18. Daire
Daire
It was the tether I had to Viktor that kept me moving.
He was confident, assured that we were going the right way. As terrified as I was, I couldn’t dig in and refuse to move. I wasn’t half as confident as he was, so we were going with his plan.
Which involved me, walking with Buddy the raccoon who’d eaten kibble off our porch when I filled the bowls for some nearby stray cats and was now, apparently, a shifter too, into the very center of a werewolf pack that I’d—
Well, maybe I hadn’t hurt them directly, but I hadn’t stopped them from being hurt. I’d seen enough to know it was wrong, and I hadn’t been brave enough to do anything about it until I had one of them inside me.
So I still hadn’t done them any good. We weren’t allies. And I—
I trusted Viktor, but I had a deranged impulse to gnaw off my arm rather than face them.
Viktor, who’d carried his balled-up shirt in his hand ever since he’d shown me how to shift, offered it to Buddy now, who frowned at it for a second, glanced over at Aleks, and then pulled it over his head.
The thing swallowed him completely.
He was just—all right, he wasn’t a kid, but he had to be younger than me. And the coven had killed his parents.
I’d seen Buddy around for years. Been feeding him. I had no idea he was a shifter and all that time, he’d been alone.
I had let him eat cat food—a kid alone in the woods.
We’d murdered his family!
At this point, my best bet was to run into the woods and forget I’d ever been a person at all, but Viktor held out his hand beside him, searching for me.
I was a fool, that the only thing I wanted to do was shove myself under his palm. But his fingers ran through my fur and scratched the scruff of my neck. I shoved against his leg.
The second-best thing for me to do was just to stick by his side.
We kept moving, and I kept Viktor between me and the rest of his pack. I had no idea how he kept pace without getting winded, but by the time we saw the werewolves’ old shacks through the trees, I didn’t hear the coven’s SUVs anymore.
After Tristan and Kate hadn’t come back, there was no way they’d want to face the wolves on their own territory again. Mother was stuck, her spell half finished, and for the moment, we were safe.
One of the wolves—an enormous gray one with brown on his muzzle—shifted back onto two feet. He looked like Viktor, if Viktor had never been stuck in Russia maybe. His eyes were clearer, his face more emotive.
He stared at Viktor like he’d been stricken. “Where did you go? Who were you—”
Viktor’s twin stared down at me, and I shrank behind him.
“That is your wolf, isn’t it?” His twin asked, brow furrowed like even he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing.
Viktor sighed. His hand was still nestled in my fur. My tail curled up between my legs, pressing up into my stomach.
“Yes,” he admitted. “The witches took him.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” the alpha asked, his arms crossed.
Viktor didn’t even flinch. “It was my problem to fix.”
“And now you’re, what, running around half here and half there?”
Finally, Viktor grimaced. I smelled his frustration as he gauged how to answer, but I—I was the only one who knew exactly what had happened and why.
As tempting as it was to stay on four legs and let them think I was just a wolf and nothing more, Viktor glanced down at me with a frown, and a throbbing sense of shame made it impossible to stay down there.
Now that I’d shifted on my own, it was easier to change back. I pressed myself against Viktor’s back, still half behind him, and raised my eyes to look at the pack.
I didn’t have to say anything before one of the wolves—sleek and dark—crouched toward the ground, snarling. His lips pulled back from long white fangs. I jerked back, fully behind Viktor, but that didn’t stop the wolf from barking furiously.
Viktor threw his arm out behind him, his hand on my hip to keep track of me.
What happened if he got bit by a werewolf when he was full of my magic? Fuck.
I grabbed his wrist and tried to pull him back, but he stood firm, leaning forward and glaring. “Back off, Cash,” he said, not loud and angry but leaving no room for argument.
The dark gray wolf didn’t stop growling until the alpha put his hand on the back of his neck, just like Viktor had done to me. Aleks, that was his name. I’d seen him at the coven house before he’d taken over for Grant.
He recognized me too.
“You’re one of the witches.”
“He’s Ermengarde’s son,” Viktor offered.
“I’m Daire,” I squeaked, grateful for werewolf hearing, because it meant that even though I could hardly speak, they’d hear me.
“So why the hell are you running around as my brother’s wolf?” the one who looked so much like Viktor demanded.
Right . . . I needed to explain that. But my chest felt squeezed like I was trapped in a giant’s fist, and I couldn’t talk, and I was probably going to die anyway, so what did it matter?
“He’s not like the other ones,” Buddy piped up, staring at Leo with wide, dark, doleful eyes.
“How do . . . ” Viktor’s twin looked Buddy over. Not Buddy. Fuck, I needed to learn his name. But the werewolf shook himself. One problem at a time. “How do you know?”
“He fed me,” Buddy said, smiling. His eyes were gleaming as if in his world, that was truly the most generous thing a person could do, but we’d killed his parents. We fucking murdered people. “Even when he knew it was me eating it, he only put out more. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
Aleks’s nose flared. “It was Ermengarde’s spell, right? The one that was supposed to hit me.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t know what it’d done, but I felt . . . something that day. I didn’t realize I’d taken anything until I—Viktor came to the coven house, and we captured him. Not—not me, but—”
“But your people,” Viktor’s twin said, cool and unimpressed.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “There was a ritual, and I . . . I shifted. It is Viktor’s wolf, a-and he has my magic.”
“Why?” Aleks demanded. The wolf at his side had begun to growl again.
“Because . . . ” I didn’t really know, but I’d studied magic.
Forces worked by rules, and everything wanted to return to its natural state.
Magic meant convincing the energy in the world to do something else.
“Because if you pull a bungie cord to the opposite side of the room, and you have another on the other side, and you do the same thing, as soon as you let them go, they’re going to spring back into place.
I think my—my mother wanted to capture that energy in the middle and . . . and take it for herself.”
Viktor’s twin looked horrified, an overly dramatic widening of his eyes that was like an exaggerated mirror of what I’d seen from Viktor earlier that night. “She’d take your magic?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know if that was always her plan, but I think that was what she was trying to do tonight, yeah.”
“She would’ve killed us both,” Viktor said firmly.
My guts twisted up at the notion, but when my eyes fell to the ground, I still nodded. “I think so.”
“Fuck,” Viktor’s brother said.
“So how do we fix this?” Aleks asked.
And then, a svelte form came trouncing around the biggest house from an area I couldn’t see.
Altair was in dark, tight pants and a button-up shirt that was crisp and rolled up to his forearms. He’d put on a vest and looked .
. . well, he looked nothing like the half-mad beast I’d let out of his cage.
He grinned as he sauntered into the gathering, and his arm slid around Viktor’s brother’s waist. “There you are,” he said. “I see you found Viktor. Glad you’re home,” he said to Viktor. Then he kissed his brother’s cheek. Altair didn’t hesitate a second at his nakedness.
Then, he looked at me. His teeth glinted in the light, too sharp to be human. “Hello, Daire. Darling”—he curled forward to rest his cheek on Viktor’s brother’s shoulder—“this is Daire. He’s the witch who released me.”
Viktor’s brother sighed through his nose, but the anger in his face disappeared before the next time he glanced my way.
Maybe I hadn’t been so crazy to let the vampire out after all.