed to scoff and turned away, toddling along the edge of the brick wall that surrounded the enclosure, but with . . . a strange sort of intensity. Not like he was wandering, exploring, but as though he were headed somewhere specific.
As though he’d been there before.
This was far for such a small creature to range in his territory, but something in me said to trust his instincts. He was over three years old, which was impressive for a raccoon, so his self-preservation instincts weren’t nonexistent as they sometimes seemed.
He led me down to a small hole in the wall, raccoon-sized rather than human-sized, but before I could get frustrated with myself for assuming a raccoon knew a damned thing about what I needed, he pointed inside, rather than just going in.
Interested, I knelt and looked through the hole.
The hole led to the back of a house, where on a patio next to a sliding glass door, there were two dishes for animals.
Maybe cat-sized. I didn’t recall the witches ever smelling of cats, but .
. . Drew had been here before, clearly. Had eaten here before.
Knew that this was a relatively safe spot to enter, at least for him.
I smiled and reached out to pat him on the head. “Thank you, friend. This is helpful.”
Even if the hole was too small for me to fit through, it was something. The front of the compound had a guardhouse, so going in that way would get me seen straight away, and at least this wasn’t that.
Not that the guards had looked terribly threatening, one sitting in the small building with his feet on a desk, reading something, and the other leaning on that same desk with his back to the road, eating a snack cake.
Still, not being seen was preferable to being seen, even by people who didn’t concern me. I didn’t want any more attention than I was bound to get from the witches.
So I found a loose brick in the wall and pulled on it till it made a proper toe-hold, and then used it to heft myself up and over the wall.
When I got to the top, I pointed back down at Drew.
“You stay out here. They’re going to be as angry as a kicked hive once they realize I’m here.
You don’t need to get caught up in that. ”
He sat there on the outside of the wall, looking mildly concerned, but oddly enough, he followed my order.
The dishes on the patio were both filled with some kind of kibble, so . . . one of the witches seemed to be trying to feed the local wildlife, given the fact that they were overfilled. Odd, considering how little regard most of them seemed to have for any life at all.
They had abandoned multiple of their own coven to death at our hands, and Tristan to wolfhood after he’d been bitten. He was an annoying little shit, but if he’d been my pack, I wouldn’t have left him that way, annoying or not.
The glass door was locked on the inside, with a deadbolt, which was rather hard to pick, and lockpicking had never been my specialty.
I didn’t particularly want to break that much glass, either, since it would be loud.
Best to break a single pane if I had to resort to that.
Best of all to find an open window and simply climb inside.
I skirted the side of the house, which was .
. . well, calling it a house was perhaps ungenerous of me.
Mansion? Compound building? It was built like those old-style houses, what were they called?
Victorian? With the turrets and multi-angled roofs and such, that looked, to my eye, more like a mishmash of a dozen different houses rather than a single, cohesive unit.