The Alpha's Mage

by Claire Cullen

  “Let’s take a break for now.”

  He all but dragged Lorcan to his feet and away from the barrier, nodding to his wolves to keep watch.

  “But I think I’m close,” Lorcan argued, twisting under his hand.

  “Close to needing another band-aid,” Knox muttered, eyeing the half dozen already plastered to the mage’s hands that gave them a vaguely mummy-like appearance.

  Something wasn’t right. Even if Lorcan was in training, even if he’d never touched boundary magic before, he was still a sorcerer. All his tinkering should have had some effect. Instead… zip, nothing. Like he wasn’t even trying. Knox gave the mage a sidelong glance and then put a hand to the back of his neck and steered him toward the center of the pack.

  “Where are we going?” Lorcan hid a yawn behind one bandaged hand.

  “We’re taking a walk to the pack house. I think it’s time you had a sit-down with Orion.”

  “Maybe I could go back to your hut and take a nap instead? I’m beat.” Lorcan exaggerated his yawn this time, his eyes wary.

  “Later,” Knox promised, keeping a firm hold on him. Whatever was going on, Orion would get to the bottom of it.

  They passed a few wolves as they neared the center of the pack. Lorcan still got a few long stares, but nowhere near as many as he had his first days around the pack. They were getting used to him. It was both a good thing and a bad.

  As they reached their destination, he gave Lorcan a light shove toward the tree trunk he’d sat on the previous day. “Go sit down.”

  Lorcan sighed and trudged in that direction, glancing back at him uncertainly.

  Knox waited until he was settled before heading inside, going straight to Orion and Asher’s room. He knocked on the door and heard a muffled reply from inside. Cautiously, he opened it and poked his head in.

  “I can come back?” he offered when he spied the old mage clambering out of bed.

  “No need. I’m up. Just give me a minute to get decent.”

  Knox hung around outside his room, keeping one ear out for Lorcan. Unless he was very much mistaken, the mage had visitors in the form of the younger cubs who were yipping and playing around out there.

  Orion’s door swept open and the mage appeared, leaning heavily on a walking stick. Knox offered his arm, which was ignored. They made their slow way to Orion’s workshop, where the mage lowered himself carefully onto a seat, gesturing for Knox to sit on the bench opposite.

  “Tell me,” Orion said.

  “Lorcan is hopeless.”

  The mage blinked. “I see. No, wait, I don’t. Hopeless how?”

  “Magically. He’s been at it three days, and the boundary is just as broken as it was when he started. It might even be worse.”

  “There’ll be a natural level of degradation with the loss of integrity,” Orion said quietly, speaking more to himself than to Knox. “Have you asked him what the problem is?”

  “He says he’s trying his best. He says he’s close. But he’s been saying that since day one. I’m starting to think he has no idea what he’s doing. I mean, I know that sorcerers favor training alliances with packs to teach their mages, but I never thought that meant they’d know nothing when they started out.”

  Declan’s sorcerer ex-boyfriend had certainly never given that impression.

  Orion’s forehead creased. “It wouldn’t. The finer points would be learned with training, yes. But the magic itself is instinctive; they learn to master it from childhood. He shouldn’t be struggling this hard.”

  “Could he just be, you know, weak? Lacking in talent?” All mages weren’t made equal.

  “I’d say that was possible, if it wasn’t for the earlier demonstration of his skills.”

  “You mean your amulet.”

  “Yes, that.”

  “You figure out how he did it?”

  “Not just yet.” Orion pulled the amulet from his pocket and set it on the table, stroking his fingers across it.

  “He called it ‘dumb luck.’ Is that possible? That he didn’t mean to do it?”

  “I have considered the possibility.”

  “But you don’t think that’s it?”

  Lorcan was a mystery they needed to solve, and soon. The survival of the pack depended upon it.

  “I think,” Orion said slowly, “it’s high time I talked to our guest.” He pushed to his feet and gestured Knox toward the door. “Lead the way.”

  Knox walked with him to the front of the house, making a beeline for where Lorcan was sitting.

  Orion caught his arm, his grip surprisingly strong for someone so frail.

  “I’ll take it from here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  He definitely wasn’t leaving Lorcan alone with Orion in the heart of the pack.

  “Then give us some space. This is a delicate conversation we’re about to have.”

  Knox gave Orion a harder look. “You know what’s wrong with him.”

  Orion was unruffled by the accusation.

  “If I’m right, there’s nothing wrong with him.”

  “You mean he’s faking it? Pretending to struggle with fixing the boundary?”

  Just the thought set Knox’s blood boiling, the urge to get his hands on the mage and kiss the defiance out of him almost irresistible.

  “Not quite,” was all Orion said, a small smile on his face. “Be patient, Knox. All will be revealed.”

  Knox grumbled under his breath at that. His patience only stretched so far. He hung back as Orion approached Lorcan. The two mages spoke for a moment before starting a slow walk around the houses. Knox followed at a distance, watching and listening, keen to know just what was wrong with his mage. It was only as they rounded the corner ahead of him that he wondered if the problem wasn’t what his mage was, but who.

  9

  Lorcan knew he was in trouble when Knox all but dragged him into the center of the pack. His suspicions were confirmed a while later when Orion, the pack’s old mage, hobbled his way toward him.

  “Join me for a walk, Lorcan. We have things to talk about.”

  Hiding a grimace, Lorcan got up and moved to Orion’s side. He let the old man set the pace as they circled the nearby houses.

  “I’ve been making some inquiries about you.”

  Tension gripped him at Orion’s words. That couldn’t be a good thing. He did his best to sound nonchalant about it.

  “Oh? From who?”

  “Just in town. You told Gage that your surname was Warren.”

  Lorcan managed not to wince. He’d played along with his uncle’s ruse, assuming that was why he’d been taken. “It is.”

  “And yet, despite having the name of the most prominent family in Hartstown, you are somehow an unknown.”

  “Not every sorcerer craves the limelight.”

  “No,” Orion agreed. “But your family isn’t exactly shy about advertising its assets. Yet the fact that they have a mage who’s a year or two past mating age seems to have escaped most people’s notice. Some families like to keep that under wraps. The Warrens like to ply their wares, so to speak. An arrangement would have been made for your pack training during your early teens, and an agreement on your eventual permanent bonding would have been settled a year or two before you turned eighteen… How old are you?”

  Lorcan would have lied if he thought he’d get away with it.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Since…?”

  “December.”

  “Nineteen and a half, then. How long had you been with Maken Pack?”

  In an attempt to distract the mage from his line of questioning, Lorcan tried some indignant anger on for size.

  “Is there a point to all this? What, did you abduct the wrong mage? I’m sorry I’m not living up to your lofty expectations.”

  Orion wasn’t dissuaded. “Not long then, I take it?”

  Lorcan pressed his lips into a thin line and refused to answer.

  “I almost didn’t put it
together, you know. I wouldn’t have, in fact, if it wasn’t for the amulet. You could just be a particularly untalented sorcerer mage with no aptitude for magic, in or out of the pack. But what you did with my amulet… That, my dear, was clever. A little rough-and-ready, mind you. It lacks the discipline of a sorcerer’s touch. But then it would, wouldn’t it?”

  They stopped walking abruptly, and Lorcan realized they were standing outside the guest house where they’d been keeping him the night he’d run.

  Orion gestured to the little patch of garden in front of the guest house, directly below the window of the room they’d given Lorcan.

  “Because you’re not a sorcerer at all, are you? You’re something very different.”

  Given that it was the middle of summer, the garden should have been in full bloom, every flower bursting with life and color. Instead, it was a lifeless sea of brown—flowers desiccated, leaves crumbled.

  “That amulet is the most concentrated piece of magic in this pack. It took a lot of raw power to subvert its purpose. More power than you possessed.”

  Lorcan’s face crumpled as he took in the devastation he’d caused. And for what? He hadn’t even gotten away.

  “There, there.” Orion patted his shoulder. “You took only what you needed. The wick is still green, the roots still live. With love and care, the garden will flourish again, none the worse for having aided a druid’s flight.”

  So now they knew the truth. What were they going to do about it?

  Orion half-turned, and Lorcan followed his gaze to see Knox bearing down on them, his face like thunder. Time to face the music.

  “That’s what you meant before, when you said Lorcan wasn’t what he seemed.”

  It took Lorcan a moment to realize Knox was talking to Orion. He turned to the mage.

  “You knew…?”

  “I suspected. Knox wasn’t ready to hear it,” Orion said heavily.

  Lorcan’s eyes were drawn to Orion’s walking stick and the tight grip the mage had on it, his knuckles white. He glanced Knox’s way, but the alpha was already a step ahead of him.

  “Why don’t we sit down and talk this out?”

  “Inside,” Orion said meaningfully, glancing around. “The trees have ears.”

  He ignored both their offers of help as he made his slow way back inside. Lorcan had never before seen the room they ended up in. It was strewn with a variety of tools, equipment, and supplies.

  “Your workshop, I’m guessing?” he asked as Orion sank into a chair with a groan. “Or am I wrong? Is there another mage besides you?”

  He was confident that he wasn’t wrong. If they had more mages around, they wouldn’t have been so desperate to keep him.

  “Mine now. Though it used to be shared among many. Oh, the fights we’d have. Who used the last of the quicksilver, who borrowed whose talisman…”

  Lorcan itched to explore the room and its contents. Until the Warrens came for him, he’d never been exposed to magic beyond what his druid family practiced. The two magics—druidry and sorcery—couldn’t have been more different. He could see there was no escaping a conversation about his origins, loath as he was to talk about it.

  “I hate to interrupt the reminiscing, but I have some questions.”

  Knox looked pointedly from Lorcan to a chair. Lorcan sat down with a sigh.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “You’re not a sorcerer?”

  “I am. Well, half-sorcerer, anyway.”

  “But not raised among them,” Orion said pointedly.

  “No,” Lorcan agreed, folding his arms. “I grew up among druids.”

  He had no intention of spilling his life story. He’d tell them just enough to get them off his back for now, since he was still no closer to working out how to get away from Knox.

  “Druids,” Knox repeated slowly. “I didn’t know there were druids in Hartstown.”

  “I believe there are a few still living outside of town,” Orion said. “There used to be more, a whole village of them, but they left years ago.”

  Two pairs of eyes were trained on him expectantly.

  “The Warrens brought me here,” he said. “They started my training at their place in town, and then sent me to Maken Pack to learn how to be useful.”

  The Warrens didn’t rate druid magic highly. Or at all. His family—his real family—and their magic was seen as primitive and crude. Ever since his uncle had walked into his life seven months ago, everything had taken a turn for the worse. Which he guessed was par for the course in a relationship founded on threats.

  “So you really are a novice to magic?” The look of disbelief on Knox’s face was almost painful to watch. “That explains the boundary.”

  “A novice to sorcerer magic. Druids have magic, too.”

  Which wolves clearly didn’t think much of either, from the look Orion and Knox exchanged.

  “Can you use druid magic to fix the boundary?”

  It was the first question he’d have asked, so he couldn’t blame them for it.

  “The boundary is sorcerer magic in origin, if I’m not mistaken.” He’d learned enough in seven months to recognize it, at least.

  Orion smiled, as if he’d said something clever instead of obvious. “Yes, the boundary was originally created by a sorcerer. But I’ve been the only one renewing it for almost… four years now.”

  “You’re not a sorcerer.” Orion didn’t have the arrogance that seemed to be part and parcel of that branch of magic.

  “Good catch. Can you guess what I am?”

  Lorcan almost rolled his eyes. As questions went, that was an easy one. “With that amulet you put on me? You can only be a caster.”

  Spellcasters and sorcerers weren’t all that different on the surface. Look deeper, though, and the two were like chalk and cheese.

  “But if you’ve been able to maintain the boundary without sorcerer magic, then so can Lorcan, right?” Knox said.

  “Caster and sorcerer magic shares similarities,” Lorcan admitted, letting his eyes fall closed. “They’re like buds on the same branch of a tree. Druidry is a whole other branch. Maybe even a different tree.”

  Knox burst into motion, pacing around the room in agitation.

  “Why, Orion? You said I’d be drawn to the mage that we needed. We need a boundary. Without it, Joel is just the first of us to—”

  A ripple ran through the alpha’s muscles, and then he shifted, the motion sudden and violent, tearing his clothes to tatters. The wolf burst from the room, leaving the door hanging off its hinges.

  Lorcan stood and stared after him.

  “He’s been under a lot of strain since…” Orion trailed off.

  Lorcan forced his gaze from the door. The old mage looked tired again, his face pale.

  “You should get some rest. Let me help you to bed.”

  Orion nodded slowly, his eyes glazed with pain. Lorcan couldn’t tell it if was physical pain or grief. Who was Joel, and what had happened to him? He could have asked the mage then and there, but something stopped him. This was a story he needed to hear from Knox when the alpha was ready to tell it.

  10

  Knox stalked the whole boundary in his agitation, unable to settle as his thoughts returned to Joel again and again. Guilt dogged each step. It was his fault Joel was dead. He should have been there to stop it.

  When the worst of his anger finally faded, his body tired, he retreated to his hut. Long before he reached it, he sensed Lorcan waiting there. He came inside, ignoring the mage sitting cross-legged on the floor as he shifted back and grabbed some clothes.

  When he finally turned around, he noticed the plates of food sitting on the small, rickety table against the wall.

  Lorcan followed his gaze, speaking softly. “I brought dinner. It’s cold by now, but I thought you’d be hungry.”

  Knox never turned down food, cold or otherwise. He grabbed the plate with the biggest portion, obviously meant for him, sat down on his bed, and
started eating. Lorcan stayed sitting against the wall, staring at his knees.

  Knox jerked his head toward the second plate. “Eat.”

  “Maybe later.” Lorcan sounded distracted, his eyes distant.

  “Now.”

  Lorcan raised his head at that, his eyes flashing with anger. He glanced at the plate, back at Knox, and then dropped his gaze back to his knees with a heavy sigh.

  “Who’s Joel?”

  Knox swallowed hard, his stomach lurching as his appetite deserted him.

  “No one you need to worry about.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s all the answer you’re going to get.”

  He forced himself to finish his plate, getting up as soon as he was done.

  “Eat your food. Don’t leave the hut. I’ll be back later.”

  “I’ll come with you—”

  “No, you won’t.”

  Knox didn’t want or need the company. He especially didn’t want Lorcan trailing around after him. He’d thought the mage would be their saving grace, but now he was just another mouth to feed, another millstone around their necks. And with their boundary still wide open—all two feet of it—Knox couldn’t afford the distraction that the mage presented. Maybe it wasn’t too late to farm him off on Ronan or Declan? Their bond was temporary. It would fade in a matter of weeks, and then he’d be rid of the mage. Maybe Lorcan could do some good somewhere else in the pack.

  He stalked off, shifting as he walked. This time around he focused, making sure to bring his clothes with him. His control hadn’t slipped that badly in a while. But exhaustion, not enough food, and the magic famine his pack was living through all made the simple act of shifting tougher to bear and lessened the power he had over it. He left one of his betas outside the hut to guard Lorcan and took the others with him. Despite the tiredness dogging him, he walked every inch of the boundary again.

  As night fell, he left the rest of his wolves spaced out to guard the boundary. Declan’s howl cut through the darkness as he took his hunters out into the night. The hum of magic hit Knox as all six of them crossed the boundary. They’d be gone at least a few hours. He hoped they found whatever was out there stalking their pack. It was ten days until the full moon, ten days until they had a chance to seal their boundary again. He wouldn’t be getting much rest before then.