23. Viktor
Viktor
It was cheating, pointing out that Daire couldn’t leave without me.
I knew damn well that no matter how hard Cash was holding onto his grudge, no one would let me leave again, not even him.
They’d been worried, which . . . well, the whole point of me going on my own was to try to not get them hurt.
My wolf was my responsibility, not theirs, and the last thing we needed was for members of the pack to die over me and my wolf.
My family had suffered enough on my account.
And while Daire hadn’t suffered because of me, frankly, he’d suffered enough.
Sure, he hadn’t released Altair years earlier. But why would he have? He’d been raised to think of Altair as a dangerous monster who needed to be imprisoned, I was sure. Why would he have simply changed his mind?
My wolf.
So of course, he thought he’d done wrong because he hadn’t come up with it all on his own. But that wasn’t how people worked. They needed a catalyst to change, and my wolf had simply been his.
Cash ate angrily, glaring at his bowl like it had done him wrong, and every scrape of his spoon seemed to drive Daire’s head down farther and farther. I was concerned that any moment, he was going to just put his head down on the table and cry again.
“So,” Leo said when the table had gone quiet again, “how do we stop this spell, and get the wolf and magic back where they belong?”
Daire’s shoulders dropped even more, so much he looked like he was melting.
Tristan was the one who spoke up, though. “Hard to say. Trying to break a spell in process is dangerous. It could be simple and just dissipate and leave everything sunshine and rainbows, or it could backlash and hurt everyone involved. Kill them, even. There’s no way to know without doing it.”
“There’s no way to just anti-magic it? Negate everything?” Aleks was frowning at Tristan like he’d have preferred he either keep his mouth shut or lie, rather than give us such an ugly truth.
And I assumed it was all true, from the way Daire’s breathing had gone shallow and panicky.
Tristan shook his head. “Not that I know of. I mean, I was still an apprentice, so I won’t claim to know everything about magic, but in my understanding, leaving magic half-finished like this is incredibly dangerous for all parties involved.”
It was times like this I realized something was truly broken in me, because my first thought was that it was good.
Even if it ended up killing Daire and me, it would probably take Ermengarde too, since she was an involved party.
Still, I didn’t want Daire hurt, and I didn’t particularly want to die, so it would be better to find an actual solution.
“We can call Prudence,” Evie suggested. “She was a badass, so if anyone knows how to break spells, it’d be her, right? Or I guess maybe that guy, what’s his name.”
“Dakota,” Mama offered, and rolled her eyes when Aleks scowled.
It was almost funny, how much my brother did not want to accept help from the Crescent alpha or his mate.
“In the meantime,” Altair interrupted smoothly, ignoring all the tension at the table, “we need to try to keep the witches out of our territory. They will definitely try to sneak in and take at least Daire back. In fact, since he’s related to Ermengarde, they might try something diplomatic rather than force, since it’s been proven that Wildwood wolves are more than willing to bite when threatened.
They might go to another local pack and demand parley. ”
“Or they might try to hide their incursion instead of driving up the road,” Daire said, almost in a whisper.
“That,” Tristan agreed. “The Sawtooth and Payette packs hate her even more than Wildwood. They never agreed to work with her before, so it’s not likely they’ll do it now, even if she asks.
Ermengarde does not like to be turned down, so it’s more likely she’ll try to sneak in the back way and try to steal them.
Or even finish the spell right here on pack lands, since that might be easier.
Once she’s a witchwolf, she can do almost anything, and stopping a pack will be child’s play. ”
Unrest in the coven.
No deals with Sawtooth and Payette.
It seemed to me that just maybe, the coven was on its last legs, and they desperately needed this win. Or Ermengarde needed to steal Daire’s and my power in order to force them back in line.
It didn’t even matter if it would work; the woman was desperate, and desperate people did insane things to try to preserve their illusions.
Maybe I’d done even worse than bringing the pack into danger by asking them to come with me to retrieve my wolf.
Maybe I’d brought the danger right to their door, in the form of a witch so frantic to keep power in her own coven that she’d do any reckless thing to force the issue.
Like murder her own son for the power inside him.
Not that I suspected she’d ever cared much about him, from what little I’d learned about Daire’s childhood. No, I thought she’d always considered him a tool, not a loved one.
I wondered if she was even capable of love.
I’d wondered the same about myself at times, but seeing her planning to murder Daire had helped a bit with that. After all, I might be a disaster of a person, with broken and missing pieces in my soul, but I would never, ever have considered sacrificing the lives of my own family for power.
“We could . . . there are wards,” Daire said, and when Cash whipped his head up to glare at him, he leaned hard into me, and his voice went even quieter than before. “We could at least set up perimeter wards around your homes, so we’ll know if witches cross them.”
“You mean other witches,” Cash near-snarled at him.
“Yes,” I agreed. I met his eye and tried to be as sympathetic to his anger as possible, but well . . . emotions weren’t exactly my forte. “Witches other than me.”
The face he made was somewhere between horrified and disgusted, and I couldn’t blame him. I had no great desire to be a witch. I’d rather have my wolf back by far. But if I was the pack witch for the moment, then this was my responsibility.
“We will try to lay these wards in the morning,” I told Daire. “You need rest before that. However good you are at teaching, it has been a long day and night, and we both need sleep.”
He didn’t deny it this time, just nodded without looking up.
Thank goodness. I loved everyone in the room with me—well, except for Tristan whom I barely knew—but the last thing I needed was to deal with any more of Cash’s anger at that moment. He was like another brother to me, but Daire was . . .
Had I just failed to exclude Daire from the people I loved?
Strange.
Well, we’d been forced together rather violently, and so far I did actually like what I knew of him.
Beyond that, well . . . there was something about him being in possession of my wolf that had led not to snarling anger, but softer feelings.
Like his feeding Drew for years, he was now taking care of my wolf, and the fact that it hadn’t ripped him apart said good things about the brightness of his soul.
Like how light and beautiful his magic was. Just like his smile, not that I’d seen that in a few hours. His magic was inside me, a part of me, and the intimacy of it, the way it felt, was teaching me more than I could have learned about him in a year of conversation.
Daire was the perfect witch to be going through this with us. He was entirely on our side, and now, as far as I was concerned, he was one of us. More than Tristan, who hadn’t found a place inside the pack yet. Daire had a place, and it was right where he was, at my side.