He shifted toward me, ducking his head slightly as if to kiss me, but catching himself just as he moved. The air between us felt like a hot wall, as if summer had suddenly taken up residence in the small space between us.
The IronMoon territory was huge. I had known it was large, but seeing it mapped out was chilling. Warmth forgotten, my eyes moved over the large, thick, green line of tape that marked the boundary of IronMoon’s holdings. Smaller, thinner lines marked individual pack territories within the holdings.
Shadowless.
“I have done nothing to your birthpack.” Gabel read my jolt of distress.
“Except conquer them.” Except for the obvious insult of putting them on leads like good little doggies.
Gabel shifted with mild contempt. Conquer was a very strong word. Shadowless hadn’t even fought.
Old conversation. I turned my attention back to the map and tried to figure out Gabel’s next move, and when he’d be foolish enough to bid for SableFur.
SableFur. I gulped down some bitterness. I wasn’t mad at them. I was mad at myself for being stupid enough to think they’d come save me.
At some point Gabel was also going to have to pick a fight with IceMaw who wouldn’t roll over. Except that should have been Shadowless. Maybe their Alpha, Aaron, would fight back. Maybe he’d kneel down like all the others.
Why in the Moon’s name did I want him to fail? I was Gabel’s BondMate, and that meant I’d be first in line for abduction or death in a fight. Me wanting Gabel to get his tail handed to him in a fight didn’t do much to keep me alive.
I rubbed my Mark. “There will be war.”
Gabel pondered his map. “Probably.”
Something in his voice caught my ear. “Wait, are you trying to avoid a war?”
“I don’t think there is any way to avoid war,” Gabel said thoughtfully.
“Then why not be content with what you have?” I asked, nonplussed. “Look at this, Gabel. Isn’t it enough?”
“Would you stop scrying just because someone told you you had done it enough?” Gabel asked.
It would have been so much easier to dismiss Gabel if he had been stupid. An intelligent, thinking demon was far worse than a mindless flesh-render looking for its next meal. “Conquering packs is not the same as the Tides.”
“No? You never know if you’re going to come back. Or have you not realized the risks you take?” He turned his head just enough so that one of his sea-blue eyes met my gaze.
“It’s still not the same thing.”
“It is exactly the same thing. You don’t need to scry. I do not need more territory. Did you become an Oracle because it gave you status? Glory? Attention? Power?”
“No.”
“Exactly.”
“So you’re saying you are doing this because you have a geas?” I frowned. Gabel’s wolf-form did look like a Hound...
There were plenty of legends about how the Moon would one day set Her Hounds upon the world to bring about the end of days. There’d been plenty of cruel wolves in history that stories likened to Hounds, but nobody had ever set himself up as King, then justified his methods by saying he was a Hound sent by the Moon.
Well, not that anyone remembered. There’d been plenty of dark, shattered times in our history.
“You mean do I think I’m a divine instrument doing the Moon’s will?” Gabel asked.
“Ah, sure. That.” My gut reaction was Gabel was nuts to think that. But on the other hand there was a Master of Arms with holy blue-gloss tattoos. The knowledge to make the sacred ink for those tattoos had been lost centuries earlier in one of those dark times.
Gabel chuckled. “No. I’m only drawing a comparison between your calling and my compulsion.”
“How can you compare my mandate to your ambition?” My voice trembled a tiny bit.
“You know what I meant.”
I grumbled. “So what? What if one day I want to take off my mantle? You want me to. You don’t like your little pet Oracle scrying for anyone but you.”
“Perhaps one day I will be satisfied with what I have and feel no more need.” He studied me with a pensive expression.
“What’s your next move?” I didn’t expect him to tell me.
“I was thinking of here.” He pressed his fingertip to a small territory southwest of the Shadowless borders. “But my instinct is that is not a smart move.”
“SableFur is probably still on the alert after the wolves,” I said.
Gabel’s lips drew into a line. “Yes, buttercup. My thought was to go there to show the SableFur I’m not afraid of them, but—”
“You actually are?” I prodded.
“You want me to go there and cause a war? Because it would be your precious birthpack that ate it first, when the SableFur finds out where you’re from. I am not ready for SableFur.”
My birthpack had abandoned me to Gabel. Traded me to him to buy their own safety. I could accept that, but they hadn’t bled for me. Not even a single drop. That was the wound. My father hadn’t even growled. Not once. Not even a trifle. Not even after Gabel had mauled me in front of him.
Gabel pointed to a tiny southern territory. “I think here, instead. Push south.”
“Where was the wolf who petitioned me from? I was told the south.”
Gabel pointed to a little shred of territory in the extreme southwest. “Here.”
I squinted at the map. There was indeed a forest close to the ocean. I scanned the rest of the map looking for clues as to who the Alpha had been. That was a long way from SableFur. “Have you ever seen Alpha Magnes of SableFur?”
“No, why?”
“Just curious.”
The door to the office opened, and the sounds of three pairs of footsteps followed. Hix, another warrior wolf, and a lanky wolf of about thirty. The lanky wolf was thin, filthy, his beard almost to his chest, and his hair hadn’t been cut (nor brushed) in weeks.. His sharp, cruel eyes were those of a predator.
He saluted Gabel but eyed me, trying to decide if I was worth acknowledging.
I glared right back at him.
Hix punched him in the kidney and hissed my name in his ear. The hunter wolf just sort of oofed from the impact, but half-bowed to me to greet me, an excessively respectful greeting. My name would have sufficed.
“This is Donovan,” Gabel told me, gesturing to the wild wolf. “He is our best hunter.”
Donovan ran his filthy fingers through his equally filthy beard. “You howled, Alpha?”
Despite his squalor, he had a sophisticated voice and tone, like he should have been reading poetry or acting on stage.
“Change of task for you,” Gabel said. “Pick up the trail of the wolf who petitioned Lady Gianna three days ago. Track him, find him, determine where he’s been, where he’s going, and everyone, human or wolf, he speaks to.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “You can’t do that, Gabel!”
“Alpha.” Donovan half-bowed in dramatic fashion.
“No!” I shoved Gabel. “You can’t do that!”
“Go.” Gabel told Donovan.
Donovan ducked out the room, taking his stink with him. Hix followed.
I spun around and snarled at Gabel. “You can’t do that!”
“Donovan won’t be spotted,” Gabel said. He returned his attention to the map.
“They’ll think I betrayed them. You can’t attack that pack, you can’t hunt that petitioner,” I shouted.
“Was there something I should know about either?”
“You know I can’t tell you anything.”
He rolled his eyes and smiled at me. “Fine, fine, buttercup. If it upsets you so much I’ll attack someone else.”
I pursed my lips. “How magnanimous of you.”
He stepped behind me, and his amusement curled around me like smoke. One of his hands extended toward the map and caressed it, while he whispered in my ear, “Does it please you, this thing I have created?”
His other hand slid over my
hip.
“It is not mine, and my pleasure doesn’t matter,” I rasped.
His palm slid along the line of my hip, fingertips grazing lower and lower. He kissed my neck, my ear.
“It impresses you,” he whispered hoarsely. His other hand turned my chin, and he kissed me, slow and deep and hungry, and that hand slid down my neck to grasp my breast. I shuddered and whimpered, but none of it was a protest.
The Bond dug into both of us, envenoming us like a two-headed snake. Gabel’s fingers slid lower, between my thighs, and I gasped as he touched me through my panties, his strong fingers rubbing and caressing, evoking memories that sent pleas through my whole body. My mind, paralyzed, watched, somehow convinced by the Bond’s venom that this was either inevitable or a smart move.
His kiss. I could have drowned in it. His rigid body pushed against my back.
I couldn’t tell where my thoughts ended and his began. He seemed to be everywhere, he was his own Tide, pulling me, drowning me, everywhere. His tongue chased mine, a low, wicked chuckle escaped him as my body dampened against his fingers. A moan escaped my lips. I didn’t want him to stop, I should have wanted him to stop, but I didn’t, I just arched against his hands.
“Still so ready for me,” he whispered hoarsely.
“I hate you,” I whimpered as his fingers slid under my panty hem and onto my wet skin. I was so wet.
“So pleasure for you, then my turn, hmm?”
“Gabel, we can’t—”
“I can’t resist you, buttercup. I don’t want to.” His fingers moved against me.
“Don’t say that,” I whispered.
“Alpha Gabel. Lady Gianna.”
Leaking Secrets
Gabel and I yanked apart.
Master of Arms Flint didn’t even blink.
“Another interruption,” Gabel said. “Have you all lost the ability to knock?”
My heart thundered, my pulse throbbed. My thighs were raw and wet and aching with unfinished business.
Gabel did not flinch or shrivel before the Master of Arms, but his displeasure at being disturbed was plain.
“Lady Gianna,” Flint addressed me. “I was looking for you.”
It took a few more shallow breaths for me to find my voice and hope it wouldn’t shake. It wasn’t like my father had caught me.
It was so much worse.
“What do you need, Flint?” I asked, shaken by being caught, what it might mean, that I had fallen under the Bond’s influence one more time.
Gabel turned and headed over to his desk, “You do not knock now, Master of Arms?”
I bit my lip and told my privates to settle down.
Flint only nodded to Gabel’s question and didn’t actually answer it. He had his hands behind his back, but the small muscles of his shoulders flexed under his skin.
Gabel’s hot silence was all the permission I needed to leave. Not much either of us could say. Just not speak about it. Pretend Flint hadn’t caught us. Pretend it wasn’t what it looked like. Pretend nothing was out of the ordinary, and my embarrassment was just maidenly horror at being caught with Gabel’s hand in my panties.
“Let’s speak in your workroom,” Flint told me.
Even the cool, salted air of my workroom couldn’t ease the squirming in my gut. “Do you have a question for me, Flint?”
“No.” Flint stepped over to the windows. His tattoos shone and shifted over his muscled torso. He noted the little bowls of salt and candles and other evidence of my work. “I know you and Gabel have consummated the Bond.”
I gulped down a wave of nausea. “Based on what?” I managed to choke out. “What you just saw?”
“He betrays it. To eyes who know the symptoms, it is plain.”
“Symptoms? I know I have a soul parasite. Do share what the symptoms are.”
“The way he watches you. The way his eye is always on you. The way his eye is on everyone else,” Flint stated, deadpan. “Other things that betray the connection. Most don’t recognize it, because there is rarely a gap between the Mark and the Pairing. You both try to hide it, but you don’t know what you’re trying to hide, so you do a very bad job.”
The Bond poked and prodded, like an evil gaining power for having been named.
“You do not want the pack to know.”
I didn’t answer.
He stepped closer to me, his kilt twisting around his thighs, his tattoos very dark against his skin. Flint’s hair was the same tawny color as his wolf, and his eyes a bright green, like jungle trees. He felt warm, even from a distance.
“Have you taken your suspicions to him?” I asked Flint.
Flint smiled. “You’ve grown some fangs, Lady Gianna. Gabel gave you those. No. I have not spoken with him. I am speaking with you. It would do no good to speak to him.”
“I have no power over Gabel. Gabel takes what he wants, when it pleases him to do so.”
“I don’t think he was the only one in that room pleased.” Flint raised both eyebrows.
I blushed.
“We both know what was going to happen if I had not walked in,” Flint said.
“Not what you think.” I lied to both of us.
“He is a male,” Flint told me, “and while it may sound old-fashioned, he has less control than you do. That is how we are made.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You won’t succeed in keeping this a secret. The harder you fight, the harder the Bond fights back. It is still forming. It needs feeding.”
“I don’t want to feed it. Your Alpha Marked me against my will. I don’t want to be here, and I want the Bond to die.”
Flint looked at my arm, then sighed as if I were a willful child. “We both know it’s too late for that. You must make peace with this—”
“Peace? Peace with what he did to me?” I spun away from him. “Peace with that monster who stole my soul? Who gave me this hideous Mark? Who turned me into his plaything because he was bored?”
“You are angry, and that anger is dangerous. It is fueled by Gabel. As long as you two both fight the Bond, it will think it is in danger. It will gnaw on both of you. He will pursue. You will slow. You will both go mad. It is that simple.”
“I am an Oracle. I am trained to ride the Tides. If I were going to go mad from compulsion and delusion, it would have already happened.”
“Your resolve might last longer than his, but eventually, you will both collapse. The pack will have its expectations.”
“Then help me,” I pleaded. “Tell me how to kill the Bond.”
“Is that really what you want? You’ve both tortured it, abused it, poisoned it, and it is still alive and strong.”
“Yes! I can’t be bound to that monster. Why would the Moon fashion any soul to match his?”
“So you are horrified that any part of you could love part of him?”
“It’s the balance of things, Flint. Yes, there are good, magnificent parts of him but...no, repudiation works. I know it does.”
Flint gave me a piteous look. “It only works when there is a fulcrum to break the Bond over. You want that conviction. You don’t have it. You wish you did. That is what hurts. You just don’t want to look into the abyss. Perhaps Gabel did you a favor Marking you as he did. It spared you the pain of being wooed by him.”
“Says the wolf who let him humiliate me in front of another Alpha,” I said bitterly. “Stop making excuses for him. For yourself, and how you stood by and let him do this to me!”
Flint sighed and suddenly looked very, very old. The tattoos moved with the motion of his breathing and tension. “Some things simply have to play out, Lady Gianna.”
Tears pooled in my eyes. “I won’t be forced to take vows I don’t mean. And I don’t care if this pack understands that or not. And I don’t care what the Bond or the Moon has to say about it!”
“The Moon is having Her say. The Bond will consume both of you. Eventually you will be caught in his embrace, or with his pups in you
r belly. The Tide is coming in because the Moon’s motion has willed it to be so. You’re not looking into the abyss, Oracle. You’re afraid of what you’re going to see. And then it will own you.”
Flint half-bowed to me, and left my workroom.
Ensnared
I didn’t normally watch Gabel train.
The rings sat far back from the house itself and the window was more about providing an expansive view of the estate, not sparring practice. Still, I picked Gabel out from a distance, and in the late afternoon haze, easily identified other warriors. Names were a bit of a mystery yet, but faces and bodies and scents were familiar.
Gabel might have been pissed to find me in his office. He didn’t like anyone in there without him being present (and even then, he didn’t like intruders).
The map on the far wall accused me of my actual sin: withholding information from the Alpha. If I really wanted to make Gabel mad, I could just tell him I know something you don’t know. If I really wanted to drive him into a fury. If I had the courage.
I toyed with it for a few minutes, like a sore tooth.
Yeah, that’d end well. He’d put me down in the basement, in that cement hellhole, where not even the Moon would see. The instant he broke me, he’d know what I knew, and he’d win. Then I’d have nothing left. Not even my place as an Oracle.
Gabel hadn’t broken me yet, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think he couldn’t. I knew the dark pit of his heart better than anyone. Given the proper motivation he was capable of anything. For his next trick he’d probably try to Mark the Moon.
“Where did you come from, Gabel?” I asked the empty air of the room, my eyes moving over the map on the far wall with its markers and lines. Because he’d seemed to come out of nowhere a few years earlier. Flint? I hadn’t heard of Flint at all, and Oracles would have noticed a golden wolf with jungle-green eyes and blue-gloss tattoos. He looked like he’d walked out of some old, dusty book.
Look into the abyss.
Flint had pretty much cuffed me and said, there’s more going on here. Pay attention!
The Alpha's Oracle Page 16
