You’re too late.
No!
Kage dropped into a pool of his own blood as it burst from his severed neck.
I opened my mouth on a scream that would not come, my own throat cut. As I fell with him, vision blurring, Isaac and Zar walked away.
We told you. You wouldn’t listen.
I am now. Please. Give me another chance.
Atarah held Isaac’s golden moon pendant out to me, the charm morphing into a heart.
What is your greatest strength, Cassia?
I don’t know.
Martha looked around from spinning wool in the sunroom.
What does a pack need to survive, yearling?
Guidance, direction, support. To be able to use their strengths. To work together. They need a responsive silver who understands them.
Pouring out my heart to Jason in the caravan in Cornwall.
Wanting my lunch with Isaac in London to never end.
Imagining a future on the beach with Zar and our kids.
Afraid to ask Andrew personal questions because of the potential for causing him pain, yet thinking at every encounter of wanting to know him better.
Kage’s confession of lightning and magic, his hand on my hand, my foot, my face, just being friendly, until he could not stop himself, and neither could I.
The feelings when Jed told me about the cuff: not on my watch, because it would have to be over my dead body.
Martha still watched me. So did Atarah. Still waiting for answers while I slipped below the surface, drowning.
Because I hadn’t answered them.
Love!
Too late, everything blurring to black.
The noise was part of my dream at first. Cries through tangled wolf bodies floating in bloody heaps around me, cities burning, and my own failed efforts to scream.
Even when I woke, I felt confused, taking a moment to remember being in bed with Isaac. Not only in his bedroom, but in the covers, head on pillow, holding onto him.
“Cassia?” He sounded worried. “Arä? I’ve got to get up.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost five in the morning. It’s nearly dawn.”
I eased away from him, Isaac kissing my forehead, then he climbed quickly from bed in the dark.
I heard it too then. Yelping, cries of pain or fear. People shouting. Doors banging.
The notes in the sounds sent a jolt of fear up my spine and I followed Isaac. He was already out to the living room, zipping his slacks and going for boots to pull on at the door. I took a bit longer, tugging on the jeans and underwear from the bedroom floor, finding my sandals, then, unlike him, looking for my top.
Isaac had the door open, but returned to me with my bra and shirt when he saw I was following. He hooked it in the back and I pulled the top on, shivering.
In slacks and motorcycle boots, Isaac hurried out, me at his heels.
We ran for the road. I couldn’t tell the direction the disturbances came from, though Isaac seemed to know. He headed along the top of the orchard, dark with only a few outside lights on in the park and the eastern sky at our backs just hinting at grays and blues.
By the time we reached the road in—the same spot where I’d walked up and ran into the night watch coming here through the rain—a few others had also reached us.
“What’s going on?”
“Did you hear that?”
“Was that Peter? He was on watch tonight.”
“Look! Is that Joanna?”
A gray wolf, pale in the darkness, streaked down the main road, heading south and running flat out, as if chasing a rabbit.
A sharp, piercing cry, a howl or very long yelp, painful, from far up the road. Not down it, but north and east, toward the semi-detached homes of the scattered neighbors, including the owners of the apple orchard. I’d never been up there. It seemed to lead to a neighborhood and more farmland, maybe a pub.
We all jumped at the noise. Isaac, with a couple of others, ran for the road, where my cab had turned around.
I wanted to yell at them to stop, to come to their senses, act together. But there were three, which was something.
More wolves in fur streaked past, bursting from the field, out of the alleys, running for the road.
“Joanna!” The female in Isaac’s small group stopped there to shout after her while he and the other male ran up the road toward the source of yelping. She started down the road to follow Joanna.
I ran for her. “Don’t scatter! Wait!”
“Joanna!”
“No! Let her go! Don’t go off alone!”
She paused in the middle of the road.
“Someone in fur!” My breaths were already short with fear more than brief running.
There were none near us. Looking around, though, I spotted one familiar figure coming down along the fence, away from the others. He also wore only pants and boots.
“Jed.” I dashed to him. “Change. Quickly. Go after Joanna. I don’t know what the hell she’s doing, but she just took off like a rocket on her own.”
“I can’t—”
“Change. Find her. Get her to come back. There’s something wrong. I think someone’s already hurt. Change, Jed.”
He looked around, as if suspicious a silver would materialize to stop him, but he was already kicking off his boots.
I rushed back to the road, making sure the other female hadn’t kept going after Joanna on two feet.
A minute later, a huge, dark wolf tore past us and pelted off down the road.
“Be safe,” I whispered.
“Cass?” Zar’s voice as he hurried to me.
Still, noise and commotion from far off up the road. Much in Lucannis. Other than the new arrivals, I couldn’t see anyone now. No wolves rushing past, everyone who’d set off now out of sight. But more were starting that way.
“Stop it!” I ran with them, holding out my arms like a wall. “Stop! What is the point of your guard if you burst away in all directions at the first sound of trouble? Get back to your homes. Unless you are core or on watch tonight, please, please get back and look after your families.”
They did retreat, but more like scared animals—little growls and sideways, darting glances—rather than obedient pets.
Zar helped me, talking softly. “Step back. Just wait. Where’s Peter?”
“What’s going on?”
“Who’s out there?”
“Joanna!”
Voices mixed, more questions, fear thick as smoke. But they didn’t take off.
“Everyone get back up to the top of the lane.” Zacharias’s voice. Hurrying from the park in a limping jog, as fast as he could probably go.
Whatever issues he might have, I was glad to see him.
To his command they responded, everyone retreating to wait, listening.
Lights had come on in mundane homes far off beyond a dip in the rolling landscape. We weren’t the only ones to have heard something.
In another minute, wolves began to come back. Three in fur, then two more. Their eyes rolled white, tails tucked between their legs, drooling as they panted.
“Who’s down there?” Zacharias was asking someone.
“I saw Isaac and Philip run over in skin.”
“Peter’s still out there. We heard him.”
“In fur?” Zacharias asked. “No one should be in fur out there. Lights—”
“Elder, I think Simon and Zipporah are there. I was awake and they must have been. I heard them run out at the first disturbance.”
I jumped when someone touched my arm. Only Zar, also looking up to the road running east.
We waited, those assembled still talking about who was missing, what was wrong, and more of the pack coming up from their homes.
“They’ve got to get out of there,” Zacharias murmured, watching as more lights in windows flashed on a mile away—though, now, all was quiet.
/> “What’s going on?” Kage’s voice.
“Someone’s hurt,” a female answered. “We don’t know.”
There must have been twenty of us by then, plus the four-footed.
“Guards?” Zacharias said. “One of you change, tell us what you smelled.”
A panting wolf stood right beside me and I finally thought to get a closer look.
“Andrew?”
He looked up and I saw the clear red and white mask of his face, even in the dark. He was also smaller than the others, shorter coated, sleeker, with larger ears.
I knelt between him and Zar and hugged his neck. “Are you okay?”
Andrew trembled. I felt it across his shoulders as I held onto him and his ribs heaved. He must have been out on guard tonight.
The wolves in fur paced about, as if deciding among themselves who would change, or no one wanting to.
Then, “Wait a minute,” Kage said.
I stood to look down the road. Everyone looked. I slipped the fingers of my right hand into Zar’s, left hand on Andrew’s ear as he leaned his head against my thigh.
One, two, then four figures walking toward us from the east, over the rise and down toward the orchard. Isaac, Philip, Simon, and Zipporah. A single wolf in fur walked with them, Peter, the rest of those in fur having already returned.
I felt myself shaking then also, so relieved to see them. Wasn’t that everyone? Then what was wrong?
They were carrying something. Isaac and another of the two males had their arms full of … something large.
Closer, everyone straining to see, the figures outlined in the dark by distant lights and a slightly paler sky. Two somethings. With long legs and tails and dangling heads limp in their arms.
Chapter 40
I stepped all the way back to the fence, where Jed had left his things. It wasn’t my place to be a part of their grief. Yet it wasn’t far enough away, either. Never far enough. Zar and Andrew kept close against me.
“Andrew?” I crouched for his face. “Joanna took off down the road. If these wolves were just killed up there, the murderers’ car must have gone right past here. But she can’t run as fast as a car and she’ll hit the motorway if she keeps it up. I already sent Jed to bring her back. You said you’re the fastest in the pack. Will you go after them?”
Still shaking, he licked my hand, looked around to the grass at the top of the orchard where the two bodies now lay, surrounded by their families—talking, sobbing, explanations, questions, shock. Then Andrew bounded back to the road from our verge, took the corner, and vanished at a sprint.
I sat against Zar’s legs on the slope while he stood. I used my hammering heart for a tempo, opened my spiritual third eye, and looked.
I was the two wolves, not as they had been, but as they were: one mottled with classic wolf markings, one a creamy golden color with only darker points across back and tail. Like a normal wolf who had been bleached in the sun. Both long-limbed, gangling, awkward: wolf teenagers. Both with their faces covered in drying blood, their throats slashed open below their jawbones, fur black with blood around their necks and chests, and thin wooden stakes pounded into their ribcages.
They hadn’t been hung up or bled out like the deaths in skin. These two had been a rush job: killers jumping at opportunity knocking. Two wolves straying just far enough out from home that they could be grabbed, throats cut, gasoline and cayenne pepper thrown over them, and killers driving away—as if off to work from one of the homes up there. The wolf guards probably hadn’t raised any alarm at the vehicle at all. It would have been a noise from the struggle that first sent Peter and a couple others out investigating. Then the noises, the alarm, fear and pain, bringing in the pack.
How? How did anyone simply grab a wolf and cut its throat without fuss?
Unless it was someone beyond human strength and speed.
Someone like a newly minted vampire.
What else could do that?
Another shifter.
Maybe. Beyond that, I couldn’t say. I couldn’t even guess. Because I couldn’t see anything. The image of the dead bodies, my own fast speculation. No more. The whole scene was a few sharp lines and a spattering of blood in darkness.
I could, at least, see plainly where the bodies had been found. Not that it did anyone any good. Several of those present could have told me that.
They lay, heaped together, on the side of the road at the end of a back lane where rubbish bins and a garden shed stood, in between two sets of semi-detached homes. As if they were a pile of trash ready for waste collection crews to pickup. Right along a mundane inhabited street, right before dawn.
The bodies hadn’t been like this before. They’d been in skin, for one thing. And they’d been out of the way, clearly meant for the wolf pack to find them, not for human eyes.
This…
I don’t know why it was worse. The disregard, disrespect, carelessness, or even attention-seeking feel of it. In whatever way, though, it seemed worse, more sickening than hiding your victim away in a wood.
I opened my two eyes, having gained nothing real from the third, and there was Isaac, kneeling at the roadside to watch me, his skin streaked in one of the victim’s blood. I still leaned on Zar’s legs.
Someone was crying. A long, sobbing, howling sound. Not loud, but an endless wail of pain that would not stop and brought tears to my own eyes.
And someone was arguing. “We can’t do nothing! If she’s on a trail—”
“Of a car. Not of someone on foot. There’s nothing we can do to follow them. The best we can hope for is that our guards have the smell and sound of the vehicle now.”
“I’m going after her—”
“You will do no such thing—”
It was Zacharias.
And Kage.
And still the crying.
The sky beyond Isaac’s head and apple branches was turning soft blue along the horizon.
Crying. A scuffle starting, other wolves keeping Kage where he was.
“Why did Joanna take off?” I whispered to Isaac, who only watched me, concerned or waiting to see if I would come back with any information.
“She’s his mother,” Isaac said softly.
Then I knew. Knew like I’d known all along. Like it had been clear from the moment I saw the outlines with dangling paws and lulling tongues that Isaac had helped to carry in. They were Darius and Rebecca.
Chapter 41
I’ll never forget that morning. An eclipse time if ever I knew one.
Yet, even in the moment, it was a series of choppy events and fragments as broken as a china cup knocked out a window.
The bodies and the pack.
Isaac hugging me, Zar never leaving me.
Kage’s voice and his mother’s sobbing.
Jed and Andrew returning with Joanna.
The bodies being moved to the back of the buildings by their little grave plot and the willow trees, laid on blankets, their faces gently washed and forms covered as more and more of the pack gathered around them.
The sight of Diana on a porch, phone in her hand, seeking out Zacharias’s eyes, then mine. She’d just had a call from France. Last night, a third wolf in a French pack had been murdered. In one night. Two sets of murderers working together with the same pattern to hunt wolves.
Jed, Andrew, and Zar all staying against me as if in orbit.
Isaac with Joanna and her family.
Talk and shouting in Lucannis. Anger and grief and desperation as meaningless as those deaths.
Kage and his father, whom I’d never seen before, yelling at one another about taking action versus not, about them having just “let the car get away” according to Kage; his father telling him off, saying stop, show some respect.
“Respect? Fucking respect? How about doing something!”
Pack and Jason intervening again, pulling Kage away from him and from the bodies as the new sun lit up the world with glinting dewdrops and long, fading shadows. No
birdsong greeted the day, however. With all the yelling and weeping, not one lifted a song in the park.
Then Zacharias spotting Jed and coming over, pointing out that Jed was breaking his lockdown restrictions, starting about consequences after telling Jed to go home and change, then when to meet him later. Jed not moving, staring coldly at the silver with his gold-flecked eyes.
And me saying something I would instantly regret as I faced Zacharias with them: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Zacharias had been against me since Friday morning. It wasn’t as if this made him turn on me. It was only sealing my fate. I saw it in his eyes in that second as he blinked, then stared. And I knew he’d been one of the majority against worms all along.
He didn’t answer me. “Jedediah, go.”
But Diana had come to the bodies and maybe she heard his tone, though we were far away at the edge of the road. Maybe she only had an instinct for such things. She turned and I briefly caught her eye as I addressed Zacharias.
“I told him to change. He wouldn’t have on his own. He said he couldn’t. I sent him after Joanna, and Andrew also. She ran after the car’s trail alone and she was either going to be caught and killed, if they didn’t bring her back, or run all the way to the motorway.”
“That has no bearing on Jedediah’s lockdown. As I have told you before, you do not understand our laws.”
Diana was already walking up. She also looked at Jed. “What has happened?”
I explained the same story.
“Thank you both for taking care of Joanna,” Diana said. “Jedediah, please change and resume your lockdown. Cassia, can you see anything for us?”
“I already looked. I didn’t get anything, but I’d like to have one of the stakes, something they touched, and I’ll try again.”
She nodded. “Zacharias.” Hand on his shoulder as she turned, the matter closed.
He went limping along with her. But he looked back, once more meeting my eyes for a moment, and I knew my estimation of him had been off: his feelings about me a good deal stronger than I’d thought. Could this go for the rest of them? How many weren’t only nervous around me, but hated me for being here? And what was I supposed to do about it? I’d hardly seen the pack when I’d been staying with Melanie in Brighton. Now … I had nowhere else to go. I had to stay here for a base while we worked on this.
Moonlight Heart: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 4) Page 26
