43. Viktor
Viktor
That coven of witches had never been anything but trouble, for as long as I’d been aware of them. Maybe at some point in their distant past, it had been different, but I had doubts.
More than that, I had doubts that the sudden loss of their powerful leader had made them more sensible.
Tristan didn’t seem much more hopeful than I was, the skin around his eyes tight, lips drawn into a small moue, and yet, he was suggesting Daire go.
Why?
I lifted a brow at him, and he instantly buckled and started spilling. “Some of them have decided that without Ermengarde, Daire is the coven leader. I . . . I’m sure that isn’t what Daire wants, but I think we have to handle this now, or they’ll never let it drop.”
Daire’s mouth fell open, and for a second he just stared at Tristan as though he’d said rats were on their way to eat our faces.
Then he pulled back and shook his head. “No. There’s no way.
I mean, I shouldn’t be leader of anything, but Destiny would never accept me as coven leader.
She’d rather kill me. They . . . they don’t even know I’m awakened.
Why would any of them think I should be leader? ”
Tristan leaned his head back and forth, scrunching his face up and then finally, nodding. “Okay, so there are two factions, and Destiny and her lot think they should kill you.”
Daire swallowed hard at that, but he seemed quite a bit less horrified by the idea of being killed than of being in charge.
Understandable. I didn’t usually break the world into a fight of good versus evil, but in this case, it seemed clearly that. And if the bad guys wanted to kill you, it meant you were doing things correctly. If they wanted to make you their leader? Definitely the opposite.
Not that I thought Daire was able to see them as all-bad. They’d raised him, even if they’d done it so poorly that he doubted he was worthy of love.
Frankly, it made me want to go, as Tristan suggested, but to kill them all rather than talk.
That probably wouldn’t be taken well, though, even if I could definitely do it now that I had my wolf back. I’d just lie in wait in the hedge maze, and bite them all. Any who seemed likely to survive, I’d kill while they were unconscious, fighting the bite.
It wouldn’t even be a challenge.
Daire wouldn’t approve, though, so I supposed I would have to find a less bloody answer. Maybe I could poison them—
“Aunt Ingeborg,” Daire whispered the name, almost like it was a revelation, and I had a spare second to be jealous before realizing that he’d said aunt, and also, how was it even possible to be jealous of someone who’d been saddled with a name like Ingeborg in modern-day America?
Tristan cocked his head, confused but curious. “Isn’t she sick? She went to . . . to that place with a nursing staff to take care of her. Didn’t she?”
Daire was off on a journey, though, as he turned and started tugging on my shirt. “She’s okay. I’ll bet anything. She’s okay, and she can help.”
Tristan seemed confused and dubious, but well, I wasn’t planning to spend the rest of my life living in the same house as Tristan, thank goodness.
So I just nodded as I picked up Daire’s porridge and handed it back to him.
“Very well. We will go to where she is and get her. She will handle the witches. But for now, you have to eat.”
He seemed amused, but he agreed to eat, so I poked my head back into the kitchen.
Aleks was scraping his own bowl, apparently having eaten in a hurry.
He nodded to me as he set his bowl down, thanking Mama for cooking and then standing to leave.
Cash was clearly concerned, but Aleks leaned down to kiss him on the head, murmuring reassurances that there wasn’t going to be any danger that, thank fuck, I could once again hear.
I almost shivered for the joy that ran through me at the reminder.
My wolf was home. I was of use to the pack again.
Aleks looked at the others, frowning a second, then shaking his head and taking his jacket off the hook by the door, as well as mine.
He didn’t seem the slightest bit surprised that I immediately put the jacket on Daire, just rolled his eyes at me. He did motion to Tristan though. “You need a coat?”
Tristan rushed in to get the coat that had been designated as his, and came back out a moment later with it, and also Drew. Aleks narrowed his eyes as though he would protest, but Drew rushed over to attach himself to my arm.
I just shrugged at Aleks. “He’s seen us this far. He’s family, and he wants to be there.”
Drew nodded, half hiding behind me, but watching for Aleks’s verdict. Somehow, the little raccoon had accepted a wolf as his alpha, and the rest of us as pack. Was that how raccoon shifters lived? I suspected it was more like family units, like plain wild raccoons.
Finally, Aleks just waved us all off, like we were the most frustrating thing ever.
The lot of us piled into the fancy dual-cab truck that had once been Grant’s, and Aleks looked over at Daire, who was practically on my lap in the back seat, finally eating his breakfast. “You’ll have to tell me where we’re going.”
So Daire did, leading us to a large, one-story brick building on the outskirts of Boise, shaped like a T.
I worried about finding a person without interference in such a large building, let alone one that looked like a medical facility.
They were generally laid out with the intention of keeping everything in sight, and were also usually brightly lit. Hard to hide in places like that.
But as it turned out, there was no concern about any of that. A tall, slender woman standing right outside the building grabbed Daire and Tristan’s attention right away.
“Ingeborg,” Tristan muttered with astonishment. Then he turned around from where he was right in front of us in the front seat, and stared at Daire. “How did you know?”
Daire flushed and swallowed hard. “I guessed . . . once I stopped trying to defend Mother in my own mind. Spells are broken when their caster dies.”
Tristan stared at him, his mouth falling open and the breath punching out of his chest as though Daire had literally hit him.
Before he managed to say a word, the woman opened the front door of the cab, right next to Tristan. He turned and stared at her, mouth opening and closing as she lifted a brow at him, unimpressed.
I liked her immediately.
Even more, when she peered across Tristan at Aleks and asked, “Shall I climb into the back, or . . . ”
Aleks scoffed and grabbed Tristan by the shirt, tugging him into the middle front seat. “Make room for Daire’s aunt, Tristan. You can be shocked later.”
Daire gave him an apologetic look, and I realized they were both dealing with the same thing, if on a slightly different timetable.
Realizing Daire’s mother had been a complete monster.
“You are Ermengarde’s sister?” I asked as the older woman climbed into the front seat next to Tristan and belted in, right in front of me.
She turned her whole body despite the seatbelt, and looked me over, including the way I was holding onto Daire.
A tiny smile turned the corners of her lips, then she looked back up at me and shook her head.
“Her aunt. So Daire’s great-aunt.” She turned her head and pinned Daire with a look.
“She’s dead, I take it? In my lucid moments, I figured out that she’d cursed me. ”
Daire cringed but nodded. “She is. I . . . I killed her. I didn’t know about the curse. I just guessed this morning.”
“Mostly because he doesn’t want to take responsibility for the coven,” Tristan added, frowning at Daire as though he thought either of them owed the witches a damn thing.
Ingeborg gave a snort at that. “And why the hell would he want to take responsibility for a coven that’s always treated him like an outsider?”
“He was supposed to be the witchwolf,” Tristan said, in a tone that said it was a denial.
Ingeborg’s dry look in response made him cringe away from her. “And how did that work out?”
“I mean, we’re kind of a witchwolf,” Daire said, mostly into his empty bowl.
I growled, then spat, “No thanks to your mother. If you hadn’t killed her accidentally, I would have done it on purpose.”
“Well then I owe you both my thanks,” Ingeborg announced to the entire truck cab. “We’ll sell the house in San Francisco and give you the proceeds as a wedding present.”
Daire’s eyes rounded, even though just that morning he’d been insisting that the coven owed him something. Maybe he thought that was too much. I had no idea how much a house in San Francisco was worth, but it seemed reasonable to me.
Why would they even need two houses to begin with? They only lived in one, and the other had been empty and stale when they had loaned it to Grant in his ill-fated plot to kill Ajax Fyse.
Daire opened his mouth and closed it repeatedly, but Ingeborg simply turned back to the front and Aleks. “Would you take me to the coven, young man? It’s time someone took those children in hand. I suspect they’ve been running amok under that ridiculous, spoiled woman.”
Aleks put the truck in drive and headed toward the coven house.