29. Viktor
Viktor
When I first arrived from Russia a few years earlier, Aleks had immediately recognized that I was not in a good place to be around many people. His answer had been to put me with Cash, and whether he’d realized it or not, he’d wanted me to protect the man he loved.
As it turned out, that was easy. Cash was soothing to be around, quiet and calm and kind.
Things had changed over the intervening years, and I was better able to deal with noise and people, but Cash had remained my closest friend in this new pack.
But with Daire at my side? Well, I needed to keep my distance from him.
Making them uncomfortable just because I enjoyed being around both of them wasn’t an option. Especially in this situation, my comfort was not the priority.
Not that I tended to prioritize my own comfort. What an odd concept.
So I took Daire around the side of the clearing, as far from where Cash was working as possible.
Fortunately for us, the current project was enormous, so there was plenty of room.
In fact, Jojo had a small workshop set up on the far side of the house, where she was working on some furniture.
The current project was a dining room set that was even bigger than the one in Mama’s house, complete with no less than a dozen chairs.
I thought maybe the kitchen could serve as the meeting place Aleks had been talking about, but maybe not.
After all, if the big house was supposed to be a safe place, we couldn’t have people the pack didn’t trust in there.
Maybe there was such a thing as a ward for intentions, to warn if people who intended harm tried to cross.
The process had seemed pretty open, so it should be almost infinitely alterable to suit the needs of the magic user. From the way Daire had been teaching me, frankly, magic seemed to be so much less hidebound than I’d believed from previous experience.
Or maybe it was about the practitioner more than the magic itself.
Jojo looked up as we practically slunk out of the woods near the work site.
Well, I slunk. Daire just followed me, looking around with a smile and his wide, curious eyes drinking everything in.
She grinned and waved us over. It was so strange to me sometimes, how the pack had accepted me even as my surly, nonvocal self.
Surely, that meant most of them would react well to Daire.
She didn’t immediately seem to have a problem with him, even though her brother had also been one of the people Grant had been sending off to the coven over his years in charge. In fact, she looked him over like she did men she might find attractive.
I was not jealous at all.
Good thing I didn’t have my own wolf in me to growl at her and put the lie to that, so I could fake it well enough.
“Hey, you two. Aleks said you were warding the pack territory. That’s so cool. Does it mean the witches won’t be able to come in anymore?”
Daire let his head fall to one side and squinted, but eventually shook it.
“Not exactly. It means they can’t just pop up without us knowing, even if they’re on foot.
They have to intentionally cross or break the wards to come in, which means we’ll know well ahead of time and they won’t catch us by surprise.
” He paused and bit his lip, clearly nervous.
“Is that . . . is that okay? I mean, there are wards that can stop people from crossing at all, but usually they’ll stop people from being able to leave, too. I could look into—”
“That’s cool,” Jojo said, leaning on the sturdy slab of maple that was the top of the table. Then she frowned down at the wood, pulling her palm away and inspecting it carefully. “Fucking splinters. I guess I should get back to sanding.”
“We can do that,” I offered, then motioned to the pile of clearly shaped pieces of wood that were waiting. “You can work on the chairs. This is simple.”
She brightened at that. “Seriously? Hell yeah. I’d do anything to get out of hours of sanding. I’ll even make lunch.”
I lifted a brow at her, pursing my lips, and she laughed.
“Okay fine, I’ll make Larry make you lunch, because we all know I can’t even make a sandwich without screwing it up.”
I snorted but took up a sander with the right grit and tossed it to Daire, then picked up one of my own.
We didn’t have those fancy electric sanders, at least in part because we didn’t have electricity all over the place to be using tons of power tools.
Plus we were werewolves. We had more ability to do hard labor and recover easily than humans.
“You can’t even cut bread straight,” her brother, Larry, pointed out from where he was already working on a chair. “But I’d be happy to make everyone lunch. Gives me half an hour of rest from the back-breaking labor thing.”
She scoffed. “Like you’ve ever broken your back for anything. You’re just hammering nails anyway.”
Daire looked between them for a moment, apparently not recognizing Larry, but focusing back on me. “What do you mean, cut bread straight? Like . . . she cuts the sandwiches diagonally?”
I just blinked at him, uncomprehending, but Jojo and Larry burst into laughter.
“Oh, sweet summer child,” she said when she’d finally caught her breath, shaking her head. “We mean that when you make your own bread, it doesn’t come presliced.”
Daire winced, clearly convinced that they thought ill of him for the mistake, but they wouldn’t. And how could anyone? I hadn’t even understood the question.
So I leaned into my own ignorance, to show him it was fine. “Does bread in the city come presliced? Seems like it would go stale very fast that way.”
“They put a bunch of stuff in it to keep that from happening,” Jojo offered, and scrunched up her nose. “Honestly, never go in a human grocery store if you don’t have to. They all smell nasty. Plastic and rotting meat and everything inedible.”
Larry scoffed at her. “It’s sugar. They put sugar in bread to keep it from going bad too fast. It tastes amazing that way. Not as good as the fresh stuff Katya makes, but come on, who doesn’t love sugar?”
Jojo shrugged in the way that said she didn’t agree, but also wasn’t going to argue with him.
That was interesting, though. I hadn’t known sugar could make a thing last longer.
I suspected it was also more complicated than that, and I knew humans used lots of things in their food that we didn’t have access to.
I wasn’t sure if we wanted them or not, either.
I hadn’t had a ton of experience outside of the pack and the military, for food.
Some foods humans made were amazing, but some smelled like they were made of the same stuff as the plastic packaging Jojo had mentioned.
I figured it was just like our housing. We lived differently because we used what we had access to, and so did they, but their access was different.
Some humans probably lived in the woods and made most things for themselves, only supplementing their own ability to forage and grow with some small amounts of outside work or farmstands.
Before we’d been spending most of our time and effort building the houses, Jojo had worked in nearby towns as a handywoman.
Walter sold some of the produce from the garden in a stand on the side of the highway every day in the spring and summer, and most of that money went to buying things like flour and other foods it was hard to produce inside pack territory.
And sometimes, concrete for building houses.
Some humans had to do the same, didn’t they? Surely not all of them lived in cities.
A strange sound almost like thunder hit my ears, followed almost immediately by a single pained shout, and then chaos.
My reflexes were too damned dulled by my missing wolf, but I spun and crouched, ready for attack, only to find a crowd gathered around where Aleks and Leo had been working when we’d arrived.
They’d been trimming the ends of the main logs intended as walls for the upper floor, and now, a crowd of wolves huddled in a tight knot around Aleks. Leo was standing halfway down the log, looking pale and horrified, and . . .
Red.
There was blood everywhere.
Fuck decorum or anyone’s feelings in the moment, I rushed toward them, and since the tether didn’t tug me even once, I figured Daire was right behind me.
We arrived there at the same time as Cash from the other direction, and I started pushing people out of the way, trying to get to Aleks at the center of the disturbance.
The saw had snapped.
It was sitting on the ground underfoot now, broken in half and covered in blood.
I’d known it was a problem. We’d all fucking known. It was too old, used too long and resharpened too damned many times. It had practically been a bomb waiting to go off, and we’d kept right on using it, because we didn’t have enough to justify throwing things away when they were old and unsafe.
When I got the last person out of my way, it was .
. . fuck. It wasn’t just bad. It wasn’t something werewolf healing was going to handle.
Aleks’s hand was . . . well. Werewolf healing wasn’t going to do a fucking thing for something that wasn’t attached to him, and his hand was hanging limp from a little bit of flesh.
Next to me, a gasping, wheezing hiss started, and I glanced over to find Cash, completely white and looking like he was about to pass out.
No doubt he was thinking of Henry, his father, who had lost a leg in an act of malice by one of the pack’s previous alphas, for which Cash still blamed himself. Shit. He couldn’t handle this on the best day, and with the witches already hanging over our heads, today was not that.
Aleks was holding his wrist against his chest, and looked up at me, then glanced to Cash and back.
He was telling me to get Cash away, but that wasn’t going to fucking help.
Yes, Aleks would be fine and could live without the hand, but this was going to destroy Cash, especially since he was in charge of the construction, so he would once again blame himself for it.
But it was done. There was no fixing this.